Northrop Frye's Writings on Education 9781442677913

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Collected Works of Northrop Frye VOLUME 7

Northrop Frye's Writings on Education

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 The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions.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

Editorial Committee General Editor Alvin A. Lee Associate Editor Jean O'Grady Assistant Editor Nicholas Halmi

Editors Joseph Adamson Robert D. Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton David Staines Advisers Robert Brandeis J.R. de J. Jackson Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Roseann Runte Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

Northrop Frye's Writings on Education VOLUME 7

Edited by Jean O'Grady and Goldwin French

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com Victoria University, University of Toronto 2000 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4827-7

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 Northrop Frye's writings on education (Collected works of Northrop Frye; 7) Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-4827-7

i. Education. 2. Education - Philosophy. I. O'Grady, Jean, 1943II. French, Goldwin S. (Goldwin Sylvester), 1923- . III. Title IV. Series. LB41.F785 2OOO

37O'.l

COO-931282-X

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

Contents

Preface xiii

Credits xvii

Abbreviations xxi

Introduction xxiii

i The Bob 3

2 Victoria College Debating Parliamen 5 3 That Trinity Debate

8

4 The Case against Examinations 10 5 Arthur Richard Cragg 14 6 On the Frosh: An Editorial 17 7 Editorial in Undress (I) 21

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8 James Delmer Martin 23 9 The Question of Maturity: An Editorial 26 10 Editorial in Undress (II) 29 11 Editorial in Undress (III) 31 12 The Pass Course: A Polemic 34 13 A Liberal Education 40 14 Education and the Humanities 50 15 Back to Work 53 16 For Whom the Dunce Cap Fits 55 17 Have We a National Education? 57 18 The Study of English in Canada 59 19 Address to the Graduating Class of Victoria College 66 20 Humanities in a New World 69 21 Greetings from the Principal 86 22 By Liberal Things 88 l_Jw 23 Senior Dinner Address 103

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24 The Critical Discipline 106 25 Dialogue Begins 117 26 Push-Button Gadgets May Help—But the Teacher Seems Here to Stay 120 27 Autopsy on an Old Grad's Grievance 123 28 Introduction to Design for Learning 127 29 The Developing Imagination 143 30 To the Class of '62 at Queen's 160 31 The Changing Pace in Canadian Education 166 32 The Dean of Women 177 33 Convocation Address, University of British Columbia 179 34 The Principal's Message 185 35 We Are Trying to Teach a Vision of Society 187 36 Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship 192 37 Foreword to The Living Name 207 38 Education—Protection against Futility 210 39 The Classics and the Man of Letters 215

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40 Charles Bruce Sissons, 1879-1965 222

41 New Programmes 225

42 Report on the "Adventures" Readers 227

43 Speculation and Concern 242

44 The Time of the Flood 259

45 The Instruments of Mental Production 261 46 Speech at a Freshman Welcome 279 47 The Knowledge of Good and Evil 281 48 A New Principal for Victoria 297 49 The Question of "Success" 299

50 A Meeting of Minds 306 51 Higher Education and Personal Life 308 52 The University and the Heroic Vision 311 53 Convocation Address, Franklin and Marshall 317 54 Book Learning and Barricades 324 55 The Social Importance of Literature 326

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56 Research and Graduate Education in the Humanities 335 57 The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University

345 58 The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract 360 59 An Ideal University Community 379 60 In Memoriam: Miss Jessie Macpherson 382 61 The Day of Intellectual Battle: Reflections on Student Unrest 384 62 Convocation Address, York University 389 63 Congratulatory Statement to Dartmouth 394 64 Hart House Rededicated 395 65 On Horace 400 66 A Revolution Betrayed: Freedom and Necessity in Education 401 67 The Definition of a University 406 68 Education and the Rejection of Reality 422 69 On Teaching Literature 432 70 Wright Report (I) 462

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71 Wright Report (II) 464 72 Universities and the Deluge of Cant 465 73 The Critic and the Writer 470 74 Foreword to The Child as Critic 476 75 Preface to ADE and ADFL Bulletins 479 76 Address at the Installation of Gordon Keyes as Principal of Victoria College 481 77 Presidential Address at the MLA 483 78 Reminiscences 494 79 The Teacher's Source of Authority 496 80 Address on Receiving the Royal Bank Award 507 81 Installation Address as Chancellor 517 82 The Chancellor's Message 523 83 Criticism as Education 525 84 The Beginning of the Word 539 85 Installation of Alvin A. Lee 551 86 The View from Here 553

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87 The Authority of Learning 568 88 Language as the Home of Human Life 577 89 On Living inside Real Life 591 90 Farewell to Goldwin French 593 91 Foreword to English Studies at Toronto 595 92 Preface to On Education 599 93 Preface to From Cobourg to Toronto 607 94 Unpublished Introduction to Beyond Communication 611 95 Woman Heads University 616 Appendix: Educational Pieces Omitted from This Volume 617 Notes 619 Emendations 647 Index 651

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Preface

This volume includes most of Frye's published articles pertaining to education in general, or to his connection with Victoria University and the University of Toronto. The main exceptions are the "Mercury Columns" (an assortment of announcements, jokes, news, and gossip) that Frye wrote as an undergraduate for Ada Victoriana, and routine reports on the college written for Victoria Reports in his capacity of principal. A list of these omitted items is given in the appendix. The previously unpublished works of Frye are to appear elsewhere in the Collected Works under the editorship of Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani: some material bearing on education will be found both in the volume of miscellaneous unpublished works (e.g., the Commencement Address to Acadia University in 1969), and in the Notebook volumes. We thank Dr. Denham for nevertheless allowing us to include in this volume several hitherto unpublished works, notably Frye's speech at his inauguration as chancellor of Victoria University in 1978, and his report on the "Adventures" readers. Attention is also drawn to the tribute to Kathleen Coburn, professor of English at Victoria, which will appear in the volume of Frye's writings on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, in the interviews that will make up one volume of the Collected Works will be found many comments on education and on the importance of the University of Toronto in Frye's life. Headnotes to the individual items specify the copy-text, list all known reprintings in English of the item, and also note the existence of typescripts and where they can be found in the Northrop Frye Fonds in the E.J. Pratt Library of Victoria University. The copy-text chosen is generally the first edition, which was often the only one carefully revised and proof-read by Frye himself. In some cases he did reread essays for

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inclusion in his own collections, such as The Stubborn Structure, which then become the source of the authoritative text. On Education, however, the collection in which a number of these pieces were reprinted, is not a very reliable text; there is no typescript in the Northrop Frye Fonds (the implication being that Frye did not undertake a systematic revision for the volume), and although correspondence reveals that he did read and correct the proofs, a number of typographical errors are still present. The individual headnotes give the rationale for an anomalous choice of copytext. All substantive changes to the copy-text are noted in the list of editorial emendations. All authoritative versions have been collated, and variants of particular interest are given in notes. In preparing the text, we have followed the general practice of the Collected Works in handling published material from a variety of sources. That is to say, since the conventions of spelling, typography, and to some extent punctuation derive from the different publishers' house styles rather than from Frye, we have regularized them silently throughout the volume. For instance, Canadian spellings ending in -our have been substituted for American -or ones, commas have been added before the "and" in sequences of three, and titles of poems have been italicized. Sometimes, where editors have added commas around such expressions as "of course," these have been silently removed to conform with the more characteristic usage in the typescript. The traditional capitalization of such words as Honour Course, Pass Course, and History Department has been retained, though in other cases (such as personal titles) the more contemporary usage of the lower-case has been adopted. Notes identify the source of all quotations that we have been able to track down; in the case of short Classical identifications, the section number, from the Loeb edition, has been placed in square brackets in the text. Notations of the form "3T3" refer to the class of 1933 according to traditional University of Toronto usage. Notes provided by Frye himself are identified by [NF] following the note. Authors and titles mentioned in passing are not annotated, but life dates and date of first publication are provided in the index. The introduction is in two parts. In studying literature, Frye maintained, there are two operations: a diachronic phase in which we read the piece in linear fashion, followed by a synchronic phase in which we stand back and view the structure as a whole. The distinction provides a convenient paradigm for an introduction written by two co-editors, of historical and literary backgrounds respectively; first we place the writ-

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ings in the historical context of Frye's life (Goldwin French), and then we consider them as an ensemble (Jean O'Grady). This procedure may result in the proverbial camel—a horse designed by a committee—but then a camel is a useful animal, and usually it holds water. Acknowledgments A number of people have helped us in the preparation of this volume. Without the assistance of Robert D. Denham's splendid bibliography— which has provided dates and headnote information—the collection would hardly have been possible; and Dr. Denham himself has answered a stream of queries with unfailing good humour. Our graduate assistant, Marc Plamondon, has done wonders in tracking down obscure quotations, including newspaper articles that one would have thought lost for ever, and his quiet competence has been much appreciated. The articles were originally expertly typed or scanned by Carrie O'Grady and Miranda Purves, with later aid from Alex Stephens. We thank them and also two expert copy-editors: Judith Williams for the Press, and Margaret Burgess at the Collected Works. Both have shown exemplary thoroughness and saved us from a number of errors. Among others who have answered queries and provided information are Tom Adamowski, John Baird, Deanne Bogdan, John Cairns, S.L.G. Chapman, William Conklin, Jack Dimond, Neil Dobbs, Bert Hall, Nicholas Halmi, John Honsberger, Wallace McLeod, Richard Rempel, Ian Singer, Francis Sparshott, Ken Thompson, Thomas Willard, the archives of the University of St. Michael's College, the library of the University of Texas at Austin, the registrar of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the staff of Hart House, and archivists at the University of Toronto Archives, the National Archives of Canada, the Victoria University/United Church Archives, and the University of British Columbia. We are most grateful for general support from Alvin Lee, the general editor of the Collected Works, and especially for the patience and understanding of our spouses.

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Credits

We wish to acknowledge the following sources for permission to include works previously published by them: Association of Graduate Schools in the Association of American Universities for "Research and Graduate Education in the Humanities," from Journal of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Association of Graduate Schools in the Association of American Universities, ed. W. Gordon Whaley (1968). Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for "The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University," from The Ethics of Change: A Symposium (1969). The Editor of Chicago Review for "The Instruments of Mental Production" (1966). Cornell University Press for "The Knowledge of Good and Evil," from The Morality of Scholarship, ed. Max Black. Copyright © 1967 by Cornell University. Used by permission of Cornell University Press. Curriculum Inquiry and Blackwell Publishers for "The Teacher's Source of Authority" (1979). The Editors of Dalhousie Review for "The Study of English in Canada" (1958)Dartmouth College for "Congratulatory Statement," from Greetings to Dartmouth: Bicentennial Convocation and Commencement June 15,1969 (1969).

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Credits

Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario for "We Are Trying to Teach a Vision of Society" (1964) and "The Social Importance of Literature" (1968), from Educational Courier. The Empire Club of Canada for "The Authority of Learning," from The Empire Club of Canada: Addresses, 1983-1984 (Toronto: Empire Club Foundation, 1984). Reprinted with permission of and appreciation to the Empire Club of Canada. Governing Council of the University of Toronto for "Foreword," from Robin S. Harris, English Studies at Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), ix-xii. Harcourt Brace and Co. for On Teaching Literature (1972). Irwin Publishing for By Liberal Things (1959). Modern Language Association of America for "Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship," from PMLA (1964); for "Preface," from the ADE and ADFL Bulletin (1976); and for "Presidential Address 1976" (i977)Professor Jerome T. Murphy, Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education, for "The Developing Imagination," from Learning in Language and Literature (1963). The Royal Society of Canada for "The Critical Discipline," from Canadian Universities Today: Symposium Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1960, ed. George Stanley and Guy Sylvestre (1961); and for "Charles Bruce Sissons, 1879-1965," from Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada, 4th ser., 3 (1965): 173-5. Stoddart/General Publishing for "The Definition of a University," from Alternatives in Education, ed. Bruce Rusk (1971). Tavistock Publications for "The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract," from Higher Education: Demand and Response, ed. W. Roy Niblett (1969).

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Teachers College Press for "Foreword," from G.D. Sloan, The Child as Critic: Teaching English Literature in Elementary and Middle Schools, 3rd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, © Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved), xv-xvii. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. University of Toronto Press for "Humanities in a New World," from Three Lectures: University of Toronto Installation Lectures (1959); for "Introduction/' from Design for Learning (1962); and for "Foreword," from The Living Name: A Tribute to Stefan Stykoltfrom Some of His Friends (1964). University Press of Kentucky for "Speculation and Concern," from The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality, ed. Thomas B. Stroup (1966). Wascana Review for "The University and the Heroic Vision" (1968). York District High School Board for "The Question of Success," from The Meaning of Success: Centennial Lectures (1967). With the exception of those listed above, all works are printed by courtesy of the Estate of Northrop Frye/Victoria University.

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Abbreviations

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Ayre John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. CP The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. CW Collected Works of Northrop Frye DG Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. James Polk. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. DV The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1991; University of Toronto Press, 1991. FI Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. GC The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. MC The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. MM Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. NF Northrop Frye NFC Northrop Frye in Conversation. Ed. David Cayley. Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992. NFF Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library NFHK The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939. 2 vols. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 1-2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. OE On Education. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1988. AC

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RW

Abbreviations

Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935-1976. Ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1991.

SE SM StS TS

Northrop Frye's Student Essays, 1932-1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 3. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. Typescript

Introduction

i Northrop Frye entered Victoria College on probation in September 1929. He had achieved a measure of acclaim as New Brunswick's typing champion, but, as a grade 11 graduate of Aberdeen High School in Moncton, he was enrolled in the Pass Course.1 A year later he was admitted to the Honour Course in Philosophy and English, from which he graduated with the highest standing in 1933-2 In 1936 Frye completed his theological training in Emmanuel College and was ordained as a minister in The United Church of Canada. Three years later he secured a first in English Literature from Oxford University and was appointed as a full-time member of the Victoria College faculty.3 Apart from leaves and periods as a visiting professor in other universities, Frye taught in Victoria and the University of Toronto until a few weeks before his death in January 1991.4 Looking back on his career, Frye commented, "any biography ... would say that I dropped preaching for academic life: that's the opposite of what my spiritual biography would say, that I fled into academia for refuge and have ever since tried to peek out into the congregation and make a preacher of myself."5 Although he "always used a very secular attitude in order to win the confidence of people,"6 Frye was in reality a preacher who assumed the guise of a university professor and literary critic. His congregations were successive generations of undergraduate and graduate students, teachers of English in the schools and universities, and the scholarly community as a whole. His teaching/preaching took a number of forms: his college lectures; volumes on literary criticism, notably Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism; his studies of

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the Bible and literature, The Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990); essays on the teaching of literature in the schools and universities; and papers and addresses on the university in modern society. This volume contains Frye's writings on the two latter subjects. In 1942, Frye wrote privately, "I love Victoria." He described himself as "a long, rangy, flop-eared intellectual mongrel, and to curdle the metaphor, I flourish best in a smug and sterile soil."7 Doubtless more conventional scholars would have agreed that Frye was an "intellectual mongrel." Others, such as his older contemporary Frank Underhill, considered Toronto smug if not sterile. Nevertheless, Frye's conception of the authority of literature and the humanities generally and of the character and role of the university was shaped by his Methodist upbringing, the climate of opinion in Victoria College and Emmanuel College in the 19305, and the powerful influence of his mentors in the Philosophy and English course. Moreover, by 1936 he had discovered and begun to grapple with the works of Oswald Spengler, James Frazer, and A.N. Whitehead, and had decided that he would write a definitive study of William Blake's poetry and art.8 Frye's family, and especially his mother, were very aware of and attached to their Methodist heritage. His maternal grandfather, the Rev. Eratus Howard, was a humble and long-serving Methodist minister.9 Evidently Frye attended church regularly, and he came to Victoria in 1929 as a candidate for the ministry of the United Church of Canada. In his adolescent years, Canadian Methodists were leaders in the churchunion movement that would result in the formation of the United Church of Canada, and in the development of social Christianity. They still saw themselves, however, as the pre-eminent evangelical denomination in Canada, and, as such, committed to preaching designed to bring about "conversion," an "immediate and vividly conscious personal transaction between the Divine Being and the individual soul."10 Emotional, simplistic preaching was still popular, and in this atmosphere traditional versions of sin and damnation were presented without any hint of the impact of modern Biblical criticism on Christian theology and practice. In this atmosphere Methodist moralism continued to flourish—alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and dancing were on the prohibited list and "blue Sunday" was still the norm among Methodists. A sensitive and highly intelligent youth, Frye was irritated by Methodist moral rigidity and the intellectual poverty of much preaching. He was beset, as he said later, with "anxieties about the old stinker in the sky and the postmortem hell and all the other anxieties."11 During his high

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school years he abruptly rejected "fundamentalist teaching," his allembracing and somewhat inaccurate term for evangelical theology.12 From Blake, he would acquire eventually a new perspective on the relations between God and man.13 At his ordination in 1936 he would assert publicly, "I have no mystic experience to relate . . . and I cannot name the date of my conversion."14 In fact, his rejection of conventional theology and his reluctance to accept ordination were conjoined with an intense and enduring religious and moral concern, openness to mystic insight, and a perspective on critical theological issues that owed something to the positive side of his Methodist inheritance. The Victoria College to which Frye came in 1929 was a semi-autonomous institution in the relatively small University of Toronto.15 In his final year, 1932-33, the college would have 1,059 students, but they were still able to forge close ties of friendship and loyalty with each other and with the college.16 Since the college was a former Methodist, now United Church foundation, Victoria's president and most senior faculty members had Methodist backgrounds.17 Their influence, combined with that of the many male undergraduates who were candidates for the United Church ministry, fostered and sustained a restrained and conformist social atmosphere in the college community. But social events such as the annual "Bob," the activities of the Debating Parliament, and the venerable student journal, Acta Victoriana, edited by Frye in 1932-33, stimulated interest in cultural and political matters. Faculty and students were disturbed as well at this juncture by the tragic economic and social condition of Canada in the 19305. Drawing on the Methodist commitment to social reform, some would become supporters of the new Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, or the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order.18 Others such as Frye's fellow student Norman Knight, would become Marxist activists.19 Frye, liberated from the stultifying social and cultural atmosphere of Moncton, participated in the extracurricular life of the college with immense enthusiasm. His published comments on his fellow students and student activities were both laudatory and slightly patronizing (nos. 2,5, 6). In reality, he was developing a deep and enduring affection for his classmates and for the kindly, open-minded, and caring attitude of faculty and students. His later respect and care for students, his support for the college system in the University of Toronto, and his conception of liberal education were shaped in part at least by his positive undergraduate experience. The Honour Course in Philosophy and English to which Frye was

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admitted in 1930 was one of several specialized programmes offered by the University of Toronto. They were designed to produce graduates with a thorough grounding in their chosen subject and a demonstrated ability to use its insights effectively. The Philosophy and English course offered students a solid account of the history of philosophy and a limited exposure to the history of English literature.20 Students in this or in similar courses were required to submit essays which were carefully scrutinized by their instructors. Moreover, to remain in the programme students had to complete a specific body of work each year. Frye was treated with "extraordinary sympathy and kindliness" (125) by Professor George Brett, the head of the Department of Philosophy and the senior philosopher in the university.21 The author of major works on the history of psychology, Brett affirmed vigorously the unity of scientific and humanistic knowledge and fought the promoters of irrationalism and determinism. For him "philosophy, history and the new sciences of human nature attested to the values of human free will and creativity."22 Probably Frye was unaware of the extent and specific focus of Brett's works. He was greatly impressed, as were many others, then and later, with the range and precision of Brett's lectures.23 His own understanding of the imaginative power of the mind may have begun to take shape from the tone and content of Brett's words. From him and from Reid MacCallum, who taught aesthetics, he acquired a solid background in the history of philosophy and a satisfying glimpse as well of the cultural life of the university community (no. 27). Frye, however, was not a budding philosopher. He was intrigued and inspired by his instructors in English—Pelham Edgar, John Robins, and E.J. Pratt—all of whom stood outside the conventional Victoria mould. Edgar, an Anglican and the scion of a prominent Liberal family, who enjoyed whisky and convivial gatherings, frequently detoured around his nominal subject to talk about contemporary literature. From him Frye learned about writers such as Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, and he was enjoined if not urged to study William Blake's works. Robins introduced him to the world of ballads and folk literature—a world Robins would evoke in recitals from such works. E.J. Pratt, a sometime Methodist minister and instructor in psychology, would soon become Canada's leading poet, a living embodiment of the power of the imagination in an uncaring and potentially hostile cultural environment. The teaching and example of these men not only set Frye on a literary path

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but also shaped the direction it would take—a fact to which he would often allude subsequently and always affectionately (125). The young Frye who graduated in 1933 was not simply an erudite scholar torn between his interest in Blake and the unwelcome prospect of three years of theological education. As editor of Acta Victoriana he had challenged two important features of the university—the system of annual examinations and the Pass Course. "The Case against Examinations" (no. 4) was a perceptive analysis of the ways in which students responded to final examinations. "The examination," he wrote, is "the mainstay of the slacker, the superficial skimmer of culture, the uninspired and Philistinic 'average student'" (13), and makes possible "the survival of the misfit." "Let us get away," he urged, "from the iniquitous system" and replace it with regular evaluation of students' work (13). His final word in Acta was entitled accurately "The Pass Course: A Polemic" (no. 12). The Pass Course, which became a three-year programme in 1931, enabled students to select a variety of subjects—"four or five chaotic masses of culture," from which the student is "almost certain to emerge with a confused mind and a sense of resentment and disillusionment" (38-9). Most such students "harbour a sense of inferiority which breaks up the unity of the college by an idiotic caste distinction." Thus, he concluded, "the total and unconditional abolition of the Pass Course is a necessary step in the development of Canadian education" (39).^ If they read Acta, the faculty of Emmanuel College must have been impressed and alarmed at the prospect of Frye's arrival in 1933. The college was a new foundation (1928), based on the union of the Methodist Faculty of Theology of Victoria University and those among the Presbyterian faculty and students of Knox College who had joined the United Church.25 Richard Davidson, the principal and an Old Testament scholar and distinguished liturgist, Kenneth Cousland, professor of Church History and a graduate of Knox and Oxford, both former Presbyterians, and John Line, a former Methodist actively interested in social reform, were key figures in the college. They helped to create an atmosphere that was scholarly and quietly evangelical, one in which the neo-Kantian idealism of John Baillie was more influential than the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Earth, and the insights of contemporary Biblical scholarship had been absorbed without controversy.26 For Frye, immersed already in Blake and English literature generally, the theological course and the prospect of becoming a minister, of which

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he was "deadly afraid," were tormenting and distracting.27 But, working immensely hard as usual, he took English courses, taught English to undergraduates, and pursued his study of Blake in addition to his theological programme, all of which was eased by the patience and intellectual ecumenism of his Emmanuel instructors. As his essays indicate, he had absorbed, primarily from Spengler's Decline of the West, an understanding of "the destiny of art forms" and the concept of interpenetration, "the notion" that "everything is everywhere at once," an idea delineated as well in Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (i925).28 Frazer's Golden Bough, "written by a rather stupid man," described the function of myth in religion and culture. Mythically, Frazer's work "was the great pyramid,"29 or a major account of the function of myth in human society. For Blake, Frye discovered, the Bible is "really the Magna Carta of the human imagination." Christianity is "pre-eminently the religion which united the divine and the human and consequently opened a path of freedom to man which is infinite." What "God does comes through man—the consciousness and the imagination of man."30 The Frye who returned to Toronto in 1939 at the end of his rather uninspiring experience at Oxford to take up his appointment at Victoria was a formidable scholar.31 He had written a massive manuscript on Blake, but he had not acquired a doctorate. He was and would continue to be primarily a teacher, and would write and speak perceptively and persuasively about the teacher's role in the school and the university. He would become a powerful defender of the kind of university education he had had. His teaching and his defence of the university were informed and inspired not simply by his immense erudition but also by his understanding of the power of the imagination and his religious conviction. Behind the fluent, sharp-tongued scholar with left-wing political sympathies was a Christian mystic, fully aware that the natural man is a "psychotic ape" and that "the language of love is the only one spoken and understood by God."32 By 1945 Frye had composed the manuscript that would appear as Fearful Symmetry and had published articles on ballet and art in the Canadian Forum. "A Liberal Education" (no. 13), his first major statement on that subject, appeared in the Forum in that year. Following a summary of the views of progressive and antiprogressive educators in the United States, he argued that "it is not progressive, but dangerously reactionary, to identify reality with an ordinary middle-class American's conception of reality. It is not progressive, but dangerously reactionary, to reject the

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authority of past genius in favour of the authority of present mediocrity" (47). He continued: "I do not myself believe in any educational programme that adjusts the student either to an ideal or to an actual environment. ... The purpose of liberal education today is to achieve a neurotic maladjustment in the student, to twist him into a critical and carping intellectual, very dissatisfied with the world . . . and yet unable to leave it alone" (48-9). "The Bible tells us," he concluded, "that ten righteous men could have saved Sodom from destruction. We need a new slogan for education: how about 'Education for Gomorrah'?" (49). Two years later, in "Education and the Humanities," he contended that "authority in the humanities comes from certain great artists who always have been and always will be models of the highest possible achievement in their fields. . . . Authority in the arts . . . derives from individual genius" (50-1). Thus "the purpose of reading a Shakespeare play . . . is ... to drop a seed of great vision into the mind in the hope of stimulating the growth of that mind as a whole" (51). The humanities lead us "toward the discipline of spiritual freedom from which they derive the name of liberal" (52) and thence to understanding the Christian experience. Recognized by 1950 as a distinguished scholar, Frye was becoming influential in his own discipline and in the university. In 1952 he became head of the Victoria Department of English, a position he kept until 1959. Speaking at the first meeting of the future Association of Canadian University Teachers of English in 1957, he suggested that the proposed society would help English teachers to keep abreast of developments in literary criticism and especially the formal principles of writing. His principal concerns, however, were with the changing role of the scholar and the task of the university. "We may be moving back again to the Newman conception of the undergraduate university as less intellectual than, in the highest sense, social, less concerned with research as an end in itself than with a definite social aim, an aim that might be described as realizing the idea of a free society" (61). A university "trains its students to think freely, but thinking, as distinct from musing or speculating, is a power of decision based on habit." Universities "with department-store curricula... are merely cheating" the student and "undermine the habits of continuity and repetition which are the basis of learning" (63). A year later, Frye spoke on "Humanities in a New World" (no. 20). In this lecture, he argued that "the two great instruments that man has

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devised for understanding and transforming the world are words and numbers." The primary concern of the humanities—language and literature—is "the disinterested study of words" (72). This kind of knowledge is crucial to society, for "the human word is... the power that orders our chaos, and the light by which we live" (85). Within a year, Frye would be installed as principal of Victoria College, and as such one of the guardians of the university's system of federated colleges and Honour Courses. In his installation address—an eloquent "lay sermon"—he argued that federation demonstrated the value of the small residential college and would help the university to combat the dangers of "bigness" and "uniformity." The Honour Courses "do everything for the student that a carefully planned and balanced programme of studies can do." In contrast, he expressed great sympathy for students in general courses and "nothing but contempt for the educational theory" that supported such endeavours (93). The university, he proclaimed, is "the powerhouse of freedom," from which comes "respect for the artist's vision, the scientist's detachment, the teacher's learning and patience" (99). In the end, "we can hope for no better future for our students than a life of ... intellectual war" in which they will be sustained by the "inexhaustible," "infinite and eternal" "sources of power in the human mind" (102,101). Frye would be principal of Victoria until 1966. He fulfilled his responsibilities as the college's academic head efficiently and conscientiously, at a time in which the university was changing rapidly and becoming increasingly uncertain about the role of the colleges. By 1966 he was overwhelmed by the demands of writing, teaching, and administration on his time and energy. Thus, he gratefully accepted appointment as the first university professor in the University of Toronto. He was now freed from routine tasks, but his attachment to Victoria and to the ideal university celebrated in his installation address was not weakened.33 By 1967, however, the social and political environment in which the universities in North America and Western Europe functioned had begun to change dramatically in ways that would gravely threaten the institutional and philosophical structures cherished and defended by Frye and other likeminded scholars. The University of Toronto was caught up in these developments and, partly, in response, effected far-reaching alterations in its institutional arrangements and programmes. During the 19603, the United States was severely shaken by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King,

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and Robert Kennedy, a potential presidential candidate. These events were symbolic of the widespread tumult generated by the civil rights movement and the opposition to the increasing military involvement of the United States in Vietnam.34 The universities, initially the peaceful target of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as defenders of the establishment in the economy and the state rather than effective proponents of social change, were beset between 1965 and 1970 by demonstrations and "sit-ins."35 A severe clash at Columbia University in the spring of 1968 was followed by a violent confrontation in Chicago, ostensibly to prevent the disruption of the Democratic party's presidential convention. Frye witnessed the harsh suppression of student protest at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1969 (385-7). Frye had spoken vigorously and optimistically at university convocations in the early 19605 and had worked with Toronto secondary school teachers to develop proposals for changes in the schools' curriculum. "The real power that drives the educational machine," he insisted, is "the power of self-criticism in teachers, which means the renewing of the vision of the subject they teach" (142). "The ultimate purpose of teaching literature," he would add later, "is not understanding but the transferring of the imaginative habit of mind ... from the laboratory of literature to the life of mankind" (159). A perceptive observer with an intense concern for the well-being of students and the preservation of the liberal university, Frye responded gravely to the crisis in the universities. His response reflected his own experience of the ideological and social turmoil of the 19303 and his clear understanding of the Marxist and liberal explanations of political and economic conflict. He believed that student unrest and the student movement would be short-lived, since, unlike the civil rights agitation, they were not generated by long-standing social and political injustice. Nevertheless, by denying students "a sense of social function" as schools and universities had done in the postwar years, "we were unconsciously creating a social proletariat," that is, "a body of people in society who are excluded from the benefits that their own labour entitles them to" (319). "Student power" was for him, however, a meaningless phrase: "the university is not a power structure." "Student representation on governing bodies" could be arranged easily, but would not result in much change (320). "A student's first duty is to study" and in so doing to grasp the distinction between "real knowledge" and "the false knowledge that we get from news media, propaganda, and advertising." "In the great

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things that man has made and thought, man still lives .. . and while he lives they give his life a radiance beyond his knowing" (321,323). Frye spoke at the University of Western Ontario immediately after observing the confrontation at Berkeley in which "it was the police who were rioting" (386). Governor Reagan and the SDS "are very pleased with the result." For both, he concluded, the university was ultimately "an obstacle" to be destroyed or transformed (387), an event that he was certain would not occur. "The university is the centre of all genuine social order" and "effective social action has to begin by strengthening and unifying the university community" (388). Three days later he would tell the students at York University that the "tactics of trying to revolutionize society by harassing and bedevilling the university are the most foolish and frivolous tactics that could possibly be devised" (393), and reflected the confusion of would-be radicals. The spiritual perspective from which he viewed these events was evident in an address at Hart House, in the University of Toronto, in November 1969 (no. 64). "The rationalizing of distraction is really an aspect of the death-wish in the human mind, its constant impulse to throw life away under the chariot of some cause that gets a lot of headlines." "Our only real enemies," he argued, are "the legions of demons inside us. And the university ... still does provide us with some of the weapons we must have for winning the only war, and accomplishing the only revolution, that really exist" (398). The university's weapons were described succinctly in his 1970 address at the University of Windsor (no. 66). "The university tries to show us that the intellect and the imagination provide the air which it is more natural for us to breathe." It "says that there is a reason beyond rationalization . . . and that if we develop philosophy and the sciences we get something more useful than the rationalizing of thugs and ditherers" (402). The "authority of the logical argument, the repeatable experiment, the compelling imagination, is the final authority in society. . . . As this authority is the same thing as freedom, the university is also the only place in society where freedom is defined." Many in our society, he added, "hate the very thought of freedom . . . human society is not capable of any freedom except academic freedom and what is derived from it" (403-4). Doubtless Frye's impassioned words reflected concern not only for the well-being of the universities in general, but also for his own university. During the 19605 the University of Toronto achieved "multiversity"

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status; that is, it now had a very large enrolment and was giving increasing attention to graduate studies and research, with a concomitant weakening of undergraduate education.36 Not surprisingly, in the late 19603 the university was beset by student unrest and insistent demands for student representation on its governing bodies. The tension generated by this movement was heightened by the university's decision to revise its undergraduate programmes in Arts and Science and to consider major changes in its system of governance. The report of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Instruction in the Faculty of Arts and Science (Macpherson Report) was published in 1967.37 The committee recommended the abolition of the Honour Courses in the interest of improving the quality of instruction for all undergraduates. This proposal was adopted "in a great wave of exuberant hysteria" (419), a decision that Frye hoped and probably expected would be reversed in due course. In fact, as its reception coincided with the continued growth of graduate programmes in a period of inadequate funding, the projected improvement was not effected. In 1971, the University of Toronto adopted a unicameral governing structure in which students and faculty were represented at all levels. Frye believed it would be "futile nonsense" to oppose this development, but he anticipated that the real result would be "the running of the university" by "an increasingly invisible civil service." Real teachers and real students in all universities would be obliged to discuss their concerns unofficially. "This conspiratorial activity," he believed, "will be what will rebuild the university" (418-19). The university would continue to be attacked from the left and the right, as it had been in the 19505 and 19605—an offensive directed against academic freedom. In these circumstances, every university must continue to stress that "experiment and reason and imagination cannot be maintained without wisdom .. . without infinite sympathy for genuine idealism and infinite patience with stupidity, ignorance, and malice" (421). From 1971 onward the process of curriculum adjustment lurched ahead in the university, in ways that must have seemed questionable to Frye. In 1974, federation, the second pillar of the structure in which he had worked, was also altered significantly by a Memorandum of Understanding approved by the university, its colleges, and the federated universities.38 The distinction between university and college subjects was dropped and the teaching staffs of the former college departments became members of centralized university departments. In addition,

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the federated universities effectively lost the right to make academic appointments. Frye reluctantly supported adoption of the Memorandum. Clearly, however, he feared that Victoria and the other federated colleges would become simply providers of services to the university. Thus in 1978 he warned that "if all the colleges were weakened beyond effectiveness, the arts and science faculty would still be big and impressive, but no longer great" (521). In 1978, Frye became chancellor of Victoria University and received the Royal Bank award for distinguished service to Canada. His installation address was nostalgic and optimistic. "As long as I have been here," he remarked fondly, "I have continuously had the feeling of living in Canadian cultural history" (522). "Victoria's distinctive tradition," he stressed, "has three aspects, religious, humanistic, and residential, and removing any of these would destroy, for both staff and students, the double identity of a distinguished college and a great university which they possess now" (521). He added: "a great tradition is not a dead weight from the past . . . but a continuous source of energy. . . . The promise that truth leads to freedom ... is ... the guarantee of a direction and a purpose in life" (522). His address to the multitude gathered by his banker hosts touched on his principal concerns and interests: the teacher's role, metaphors and myths, "the building of worlds out of words" (511), "the liberalizing of the imagination" (514), and the crucial importance of an undergraduate experience in which "the intellect and the imagination" have "a functional role to play" (516). His final words, however, were an indication of Frye's religious insight and commitment: "as our personal future narrows, we become more aware of another dimension of time entirely, and may even catch glimpses of the powers and forces of a far greater creative design. Perhaps when we think we are working for the future we are really being contained in the present— Perhaps too that present is also a presence . . . a person in whom to find ourselves again" (516). Goldwin French II

Frye's thought on education was no mere pendant to his work on literary theory, but an integral part of it; as he recognized, all his books were essentially teachers' manuals (GC, xiv). Frye remained a teacher all his

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life, trying out his ideas in the classroom and adopting a rhetoric derived from the speaking voice of the teacher. His belief in the vital role of the imagination in human life committed him to furthering literary education at all levels: fostering and developing the child's love of rhythmical and colourful language, designing a curriculum that built up literary knowledge sequentially, and providing a university experience that liberated the student's creative powers. Preoccupied with human civilization and culture in the widest sense, he sought also to define the contributions made by the different disciplines, particularly by the humanities as contrasted with the sciences. This part of the introduction is an examination of these educational ideas as parts of a coherent structure of thought and in relation to their historical context. A consideration of the centrality of study in Frye's thought might well start from the fact that his view of the external world was largely negative. Nature was to him fallen nature, a tyranny of iron laws, and a source of death and corruption: for him, as for Blake, where man is not, nature is barren. His evaluation of the outward forms of social life was also unenthusiastic. According to the pieces published here, daily life is a phantasmagoria characterized by meaningless change: in an oft-repeated formulation, at one time the King of England was the Emperor of India, China was a bourgeois friend, and Japan was a totalitarian enemy (e.g., 175,414). Like a frustrated Platonist, Frye looked for permanent forms or principles, and found none in the welter of varying political alliances, the rush of unbridled and pointless consumerism, and the din of propaganda, advertising, and inane television programmes that characterized, for him, human life on the ordinary level. All this is to say that Frye was by nature an introverted thinking type, for whom the life of the mind was pre-eminent.39 Like many postKantian thinkers, he rejected the possibility of our knowing absolutely an external world; our perceptions are shaped by our perceiving organs, and by the language and assumptions that he took to calling (before Canadian bureaucrats adopted the term) "the cultural envelope." Thus such order as we find in nature is imposed by the human mind. It follows that, for Frye, the arts and sciences are at the centre of human life. They constitute "the permanent body of what humanity has done and is still doing" (265): permanent not in the sense of being static and unchanging, but in that they have coherence and they progress in an orderly manner, keeping continuity between the generations (278). A liberal education in such disciplines is not a luxury but an approach to

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reality—a study of the paradigms that have structured the world we see. In Romantic fashion, Frye reverses the conventional imagery of a "real world" inhabited by businessmen and workers, and dotted with ivory towers in which academics perch like Rapunzels above the fray: instead, academics, grappling with the models underlying the shifting appearances of everyday life, are presented as navvies toiling in the bowels of some mighty ship, down in the very "engine room of the world" (280). Admittedly this metaphor applies more naturally to scientists in their laboratories than to humanists in their studies, and Russia's launching of a Sputnik in 1957, often mentioned in this volume, ushered in an era when scientific truth was at a premium and the humanities felt called upon to justify themselves. Frye was a popular spokesman for the traditional disciplines because in his encyclopedic way he had surveyed the whole of knowledge and could communicate to audiences his own belief in the vital importance of the arts. In the fourth essay of Anatomy of Criticism, for instance, he divides "the good" into three main areas; art is placed in the centre, between history (dealing with the world of social action and events) on the one hand, and science and philosophy (dealing with thought and ideas) on the other.40 The centrality of art in the diagram cannot help but carry the polemical suggestion that it is central, or plays a mediating role, in the human endeavour. Frye made little use of this scholastic and trinitarian formulation, however, in the shorter pieces reproduced in this volume in which he discussed the distinction between the arts and the sciences. In this context he was concerned not so much with the arts as with the humanities, pre-eminently those such as English or music which study the arts rather than creating them. Thus he rejected any simple division between art as appealing to emotion and taste and science as appealing to logic and reason. He insisted that, as disciplines, all the humanities and social sciences are to some extent "sciences" in that they must respect scientific standards of evidence and correct reasoning (e.g., 114)—a plea he had already made for criticism in the Anatomy. Some readers may in fact experience uneasiness with the formulation Frye used so often, with minor variations, for the guiding principle in the university, "the authority of logic and reason, of demonstrable and repeatable experiment, of established fact, of compelling imagination" (372). The last item seems less authoritative than the first three, since what compels one person may leave another cold, and there are no objective criteria to appeal to (certainly there are none in Frye's literary theory) in deciding which

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imaginative construct has merit. Science, in methodology at least, seems privileged. Frye was even prepared to float the notion that artists themselves had a kind of objectivity and detachment analogous to that of scientists (284).4I Instead of distinguishing the sciences and the humanities by their methodologies, Frye distinguished them by their subject matter. The scientist studies the world as it is, or nature; the humanist, the world humankind wants to live in, or culture (248, jig).42 Though he maintained that scientists cannot know the world in an absolute sense, nature nevertheless does exist. On the other hand, the subject matter of the arts and humane disciplines, such as religion, law, and philosophy, is entirely a human creation, based on the ideals of a civilization under construction. The arts themselves express what in "Speculation and Concern" of October 1956 (no. 43)—his first foray into this subject, and surely among the more difficult and challenging of his pronouncements—Frye calls "humanity's awareness of being itself" (248). Frye draws on the insights of the existential philosophers to explain this sense of "being in time" which is amenable only to the arts. In this context he is prepared to admit that the "compelling imagination" does not have the final authority of the "repeatable experiment," since these imaginative constructs involve the inherently controversial area of ethical choice (e.g. 333,519). In no. 43, given at a conference on the topic of "The Humanities and the Quest for Truth," he concluded that the real distinction between the sciences and the humanities resides in the attitudes of the scholars involved. Whereas the scientist ideally remains detached and objective, the humanist is necessarily involved in the social context of his subject. In the mind of the humanist studying the arts there is a constant tension between the realm of values and commitment and the scholarly demands of objectivity, as he studies "the nature of the human involvement with the human world" (258). Frye studied the world humankind wants to live in most closely, of course, in relation to literature. He tried not to privilege English when talking to a general audience, and in fact insisted that "any genuine discipline can be used as a centre of knowledge" (113). In late years, in response no doubt to the general tendency to dissolve the boundaries of discourse, he even went so far as to say that the days of English literature as a subject may be numbered: "I think we may be moving toward centralizing the humanities on a comparative-literature basis, and break-

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ing down the distinction between literary and nonliterary."43 Nevertheless, it was through his studies in English literature that he became aware of the role of myth in human culture, and it is obvious that for him the study of literature is central to a liberal education. The Educated Imagination of 1963 is his most accessible statement of what happens when one studies literature. To recall its argument briefly, poets use language in a "primitive" or imaginative way to identify, through metaphor, the natural world and some aspect of human life. Whether consciously or not, and with varying degrees of disguise or displacement, they use the patterns and archetypes of literature that are derived from myth. To the synoptic view of the critic, all poets together are engaged in elaborating a vast, self-contained myth or verbal structure (called a "communal enterprise" at 256) in which the external world becomes a symbol for human desire: comedies and imagery of spring, gardens, and heavenly cities suggest all that we long for, and tragedies and ironic works, with their waste lands, dungeons, and winter, define what we reject.This imaginative construct provides a goal for what civilization is trying to build, a humanized world with nothing alien and exterior to it. Such an articulation of human desire is essentially what one apprehends when one reads literature and reflects on it as a critic. Frye's literary theory has an almost mystic dimension, in that he posits a moment of awareness when external nature is completely "swallowed" by the imagination and man thus becomes liberated and godlike. The Anatomy's concept of anagogic metaphor, in which the whole universe is inside the mind of a giant human figure, celebrates such a triumph of the creative imagination. This is heady stuff, indeed; but Frye perhaps did not realistically expect many students to follow him into what he elsewhere calls a vortex in which the verbal structure turns inside out and nature as content becomes nature contained.44 When called upon to explain the value of English studies to general audiences, he scaled down his claims. In no. 69, On Teaching Literature, for instance, he stressed the "social vision" gained from the imagery of desire and aversion. In this sense literature is the "laboratory of myths" (375), and the ability to imagine a better world through myth is basic to "a genuinely human life" (459). Frye also talked about the importance of metaphor, rhetoric, and figurative language, "words with power" that poetry keeps alive. In studying the poets the student absorbs some of their verbal energy and becomes himself more articulate and thus potentially more free (527). Frye was also aware, however, of the nonimaginative use of English as

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a medium for other disciplines. In his remarks on Claude Bissell's inauguration as president of the University of Toronto in 1958 (no. 20), he proposed the distinction that the sciences were the mathematical subjects, and the humanities verbal. This formulation was rejected in the same piece as inadequate, since the sciences, at least in their more elementary phase, use language too; but it recurs in no. 43, where a parallel is drawn between mathematics and English as "informing languages" or mediums for other studies. Frye had drawn attention to the degree to which mathematics is an art, constructing its own selfcontained universe, in the closing pages of the Anatomy;*5 now he emphasizes that math is scientific in that it "stabilizes the subject on the 'rational' level" (251). The double nature of mathematics is paralleled by the two uses of English, as an imaginative and a referential language. As the literary student ponders these different uses and becomes sensitive to the way in which myth and metaphor permeate even descriptive language, she makes herself less susceptible to their use in propaganda and advertising, and more conscious of her social conditioning.46 The motto of Victoria University, abeunt studia in mores ("education passes into character"), expresses perfectly the way Frye saw studies informing future life. A student leaves the university not so much with a stock of knowledge, which will inevitably leach away, as with a vision against which to measure the shortcomings of his or her own society; he or she will be maladjusted and crotchety, "a critical and carping intellectual," "probably one of that miserable band who read the Canadian Forum" (49). No wonder that for Frye the graduation address was a favourite genre, in which he sent graduates forth as a band of pilgrims. At Victoria, where a baccalaureate service forms part of the graduation ceremonies, he was famous for the "commissionings" in which he bestowed a blessing, and which are similar in spirit to the addresses in which Chancellor Burwash used to send out graduates to build the Kingdom of God.47 In the secular convocation addresses printed here, he usually ends with an invitation to the new graduates to consider themselves part of an invisible society of intellectuals, "the oldest and most honourable company in the world" (165). Frye's view of the importance of literary education was reflected in his considerable involvement in education at more junior levels. As this collection indicates, he gave freely of his time to address secondary and elementary school teachers and organizations concerned with them (nos. 28,29, 35, 36,49, 55,67,79,84), never counting a day wasted in which he

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had done so. He is said to have remarked to such teachers, "If you didn't do your job, I wouldn't have mine!" One of his main concerns was to ensure an adequate and challenging curriculum that would foster the imaginative habit of mind from earliest days, for "in moments of depression one feels that the majority of university students have already been conditioned beyond the point at which the university can affect them at all" (109). He called literature a deductive study, in the sense that the teacher has a (Frygian) sense of the overall derivation of literature from myth, and needs to find examples illustrating it (147, 204). The teaching of literature revolves around central classics and models, and the curriculum therefore needs to be structured. Unfortunately, the primary and secondary schools' curricula in North America during the 19405 and 19505 did not always reflect Frye's sense of English literature as an ordered body of work with poetry at its centre. On the contrary, the prevailing attitude seemed to be that English was a tool of communication, and that students might be persuaded to read prose and sensible stories, but would balk at too much poetry.48 Frye was therefore one of the people who responded to the call of Roy Sharp (trustee of the Toronto Board of Education) and Robin Harris (professor and acting principal of University College) to bring together university professors and teachers in a joint committee to study the curriculum in elementary and secondary schools. He was part of a widespread impetus at this time to impose more structure: in 1959, for instance, the MLA had embraced the notion of a "spiral curriculum," as recommended in the work of Jerome Bruner, in which the same elements are revisited at everdeeper levels. Frye was the editor of Design for Learning, in which the reports of the three area committees of this joint board were published, and wrote an introduction to it (no. 28) which he once described as "the spine so to speak of my work on education outside the university."49 The volume received some enthusiastic reviews50 and, according to educational historian W.G. Fleming, caused some consternation by its criticisms. Ontario's Department of Education had, as Fleming remarks, "retained an air of complacency and self-satisfaction";51 perhaps its officials were still basking in the glory of the twenty-one prizes the Ontario system won at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, when it was declared the finest practical system in the world.52 The report of the English committee, echoing Frye's introduction, criticized the readers used in elementary schools as "too low in vocabulary count, too dully repetitive, too vacuous," and

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recommended the study of "the forms and the recurrent themes which are, perhaps, the basic principles of structure in literature."53 A more detailed exposition of what Frye thought was wrong with the way literature was often taught in the primary grades can be seen in his criticism of the "Adventures" series of readers (no. 42), which he was asked by the publisher Harcourt, Brace and World to evaluate.54 These texts were used chiefly in U.S. schools, but Frye's comments on Ontario teachers who were asked to "substitute various kinds of slick verbal trash for literature" (73) suggest that the same phenomenon was widespread in Ontario. The readers encapsulated the approach to literature castigated in the Anatomy, in that the extracts they used were presented as an unstructured heap. They also showed a dangerous tendency to equate reading with social conditioning, as the works anthologized all affirmed the "American way of life." Frye recognized the need for students to be introduced to their society's central mythology—in the United States, ideals of democratic equality, respect for the flag, and so on—but he argued that such teaching should come in a civics course, and be combined with a certain amount of critical detachment. The publishers were so impressed with his arguments—or so devastated by his opinion of their books—that they asked him to supervise the production of a new series embodying his ideas of a coherent literary education. This series, under the general title of Literature: Uses of the Imagination, duly appeared between 1972 and 1974, with editors Hope Lee, Alvin Lee, and W.T. Jewkes working under Frye's general editorship. The thirteen books, intended for use in English classes in grades 7 to 12 in Canada and the United States, grouped works on the basis of literary structure rather than of content (442). Stories and poems from different literatures and periods highlight recurring elements such as garden and wilderness imagery, myths of quest, and the narrative patterns of comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. The pupil is introduced first to sensuous, rhythmical poetry and chants, and then to the four types of story; there are three readers giving Bible stories and their later echoes, and three more doing the same for the principal Greek myths; and finally the student is led to revisit the four mythoi on a deeper level as recommended in the spiral curriculum. The influence of this series must have been considerable. According to the sales figures, which are available for the first six volumes alone, they sold steadily from 1972 until the mid-1980s, with each volume averaging 45,000 copies; a total of 270,000 copies of volumes i to 6 were sold before

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the series went out of print in 1991. Assuming the next seven volumes sold approximately as well, more than half a million copies were distributed across North America. And though some children may have been the recipients of several readers, on the other hand the books were often bound and used as class sets year after year, and it would not be out of line to think of over a million users.55 Unfortunately, the publisher felt the series did not have the requisite mass-market appeal, and eventually brought back the old "Adventures" series so disdained by Frye. But the introductory booklet written by Frye to accompany the series, On Teaching Literature, had a wider and continuous circulation. Reprinted in On Education, it was read and appreciated by numerous teachers looking for a coherent approach to their subject. Frye's influence is still felt in a more general way in the primary and secondary schools through former students who have fanned out across the world as teachers, and who feel it part of their mission to convey the imaginative heritage he opened up to them. On this level his approach has survived the vicissitudes of critical theory, since it so obviously enriches the classroom and "works."56 When critical theorists abandoned the category of "literature" in favour of a more general "text," it appeared that Frye's concept of literature was infinitely elastic; his celebrated stand against value judgments works against prematurely defining the "canon," and popular stories and romances had always formed part of his purview. In particular, Frye dignified children's literature; as Leland Jacobs put it in introducing Frye before his talk to the library school at Columbia (no. 83), in his theory Peter Rabbit could coexist with King Lear. Leland Jacobs was the editor of a series of books on elementary teaching, of which Glenna Sloan's The Child as Critic is one. Sloan declares herself a believer in Frye's principles of leading the student towards seeing the unity of literature, and Frye wrote an introduction to her book (no. 74); through channels such as this his ideas continue to percolate.57 Frye's views on literary education also affected his own style and method of teaching. On the one hand, the demands of a critical overview led him to favour the traditional lecture format, with the instructor at the head of the class. His experience with Blunden at Oxford had early taught him the limitations of the tutorial system,58 and he was aware from Princeton of the "horrid articulateness" consequent upon the too great reliance on what he called "the mystique of the seminar" (417), where students merely repeat their prejudices. On the other hand, his

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democratic leanings made him uncomfortable with all the implications of the superior-inferior, teacher-student relationship, which he went so far as to characterize as "embarrassing" (498). The teacher's superiority is not, of course, a matter of caste, but a consequence of a greater concentration on the subject, and the subject, for Frye, had an authority over both teacher and taught (499). In this sense a teacher is "not primarily someone who knows instructing someone who does not know" (GC, xv), but the "transparent medium" of his subject (112), avoiding any projection of his own ego but trying to free the student's mind for the recreation of the subject or the author's vision. Thus Frye himself was far from flamboyant in the classroom, his humour dry and understated and his readings of poetry unemphatic. Perhaps he did not realize the tremendous force he exerted willy-nilly; during the legendary long silences in his classes the students were often frozen witless, perversely unable to answer the simplest question unless something occurred to break the log jam.59 Then perhaps they realized that, as Margaret Atwood has testified, he was "surprisingly gentle with youthful naivete and simple ignorance."60 Thus also he opposed any kind of training in pedagogy for university teachers, as if this might make them persuaders rather than vehicles—not realizing, again, that students' complaints of inaudible lecturers and the like were legitimate and could easily have been addressed. His assertion that any good scholar who doesn't have a cleft palate can teach university is not one of his most successful jokes (62). There were personal reticences, too, in his teaching, which have been explored by Margaret Burgess chiefly in reference to his classes on the Bible and mythology.61 His literary subject matter was also potentially explosive, as in the final analysis he was working towards not just intellectual understanding but a transformation of vision. He hoped to clear space through the student's preconceptions and prejudices in order to let in the light of the great poets' imaginations, and in the face of such possible illuminations his reaction was one of extreme tact and delicacy. His allusions to moments in the classroom when "a window opens into the created world"62 have a touching wistfulness that suggests the rarity and preciousness of such occasions. Frye's principles and practices led him to be characterized as a "traditional" educator in W.G. Fleming's history of education in Ontario.63 This view needs to be leavened by emphasis on the unsettling and iconoclastic results Frye hoped to achieve; some of the early essays attack

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"progressivism" and "practical" education precisely because it involves adjusting the student to existing society (e.g., nos. 13, 20, 24). But in methodology he declared himself, in 1960, a defender of the universities' "traditionally retrograde, obscurantist, and reactionary way" (115). Since in his student days he had been something of a rebel, publicly criticizing the examination system though afraid that his outspokenness might cost him the Trick scholarship,64 it is perhaps tempting to ascribe the stance to age and encroaching conservatism. It is true that he does reverse himself to some extent in his mature years, for instance insisting that Victoria College in his undergraduate days was full of intellectual excitement (no. 27), whereas his student writings in Ada Victoriana are patronizingly conscious of cultural lacunae (nos. 2, 3, 7, 11). But this change of perspective must not be mistaken for an abandonment of principle; examinations were only a means to an end, and the underlying intellectual structure, even in the early Acta essays, remains remarkably consistent. Frye enjoyed a brief heyday when the shortcomings of progressive education were shown up by the apparently greater success of the structured Russian system, but he soon acquired a new set of antagonists in the student radicals of the late 19605 and early 19705. Many of the items here deal with this subject (especially nos. 52-5, 57-9, 61, 62, 66, 67, and 72), and they have been so frequently reproduced that it might seem as though Frye felt threatened to the point of obsession with the topic. But, as he points out in the preface to On Education (603-4), student unrest was a subject he was requested to address many times. For all the Maoist jibes about his clerical status, he was so obviously not of the establishment, so essentially a scholar without social ambitions, that a defence of the life of the mind coming from him had weight and conviction. In some ways the radicals were tantalizingly close to what Frye saw as the end product of a successful education: questioning minds liberated from conventional shackles. He had complained of conformity and the passive cliche-response, particularly in The Modern Century (1967); the radicals recalled his "crotchety, maladjusted" ideal students, criticizing society in the light of a more worthy ideal. In his undergraduate years he had sought the abolition of examinations (no. 4), and of the division of students into Pass and Honours (no. 12); the radicals called for an end to such mechanical requirements and invidious distinctions. The radicals wanted to open a university education to all comers; Frye, though not going quite that far, welcomed the presence of adult students (176,184). He was often sarcastic about the "population explosion in scholarship"

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(169), sought for alternatives to the Ph.D. or to the writing of a thesis, and recommended the establishment of smaller liberal arts colleges to complement the larger research establishments.65 For all this, in basic ways the radicals were not of his spirit. Frye has a name for such near misses: they are parodies of the real thing, he might even say demonic parodies. The radicals' mistakes could be divided into two areas. On the level of studies and curriculum, they demanded a flexibility and a "relevance" which precluded their really learning anything. On the level of university policy, they wanted to co-opt the university for a socially worthy aim, while Frye insisted on the university's holding itself aloof from all such causes. For Frye, the radicals who demanded the right to choose their curriculum were ensnared by the same faulty notions of freedom as Adam and Eve eating the apple, or Arnold's nineteenth-century liberals doing as they pleased. His own notion of freedom was more Miltonic, equating true freedom with the acceptance of right reason, and thus collapsing the antagonism between freedom and necessity—as eloquently explored in his convocation address at the University of Windsor (no. 66). This meant that to liberate their creative powers, students had to accept discipline and undergo a laborious apprenticeship in mastering their subject. Honour Courses like Toronto's "English Language and Literature" provided a coherent body of knowledge far superior to a smattering of courses chosen according to personal predilection. The demand for relevance, too, involved all sorts of difficulties. In practice it generally meant courses with subject matter concerning the modern world, a kind of pop sociology. Frye defended the central tradition of English literature, even though most of its authors were what would later be described as dead white males. He championed poets such as Milton and Spenser not only because they point directly to the archetypes but also because of their very strangeness of context. It is the study of a partly alien body of assumptions that provides the truly "liberating" element in a liberal education (485). In apprehending them in their pastness and at the same time relating them to ourselves, we are recreating them. On the level of curriculum, however, Frye's view did not prevail. Ironically, the distinction he complained of between Pass and Honour Courses was abolished, at the University of Toronto, by the sweeping away of the Honour Courses. Now a Toronto student could be certified a specialist in English without having taken (apart from one initial survey course) a course covering any of Shakespeare, Spenser,

xlvi

Introduction

Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Eliot, or Yeats.66 While Frye welcomed the inclusion of neglected women or minority authors, he felt this should not be done to the extent of obliterating a core of classics which have permeated later literature. The second area of radical demands, that the university enter as a moral force into society—divesting itself of investments in South Africa, admitting minorities in a preferential way, and generally championing social justice—demands more protracted discussion, as Frye presents a complicated countervailing vision of the way the university serves society. Again, there is no underlying disharmony between his earlier and his later thought, but rather a change of emphasis and terminology. Frye had always insisted, in his graduation addresses, on the distinction between students' roles as students and as citizens. As students, they operated on the speculative level, gaining knowledge about things; as educated citizens, they ideally had acquired wisdom or the knowledge of things, and were thus equipped to operate on a practical and committed level (163-4). At the start of the student unrest he was led to clarify this position, and examine more closely the relation of literature to ideology. He did so partly by crystallizing his thought around the concept of "concern"—a term close to, though not identical with, the radicals' "involvement." Frye used this term as early as 1965, deriving it probably from the writings of Paul Tillich. He explored it most fully in The Critical Path (1971), to which shorter works of 1965-68 such as nos. 43, 47, 57, and 58 are contributory. According to The Critical Path, society's myths can be divided into two groups, those of concern and those of freedom. Concern encompasses all the beliefs that hold society together; Frye later divided it into primary concerns such as food, shelter, sex, and physical freedom, which are basic to all human life, and secondary concerns such as religious, political, and economic systems, or ideologies, which may be particular to one group. The myth of freedom (and here the word "myth" seems stretched to its utmost from Frye's basic meaning of "story") encompasses values such as objectivity, appeal to logic and proof, tolerance, and respect for the individual. It forms the critical opposition which questions society's values and ensures that they do not become hardened into dogmas. Contemporary literature has generally adopted a critical stance (as analysed in the second chapter of The Modern Century), but Frye points out that poets as a whole write from the conservative stand-

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point of concern and social values. They generally have, in fact, an ideology; but this ideology is not their real "meaning" or "message." Their concerned aspect derives rather from their contributing to the symbolic pattern that articulates, as discussed before, man's basic desires and needs. Since the arts do not demand allegiance as social myths do, but remain on the imaginative and hypothetical level, they provide, not a myth of concern, but the language of a myth of concern (CP, 98). It is necessary at this point to revisit, in spiral-curriculum fashion, Frye's distinction between the semi-scientific, rational nature of the humanities and their concerned or imaginative subject matter. In The Critical Path he insisted that the humanities themselves must not be committed, but must remain in the area of the myth of freedom where dissenting voices can be heard. The arts and sciences present a body of established truths, but the appeal is always open to new arguments and insights. About this time Frye began to call the troika of logical argument, repeatable experiment, and compelling imagination the "educational contract." This contract is a free spiritual authority at the centre of society (in contrast with the social contract, which rationalizes the existing power structure); and the university is its main home. Those such as the student radicals who think that the university should discern where justice lies, and embrace it institutionally, are therefore closing the doors to new truths, making the university a "bastard church" (354), and engaging in what Julian Benda calls the "trahison des clercs." Frye's heated response to the Wright Report on the reform of postsecondary education in Ontario in 1972 becomes more understandable in the light of these concerns. His public letter of protest (no. 70) does, as another respondent complains, concentrate on a rather peripheral point made in a footnote. His total rejection of the report is clearer in a private letter to the chair of the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario, to whom he complains that "The report is not simply incompetent or incoherent: it is a polemic motivated by a fanatical hatred of the university."67 Under the guise of a commendable desire to make higher education more accessible, Wright (who was Chair of the province's Committee on University Affairs) appeared to Frye and to many professors to be destroying the integrity of the scholarly endeavour. The brief of the Faculty Association mentioned by Frye had several specific objections: to Wright's dislike of "intellectual elitism," for instance, to his stigmatizing of "fixed and rigid curricula," and to his emphasis on part-time study instead of total immersion for four years.68

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Moreover, the proposed governing councils stacked with government appointees threatened the autonomy of the university in the name of public accountability. Wright was aiming to make the university an agent of social goals, and thus, for Frye, was falling into the same error as the radicals: their faulty thinking had advanced into the heart of government. When Frye insists that the university must remain in the area of the myth of freedom, he is not denying the importance of concern. He personally opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam, and he welcomed the involvement of students in organizations of protest like Pollution Probe (427). But his experience at Berkeley during the disturbances in 1969, when he saw radical, unreasonable students battling enraged, brutal police, crystallized his insight into the dangers of commitment from both ends; thereafter his controlling image is of two surprisingly similar extremes pressing against the middle, the endangered university. For him the university itself is, as Newman maintained, "primarily a social entity rather than an intellectual one,"69 yet paradoxically it can only carry out its role by remaining in the intellectual sphere. Similarly he maintains that literary studies themselves never made anyone a better person (526); education "has no goal and purpose";70 and Nazi prison guards may appreciate Goethe and Mozart, though on the other hand studies are the main route to personal improvement (458). Only as individual members of society can scholars act out of social conviction; they live in permanent tension between concern and freedom. Several questions arise from the foregoing discussion of the university's place in the dialectic of freedom and concern. One pertinent one is the nature of the concerned "vision" presented by poets. If primary concerns like food and shelter are so basic—shared by all societies no matter where or when, and such as to be almost too obvious to state (CP, 107; cf. 615)—what need of a literature to embody them? Frye seems to address this question in later works such as Words with Power (1990) and The Double Vision (1991) when he introduces a further category, the spiritual dimension of primary concerns, which encompasses such things as freedom of speech, love, and a classless society. But how do such ideals and values arise from a metaphorical universe constructed not of ideas but of images, and possessing the indefinite resonance of symbols? Some critics of Frye might argue that such values are not timeless anyway, but part of a bourgeois, liberal ideology. Frye would not wish to repudiate the bourgeois and liberal label for himself, since he does not

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claim that an individual can completely escape his historical context. But he maintains that the spiritual values are shared by all religions, if not by all human beings. And he distinguishes them from the ideologies that constitute secondary concern by their being ideals, not obligatory articles of belief. They count as spiritual primary concerns when they are held by what The Double Vision calls a "mature" society (9)—though, on this criterion, most secondary concerns have this status too in a liberal democracy. Another way of approaching this same question is to ask, regarding the hypothetical model of human work that university studies present, whether it is one model or several, many particular possibilities or one overarching and general one. Frye sometimes speaks of the verbal universe as the model for human work built up by all poets, including those who ostensibly hold reprehensible and antisocial views (MC, 104-5). Even at this level of generality, the notion that a totally humanized nature is "mankind's" goal might be disputed, for instance, by an ecologist. But at other times Frye speaks of literary works, and humanistic studies in general, as providing competing possible models for human action. His favourite explanation that the social worker has a vision that animates her work, as do the doctor and the judge (174), makes more sense when we think of these visions as particular and not identical. The Critical Path speaks of an "encyclopaedia of visions" (128). Yet it is hard to see the source of models of this type in works of literature, except in more programmatic works such as D.H. Lawrence's, where the overt message is precisely the part that Frye de-emphasizes. Whether graduates are conceived of as going out armed with a particular vision of what might be done in society, or more generally fired by the ideal of a society where all primary wants are taken care of, one might then ask the further question: will not society improve, and education be seen to make a difference in the social fabric? The question cannot be answered simply in the affirmative, because Frye sets himself so resolutely against the idea of progress. The march of progress, he says at 213, applies only to things like leukemia and suburban bungalows. Frye seems almost preternaturally anxious to distance himself from any belief in historical teleology, whether of a liberal, Darwinian, Marxist, or Biblical type. One of his objections to these, frequently stated here, is that any notion of a future goal sacrifices the present, making the end justify the means (366). Certainly this has frequently happened, in such phenomena as the Stalinist purges, but it does not seem logically inescapable; it is

1

Introduction

also possible to visualize, with J.S. Mill, a progressivism that works through reasoned argument. More compelling is Frye's observation that an ideal society based on reason and justice would in practice be a tyranny. A Utopia must remain nowhere, as its name implies: a mental model, not something to be brought into being. A society that actually circumscribed behaviour in accordance with an ideal would become unbearably repressive, as most of the theocracies and communes in history have proved to be. For Frye, the only kind of transformation possible is a personal one. The educated individual, like the Blakean possessor of double vision, looks at a fresh and recreated world. Such an individual may be somewhat like Job at the end of his book according to Frye's interpretation: perceiving a transformed environment, but possibly, to the outward eye, still a naked man sitting on a dunghill (SM, 239). However, all is not so simple with Frye: the renewal he prizes so highly is not valuable for itself, but only in so far as it fuels action in the social world. Our real self, he suggests, may be found less in some inaccessible realm of the psyche than in our reputation and what we offer to the community (295>71 Vision ends in commitment, and the educated individual, like Socrates' just man, will act to the best of his ability in accordance with the laws of a just society (371), avoiding exploitation and mindful of links with all humanity. Thus there is a paradox at the heart of the ideal vision. Valuable only in that it seeks to be embodied, it nevertheless never can or should be successfully embodied; if realized, it would cease to be desirable. It must remain eternally pursued but unfulfilled, like the nymph on Keats's urn, "For ever warm and still to be enjoyed." All the same, we might ask, if enough people are educated in this Joblike fashion, will they not in their attempts to act justly and with charity produce some transformation in society? Frye does admit grudgingly at times that improvements have taken place. The advances in medicine and plumbing are not negligible, whatever may be said of suburban bungalows. More significant are such moral advances as the abolition of slavery, and the spread of literacy itself. Indeed the very concept of a mature society, where dissent is tolerated, implies some slow development over time. Speaking to the MLA in 1976, in a rare admission, Frye even says that "in the future there is the possibility of an ideal society in which man's vision of his culture has liberated and equalized his social existence," since "whatever man has been capable of in imagination he can realize in life" (485).

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li

Such a possibility, however, comes up against a strand in Frye's mind that might variously be described as a realistic assessment of the human condition, a belief in original sin (not as a doctrine to justify God's wrath, but as a mythological explanation for human limitations and perversity), or a Buddhist sense of the cyclical nature of the world. He never lost his Spenglerian vision of the rise and fall of civilizations, and there is no place in this vision for delusive hopes of an end of history, or a permanent victory of the human spirit. Any improvement, in solving one problem, generally introduces another one: universal education itself created a "proletariat" of protected adolescents and led to the violence and confrontations of 1969 (329). Frye's typical attitude may be seen in his answer to the Varsity, which had asked him rather truculently whether the University of Toronto conformed to his ideal of a university, and if not, "why are you here?" and "what are you doing to bring a better one into existence?" He explained that, though he followed a liberal and progressive path regarding improvements such as increased student representation on decision-making bodies, he did not expect such changes to make any real difference (no. 59). Or again, describing what an improvement multicultural Toronto was over the WASP town it used to be, he reminded his audience that "future generations are never the children of light: they are no better than those they followed, though they see different things" (516). The ramifications of mental vision as Frye espouses it take us far into his thoughts on religion, the Incarnation, and man's existence in time. Such thoughts were not susceptible of simple explanations to general audiences, and they make some of his pronouncements on education somewhat opaque, as for instance in his early description of the student who "suddenly knew that something of which his own mind formed part was much more deeply involved in the nature of things than he had ever dreamed" (99). Only occasionally, to a special audience such as the one gathered when he received the Royal Bank Award (no. 80), did he express his sense that this unrealizable vision held in the mind was our link to the eternal: that when we think we are envisioning an ideal future we are really experiencing an eternal present, and so escaping the tyranny of time and perhaps finding ourselves in an infinite person (516). This final figure, a shadowy allusion to Christ, is as far as Frye goes here in exposing his belief that enlightenment can be envisaged as the identification of the individual with an archetypal human figure, at once God and humanity. But he often speaks of the community of all those

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who accept the educational contract, which repeats on a secular level the figure of the universal man. Such a community is, as Matthew Arnold argued, a society of equals (373), and acts as a leaven in actual society. It is not of course identical with the community of university graduates, and it is distinguished too from one's physical neighbours; long before the advent of the Web, Frye was championing the virtual community (303-4). Frye himself experienced the community of scholarship in his own university, which had opened new dimensions in his impressionable youth; as he explained, "the college really does foster the intellectual community that a scholar needs, where everything you write is a contribution to the community."72 Thus the essays included in this collection which deal with Victoria University and the University of Toronto have relevance, showing how Frye contributed to the community and developed his ideas from particular roots.73 But it is the generalizing of this experience that remains for all time, in his defence of the university as the place where all that really happens occurs (558). Jean O'Grady III

In Frye's last years the distinctive features of the University of Toronto of his youth had faded into the past. The university had become a multiversity in which the Honour Course system was a memory and the stature and influence of the colleges had declined. More important, however, was the fact that the social and political context in which the University of. Toronto and Canadian universities generally functioned had changed and would continue to change rapidly. They were and are being pressed to admit more students, to adapt their teaching methods in response to the massive and ongoing developments in communications technology, and, in Ontario particularly, to operate with smaller government grants than those provided in the past. In response, the University of Toronto and indeed all Canadian universities have become increasingly dependent on the generosity of their graduates. In addition, many universities have formed partnerships with the corporate sector by which they agree to carry out directed research or other tasks in return for financial assistance—associations in which the autonomy and objectivity of the university may be subtly and effectively compromised. One may well ask: are the observations and convictions of the Frye

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who so cherished his college and his teachers, and wrote extensively on literary criticism, relevant to the needs and concerns of the rapidly evolving contemporary university? Although he did not state it directly, Frye was convinced that the university is one of the most vital institutions in Western society. For him it was "the nearest thing to a model community," a "place where one can get the sense . . . of what life would be like if the intellect and the imagination were continuously part of it."74 This was not empty rhetoric; he believed that clear thinking, honest experiment, and creative imagination—the components of the educational contract—must continue to be a leaven in state and society, undermining and curbing intolerance, superstition, and the insidious tendency to confuse self-interest and the public good. The duty of all universities is to uphold the educational contract and to ensure that it remains meaningful and influential within the university and beyond. Although his writings were shaped by the circumstances of his time and his own response, they will be a fruitful and enduring legacy for all those engaged in this endeavour in the next century.

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Northrop Frye's Writings on Education

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1 The Bob October-November 1931

From the "Monocle" column of Ada Victoriana, 56, no. i (October-November 1931): 30. Reprinted in an article entitled "Most Likely to Succeed," in Toronto, 3, no. 11 (February 1989): 30-3, 50. During the 1931-32 school year, Frye and Miss J.P, Morton were "Monocle editors," in charge of the section of Acta that reviewed college activities and productions. The Bob was an annual event at which the second- and first-year students entertained each other with amusing songs and skits directed at the latter and members of the faculty. It was established in honour of Robert Beare, who was the very popular college janitor for forty years (1871-1910). By the 19305 the Bob had reached its height as a form of theatre. The chief credit for the fifty-ninth working of that annual miracle known as the Victoria College Bob rests this year on the diminutive shoulders of John Arnup, who wrote, directed, and staged the performance. The dialogue was well written and comprised a very comprehensive satire, though, as usual, the parts were too small to call for especial mention. But, again as usual, the dialogue and play itself was crowded into the background by the musical numbers. Stan St. John and his orchestra were in fine form, and their rendition of the St. Louis Blues suggested hitherto undreamed-of possibilities in 1933 to the audience. A very presentable chorus provided some very good entertainment, including a square-dance which was one of the best things in the Bob. The Bob is the second year's revenge on the first, and its essential feature is the ridiculing of the first year. Vic has a more subtle sense of humour than most of the campus, and their initiation is correspondingly more exquisite and refined torture. For this reason I oppose the bobbing

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Writings on Education

of sophomores and upper classmen if the Bob is to be anything more than a localized vaudeville show. With regard to what might be called the community singing, this is the first time in years that the sophs have not looked rather foolish. The freshmen would have done better if they had transposed some of their songs into more convenient keys. But the Bob should be followed by the sophs and frosh giving three cheers for each other and going in peace, and whoever was responsible for such an exit of the two lower years from the hall showed the worst possible taste.1 P.S.—We want food at our Bobs in future.

2 Victoria College Debating Parliament January-February 1932

From the "Monocle" column of Acta Victoriana, 56, no. 4 (January-February 1932): 32-3. The students' parliament, a forerunner of the Victoria College Union, was reorganized in 1924. One of the officers was director of debating. In 1930 the Victoria College Debating Union was established, meeting at Wymilwood, the women's student centre at the time. Frye was treasurer in 1930-31; Pauline Mills (3T$) was secretary. During the 19305 and 19405 the union functioned on parliamentary lines, with a speaker, cabinet, and opposition leader. Its objective was to foster effective speaking and debate on substantive issues in a parliamentary context.

The second debate was held in Wymilwood on December 7. Subject, "That at the present time a general disarmament would be the best move in the interests of world peace." A heavy subject, by reason of its breadth, with plenty of room for the sloppy optimism and foreshortened idealism so dear to the heart of Victoria College when it begins to reflect deeply on the "higher things of life." I do not see a particularly strong case for the negative in that wording—obviously nations fight with armaments, and keep peace perforce if they are disarmed. There are three possible lines of attack for the negative: the pax romana of Hodgetts, who spoke on the paper; the thesis that war is a necessity, advanced by E.F. Scott; and the argument from the competitive system in economics brought forward by T.L. Avison. The first two of these can be exploded easily enough; the third merely illustrates our helplessness in the grip of historical movement and the futility of discussing the matter at all when only the universal consciousness of mankind has any control over it.

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Writings on Education

Earl Davison and Ruth Sparling gave a fairly clear and coherent affirmative exposition of the subject, while Bernie Hodgetts and Phyllis Foreman upheld the negative; and, although their arguments overlapped and sometimes clashed, they did about as well with the subject as its nature permitted. There was a good representation of students of Modern History and Economics present, and those who spoke, aside from the betrayal of the tyrannical influence of Baldwin House1 in moulding their thinking, adopted a somewhat naive attitude of cynical pessimism and disillusionment with regard to any arguments from "religious, ethical, or aesthetic standpoints"—meaning, of course, from a sentimental standpoint. In this I sympathize to a certain extent. Victoria College generally tends in its debating to establish dichotomies of good and bad, right and wrong, with only a passing reference to the great surging causes underlying the problem which have nothing to do with moral categories. So we hear arguments based on a certain conventional standard of ethics rather than on inferences naturally arising out of the facts of the case. Plain living and high thinking is all very well, but when the living is really on a plain and the thinking actually in the clouds, the result is unhappy. The time allowed in the debate was too short, for one thing, and the subject was not treated in all its implications—W.C. Grant, for example, was ignored when he tried to force the issue of how far "general" implied "total"—surely a fairly important item. The attendance was deplorable—the Toronto interest in debates is at its lowest in Victoria. There are no Vic men on the Hart House debates committee and the Vic attendance at Hart House debates is far below its numerical proportion to the university. There is no necessity for this apathetical state of things—Victoria is not a brilliant college, but it has plenty of solid and sterling qualities, and its lack of interest in the more cultural side of its development—which lies between the purely social and the purely academic—would seem to imply that it is a far more vulgar institution than some of the American seats of learning, enthusiastic if somewhat misguided, which it so much despises. I should like to recommend that the Debating Parliament be more closely modelled on the Hart House system. This would eliminate a good deal of formality and give the members less opportunity to display their inadequate and ill-digested knowledge of "parliamentary procedure." Just how deep this knowledge is was amply illustrated by the fact

Victoria College Debating Parliament

7

that one speech was read without a word of protest from anyone. The Speaker was luckily quite efficient. One last word. Children, if you wish to attend a meeting of the Debating Society, and have nothing to say and consequently do not wish to obtain the floor and speak, then in heaven's name sit still.

3

That Trinity Debate March 1932

From the "Monocle" column of Ada Victoriana, 56, no. 5 (March 1932): 33-4. Frye's comment is on a debate between Victoria and Trinity Colleges.

"Resolved, that this house deplores all restraint of free speech." Rather redundant: how can you restrain speech that is free? This obvious quibble was luckily ignored, but there were plenty of others, and no lack of complaints about the purely verbal nature of much of the argument. On the whole, however, the discussion impressed us as being a sketch of a good debate. There were indications of wit, indications of brilliance, indications of fluency, indications even of the general lines of logical attack. We really feel that most of the important factors bearing on the problem were discussed. There was, we are glad to write, no "outstanding speaker," but an atmosphere of good-humoured tolerance and that peculiarly courteous lack of reserve so seldom found outside a university of high calibre. Digressions from the main argument increased interest and amusement without proving disconcerting. A larger crowd would probably have been an inspiration and improved the debate. Victoria came armed with sarcastic remarks about the Tennessee monkey trial, the Boston Book Massacre of 1927, and Toronto's decidedly emasculated Reign of Terror.1 Trinity, however, made no attempt to defend such follies and retired behind a barrier of "sedition, indecency, blasphemy," and slander. Victoria's next line would have been to ask whether sedition was not merely a catchword of jingoism, indecency a concession to oversexed spinsters, and blasphemy the survival of a superstitious taboo, and whether free speech could be called restrained when it is being tested for truth, as in the case of slander and of scientific

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9

theories. This, however, they had not the courage to do, and Trinity was able to declare its unshaken faith in the holiness of chastity unchallenged. The amount of repetition in argument, especially from the Victoria side, made us wonder at length whether the introduction of new matter really ought to be banned by the Speaker. The essential basis for the argument is simply that the more ignorant and superstitious a society is, the more insecure it is, and the more taboos it erects, while the amount of liberty of expression is regulated by the state of civilization then present; consequently it remains to be examined whether or not our society has advanced to the stage where it is sufficiently mature to throw off any kind of arbitrary restraint, that on free speech being largely arbitrary. Had this fact been recognized by both sides, we should have seen the spectacle of this humourless but by no means witless college becoming piercingly ironic and blase, and of the superficially brilliant middle-road liberalism of Trinity clinging to the altars of High Anglicanism. Such a debate would have been sufficiently entertaining if nothing else, but we missed that, and found an atmosphere little better than that of the ordinary SCM group and Literary Society meeting respectively.2 The faults and weaknesses of both colleges could easily be seen, with their positive virtues more or less hinted at. Trinity did not take the debate very seriously; their speakers on the paper were both frosh, and although Seaborn, Stewart, Hughes and other well known men were present they had obviously not considered the subject deeply. Neither had we. As it was, Trinity certainly displayed far more fluency, ease, and charm of manner and retired with the honours of war. If they had trained the guns of their full debating ability on us we should probably have been annihilated. The vote was, Victoria 38, Trinity 36. The registration is, Victoria 946, Trinity 307, the figures being those of last year.

4 The Case against Examinations April 1932a

Acta Victoriana, 56, no. 6 (April 1932): 27-30. This article protests against the marking practice at Toronto whereby the grade for a course was derived largely from a three-hour examination in the spring; Frye describes vividly and accurately the impact of the system on various kinds of students and the strategies adopted by them to achieve satisfactory results. Whatever the merits of Frye's argument, the examinations were administered by the University of Toronto. Changes could be made only by the Council of the Faculty of Arts, on which the federated colleges were represented.

The periodic warping and twisting of life brought about by the May examinations has long been accepted both by faculty and students as a necessary evil, but the students at least have never succeeded in becoming thoroughly accustomed to it. The sheer magnitude of the injustice involved in asking the hopes of our civilization to stake their most valuable years on the fortunes of a few hours at the end of each is sufficiently appalling in itself to dismay the stoutest, and when this is backed up by the mob psychology of a small college centred in residences, in which the leaders are always on the side of panic, the result is a distorted and almost inhuman existence. Around the middle of April a subtle transformation takes place. Women become excited and hysterical, men sullen and irritable. The exams are used as an excuse to dodge any kind of uncongenial work except the actual preparation itself. The shamefaced borrower of notes and the exasperated lender come into prominence, and the scramble for standard texts at libraries becomes a perpetual battle. For two months or more there is a continual striving to put aside all tendencies of any recreation other than the most trivial, all

The Case against Examinations

11

reflective or constructive thinking, all pleasant and relaxing conversation, in favour of a monkish and secluded existence combined with a nervous and time-serving dread, which for ninety per cent of the students, and for all of the normal and healthy and attractive ones, is a monstrous abnormality. Some of the hard, consistent, steady workers are, it is true, serene and confident, awaiting their reward; but more of this class are thrown into a worse panic than the rest, not only because they have got deeper into the subject and realize better how utterly ignorant of it they are, but because they suffer from a predicament similar to that of the aesthetic fly on the oil-painting in their lack of perspective. Here and there is a cynical slacker with a ready vocabulary and an abundance of gambling nerve, who approaches the ordeal with a modicum of hastily acquired knowledge, usually specialized, or at least topicalized, with a number of airy references and generalizations, with a faculty of being able to pass a confidential wink in writing to a tired and equally cynical professor, and with his tongue nearly behind his ears. His mark varies, of course, with circumstances, but usually he accomplishes either a brilliant success or a brilliant failure. In the former case he is a well-known type of first-class honour student whom I know quite well, having been of his number myself for two years. To him the examination loses its pathetic and even tragic implications and becomes, due to its utter futility especially in his own case, positively amusing; a nuisance no doubt, but still faintly ridiculous. If the marking of examinations were as idiotic as the system, which it certainly is in many smaller colleges, it would be difficult to see how our alma mater could boast of a high standard of graduates. The professor, however, does not content himself purely with an abstract mark, which he is quite entitled to do. He has to take the term work into account, to look behind the paper at the qualifications and condition of the writer and make an estimate based on hopelessly insufficient data regarding the latter's ability and knowledge. The examination being manifestly unfair, it follows that its three features making for fairness inside it are fallacies and obstacles in the professor's way. The three features I refer to are the presiding examiner, the ranking system of marking, and the pseudonym. It is a similar fallacy for the professor to try to be fair and judge the paper on its own merits entirely, though often he can do nothing else. If he is fair according to the theory of examinations, he passes those fluent in expression with enough knowledge at their fingertips, regardless of whether it is in their heads or not; if fair according to

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his own common sense he is blocked by that theory with all its implications at every turn. There are two canonical ways of studying for examinations. One is the method of concentration on a few topics, the other that of obtaining a wide view of the work to be covered and applying it in the various questions. The first is bad for the undergraduate who wants first of all a broad background, and what is good in it is nullified by the fact that at the examination he can only reproduce what happens to be in his mind at the time in a more or less haphazard way. The second would be all right were it not that the hasty cramming of the entire course into a somewhat groggy noddle the few days before the test—which is inevitable if the professors do try to dodge the fact by preaching against it— effectively prevents it having any permanent value. Thus students who regard college training as a preparation for a career of any kind, from politics to marriage, find examinations an insuperable barrier in the way of getting an education, and the value of their four years is found in the acquiring of a poise and culture resulting from moving in an intellectually stimulating society. The remainder are mostly research scholars, attracted to academic training for its own sake. Their work is necessarily careful, laboured, and systematic, and so for them a random and timelimited quizzing is an impertinence. Thus the examination strikes at the very roots of scholarship, which demands cool and careful judgment and not presence of mind in an emergency, and of culture, which requires leisure and calmness. It is, like the law, useless for the superior undergraduate, but it does hold a very definite appeal for the least desirable types. The student who gets through an education as he would get through a crowd of people on a sidewalk finds the examination just built for him because it is so purely utilitarian. He does not need to take an interest in his work to the extent of straying off into some field of research of his own, of obtaining a broader or deeper view of his course than the lectures provide, or of supplementing it by a casual glance at other lines of academic work. He would not have very much time for this in any case, for the examination looms up on the horizon, scowling like a gorgon at such behaviour. He knows it is not necessary to think constructively or obtain anything more than an absolute minimum of information to "get through"—for he has no opportunity to display anything else on the examination. There is another kind of student who considers academic work, from whatsoever motive, drudgery, yet goes to college because it is the thing to do. Such a

The Case against Examinations

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one is not necessarily a liability to the university by any means, but it is a fact nevertheless that the final examination allows him to stay at college and still retain this attitude. If he does not like his work, he knows that he can get up about as much of it in two months as he could all year, and therefore, does so, doing a good nine-tenths of his really concentrated studying at the last minute, when all the rest are doing likewise, so that he is not missing so much of the good time he came down for. On the other hand, the possessor of a really fine mind who goes to college to have it orientated is at a hopeless disadvantage. If he gets a flash of genius towards the end of April, he might just as well have had an attack of measles for all the good it does him. It is probably for this reason that the fine arts, which require real talent, genuine love for the work, careful and properly balanced and regularized study, and to which examinations are consequently fatal, have been so rigidly ruled out of the "arts" courses. Literature still remains, however, mainly for the benefit of the women. As a result Canadian literature is decadent and commonplace, for the literature of a young country needs to be young too, and what is done in Canada, though it may partake of the stifling heat of summer, the cheap gaudiness of autumn, and the sterility of winter, can never reflect the awakening enthusiasm of spring which those educated here have always missed—for the average man brought up on May examinations knows as little about spring as he does about a sunrise. The examination remains, however, the mainstay of the slacker, the superficial skimmer of culture, the uninspired and Philistinic "average student," and justifies the existence at best only of the cold, keen, systematic intellect who treats the May examination with the contempt it so richly deserves. The remedy? Well, even the theory of examinations recognizes that they are given only to check up on the odd idler or moron, and claims as well that for the real student they are an impetus which it would be very difficult to dispense with. If this is true, then by all means check up on the student all through the year, with essays, laboratory reports, fortnightly tests, and so forth, but in heaven's name let us get away from the iniquitous system of one final, free-for-all examination which promotes in so thoroughly Darwinian a manner the survival of the misfit.

5 Arthur Richard Cragg November 1932

Acta Victoriana, 57, no. i (November 1932); 18-19. With this first 1932-3 issue of Acta, Frye began his tenure as editor. This article and the two succeeding ones were all written by him for the same issue; in no. 7 he explains why it is a month late. The following sketch of his friend Arthur Cragg (1910-97), a student in the Philosophy and History course, was one of a series of biographies of senior-year students appearing in Acta. When Art ran last year for the position of president of the Victoria College Union it was obvious enough to the cognoscenti that anyone in Victoria College attempting to oppose him would lose his deposit. The strength of the conviction that he was the man for the job was so intense and widespread that it implies a deep affinity between Art's personality and the inward characteristics of his alma mater. For Art is not a popular hero and he is not a poseur. Were he the former, he would be wildly applauded for his reassuring shallowness and vulgarity; were he the latter, he would be the object of an uncritical and gaping awe. Either quality would conspire to give him the position he now holds, but neither did, being absent. His election was therefore not a popular choice so much as an inevitable one. He was made undergraduate head of Victoria College because he is Victoria College in microcosm: the incarnation of its essential spirit and the epitome of everything it stands for. Once this basic fact about him is grasped, the rest of his character can be unravelled easily enough. For Victoria itself is an organic unit; it is quite possible to speak of the "spirit" of the college without talking nonsense. In him we can see reflected, like the surrounding country upon a quiet deep lake, those qualities which have made Victoria the

Arthur Richard Cragg

15

cradle of the United Church, the church which inevitably will be the cradle of all future Canadian philosophy and culture... .* But this will not do; we are here to discuss Cragg. We have heard it said of Art that he is not easy to get to know, and that, though seldom intended as such, is a profound compliment. His quiet and easy courtesy and his obvious if never obtrusive superiority of manner make him accessible enough, but his outward qualities do not by any means exhaust him. Not that there are any dark or devious windings in his soul; his personality, his virtues and limitations alike, are quite apparent, but they are also quite apparently excellent. He is not to be fully appreciated without close association, but one does not tire of him once that association is made. There is evident rather sincerity than earnestness—he believes what he says and is impatient of quibbling and hair-splitting. His is never a dispassionate, analytic intellect, but the impinging of his moral strength and solidity upon a cheap cynic or half-baked sceptic is usually sufficient to explode the latter. On the other hand, he is not a propagandic evangelist in any sphere. In short, he is the college again—he has an instinctive sense of values but does not trouble to organize a rationalized defence of them until they are challenged. However, he is quite capable of such organization, which the college as a whole is not, as shown by any debate. His academic record is, of course, an excellent one, hampered only, as far as his peace of mind is concerned, by his over-anxiousness to live up to his own standards. What he lacks in brilliance—a quality usually a development of precocious child-cleverness—he makes up in matured and comprehensive intelligence. It is this which makes him so reliable an executive and develops so uniformly the other sides of his character. This year he is a Rhodes applicant. We will not commit ourselves concerning that, merely remarking that he suffers a disadvantage in being polished rather than veneered. But whoever do get it, if he should miss out, will know they have been in a fight. Just as the college is best when most typical of itself, so Art is the finest type of mind produced by it. The old Methodist tradition of the bespectacled theological student of immense energy and occasional stodginess is giving way to a new conception of the United Church scholar, of keen, penetrating intellect, wide outlook, and occasionally mistiness of thinking. Art stands at the turning point. I will not say that he combines the virtues and avoids the faults of both, but simply that he comes closer to

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doing it than anyone else I know. Let us call him a very good example of a superb type, and sigh with relief that in the weltering turmoil of contemporary existence the presence of Art Craggs in the world is a sure guarantee of convictions that rest secure and of human values that remain.

6 On the Frosh: An Editorial November 1932

Acta Victoriana, 57, no. i (November 1932): 24-6. It is probably obvious to the incoming year that the freshman is regarded as a redeemer expressly come to revitalize the college, and all the terrifying pictures formed by his high school imagination must surely vanish at the first touch of the reality. Juniors fondle him and encourage him to insubordination against the sophomore; seniors carefully shepherd his arrival and blanket him with an integument of unctuous platitudes. No announcement of an athletic team practice or the opening meeting of a society is complete without the tail line "Freshmen especially invited." As for the freshette, the very mention of her name acts as the report of a shaky but plausible Cezanne, newly discovered, upon a group of art connoisseurs. Senior upon senior adopts some lanky young neophyte for his own, leaving his unfortunate playmates in his own year to find solace in bond salesmen or professors. Surely, with such a consensus of interest rampant, we who vocalize the spirit of the college can do no more than surrender an editorial tribute. But is this interest instinctive or customary; the tradition of novelty or the charm of starry-eyed youthfulness? In either case the freshman seems a definite genre: as long as he is actualized he is, however transient and embryonic, a plateau in a development lasting presumably a year, possibly, and regrettably, two years, perhaps for good. Let us analyze. The Freshman Annual, then, is postulated as a normal type. Such a frosh represents the summation of adolescence. He comes down with his intelligence just matured, the impressions and experiences of boyhood and earlier school training for the first time gathered up and unified. Froshism is not a step in a steady development; it is a halting and a

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taking stock of the material so far assembled, ordering it in relation to what is to come. There is thus a great spiritual difference between the freshman and an upper-classman who may or may not be much older. Chronology is nothing; experience in mental adventure is everything. But the very fact that the frosh is in so precarious an intellectual position makes drastic methods of alignment necessary. There are essential both unreserved and insistent welcoming from the upper years and sudden expurgation of the high-school complex which is mere uncouthness in the new world. The initiation is intended to do both, and the reaction against the overemphasis of the latter element which is setting in this year should not blind us to the fact that active ridicule, if abolished altogether, reverts to passive sneering and the development of a caste system based on years. Better for the frosh to meet with a chilly shower than with a chilly silence. Probably, in fact, it was this feeling of the necessity of violent precipitation into college life assisted by upperclassmen which engendered the tapping party,1 which thus appears as an institution of the profoundest mystical symbolism. The Eleusinian votary has lineal descendants on the Bob committee. But we digress. There is, secondly, the Freshman Biennial, who, like biennials generally, is mostly root, living a befogged and benighted existence underground throughout the winter. By a Freshman Biennial I do not mean one who is repeating his first year, necessarily, but simply one who has taken two years over the process described above. Perhaps through living out of residence, or through lack of initiation in the broad sense, or through excessive shyness, or excessive insensibility, for one reason or another he misses his cue in that critical first year and only gets his balance in the second. And when he has finally attuned himself to the beat of the college he is still a year behind, retaining the scared, lost, shy look of the Thursday night arrival; good-natured and affectionate, but bewildered none the less with a sense of constituting a rather dim background. The abolition of the fresh-soph may attenuate this class.2 But oh! that Freshman Perennial! This is the man who refuses to change inwardly, insisting on the unrestricted expression of his high school development in terms of his new life. To his grosser physical and social manifestations this editor does not condescend, but he is a factor to be reckoned with in the intellectual sphere. On entering the college he takes one look around, and then jumps as far to the left, or right, as he can. In the former case he—or she, as the type is commoner among that

On the Frosh

19

sex—develops two traumatic neuroses at the start of her college career. First, her new personal responsibility causes her violently to react against her former passive absorbence. Her high school training she has to accept, and her religious upbringing gets the brunt of her fury. She is literally pathological on the subject of ye olde time religion. The stuff she had to swallow when she was a kid! The other neurosis is directed on her high school predilection for love stories and lantern-jawed movie heroes. For her now the only kind of love really worth while, after all, is Platonic love—just being good friends, you know. As the initial gawkiness of this stage wears off the neuroses become more subtly sublimated. The Freshman Perennial, in fact, in large measure dominates the overstrained metropolitanism of Canadian culture. (By the definition it is obvious that it matters very little to the Perennial whether she goes to college or not—in fact, she often affects to despise the university as a stamping-ground of pedants.) The initial confusion of religion with ladies' aids leads our heroine to oppose religion itself to free thought, resulting in the linear conception of culture which every shallow and uprooted big-city agnostic possesses—an inability, that is, to distinguish the new from the original, the fresh from the vital. A "practical atheist" cannot take culture seriously as she has no adequate idea of a tradition—she must therefore take it as a joke in which any big name she has heard of before is stale. Again, the "Platonic love" thesis causes her to become uneasy in the presence of any work of art with a trace of emotion in it, that being to her difficult to distinguish from sentimentality. Every product of art becomes a "good (or bad) piece of work." This attitude can be transposed into any key—it sounds the same in the political or scientific sphere. The two sides of it mentioned merge into the one underlying principle of nervous uneasiness in the presence of the really great—that is, the adult—against which they are both defence reactions. The Freshman Perennial who jumps to the right instead of the left becomes, of course, an Empire Builder. Both attributes are typical of the lower strata of intelligentsia in the Anglo-American metropolitan outlook which Canada is aping, just as American literature in the colonial period aped the worst fashions in England. Toronto in particular is a city of Freshman Perennials—a small group of underdone cultural egotists reacting against a massed weight of overdone conservatism. Watch the city papers in the next controversy with the university, and

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you will find that the great unwashed who write the letters attack the professors, like small boys protruding their tongues at teacher, but the type singled out by the editorial comment as emblematic of all that they hate and fear in a college is not the professor, not the undergraduate generally, not the senior, but the sophomore. Poor Frosh!

7 Editorial in Undress (I) November 1932

Acta Victoriana, 57, no. i (November 1932): 31. The articles mentioned include M.D. Shahane's "The Servants of India Society," the address to the graduating class of 1932 by the late Alfred Gandier, principal of Emmanuel College, and Gwyn Kinsey's "Ghost's Speech from the 'Bob.'" Well, Acta is out at last, and most of the editorial life-blood has gone out with it. The inordinate delay is occasioned, first, by a hiatus in tradition—always a stunning blow to an orthodox Victorian. The magazine is being printed this year by the University of Toronto Press, not, as formerly, by Ryerson. Secondly, this is not an easy year to collect advertisements, and, prosaic as it sounds, we must have those. This is an explanation, not an apology—it is nobody's fault in particular. There will be one more issue before Christmas, and an extra one next term. We welcome to our columns M.D. Shahane, Massey Exchange Student from India, who is already a well-known figure in the college. The address of the late Dr. Gandier may be considered a supplement to the sketch of his life and personality which appeared last January. In undergraduate contributions, there are prominent Gwyn Kinsey's clever blank verse work, Norm Knight's incisive survey of the Bob, Munro Beattie's reflective literary discussion, and other promising material. But the fact remains that the typical Victorian's interest in literary matters is about equal to a coal mine pony's interest in chorus girls. For that reason we depart from the usual editorial cliche. We do not welcome "criticism." This is an undergraduate magazine and it is what the undergraduate makes it. It is quite impossible for it to be any better than it is with the material at our disposal. A courteous suggestion is, of course,

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one thing, but an automatically contemptuous air based on a casual survey of the jokes is quite another. The opening number always is more or less a perfunctory affair, and in succeeding issues we shall draw more heavily on undergraduate contributions. We are less interested in maintaining a level of literary excellence than in making the magazine the verbal epitome of the college itself. That begins and ends our statement of policy.

8 James Delmer Martin December 1932

Acta Victoriana, 57, no. 2 (December 1932): 21-3.

When the author of this sketch was the room-mate of its subject, which was about four years ago, he nominated the latter as president of his year. As has frequently been the case, however, the said author's extraordinary keenness of perception and discriminating taste was not shared by more than an enlightened minority of that year, whereupon he retired and vowed in silence that a day of reckoning would come in the senior year—the right time for it. It did, of course. So Del is now the president of the senior year, and a victim of prophecy, or rather of intuition, for he holds his position just as inevitably as our hero of last month holds his.1 There is a precisely similar affinity between Del and seniordom. He is a Senior Perennial (see last month's editorial; single copies 25^). When 3X3 was in its first year, noisy, healthy, and bonhomous, Del was a quiet, amused, unassuming figure; in its second year, pushing its way aggressively into the college life, he was known and liked; in its third, a still immature but powerful aggregation, he was well known and admired; and when it came to the fourth year of responsibility and decorum, they instinctively turned to him as their leader. He is the senior's senior; that is the key to the not very complicated puzzle of his personality; and if you know what a Victoria College senior ought to be, you are a long way towards knowing Del. Now it is the senior who holds together and keeps intact the perilous but intense grip which the undergraduate exerts on life. It is necessary, before a man can be truly educated, to keep a sense of coherence and meaningful reality in incubation, so to speak, in order that he can inter-

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pret and therefore intelligently deal with the vague, chaotic forces which strike him on all sides at once when he is thrown upon the world. And here is where the peculiar fitness of Del comes in. No one can talk to him for five minutes without realizing his stability and his soundness of outlook. The undergraduate comes down to acquire his orientation in the world. Consequently he has to see the world in epitome, to get a perspective of it, and that miniature is the college. But he also needs to see an incarnation of that perspective actually living and working it out. That is what you get when you meet Del. His most valuable asset is his balance. He keeps both feet on the ground and his head erect, and illustrates the value of both the ground of reality and the air of intelligence without exaggerating either by developing a dyspeptic cynicism or a bewilderingly coruscating intellect, as weaker brethren are so apt to do. So much for him as an undergraduate. Now what does he represent when he gets outside the shielding walls of Victoria? Well, he is, in the first place, an essentially Canadian figure. I doubt if you could find a Del Martin across the line or in England. He is a brick in a foundation, not a decorative top-piece. Canada looks forward to a cultural era, not back at a tradition. The "pioneer," in the strict sense, is no longer necessary—at least for this part of Canada. The land has been cleared and settled, and we are just at the stage now when we are ready to actualize our spirit, to develop a Canadian race, and live out a distinctively Canadian civilization. For that we need another generation of cultural pioneers; men who despise posing and the "disillusionment" of spoiled and pampered children, who have an instinctive affinity with whatever is vital and sound, who have a living blood-relationship to the really good things in life instead of the "sophistication" of a critical epiphyte. In short, we need a block of men like Del filling the strategic positions of Canadian life— mainly the churches. Del's existence is a guarantee that this is possible. Those who know Del personally, who know how accessible and easy he is, who have sampled his simplicity, sincerity, and straightforwardness, who know how impossible it is to avoid taking an instinctive liking to him, may wonder why I do not know all this too, and ask somewhat impatiently why the devil I should tangle myself up in a maze of obscurities when I try to write about him. The reason is simple enough. His surface qualities are the least part of him; when he is referred to as a "good head," that is all that needs to be said about him from that angle. Anyone who refuses to rest content with this must see him against his

James Delmer Martin

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background, which presents some very abstruse problems. If there were nothing more to Del than the easygoing and courteous student you see walking around the campus, Victoria University would be merely a machine—a very good one, certainly, but still a machine, turning out graduates with mechanical precision, deftness, and soullessness. But, for special reasons we may indicate later, we regard every prominent Vic graduate as a symbol of much larger significance. And Del is the head of the graduating year.

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The Question of Maturity: An Editorial December 1932

Acta Victoriana, 57, no. 2 (December 1932); 23-5. In this piece the old Acta Frye refers to is vol. 15, no. i (October 1892). "The students are less mature than they used to be," stated a well-known and popular professor recently. Now the average undergraduate, who sees students of bygone days in the dignified officialdom of their postprime, or who views the venerable-looking faces peering out of fogs of nimbus clouds in Alumni Hall, is likely to accept that statement as something self-evident. The fallacy that the "old boy" always was old is an easy one to fall into. But he who has accessible old Adas gets a different critical bias. Here, for instance, is the opening issue of a year in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, a decade usually associated now with Wilde, the Yellow Book, Beardsley, the earlier Shaw, the novels of Hardy— generally a period of sophisticated and artificial disillusionment, of effeminate posings and universal hopeless doubt. But this number has not heard of any of this. On the inside front cover is an advertisement inserted by the university beginning thus: The federation system enables Victoria to offer the following advantages: 1. A compact college life in a commodious and beautiful modern building, provided with all the latest conveniences for healthful work. 2. A large staff of College Professors, composed of men with thorough European training and ripe experience as teachers, and of earnest Christian character.

The Question of Maturity

27

The building so described in (i) is the same as that which now squats like a huge red toad in the middle of the Victoria grounds. In (2) please notice the word "European." The first thing in the magazine is the editorial section, which consists of nine columns (the whole paper is printed double) of notes. The first begins thus: "The truth shall make you free."1 Gazing at those words that seem to breathe a sort of quiet confidence and restful strength, how many of us will wonder, "Will it make us free?"

He has a quiet sense of humour, has this editor, and he makes a remark well worth repetition after half a century: Ada may not consist as much of comments on current affairs as some would wish. If pressed too hardly here/we may say that "small wits are inspired the most by small occasions."

The next section is entitled "Literary and Political." (Acta seems, in fact, to have taken a literary interest in politics and a political interest in literature at every period.) The leading literary article is a discussion of Tennyson. It consists almost altogether of quotations, including the whole of the "let them rave" poem. A few remarks about the poet are made, however: Unfortunately the hopeful and optimistic philosophy of the first Locksley Hall is shadowed by the gloomier sentiments of his later works. The Charge of the Light Brigade ... remains the most spirited war poem of the language. His poetry reproduces the feelings common to mankind in all ages, checkered by the lights and shadows of the present day—lights of progress, growing intelligence and coming peace; shadows of religious doubt, poverty and crime.

A poem of Whittier concludes the literary section. "Locals" follow—eight columns. There are several references to "Robert" and some early Methodist humour: Sups, were well attended.

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"Social and Religious"—entirely religious—is the next thing. After the "Personals" comes the "Missionary" section—six columns. One's final impression of the whole magazine is that it is an extended sermon. There is not a single sentence in it that is not obviously written by a theologically minded student, and not one idea that is independent of theological implications. There is thus, of course, great uniformity of tone and style. Everything conspires to give a single conception of the thought and life of the college. To compare the issue just described with, say, the present one shows a volte face so complete as to be alarming. To enlarge upon the enormous change of thought represented by two such issues would be futile. If anyone suspects the present writer of ridiculing this early Ada he is misunderstanding him. Two separate periods cannot be comparatively evaluated in themselves. The "old fogy" and "mid-Victorian prude" attitude must be dismissed without serious consideration, and so must the opposing pretence that the youth of today has had its morale uprooted by the war (the present editor was two years old when it broke out) and that Tennyson is at any rate "healthier" and more "wholesome" than Aldous Huxley. I went this far back, picked out so antithetical a contrast, because I am here interested in establishing the question of relative maturity of undergraduate attitude. In the earlier we have a solid and, within its limitations, balanced, earnestness of outlook, but we also find a definitely pontifical pose. The student here has focused his mind on the idea of being a teacher and spiritual leader of men; all his thoughts are more or less consciously delivered to an edified and approving audience. He is in a hurry to grow up; hence he lets his moustache and beard grow at the earliest opportunity and studies to cultivate the adult's solid respectability which lends such force to dogmatism. In the later is far more brilliance; less seriousness, perhaps, but an immensely increased analytic power. The best of our contributors, like the best of our debaters, strive at impartiality of survey rather than judgment in terms of a preconceived attitude. The emphasis lies on self-expression rather than group-expression. This is true Protestantism, the liberal thinking of the United Church, the other is Catholicized and congealed Protestantism. We are infinitely more mature than past generations, because, paradoxically enough, we regard maturity as death.

10 Editorial in Undress (II) January 1933

Acta Victoriana, 57, no. 3 (January 1933): 29. Among the articles commented on here are Principal Walter Brown's "Some Impressions of New England Colleges" (describing the efforts of Harvard and Yale to break up their student bodies into smaller residential units), Henry E, Rowland's "Position of Mr. Woodsworth" (on the provisional chairman of the newly formed Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or CCF party),1 Helen Kemp's "The Library, Old and New," Munro Beattie's "The Poetry of T.S. Eliot," Norman Knight's "A Backwater of Stagnant Liberalism" (characterizing Victoria College), and Elizabeth Eedy's "Whither Seniors?" (commenting on the reduction of the senior year with the graduation of students in the new three-year Pass Course). Kemp and Eedy later became the first and second Mrs. Frye. The opening article in this issue is by Dr. Brown, principal of Victoria College, who thus makes his appearance through these columns for the first time since his inauguration. Dr. Brown, as every sentient undergraduate knows, has come to us from Yale, though he received his training here, and therefore is peculiarly qualified to write on this topic. The moral appears to be that the greater the population, the more adolescent the college. Hence if in Canada we are able, as our population increases, to keep our college registration evenly distributed, so much the better; if not—and it seems extremely likely that centralization in Toronto and McGill will grow more and more acute—then a terrific strain will be increasingly imposed upon the undergraduates in these two universities to keep their traditions coherent and prevent any falling apart into chaos. The Depression is perhaps the only thing that has so far saved us from cracking.

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If there is one institution in Canada that has a square deal coming to it that institution is surely the CCF. It has suffered from cheap and slapdash journalism, suffered from sentimentality, suffered from blind prejudice, from invincible ignorance, from oracular pronouncement in high places so simple and yet so sublime in its incandescent idiocy as to rend our souls with a kind of divine frenzy. At best it gets a lumen siccum synopsized in about four words: "All very well, but ." The enclosed article, by a senior in Modern History, presents its case from the viewpoint of a warm sympathizer, and is excellent alike in its sanity and its genuine eloquence. No group is perfectly intelligible without its voice crying. Norm Knight is our Marxist, and we are very proud of having a Marxist. He tells us what he thinks of us, and we gather he doesn't think we're so good. Oh, well, John Knox wouldn't like us, either. Equally lugubrious, equally entertaining, and more decorous, are the forebodings of Miss Eedy. Helen Kemp is the little brown-eyed girl who sits on you when you make too much noise in the library. A library, Gate House, is a place where they keep books and things. Helen has recently made herself quite famous through her publication of the animated map of the University of Toronto in red, green, and white which smiles at you from the walls of the Book Bureau, the Tuck Shop, and, in fact, almost everywhere. Earl Lautenslager, '31, gives us the highlights of his globe trotting. That pregnant remark about the rugs will bear a good deal of introspective study from those who read newspapers.2 Munro Beattie is an invaluable addition to the staff. He is as careful, scholarly, and subtle a critic as we have among the undergraduates, catholic and tolerant in his sympathies, reasoned and unbiased in his judgments. Further, he is one of the half-dozen or so who read books. This is the second article dealing with famous contemporary writers, and if you don't read it it's your loss. We regret to state that owing to exigencies of space the two biographies we had collected will have to be held over till next month. The fact that we also have to go to press without an editorial is regarded (by the editor) as little short of catastrophic, and he will probably write the whole of the next Ada to make up for it. We are proud of this issue, and we are beginning to like our job.

1 1

Editorial in Undress (III) February 1933

Acta Victoriana, 57, no. 4 (February 1933): 7-8. The articles mentioned in the penultimate paragraph (besides those that are self-explanatory) are William D. Conklin's "Quo Vadis, Canada?" (on the future development of Canada), Norman De Witt's memoir of Professor A.J. Bell, professor of Classics at Victoria, who died in 1932, and Ernest Gould's "The Possibility of Another World War."

This is going to be a lecture, because this is an immense issue, a literary one, besides, and consequently represents the art as well as the thought of the college. After some consideration, the judges awarded the shortstory prize to Miss Gram's A Vacant Room. Miss Oram is now in her final year, and her story shows remarkable promise—a hideous but useful word. Mr. Beattie's Through Three had a decided edge in power and imagery, losing out a little, perhaps, in unity of design and balance. To Mr. Beattie we must extend our apologies for cutting out some excellent profanity towards the end of the story; we being assured by one of the judges that the resultant row would hardly be worth the point gained in printing it. We are discreet, but our nose titillates. The judges as usual refused to recommend any poem for the second award. Nevertheless, we felt it incumbent upon us to print a fair proportion of the poetry submitted to us, and hence were compelled to make one. We considered that it was not so much our job to encourage the writing of poetry in this college (as a matter of fact we are much more inclined to view it with alarm) as that it was necessary to present, for the sake of perspective, an ordered anthology of the best attempts at poetry written here. With this in mind we awarded the laurel, or bay, or palm,

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or cypress, or whatever the appropriate vegetable happens to be, to Mr. Rowland's Winter, 1933. Too much of the poetry we received—and this perhaps applies more to the imprinted section of it—bears distinct traces of a precocious approach. If one is really interested in the writing of poetry, it behooves him, not so much to be "up to date" as to express himself, and as he lives in a certain definite age, he must necessarily express that age through himself. To this extent he must make an exhaustive survey of the kind of work done by his most distinguished contemporaries, and trace out the precedents and traditions they follow. Anyone who attempts to write a poem whose ideas about poetry are gleaned from the Shorter Poems and very random and irresponsible excursions into English literature, has no foundation, or succubus, on which to beget a poem, and consequently is bound to produce a hermaphroditic lyric, which, though literate and fairly accurate as regards metre, rhyme, and imagery, is also quite unreadable. As long as the bulk of English poetry remains a chaos to the poetaster's mind, he can have no coherent idea of what it means and what is good in it, and until he knows that he cannot produce a poem which is half so interesting as his conversation or personality. And if it be still possible for him to say, "Gosh, I don't see what there is in a lot of this modern stuff," he had better court some other Muse. The half-sentimental seriousness brought on by the Depression has probably increased the amount of poetry-writing, and this has entailed a comparative neglect of the pursuit of prose as a fine art. With the kind of training we get here, expressing ourselves in prose comes far more easily and naturally than expressing ourselves in poetry, which we do about once in a blue moon. If you will turn back from Mr. Rowland's sonnet to his article on the CCF in the last issue, you will find there an extremely sensitive feeling for prose rhythm. To the great majority of students, however, we can only advise: Do not spend too much time or energy trying to master the difficult job of writing poetry, which can only discourage you, but cultivate with all diligence a feeling for fine and tasteful prose-writing, and then whenever you write a letter, a speech, an essay, or even whenever you speak, you will be doing an ordinary thing well and beautifully, which is the essence of religious and cultured living. In such an atmosphere vulgarity suffocates. Not all of us can write poetry, but we can all appreciate it, and with it to some extent the genius of our language. We have very little space left to review the various articles. Mr. Conklin's

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article is especially recommended, dealing with the most important subject which can possibly face a Canadian as a Canadian, and written from a sound economic background without any of the economist's cheap superciliousness in regard to common sense. Mr. Gould's theme is on the imminence of war, which he treats boldly but sanely. The article on the SCM, by Mr. Langford of the second year, is extremely well written, but not provocative and does not propose to start an idle controversy. Although it remains a cherished illusion of ours that it is a fallacy to argue from American to Canadian colleges, the essay contains a good deal of keen analysis and clever writing. In a student body it is primarily the business of any students' Christian organization to urge the necessity of religion to culture and academic study, and vice versa, in order that each may be comprehended. Whether or not the SCM does this is the question proposed. Dr. Bell is not known to many undergraduates, but was a powerful influence in his time, and remains one of the great Classical and philological scholars on the continent. He stands with Professors Robertson and Edgar as one of the three commemorated in the Hart House windows from this college. Mr. Beattie's article on Ezra Pound is of great interest to all those who love poetry, and of great instructiveness to those who say they love poetry but have never heard of Ezra Pound. Well, Ezra Pound is certainly one of the greatest, and perhaps the greatest, of living poets—now go and read the article. We are still holding biographies, and although we regret very much to have to do this, still it speaks well for the college that it rallies so well to the support of its magazine that there is no room for them. It shows more interest in the actual than in the potential, but of course it is the editor's job to concentrate his attention on the latter.

12

The Pass Course: A Polemic Midsummer 1933

Acta Victoriana, 57, no. 7 (Midsummer 1933): 5-10. The original curriculum of the University of Toronto had been modelled on that of King's College, London, but owing to the inadequacy of the secondary schools, students were admitted to a four-year programme rather than the three-year one customary at English universities. Initially all students were required to follow the same "Fixed Course," but by 1877 a number of more specialized Honour Courses had also developed which were highly regarded and became a model for those in other Canadian universities. In 1926, Howard Ferguson, Ontario premier and minister of education, urged the universities to transfer responsibility for first-year instruction in arts and science to the secondary schools. After lengthy debate, the University of Toronto accepted this proposal, and put it into effect for Pass students in 1931. This change, combined with the lack of specialization in the programme, doubtless accounts for Frye's attack on the system. A footnote to the title says that "Acta Victoriana permits a free expression of opinion from contributors. The following is not necessarily an expression of General Opinion." The Devil (mortified): Senor Don Juan; you are uncivil to my friends. Don Juan: Pooh! why should I be civil to them or to you? In this Palace of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you. Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen... Bernard Shaw, Man and Supermanl, act 3] Avoid the reeking herd, Shun the polluted flock. Elinor Wylie [The Eagle and the Mole]

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It is a well-known fact that in a public or high school class the centre of gravity lies in the densest areas. I mean by that simply the commonplace that a schoolteacher cannot proceed without assuring herself that the stupidest member of her audience has taken in what she has to say. There is probably not one of us who has not sat tense and strained, driving our nails through our palms and our teeth through our lips, while a public school teacher patiently went over an obvious point six times or so for the benefit of some borderline case who stared dully at the blackboard with a distended neck and prognathous open jaws. The latter, himself a witless bumpkin, if you like, nevertheless is the arbiter of the schoolroom. The teacher cannot in conscience advance a step beyond him; she talks primarily to him and concentrates her attention upon him. Whether or not this be a necessary evil in regard to compulsory education, it can hardly be recommended for the voluntary study which supervenes it. It can, I think, be taken as fairly certain that the Pass Course in Arts was evolved, however, from an allied feeling. I have no desire to insult any student of the Pass Course, but the principle that the dunce must first of all be satisfied, applied to higher education, gives the doctrine that there are those among college students who, while valuable assets along social or athletic lines, cannot for various reasons be expected to take their work as seriously as others. Why not provide a special pasture for them where they would not feel self-conscious and inferior? It can hardly be denied that some principle such as this underlies the establishment of a so-called general course of study with a lower standard of examination marks and far more laxity with those unlucky enough to fail in one or even two subjects. Other motives doubtless enter as well. There is the question of finance. A group of students not good enough for a profession and too good for the army would be expected to become wealthy, and where is the money to endow universities to come from if the latter become too exclusive? Besides, an university has to attract the masses of youth to justify its state support. Again, Pass Course students pay the same fees as anyone else, and are far cheaper to teach. Thus, begotten by Expediency out of Sophistry, the Pass Course was born. It is no good reminding me that the distinction between honour and pass courses is as old as the Middle Ages; the Pass Course would hardly have survived till our own day without a contemporary reason for its persistence. The very arguments used to justify it admit its present inferior status. On one side it is urged that the Pass Course gives a broad and general education where the Honour Course leads to specializing. This can only mean that the one is trying to acquire culture, or rather

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culchah, while the other is trying to learn something; the one improving his mind (like an ascetic scourging himself to improve his soul), the other getting a grip on realities. On another side it is claimed that overemphasis on intellect would flood the campus with a number of wizened spectacled cranks and pedants, and that the Pass Course would relieve the landscape by supplying a number of clear-eyed Adonises who might be a little short on brain but long on other things. This class of people (very often athletic directors) stress the necessity for students being "developed on all sides at once." As the only things permitting such a method of development are expanding spheres, like soap-bubbles or balloons, it is not surprising that any individual so unfortunate as to be inflated in this way becomes an "all-round man." That anything really worth while is always developed from a hypertrophy does not of course occur to these advocates. I am not attacking the positive theory of a balanced education including music and gymnastic, but I am vigorously opposed to its negative formulation of: Don't let your brain grow too much; whenever you find yourself getting too absorbed in your work look after your physical or social necessities. Anyone who supports a general pass course on the ground that it prevents one from becoming overintellectualized is only too evidently trying to keep intelligence tied down to the least developed side of the personality—exactly the attitude of the schoolroom dunce. Not that these pretensions of the Pass Course apologists are valid. On the contrary, the course which aims at being general succeeds only in being superficial. Our common school education is general; it is also almost altogether tentative. In school the student is shown many things, some of which do not interest him; when he has made a selection of what is best suited for his further study he is ready for college. It is those who are too indolent or too inexperienced to commit themselves who drift into the Pass Course, which is a direct continuance of the high school method of promiscuous education. The subjects are grouped to ensure a "varied" choice. Which means that they are so diabolically arranged that every student not too sponge-like in absorbence to have any preferences at all is practically certain to dislike at least two of his five selections. If he must work hardest at the subjects which interest him the least—note the recurrence of the pull toward mediocrity!—he perforce neglects the ones to which he is better adapted, and consequently loses what curiosity he did have. By the time he graduates he bitterly resents his lack of guidance in his salad days. He starts, let us say, Astronomy, with a vague

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idea that it might be interesting to study the stars. He sweats like a galley-slave over mathematical diagrams in a stuffy laboratory for three years, and emerges admitting sullenly that it might be interesting to study the stars if you liked that sort of thing. He doesn't. But had he gone into an Honour Course including Astronomy he could have reinforced that study by others bearing directly upon it, and in any case would have walked into the course with his eyes open. This is not a polemic against college education generally. It could easily be mistaken for one, because the majority of our alumni are Pass Course graduates, who have gone through three years of saying apologetically, "Oh—er—just Pass," when anyone was tactless enough to ask them what course they were in, realizing that it meant, two-thirds of the time, that they had picked the wrong Honour Course in the first year. As academically they have never really got into the college, they can have only a very inadequate idea of the academic stability it gives, and a little knocking around in life soon makes Philistines of them. It is these people who throng the pages of Miss Ray's brilliant sketch in the Women's Issue,1 and who the world over make the night dismal with their disgruntled bayings of "Is a College Education Worth While?" If anyone can seriously ask that question, it hasn't been worth while for him. I do not for a moment claim that the Honour Course is free from these defects, because the people who are in Honour Courses are themselves not free from them. But the Honour Course is not necessarily superficial; if in practice it is little better it is immeasurably superior in natural advantages and does not put a premium on mediocrity. The first and most obvious of these advantages is the interest of the professor. Herded into the immense swarms of Pass Course lecture-goers, what chance has an interested student? He cannot break in to ask a question; there can be no discussion between a professor and a class of a hundred, and no professor can be expected to remember his pass students or give any personal attention to them. Our interested student goes up to the professor after the lecture—and finds him mobbed by women who either want him to go over the whole lecture again or reproduce a sentence they have not got copied down verbatim. He goes to see him in his office, and finds him out. The second advantage is the only really important one. The Honour Course gives unity; the Pass Course, variety, and while variety is the spice of life, spices do not of themselves produce much nourishment. Three years of endless jumping from one course to another leagues

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removed from it do not make for coherence, and once any serious interest is taken in any one subject the other four, like Dr. Heidegger's statue, frown and say "Forbear!"2 In an Honour Course the subjects are all grouped around a restricted and clearly defined area of knowledge. Once this area is so defined, there is more of an impetus to conquer it, but no one can wage a war on five disconnected fronts with much inspired energy. That sense of hopeless futility which besets so many Pass Course graduates when they look back on their work and wonder what a halflearned language, a sketchy idea of a science, a vague haze of philosophy or ethics, a few names and dates from ancient history, and a totally forgotten course in religious knowledge is going to contribute to the welfare of society is staved off in undergraduate days by the comparative ease of assimilating knowledge like a schoolboy. The Honour Course is more strenuous at the time, admittedly, and for that very reason better worth the fight. Giving both kinds of students the same degree after so unequal courses of study represents a hopeless confusion of thought. I am quite sure that members of the Pass Course realize all this in their hearts. I doubt if any of them would not feel complimented if a professor told them that they should have been in an Honour Course. Given just enough intellectual honesty to face the fact that three or four years in the Pass Course is mainly wasted time, enough sentiment against it should arise to depopulate it. For I am not talking to the faculty, but to the students. The faculty will never abolish it, because of the crowd of inexperienced graduate students who know comparatively little about their subject but have to be given something to do. The notion that an Honour Course is too narrowly specialized is absurd on the face of it. What is learned at college is comparatively unimportant in itself; the value and permanence of college training results from combining a sense of personal freedom and responsibility with a determination to see through the essentials in any given problem. The first is negated in the herding together of Pass Course students and the undignified scramble for standard texts at the libraries, and the second is made possible only by developing a coherent individual attitude through the interaction of a coherent personality with a coherent body of knowledge. No matter what an Honour student studies, if he is dealing with a limited aspect of knowledge he is almost certain to emerge with a trained mind and a point of view. No matter what subjects a Pass Course student selects, if he is dealing with four or five chaotic masses of

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culture, he is almost certain to emerge with a confused mind and a sense of resentment and disillusionment. Pass Course students may be classified into several groups. First, and largest, those who have been dropped from Honour Courses, many of whom would rather repeat their year if they could afford it. Second, those who go into the Pass Course because it "saves" a year, this class usually wasting three years in order to save that one. Third, those who go into the Pass Course purely and simply because they know no better, cannot make up their minds about what exactly they do like, and have only the most pathetically nebulous notions about what each course they choose lets them in for. These innocents usually graduate embittered and disappointed. Fourth, those who go into it more or less unconsciously, because it looks like the logical course. Fifth, the culture-hunters who want to know everything in general but not too much in particular. These frequently spend an agonizing length of time choosing their subject in order to get an even balance. Sixth, those who through red tape of one kind or another cannot do otherwise. The present writer survived a purgatorial year in the now-extinct First Year Pass under this category. Subtract these conscripts and others closely resembling them from the Pass Course, and the really interested and conscientious students remaining, I will stake my reputation, would not amount to one of the smaller Honour Courses in number. The vast majority harbour a sense of inferiority which breaks up the unity of the college by an idiotic caste distinction. The total and unconditional abolition of the Pass Course is a necessary step in the development of Canadian education.

13 A Liberal Education September-October 1945

From the Canadian Forum, where the article appeared in two parts, 25 (September 1945): 134-5, and 25 (October 1945): 162-4. Reprinted in RW, 63-74. Particularly in the latter part of the essay, Frye situates his discussion of a liberal education in the context of the recent reaction to the "progressive" theory of education in the United States. Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, 1929-51, had instituted a course for freshmen based on the "great books of the Western world," and introduced a liberal education programme with a fixed curriculum at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he was for a time chairman of the board. With his collaborator Mortimer Adler, a Thomist steeped in medieval philosophy, he revamped the entire curriculum at Chicago.

I

During the recent elections in Canada and Ontario I heard a good deal about professors from politicians speaking over the radio. This interested me, as I am a professor myself, and I was still more interested to observe that the remarks made about them were all hostile and all came from Tories. I was told that the CCF party was politically immature because it was full of professors, otherwise described as crackpot theorists; clergymen and schoolteachers being occasionally bracketed with them. Their argument, if that is the word, seemed to be that we don't want educated people trying to run this country, and as most of them were not elected, it is clear that we have escaped this disaster for the time being. Just in case I should fail to get this point, a pamphlet was dropped into my office consisting of a series of amazingly coarse and silly car-

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toons, done by the cartoonist of a local reactionary paper, depicting a crackpot theorist destroying the country by introducing socialism so that he would not have to go to work. He was clad in a cap and gown. Now of course it is nothing new for a teacher to come to school and find that the class moron, ambitious to become a newspaper cartoonist, has scrawled a dirty picture of him on the blackboard. But as those who sent me this pamphlet could not have wanted or expected my vote, I take it that the pamphlet was designed not merely as an insult to the teaching profession, but as an assertion that there is something in the Tory philosophy of life deeply opposed to everything that that profession stands for. And on reflection, that is quite possible. Those who are trying to maintain a competitive and laissez-faire economy will naturally be most interested in those who have left school at the earliest legal age and have gained a ten-year start in earning power and knowledge of the ways of competition over those who have continued their education. Those who decry the ideals of a co-operative society will depend for support on a large voting public of aggressive and ignorant stumblebums. This sounds uncharitable, but what other conclusion I can draw from that pamphlet I do not know. I teach English literature, a subject I conceive to be a necessary part of a gentleman's education. By a gentleman I mean, provisionally, a citizen who has an intelligent idea of how to occupy his leisure time. The pursuits of a gentleman were formerly the monopoly of a privileged class, and I am interested in any social developments that will destroy that monopoly and put them within the reach of more people. I am not interested in any social developments that tend to weaken the standards and values implied by the idea of a gentleman itself. That I believe to be essential to a civilized society. It is irrelevant to say that a ditch-digger is as good a man as a college graduate: he may be, but he has not got as much of a gentleman's education, and his life is less civilized. When Tories begin to cry up vocational education, I cannot help being suspicious of their motives. If I am told how much more useful it will be to a farmer's boy to learn farming than to learn Latin, I wonder if the motive for saying so is to make sure that his knowledge will be restricted to farming, so that he will not get any ideas unbefitting his station in life. And when liberal and progressive-minded people say the same thing, I wonder if they are not unconsciously selling out: if they are not being overcome by the hysteria engendered by an atmosphere of cutthroat competition, the pressure of getting ahead and of shortcutting all educa-

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tion so as to get into the scramble as quickly as possible. That is the laissez-faire method of getting security. A Toronto newspaper, a very different one from the cartoonist's employer, said in what was intended to be a sympathetic account of the Saskatchewan government's educational policy that a commercial-minded high school student would no longer have to be "plagued" with French and Latin.1 French being an official Canadian language, that may have been a slip, but the writer probably meant it as regards Latin. But an educational policy, as the Saskatchewan government undoubtedly knows, does not show itself liberal by making it unnecessary for any man to get a gentleman's education if he does not want one. It shows itself liberal by making it possible for every man to get a gentleman's education if he does want one. The trouble is that while reactionary interests know that they want as utilitarian and uncultured an educational programme as possible, liberal and socialist ranks are still full of people who support the same programme, who have a hazy feeling that there is something democratic about vulgarity and ignorance, who want less culture and more useful information. Such people may generally be recognized by their tendency to repeat the phrase "ivory tower." A hundred and fifty years ago, the industrial anarchism known as laissez-faire played a liberal and emancipating role in society by breaking up the remains of feudalism. Today laissez-faire is no longer a liberal but a reactionary condition, and liberal minds are once again looking for a co-operative society, on a democratic basis, which will provide an order and security which feudalism partly attained on an aristocratic one. This statement will be neither new nor startling to Forum readers. But an exactly parallel development has taken place in education. A hundred and fifty years ago, a privileged class was given a literary and humanistic education, so as to enable them to make the best use possible of their abundant leisure. The development of science, and of the rational attitude necessary to science, thus had a liberal and even revolutionary cast, and for working-class people education based on science was of great value in debunking reactionary mythologies. But the association of the humanities with a conservative and the sciences with a liberal attitude no longer exists. Science is increasingly becoming a function of government, which means that it is becoming a vested interest of the present ruling classes, who have the first cut on its benefits. And we shall never have a mature left-wing movement until we rediscover the liberal dynamic in the humanities.

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I have observed that all students of science who are any good are proud of the impersonal authority of their subject: they deeply appreciate the fact that the truth of science has nothing to do with feelings or emotions. But impersonal authority has only a very limited role to play in social life. Government, for instance, means well-meaning and confused Canadians sending more well-meaning and confused Canadians to Ottawa: whenever impersonal authority appears in government, and we start getting pushed around by an anonymous power, it is time to look to our liberties. The same principle indicates a limitation in the scope of those sciences that deal directly with human life. Psychology, to pick one such science at random, does not tell us how people behave; it tells us how they appear to behave to a psychologist, and the value of psychology depends to a great extent upon whether the psychologist is a wise man or a fool. There is nothing in the scientific approach to a human problem which automatically provides a liberal or human solution to that problem, and there is nothing in the nature of psychology itself to make it ineffective when exploited by unscrupulous people. The Nazis know all about psychology and how to use it; and our defence against them, and their successors in the postwar world, must be based, not on a belief in the accuracy of scientific reasoning which they understand as well as we do, but on an unshakable faith in humane and liberal values which they can never understand. If the Canadian psychologist is an enlightened and liberal person, he is only so because this faith still has some intellectual prestige in this country, and has not been extirpated as it must be in Nazi states. The source of authority in the humanities, in literature, the arts, and I think philosophy, is personal. In English literature certain men, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, have and always will have an exceptional prestige; they will always be models of study and imitation, and literature will never evolve beyond them, never advance or improve on their work. Here is an authority very different from that of science, where the work of Newton has long ago been absorbed in a larger pattern of knowledge, and where it is quite possible to understand the law of gravitation without reading him. Now to accept personal authority is to accept the insight of the exceptional mind as valid. The realization that in the great works of culture there is a vision of reality which is completely human and comprehensible, and yet just a bit better than what we can get by ourselves, is the mainspring of all liberal thought. We must have free speech because anybody might have something exceptional to say;

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the liberty to grouse is important, but it is not an ideal. Culture is therefore a necessity, not a luxury, the reason for social reforms, not a byproduct or after-effect of them. The primary function of education designed to produce the democratic gentleman is to establish contact between the student and the sources of authority in the subjects he studies. If that is done, the student's character and creative ability and individuality and personality and God knows what else will take care of themselves. The average student is not an easy person to repress. In the United States there has recently been a good deal of discussion about something called "progressive education," in which a large number of very different things have been discussed as though they were one thing, uniformly good or bad. The reason for this confusion is simple. A really progressive idea in education is a progressive social idea, and will be consistent with other progressive social ideas. In the States there is no political party sufficiently influential to provide a social philosophy for all progressive social ideas, and many experiments in progressive education have been worked out in a social context which is quite the reverse of progressive. Many of them have taken place in very expensive finishing schools designed for spoiling the children of millionaires, and a good deal of middle-class support for such sham progressivism is simply a demand for a mass-produced form of the kind of education that the millionaire's daughter gets. For left-wing Canadians it should be easier to distinguish a liberal idea from a laissez-faire one, and to be on guard against all progressivism introduced by people who obviously have no idea what direction society ought to progress in. To develop a child's will power, euphemistically called his personality, may merely be a way of streamlining him for a world of cutthroat competition. To arouse his interest rather than his power of concentration may merely be a way of developing a quality of facile and forgetful response which is so useful to certain types of political administration. Or it may not: it depends very largely on who is selling the idea. We can see the reactionary tendencies at work here more clearly when we see them intensified in fascism. The way that Nazis taught Nazi ideology to their children appears to have carried the sillier "progressive" ideas in America to their logical conclusion: that is, they let their children run wild, and left it to original sin to do the rest. When boys are allowed to run wild, the bullies emerge as leaders, and the pattern of the Nazi state is seen in miniature in the social organization of the gang of toughs. If the old-fashioned conception of fascism as a

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system that enforced law at the expense of freedom were correct, we should have an easy and pleasant task in Germany: the task of helping an overdisciplined people who have been ordered around too much to relax and begin to think for themselves. What we actually have is a terrifying problem in juvenile delinquency, and to cope with it we must realize that the sources of law and order, like the sources of freedom, are in liberal and democratic values. We all know this, but confronted with people who do not know it, we must produce our authority, and we cannot produce it if we have not discovered where it is. More and more people are beginning to realize that there is no coherent liberalism nowadays except that which is attached to a socialist theory of economy: to increase freedom, therefore, is also to increase co-operation, and introduce subtler problems of discipline. But the other side of this principle is that there is no coherent socialism except that which is attached to a liberal theory of education, and derives its ideals from that theory. II

There is a distinction of long standing between technical, vocational, and professional education on the one hand, which fits one for one's job, and liberal education on the other, which is not good for anything in particular, but is a good in itself, which provides the material, not for a career, but for living in a civilized way. The traditional content of a liberal education was Greek and Latin, and the idea still has largely literary associations. This distinction is not as clear as it might be, for liberal education, in its great days (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries), was really the vocational training of the leisure class. As a leisure class has no social function in a country not an aristocracy, education, in America and here, has had its liberal aspect placed within a vocational framework. That is, the tendency in American education has been to base the educational programme as far as possible on the individual student's needs, interests, talents, and ambitions, with a view, first, to developing his whole resources as an individual, and, second, to getting him into the right social context. This is what is generally known as "progressive" education, though it is almost well enough established to deserve the title of progressive conservative. American schools of education have developed elaborate teaching rituals, expounded in a jargon that rivals the worst days of scholastic philosophy, for providing the student with

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opportunities of developing his inner nature, so that his role in society may be inferred from his character without loss of time. There has been a growing feeling that this tendency in education has, in trying to meet social demands, sold out to the public's conception of what is useful to the student. It is said that it reflects, instead of trying to improve, public taste; that it gives the student the maximum of what the public wants and the minimum of what he needs. It is said to provide him with the public's mediocre materialism for his philosophy of life, and to ignore the axioms of liberal education: that learning is worthwhile for its own sake, that the desire to think is as basic as the desire to eat and sleep, that contemplation of the works of genius and idealism is essential to provide the right motives for activity. In American universities a powerful reaction against "progressive" education has already set in. A formidable list of writers, including Mark Van Doren, Mortimer Adler, Jacques Maritain, and Walter Lippmann, have come out in favour of a liberal education based on literature and philosophy, rigidly separated from vocational training, and designed to show the student in a democracy what his faith in democratic values is based on.2 Two universities, Chicago and St. John's, have drawn up curricula to teach this kind of education. The Chicago one is based on certain educational theories deriving from Aristotle and the Middle Ages, and is intended to restore to the university the sense of the unity and interrelationship of all knowledge which existed in medieval times (or so it is asserted, by people who are still mentally keeping Roger Bacon in jail). St. John's presents, as an entire course of study, a shelf of one hundred great books, covering all periods of Western culture, and designed to impress the shape of that culture upon the undergraduate mind. I am personally very leery of these curricula, but they show a healthy desire to experiment and a healthy dissatisfaction with that armour of complacency called the American way of life, on which a colossal war has inflicted only the most superficial damage. When they have served their turn, they will be thrown on the usual junk pile for discarded American experiments: Canada, to be rediscovered in due course by Canadian provincial governments. There is also a rather crude and naive pseudo-Catholicism running through the movement, and much prejudice and misrepresentation in the way that its writers present "progressive" views. John Dewey, the progressive apostle, is not a "public enemy," as Adler calls him,3 and it is silly to make the best theories of progressive educators directly responsible for the worst practices in American schools.

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But the premises on which their attacks are founded seem to me to deserve examination. They say that an educator preoccupied with getting the student adjusted to his social environment is apt to forget that there is an ideal as well as an actual environment. The more often we are told that education should be useful and practical, the more inclined we are to ask, "Useful for what? practical to what end?" And if the only answer is, "Useful for living in modern society, and practical to the end of producing a citizen for that society," then the finished product of educational effort is the typical American bourgeois. Now there are certainly worse types of human being than that. But contemporary American civilization is only a temporary kind of civilization, and revolutionary changes, which may transform it into another kind of civilization altogether, lie immediately in front of it. To get safely through this we need flexible minds, who understand the relative nature of their society and its liability to change. It is wrong to accept this change passively as something that fate will do for us, and it is wrong to regard it merely as a process with no direction or purpose. The possibilities of improving society are in our own minds. But to improve society we must have a standard for improvement, and the only possible standard is that of the permanent values of civilization, the ideals of freedom, wisdom, reason, equality, and co-operation which are true for all countries and for all ages. The place to find these is in the products of civilization which are of permanent value, that is, the works of the greatest thinkers and artists. If we cannot improve human nature, we can at any rate improve some human minds, or help them to improve themselves. But to try to do this by making the middle-class American boy realize the possibilities of his own middle-class Americanism is running in circles. He can only improve his mind by seeing what better minds are like; he can only develop himself by measuring his strength against a subtler mentality. It is not progressive, but dangerously reactionary, to identify reality with an ordinary middle-class American's conception of reality. It is not progressive, but dangerously reactionary, to reject the authority of past genius in favour of the authority of present mediocrity. It is not progressive, but dangerously reactionary, to regard scientific materialism as the climax of all history, and to assume that the advance of science implies the advance of civilization. America spent two billion dollars to develop the atomic bomb and finally produced it: that is not a vindication of the truth of scientific principles, but a terrible satire on the way that scientific

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principles are absorbed into human life. It is no good saying that we may get beneficial by-products of atomic power. We gave priority to the bomb; we should have rioted in the streets had any government proposed to spend two billion dollars on a scientific project unless its primary object had been destruction. It is clear that the use which the human mind is going to make of science is the important thing now; and it is equally clear that the average mind of today, so far from being the criterion of all past genius and wisdom, is not even wholly sane. The fate of civilization depends on establishing standards of human mentality. The biological conception of homo sapiens is altogether inadequate. Montaigne and Himmler are both biologically human beings, but the nature of the difference between Montaigne and Himmler is far more important to understand right now than the nature of the difference between Himmler and the black widow spider. Such, expressed very much in my own language, is the general drift of the antiprogressive argument. I now turn to a book of papers read at a conference representing more or less the Dewey school of thought,4 to see what they have to say. Not very much, apparently: they seem utterly unaware of the real meaning of the charges brought against them, and almost wilfully stupid in dealing with the other view. As the title indicates, they adopt the same formula as their opponents, the tiresome "everybody who disagrees with me is showing a fascist tendency" line which gets into all contemporary arguments about anything. But they are more tangled up in words: they insist that because most great men are dead, those who wish to study them are "turning back to the past,"5 and they do not seem to comprehend that to accept the personal authority of the greatest men does not necessarily mean believing everything they say. A.E. Murphy's paper, the best in the book, points out a considerable intellectual snobbery in his opponents, of the kind that considers only foreign genius profound, and remarks that if the hundred St. John's books are in the great tradition of culture, they are not in the American tradition, as they do not include Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, or Whitman.6 But in trying to preserve certain aspects of the American revolutionary tradition, most of these writers seem to have lost the American revolutionary guts. I do not myself believe in any educational programme that adjusts the student either to an ideal or to an actual environment, and I distrust both invulnerable wisdom and backslaphappy sociability as human goals. Offhand, I should say that the purpose of liberal education today is to

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achieve a neurotic maladjustment in the student, to twist him into a critical and carping intellectual, very dissatisfied with the world, very finicky about accepting what it offers him, and yet unable to leave it alone. The man who can appreciate Bach and Dante will be bored to death by most movies, nauseated by most radio programmes, stupefied by most sermons, and sickened by most politicians. The man who can understand Goethe and Montaigne will not be better equipped to deal with his own society: he will merely be more inclined to retch and spew at the very sight of a large proportion of its members, including antiSemites, spokesmen of big business, and people who want to fight Russia. The man who reads Tolstoy and Marx will not be able to find refuge in an "ivory tower": he will only be able to see with horrid clarity that most businessmen are living in one. In short, the man with a liberal education will not have an integrated personality or be educated for living: he will be a chronically irritated man, probably one of that miserable band who read the Canadian Forum, which is always finding fault and viewing with alarm. One real dose of real culture, and never again will he be able to enter, with millions of his compatriots, into the Paradisal peace of the Star Weekly and the Canadian Sunday afternoon, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest [Job 3:17]. The motive for getting such an education is not masochism, but simply self-preservation. Although America is a peaceful nation, peacetime American civilization is not good enough yet to supply what William James called a moral equivalent of war.7 It has reached the final dilemma of laissez-faire, in which the highest qualities of real civilization, cooperation, sacrifice, and heroic effort, are now brought out only by wartime conditions. Hence we must either accept war as the noblest condition of man, like the fascists, or improve the human quality, as opposed to the material quality, of our peacetime civilization. The hundred per cent American will have to do at least fifty per cent better or America (and of course Canada with it) will go the way of all musclebound empires which nowadays collapse rather more quickly than they used to do. The danger is there, but danger is not fate, and even a very small minority of educated neurotics might turn the scale. The Bible tells us that ten righteous men would have saved Sodom from destruction [Genesis 18:32]. We need a new slogan for education: how about "Education for Gomorrah"?

14 Education and the Humanities i August 1947

From United Church Observer, 9 (i August 1947): 5, 25. Reprinted as "Education and Teaching" in RW, 74-7. Frye's Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake had been published in April 1947. There has always been a broad distinction in educational theory between the "humanities," the literatures and the arts, on the one hand, and the "sciences" on the other. The distinction is real, though often badly expressed. It is, for instance, mere nonsense to say that science is "intellectual" and the humanities "emotional"; no one can chop up the mind in that way. Nor can we say that science pursues truth and the humanities beauty, for poetry is true and mathematics is beautiful. The difference between them is really the difference in kinds of authority. If we study, for instance, physics, we study a single interlocked and developing body of knowledge, and the authority of every truth in physics is backed by the unity of physics as a whole. There is a history of physics, and many great names appear in it; but however great Newton was, his contribution to physics has long been absorbed into the structure of physics, and it is quite possible to understand the law of gravitation without having heard of him. But authority in the humanities comes from certain great artists who always have been and always will be models of the highest possible achievement in their fields, classics as we call them. Others may come who will equal them, but no one will ever improve on them. The doctrine of evolution breaks down completely in the arts: a form of art is not a species, and it does not evolve. Poetry has never been better than Homer, and never will be; painting will never improve on Michelangelo,

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or, for that matter, on the cave drawings of the Old Stone Age. Authority in the sciences is thus impersonal, and comes from the subject itself; authority in the arts is personal, and derives from individual genius. It is not much wonder, then, that in periods of peace and prosperity, when everyone has the feeling of progressing very quickly to some highly desirable goal, the humanities should be neglected as outmoded and reactionary, and the sciences cultivated because they develop and advance. In studying the humanities, the student comes directly in contact with minds greater than his own, and he cannot comprehend anything of their greatness without expanding his own power of comprehension. It is this that makes the humanities so difficult to teach in comparison with the sciences. If a student goes wrong in the sciences he can be set right at once, but the slow growth which develops accurate taste in the arts cannot be taught, however much it may be encouraged. The teacher of the humanities has to tolerate ignorant and silly opinions, because each of his students must discover the most commonplace facts, such as the greatness of Virgil, as though no one had discovered them before. The difference between wisdom and knowledge exists in both sciences and humanities, but we can learn a good deal of science without realizing the importance of that difference. It is only when we land in disaster that we begin to reflect seriously on the contrast between our scientific knowledge and our appalling lack of wisdom in using it. But in the humanities the supremacy of wisdom over knowledge is obvious from the outset. It is perfectly true that one may know all the tongues of men and still be only a sounding brass [i Corinthians 13:1], but merely pedantic knowledge is too obviously useless for many students to want to attain it. The purpose of reading a Shakespeare play in high school is not to know more about Shakespeare, but to drop a seed of great vision into the mind in the hope of stimulating the growth of that mind as a whole. This may help to explain what is meant by the "personal authority" of the great artist. It can hardly transform one's character to know that Shakespeare left his wife his second-best bed and sued a man who owed him half a crown, which is about all that we do know about Shakespeare. Shakespeare survives not as a man, but as a book of plays. Milton had a much stronger personality, but reading about his life helps us mainly to understand the defects of his writing rather than the virtues of it. Most of the world's best art has been produced by men who had genius but were otherwise no better, to say the least, than ourselves. (That, incidentally, is

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why no artist can become a classic until he dies, for his death separates his genius from his life, and so releases and purifies the former.) The personal authority, therefore, comes not from the dead man, but from the living work of art. And in this work of art an ordinary man who has received the grace of genius and inspiration quite without any merit of his own (most geniuses work hard, it is true, but so do most mediocrities), has attained to a lasting personality which is both the best part of himself and something else that is not himself. The adjustment of mind that we have to make to the humanities thus begins to lead us toward the central form of our religion. For Christianity, like the humanities, is teachable only to a very limited extent: the rest consists in realizing anew for oneself what every Christian has always known, but can explain only to a receptive mind. And the goal of Christian experience is the Word of God who was once flesh and is now revealed to us in the form of a book. All literature and art, if studied with enough concentration, infallibly begin to point sooner or later in this direction. The contrast with science here is instructive. The Bible talks a good deal about wisdom, and makes it clear that a knowledge of the secrets of nature is an essential part of wisdom. But while any scientist may come to realize that his science leads inevitably to a super-scientific Something, this something is a mere power or intelligence or first cause which any Deist or Stoic could match. It is not a God necessarily to be identified with Jesus, and is therefore of no use to a Christian. Our age likes to imagine itself as the victim of an apocalypse, with all the furies of the four horsemen tearing it to pieces with calamities that no previous age has ever had to endure. This of course is mere self-pity, and the Old Testament prophets who saw Nineveh and Babylon buried under the sands would see nothing unprecedented in the ruins of Berlin. But it is true that just as in times of prosperity and confidence men turn to science to help speed up their own progress, so in times of trouble and confusion, when even the unreligious begin to understand something of what is meant by the fall of man, the humanities come into focus again. For they lead us away from that ordinary and unthinking life which promised us comfort and gave us misery, and toward the discipline of spiritual freedom from which they derive the name of liberal.

15 Back to Work November 1951

Victoria Reports, i (November 1951): 29. Frye had just spent a year's leave at Harvard with financial support provided by the Guggenheim Foundation.

I started my year off full of convictions of unworthiness. Just slinking off to Harvard didn't sound very glamorous compared to the kind of thing my friends said they would do. "What do you want to go to the States for? It's just the same as here. Now if you went to Rio...." Then, writing back home, there was the feeling that I ought to be making shrewd, piercing insights into the American scene, analyzing the political situation and the trends in domestic and foreign policy. But I never know anything about that except what I read in the papers, and nobody can read the Boston papers. So I'm afraid my memories are a bit scrambled. I remember that practically every American I met began the conversation by producing a Canadian relative or ancestor. So, if asked to name the chief products of Canada, I'd begin with "Americans." I remember in New York how a head waiter, beaming, led us to a table straight in front of the room's great attraction—life-size television. Two minutes later we moved to another table where we couldn't see the television, whereupon another waiter came up, also beaming, and said, "I agree wit' you!" I remember a cold day in Washington, and a disgusted taxi-driver saying, "Whaddya think of havin' it twenny degrees, all day long?" I remember approximately thirty-seven people who said, "Canada? You'd be from McGill, then?" I remember a very large number of universities that had graduates of Victoria College in prominent places on their staffs. I remember the quiet, unobtrusive hospitality of Harvard and the graciousness of Cambridge, and I remember a wonderful summer teach-

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ing at the University of Washington in Seattle, where we were treated the way royalty ought to be treated. And I remember stocking up on clothes at one of the stores near the university that made their living out of students, and were very knowing about university gossip. The clerk asked me what I was studying, and I said, with only a touch of shrillness, that I was teaching. Just for the summer, of course. He wrapped my parcel, handed it to me, and said, "And I hope your permanent appointment comes through all right."

16

For Whom the Dunce Cap Fits March 1952

From Canadian Forum, 31 (March 1952): 268-9. This and the following anonymous editorial have been identified as Frye's thanks to Robert D. Denham's work on Frye's diary for 1952 in NFF, 1991, box 50.

The recent announcement by President Smith of the University of Toronto that remedial classes in English are now to be held in the university was given the sort of publicity that goes with a specific political manoeuvre. It was deliberately designed to point up the fact that the Ontario school system has landed itself in what may be called either a Slough of Despond or a schemozzle, depending on how much remedial reading one has had. Evidently the university, as the only still independent part of the educational system, is prepared to fight. Granted that all our educational reformers are outstanding men, in their own sense of doing the best they can with what brains they have. Granted that they may not have introduced the OSU system of report cards1 without a careful study of the number of American schools that have dropped it after grade 3, or without learning something from the experience of British Columbia, which has had it for some time. Granted that the system of sparking a high school class with a number of cretins who have not actually got beyond grade 4 is justifiable on penal, if not educational, grounds. (The argument runs: "the law says these children have to be kept off the streets until they're sixteen, and isn't it better to keep them in their physical age group, where they only demoralize the teachers and the good students, than to keep them in their mental age group, where they might get discouraged?") Even so, the university has to do something to protest against an educational process that leaves the stu-

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dent ready for university apparently gypped out of everything except his native intelligence. Remedial English won't help much. The trouble is not the lack of respect for "good grammar," but the lack of anything to say. (An awkward question may soon arise: who is to give remedial classes to teachers of English? A fair number of them have been processed in the same way, and they can't write for nuts either.) When university people complain about the decline in the teaching of grammar, either of English or of foreign languages, they are not thinking of students who say "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested," or even of students who can't tell a conjunction from conjunctivitis, but of students who have no ideas and no will to develop any. Thinking is a habit like piano-playing, not a process like eating or sleeping. The amount of thinking you can do at any time will depend primarily on the amount of thinking you have already done. The object of elementary education is to form habits leading to thought. Thought about mathematics or the natural sciences is built up from habits of handling numbers. Thought about literature or the social sciences, or anything else in words, is built up from habits of handling words. The forming of the habit of handling words is the study of grammar. If you are carefully taught to put words together at eight, you stand a chance of being able to put ideas together—for ideas are words— at eighteen. No words, no ideas. No ideas, no thought. No thought, no free society. And all for the want of a little horse sense.

17 Have We a National Education? April 1952

From Canadian Forum, 32 (April 1952): 3. In his diary Frye wrote that he had been doubtful about this editorial but "finally shoved it in." He felt he had not established his main point, "the survival of political shibboleths, according to which there's a vague overhang of the notion that supporters of Deweyism are politically progressive and supporters of the humanities are stuffy and reactionary" (19 March, 1952; NFF, 1991, box 50).

It would be unrealistic as well as ungrateful not to count our blessings, and one blessing of living in Canada is that we can always discuss the question, "Have we a Canadian culture?" If it is not clear to the reader why this is a blessing, we may point out that in a country with a strong national feeling and a relatively small population, what culture there is can get a certain amount of ready-made publicity. Many creative people in Canada, painters especially, get what is in proportion to their abilities an unusually high degree of recognition. The same conditions make possible a certain amount of cultural leadership through a large number of national institutions, including the CBC. A country in which a housewife with a radio can lighten her washday by listening to Mozart is by no means a total cultural loss. In other words, there are opportunities in Canada for observing and learning something about the social relevance of our culture. At present there is a good deal of discussion going on about the role of the "humanities" in university education, and of the educational theories which underlie or conflict with them. The Massey Report1 was both a cause and an effect of such discussion; it has been followed by a number of conferences, reports, newspaper editorials, and public

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speeches. The encouraging thing about such discussion is that it shows a wide public interest in the question of the social relevance of education, and the responsibilities incurred by education, which parallels and complements our perennial neurosis about our culture. What has happened in education is approximately this: the answer to the question: "What is a practical education practical for?" has changed. Formerly the answer was: "To make money, and to become well adjusted to the more prosperous levels of a middle-class society." The answer now is: "To help to wage war, cold or hot, with Soviet Russia." Now as the strength of the Communist world is in its ideology, the question of democratic ideology becomes a question of immediate political importance. Hence the revival of interest in the humanities, the subjects concerned with the cultural inheritance of the past, is part of a general tendency on the part of the democratic world to look for moral balance. We cannot find out what to do unless we have some idea of what we are and what we have done. In the United States there is a strong reaction against what is called (rather unfairly) "Deweyism," because education through vocation and through integration with a prefabricated social context has now become, in the present situation, an amateurish and bungling totalitarianism. In Canada, similarly, there is a strong reaction against being made the junk pile for discarded American experiments.

18

The Study of English in Canada 19 June 1957

From Dalhousie Review, 39 (Spring 1958): 1-7. Reprinted in OE, 22-8. This was an address to eighty-two Canadian university teachers of English at the annual meeting of the Learned Societies in Ottawa, in reference to a proposal to organize what became the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English (ACUTE). When he gave this address, Frye had just seen the publication of his own Anatomy of Criticism (April 1957). I suppose the most obvious reason for forming a society of Canadian English teachers is the need of keeping up with new techniques in literary criticism. The variety of these, and the speed with which they develop, make it extremely likely that a scholar, no matter how central his situation, may be for a long time unaware of new advances in fields relevant to his own, without the help of the kind of association that it is here proposed to establish. I think, as a useful analogy, of the English Institute, founded at the beginning of the war and still meeting annually in September at Columbia University. This is a group of about 150 scholars, most of them primarily concerned with English, who meet to discuss, not research in progress, but techniques of criticism as applied to research. Nobody gets or gives a job as a result of going to the institute: its members meet for the sole purpose of acquainting themselves with what is going on in such fields as editing, linguistics, the history of ideas, analytical bibliography, explication de texte, the study of myths and archetypes, and so on. My own experience of the institute, the amount I have learned from it and the friends I have made at it, convince me of the value of a parallel organization in Canada. We step into a different world when we pick up, say, a volume of the

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eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1910. Here we find Edmund Gosse writing on the seventeenth century, Austin Dobson on the eighteenth, while for such Romantics as, say, Landor or Victor Hugo, after some dull hack has looked up the mere brute facts, Algernon Charles Swinburne can cut loose with a panegyric on the style. The eleventh Britannica is an extraordinarily useful reference work, and I am far from belittling it: I say only that no science that was in existence at all in 1910 has developed further, or changed its techniques more drastically, than literary criticism has done. Such developments are, of course, common to the whole critical field, but English studies are clearly now what Classical studies used to be, the clearing house of the humanities, and scholars concerned with other languages have much the same need to keep up with advances in English criticism that English scholars have themselves. These new developments are rapidly covering the field of literature itself, and I imagine that the next few decades will see an increasing interest in the relations of criticism to other verbal disciplines, such as history, philosophy, and the social sciences. It is becoming more obvious that we do not teach or learn literature, in universities or elsewhere, and that only the criticism of literature can be directly taught and learned. This fact is more important than it sounds, for literature, like the other arts, does not improve or progress: it produces the classic or model, and the masterpieces that literature has now will always hold their present rank, however splendid those still to be written may be. But while the arts do not evolve or improve, the sciences do, and there is a scientific element in criticism that will keep it expanding its range and consolidating its findings. The extent to which philosophical problems are rhetorical ones, and hence the concern of criticism; the role of metaphor in conceptual thought; the social and political uses of poetic myth; the relation of symbolism and imagery to faith and conduct, are a few of the questions that are likely to engross us in the near future. The old notion of criticism as a secondary literary activity, following the creative writer at a respectful distance and distributing his largesse to the crowd, is no longer with us. Critics are beginning to understand that literature, like everything else, has a theory and a practice, of equal importance, and that their own place in modern culture is no longer a subordinate one, but ranks with those of the philosopher, the scientist, the historian, and the poet. And as criticism is being faced, as it has never been faced before, with the challenge to take a major place in contempo-

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rary thought, literary scholars may be seen dividing into two groups. One group's motto is, "Why should it?" that of the other, "Why shouldn't it?" It would clearly be the second group that would be interested in the kind of association now proposed. What English does the humanities do, and the humanities are the index to the university. Apart from new developments in the criticism of English, the university as a whole is rapidly changing its relation to society, and our role as teachers and scholars is affected by the change. I think it is arguable that the day of the great scholar is over, and that he is being replaced by a type of organization man that would better be described as an intellectual, whose social reference is closer to Newman's gentleman, or even to Castiglione's courtier, than to the erudite prodigies of sixty years ago. The intellectual admires and respects scholarship, and he wishes he had more time for his own; but what he actually has is an administrative desk job, often a nine-to-six desk job, the intervals of which he must fill up with such scholarly work as he can. He is not protected, as the great scholar was protected, from the exhausting versatility that continuous contact with modern life demands. His intellectual role has an immediate social importance, sometimes a political importance. An American intellectual, for instance, may be summoned at any time to get into a plane and go off to explain American culture to the Japanese. The public is at present in a somewhat repentant mood over their underestimating of intellectuals in the past: this shows their awareness of the changes taking place, and foreshadows the much greater social demands that will be made on our eggheads in the future. Of late years the development of professional and graduate schools has overshadowed the undergraduate core of the university, but it is possible that even now social influences are setting in which will counteract this tendency. Already centres of pure scholarship, like the great research libraries and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, are beginning to separate from the university proper. We may be moving back again to the Newman conception of the undergraduate university as less intellectual than, in the highest sense, social, less concerned with research as an end in itself than with a definite social aim, an aim that might be described as realizing the idea of a free society. Similar tendencies are at work in the university itself, not least in English studies. At present the advance of critical techniques seems to be increasing the professionalizing of literary study, and thereby widening the gap between the critic and the plain reader. I think that this is a temporary

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result of rapid growth, and that we shall soon see the gap beginning to close again, as criticism becomes more coherent and more aware of its own unity. Liberal knowledge of course was never quite its own end: it was always to some extent the vocational training of responsible citizens. And as the university becomes less of a fortress and more of a marketplace, it might be well to recast our conception of it along the wider lines indicated by Arnold's conception of culture or Mill's conception of an area of free discussion. No one concerned with the church would confine the conception of the church to the aggregate of buildings called churches, and it is equally a fallacy to identify the true university in the modern world with the aggregate of degree-granting institutions. Wherever two or three are discussing a subject in complete freedom, with regard only to the truth of the argument; wherever a group is united by a common interest in music or drama or the study of rocks or plants; wherever conversation moves from news and gossip to serious issues and principles, there the University, in the wider sense, is at work in society. The candour and liberality of a society's cultural life indicates the social effectiveness of its universities. Undergraduates in arts and sciences are being trained to form an educated public, an amateur rather than a professional goal. Such university training thus comes in between the specialized research or professional training centre, and the teaching institution or school. Undergraduates usually speak of the university as "school," and expect to be taught, but it is part of the function of a university to disappoint them, to insist on treating them as adults. It is an axiom of university life that teaching takes care of itself, that lectures (to use an admirable distinction of Mill's) should be overheard rather than heard.1 A scholar who cannot teach by virtue of being a scholar must have either a cleft palate or a split personality; it is hard to see how one can master the world's most difficult technique of communication and still be unable to communicate. There have been such scholars, but their frequency and importance in the modern world is easy to overestimate. As education is not itself an academic subject, its introduction into university life makes for confusion, exaggerating the difficulty of teaching at that level, and compromising with, or deliberately prolonging, the immaturity of students. In universities, as in schools, instructors will knock themselves out trying to become conscious of everything their students are unconscious of; professors will revise their courses and

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wonder whether putting B before A instead of after it might not revolutionize their students' comprehension of the whole subject. But "teaching methods," however important in dealing with children, achieve in university classrooms only a dreary and phoney magic. Students of science who are any good are proud of the impersonality of their subject: their self-respect is increased by its demand for evidence that cannot be faked or manipulated, for facts that have nothing to do with individual preferences. The humanities are of course more directly concerned with values and with emotional and even subjective factors. Nevertheless it may be a mistake to try to popularize the humanities unduly, to neglect the very large degree of impersonal authority that the humanities, no less than the sciences, carry with them. University teachers of English are certainly not being false to their subject if they suggest to the student that he does not judge great works of literature, but is judged by them; that while he should be encouraged to make statements about Shakespeare and Milton, the statements will be about himself and not about them. Whatever changes of fashion in literature may come or go, the difference between an informed and responsible taste and a whimsical or erratic one remains constant. The English teacher's ideal is the exact opposite of "effective communication," or learning to become audible in the market place. What he has to teach is the verbal expression of truth, beauty, and wisdom: in short, the disinterested use of words. A student cannot call himself a student without acknowledging the prior authority of the university and of its courses of study. Joe Doakes at college is not necessarily a student, nor is a degree-granting institution necessarily a university. It is a university if it trains its students to think freely, but thinking, as distinct from musing or speculating, is a power of decision based on habit. Reason is but choosing, Milton says,2 but to choose is to eliminate the other choices: the greater the freedom of thought, the less the freedom of choice. The process of education is a patient cultivating of habit: its principle is continuity and its agent memory, not rote memory but practice memory. The university is doing its proper job when it presents the student with a coherent area of knowledge and enables him to progress within it. Universities with department-store curricula that allow him to leave an instructor in the middle of a sentence in order to pick up a credit somewhere else are not enfranchising him; they are merely cheating him. Such pseudoeducational procedures are an assault on the memory; they undermine the habits of continuity and repetition which are the basis of learning. All the distinc-

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tions which are fundamental to education—the distinction between concentration and attention, between knowledge and information, between education itself and instruction—depend on such habits. Thinking itself is not a natural process like eating, but an acquired skill like playing the piano: how well one will think at any given time will depend primarily on how much of it one has already done. It is because education is rooted in habit that its technological basis is the book. The book is a model of patience, for it always presents the same words no matter how often one opens it; it is continuous and progressive, for one book leads to another, and it demands the physical habits of concentration. Popular and mass media are discontinuous: their essential function is to bring news, and to reflect a constantly changing and dissolving present. It is often urged that these media have a revolutionary role to play in education, but I have never seen any evidence for this that I felt was worth a second glance. The arts of phantasmagoria can only stimulate a passive mind: they cannot, so far as I can see, build up habits of learning. The university informs the world, and is not informed by it. One of the superstitions that beset the teaching of English is the notion that the student should not be directly confronted with the heritage of the past, but should sidle into it cautiously from the present, spending his first year on the Atlantic Monthly or some collection of topical essays, but gradually learning about the history of literature from what is quoted in Eliot. It is hard to see how any university that is apologetic about the literary tradition can do much to develop writers. For not only is tradition itself a creative force in writing, but the structural principles of literature do not exist outside literature. As far as form and technique are concerned, poems can only be made out of other poems, novels out of other novels. Hence however much a new writer may have to say, his ability to say it can only be developed out of his reading: in other words it will depend on his scholarship. In fiction this fact is partly concealed by the importance of content, which is normally contemporary and derived from experiences outside literature. But we notice that in contemporary painting there seems to be less interest in realism and documentation, and more emphasis on the formal or structural principles which are brought out in abstract or nonobjective painting. The formal principles of painting are quasigeometrical; in literature they are myth and metaphor. And in literature too, at least in Canada among the younger writers, one notes a

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decline of interest in fiction and an increase of it in poetry, especially mythopoeic and symbolic poetry. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, it is a trend toward forms of expression that are inextricably involved with the academic study of literature, and hence is something on which our help might reasonably be called for. I think it probable that writing in Canada in the near future will become more academic, in the sense of being preoccupied with the formal principles of writing, with myth, metaphor, symbol, and archetype. This does not mean that it will become less popular, for these have always been the popular and primitive elements of literature. It is much easier for me to imagine Dylan Thomas popular than to imagine some documentary and naturalistic novelist like Dreiser popular. We have always had a crucial responsibility for the quality of writing in Canada, and we have always had a good deal of impersonal and professional influence on it, but that fact seems to me likely to become increasingly obvious, to ourselves, to the writers, and to the public, as time goes on. At the same time we cannot forget that there are different types of originality, and that while we may encourage some toward fame and applause or even fortune, others may have to travel a lonelier road of indifference, hostility, even of persecution. This is also a century in which great novels have been seized and burned in custom-houses, in which a frighteningly long list of writers have been driven to madness or exile or suicide. Not all Muses are soft cuddly nudes: some are obscene harpies that swoop and snatch and carry off, and faced with a writer like this we can do little but understand what is happening and sympathize with his plight. For our function, like his, may not be always a socially approved one: it may make the greatest demands on our integrity, may force us to withstand hysteria and the pressure to conform, may call not simply for intelligence but for a rare courage. If so, it will surely be some advantage to feel that there is a community of us, engaged in the same work and concerned to maintain the same kind of standards, not merely filling similar positions in different places but supporting a common cause.

19

Address to the Graduating Class of Victoria College 28 May 1958

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box i, file K. First printed as "The Larger University" in RW, 77-80.

There's an advertisement that I see on the subway every morning coming to the college. It advertises a bakery; it depicts a maudlin urchin in the act of saying his prayers, and the caption reads, "Not by Bread Alone." Now it seems clear that when "Not by Bread Alone" is the message of a bakery, it means something different from what it says. In the first place, it suggests that if bread isn't the whole of life, at least bread is a pretty good start. There may be other values in the world than those represented by bread, but still bread is something to hold you until the dessert arrives. Secondly, it suggests a kind of idealism which, whatever may be true of the bread, is certainly half-baked. Employers and managers are much attached to superpanic sentiments, because they feel that if manual workers could be got to believe in them there might be fewer strikes and lower labour costs. You may recall that "Man shall not live by bread alone" [Matthew 4:4! was the lesson learned by the Israelites after forty years of misery and starvation, and it was quoted by Jesus after he had fasted for forty days. So when Jesus made the statement he was in a position to make it, and we may be confident that he meant what he said. Well, that's only a random example of the way that we're all surrounded by a babel of voices, muttering, whispering, shouting, or shrieking, but all saying what they don't mean. No advertisement can tell the truth: it can only speak ironically, saying one thing and meaning another. We pass a cinema, and are told that a commonplace film is the thrill of a lifetime. We pick up a newspaper and find that the heroes of

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the headlines are very largely people whose merits and reputations have been constructed entirely out of publicity, and have no more substance than toy balloons. We turn on the radio, and the air is filled with political speeches where every statement, whether itself true or not, is designed to make out one side of the case. The courtroom, the city hall, the businessmen's lunch, the women's bridge club: it's the same story everywhere. Even in church you can hear some pretty frivolous versions of the Gospel. Naturally everything is much worse in war or under Communism, but even democracies at peace live mainly in a world of falsehoods or half-truths, and we may well wonder how it is that hundreds of millions of people, most of them kindly, decent, and honest people, could have got entrapped in such a network of vast and ruthless lying. I can't claim that you never hear falsehoods or half-truths at a university. But I do say that the university exists to help you find your way around such a world. You don't know why you came to college, but we do. You came to get your mind clear, for four years, of all the prefabricated nonsense in the world around you, so as to be able to live with it later and keep your own freedom while doing so. A lot of people think they're conversing when they're just asserting their egos, and think they're thinking when they're just responding to a reflex. You wanted something better, and you came to look for it where it is, in the arts and the sciences. You don't know either, as yet, what you've got from college. That will come out in bits and pieces over the next few years, sometimes in very unexpected ways. You see, there are two kinds of knowledge, knowledge of things and knowledge about things. Knowledge about things is what we teach you and examine you and mark your essays on. For anyone of normal intelligence, knowledge about things is very easily gained—that's why most of you are going to get through your exams this spring, even if you haven't done much work. But while it's easily gained, it's also easily lost. A few years from now, what with children and business and suburbs and new friends and activities, you may find that the proof of Planck's constant or the list of Latin prepositions that take the ablative are growing a little dim in your mind, and that you can't still read with the old fluency either the Arabian Nights in the original Arabian or social science textbooks in the original double Dutch. If you have a sensitive conscience, you may wonder why the government was willing to subsidize two-thirds of the cost of your education when you can remember so little of it. Knowledge of things is much harder, because it depends on moral

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qualities, like courage and integrity. But knowledge of things is wisdom, and whatever you have of that is yours for life. It's to give you that wisdom that we keep on lecturing and examining and reading essays, not because we have so much of it ourselves, heaven knows, but because we've tried to keep in touch with the poetry and science and religion that do have it. And what little we know of such things we have tried to share with you. Nobody concerned with the church would say that the church was just the aggregate of buildings called churches. He'd be much more likely to say that wherever there's any genuine faith or hope or love, there the church is in some form. And nobody should restrict the idea of the university just to the aggregate of institutions that give degfees. Whenever you're discussing something and attending only to the truth of the argument; whenever your conversation turns from news and gossip to serious issues and real principles; whenever you find yourself looking at something beautiful just because it's beautiful; whenever you answer hysterical prejudice with a firm and quiet voice, there the university is at work in society. That larger university is one you can never leave. When you no longer attend Victoria College, the university will be wherever you are. Whether you are in charge of a classroom or not, all of you without exception will be teachers, teaching by your example and influence every hour of every day. Other people, including your children, will learn from you not only what the university stands for, but what it is actually doing in the world through you. We can't hope that all of you have got what we have wanted to give you, and yet, strangely, we always do hope that. The real meaning of an occasion like this, I take it, is not to say goodbye or to flutter around you with good advice, but to recognize that you are on the point of becoming university teachers in your own right, and to welcome you into our own company, each one of you as one of us. It is a company whose ancestry goes back beyond the Greek philosophers and the Hebrew prophets, and it is the oldest and most honourable company in the world. Would those of you who like myself are guests at this banquet rise with me and drink a toast to the health of the graduating class of 1958, Victoria College in the University of Toronto.

20 Humanities in a New World 22 November 1958

From Three Lectures: University of Toronto Installation Lectures, 1958 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), 9-23. Reprinted in Four Essays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), 15-29; in Form and Idea, 2nd ed., ed. Morton Bloomfield and Edwin W. Robbins (New York: Macmillan, 1961); and in DG, 102-17, without the first and last paragraphs, and with a few minor changes and omissions. The lecture was given on the occasion of the installation of Claude Bissell as president of the University of Toronto. According to Three Lectures, three talks were given simultaneously in the three largest lecture halls on campus: Frye represented the viewpoint of the humanities, while Clyde Kluckhohn of Harvard spoke for the social sciences, and V.B. Wigglesworth of Cambridge for the natural sciences. Over sixteen hundred people attended the lectures, and twelve hundred more were turned away because of lack of space.

The installing of a young president is a natural time for a university to take stock of itself and speculate about its immediate future. It is quite possible, of course, that it has no future apart from the approaching extermination of the human race. But there is clearly no point in my going on to a third sentence unless I can assume at least a chance that this nightmare, like other nightmares, may come to overreach itself through the very intensity of its horror. If there is that chance, the immediate future seems inviting enough, and not only by contrast. Apart from personal knowledge, one feels reassured both by what President Bissell is and what he is not. What he is not is a high priest of some mystical administrative elite: what he is is a professor of English. His early studies were on Samuel Butler, and so he must have ab-

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sorbed, at an impressionable age, some of the things that that sharptongued writer said about universities in his day. In his satirical romance Erewhon, published in 1872, Samuel Butler describes the "Colleges of Unreason/' which taught mainly the "hypothetical languages," languages of great difficulty that never existed. The professors were obsessed with the notion that in this world all well-bred people must compromise, hence they instructed their students never to commit themselves on any point. They had professorships of Inconsistency and Evasion, and students were plucked in examinations for a lack of vagueness in their answers. There was however a more modern feeling that examinations should be abolished altogether, the competition involved being regarded as "self-seeking and unneighbourly." The strictest of the professors was the professor of Worldly Wisdom, who was also President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the Completer Obliteration of the Past. Butler concludes that at these Colleges "The art of sitting gracefully on a fence has never, I should think, been brought to greater perfection."1 The point of Butler's satire is that the more the university tries to remain aloof from society, the more slavishly it will follow the accepted patterns of that society. The tendencies that Butler ridicules are those of a social system in which the ideal is a gentlemanly amateur, with no definite occupation. The university that confronts President Bissell today still reflects accepted social attitudes, but those attitudes have changed, and the university has changed with them. The university is now well aware of its social function, and if it were not, public opinion would compel it to become so. Professors are still unwilling to commit themselves, but their reasons are no longer abstract social reasons, but concrete political ones. Above all, the ideal of productivity, the vision of the unobstructed assembly line, has taken over the university as it has everything else. The professor today is less a learned man than a "productive scholar." He is trained in graduate school to become productive by an ingenious but simple device. It is a common academic failing to dream of writing the perfect book, and then, because no achievement can reach perfection, not writing it. One of the major scholarly enterprises on the University of Toronto campus, Professor Coburn's edition of the notebooks of Coleridge, is the result of the fact that Coleridge never wrote his gigantic masterpiece, the treatise on the Logos that would tell the world what Coleridge knew, but hugged it to his bosom in the form of fifty-seven notebooks.

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Nous avons change tout cela. Our graduate student today must finish a thesis, a document which is, practically by definition, something that nobody particularly wants either to write or to read. This teaches him that it is more important to produce than to perfect, and that it is less antisocial to contribute to knowledge than to possess it. In Butler's day there were no Ph.D.'s in English, but since then there has been a vast increase in the systematizing of scholarship. The modern library, with its stacks and microfilms; modern recordings, reproductions of pictures, aids in learning languages: all these are part of a technological revolution that has transformed the humanities equally with the sciences. There were Canadian poets and novelists a century ago, and critics who reviewed and discussed their work, but there was not the same sense of the systematic processing of literature that there is now, in the Canadian criticism in which President Bissell himself has taken a distinguished place. Of course, wherever there is a cult of productivity there is a good deal of hysteria. New students come along with reputations to make; new poets arise to be commented on; learned journals multiply and their subsidies divide; bibliographies lengthen, and so does the list of works that a scholar feels apologetic about not having read. There seems no answer to this steadily increasing strain on the scholarly economy except the Detroit answer, that next year's books will be still bigger, duller, fuller of superfluous detail, and more difficult to house. If I were speaking only to scholars in the humanities, I should say merely that this is our business, and that we can take care of it. But as I am speaking to a wider public, I should like also to try to explain, if I can, what difference our business makes in the world. I begin with the fact that the faculty of arts and sciences, or more briefly the faculty of arts, seems to be the centre of the university. A big modern university, like this one, could almost be defined as whatever group of professional schools in one town happens to be held together by a faculty of arts. We can have a university that is nothing but a faculty of arts; on the other hand, a professional school, set up by itself, is not a university, although it may resemble university life in many ways. The reason for this is not hard to see as far as science is concerned. The university is the powerhouse of civilization, and the centre of the university has to correspond to the actual centres of human knowledge. Engineering is practical or applied science; medicine is really another form of applied science. And if we ask what it is that gets applied in these professions, the answer is clearly science, as conceived and studied in

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the faculty of arts. The basis of technology, or applied science, is a disinterested research, carried on without regard to its practical applications, ready to take the risk of being thought useless or socially indifferent or morally neutral, concerned only with developing the science, not with improving the lot of mankind. Technology by itself cannot produce the kind of scientist that it needs for its own development: at any rate, that seems to be the general opinion of those who are qualified to have an opinion on the subject. Attached to the sciences are what we call the liberal arts or humanities. What are they doing at the centre of university life? Are they there because they must be there, or merely because they have always been there? Are they functional in the modern world, or only ornamental? The simplest way to answer these questions is to go back to the principle on which, in the Middle Ages, the seven liberal arts were divided into two groups. The two great instruments that man has devised for understanding and transforming the world are words and numbers. The humanities are primarily the verbal disciplines; the natural sciences are the numerical ones. The natural sciences are concerned very largely with measurement, and at their centre is mathematics, the disinterested study of numbers, or quantitative relationships. At the centre of the humanities, corresponding to mathematics, is language and literature, the disinterested study of words, a study which ranges from phonetics to poetry. Around it, corresponding to the natural sciences, are history and philosophy, which are concerned with the verbal organization of events and ideas. And just as we have engineering and other forms of applied science, so there is a vast area of what we may call verbal technology, the use of words for practical or useful purposes. The two words practical and useful do not of course mean quite the same thing: some forms of verbal technology, like preaching, may be useful without always being practical; others, like advertising, may be practical without always being useful. Many of the university's professional schools—law, theology, education—are concerned with verbal technology, and so is every area of human knowledge that employs words as well as numbers, metaphors as well as equations, definition as well as measurement. A century ago the central subjects in arts were Classics and mathematics, Classics being restricted to Greek and Latin. Today the central subjects are still Classics and mathematics, but Classics has broadened out to take in all the languages in our cultural orbit, beginning with our own.

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This seems clear enough: why are people so confused about the humanities, and more especially confused about literature? There are many answers, but the important one is quite simple. A student who learns only a few pages of Latin grammar will never see the point of having learned even that; and today he learns so little English in early life that the majority of our young people can hardly be said to possess even a native language. "I think," said Sir Philip Sidney, "(it) was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to school to learn his mother tongue."2 But it is no use pretending that the curse of Babel does not exist. Behind Paradise Lost, behind Hamlet, behind The Faerie Queene, lay years of daily practice in translating Latin into English, English into Latin, endless themes written and corrected and rewritten, endless copying and imitation of the Classical writers, endless working and reworking of long lists of rhetorical devices with immense Greek names. Discipline of this kind is apparently impossible in the modern school, where teachers are not only overworked but subjected to antiliterary pressures. They are encouraged, sometimes compelled, to substitute various kinds of slick verbal trash for literature; they are bedevilled with audiovisual and other aids to distraction; their curricula are prescribed by a civil service which in its turn responds to pressure from superstitious or prurient voters. In the verbal arts, the student of eighteen is about where he should be at fourteen, apart from what he does on his own with the help of a sympathetic teacher or librarian. To say this is not to reflect on the schools, but on the social conditions that cripple them. So the student often enters college with the notion that reading and writing are elementary subjects that he mastered in childhood. He may never clearly have grasped the fact that there are differences in levels of reading and writing, as there are in mathematics between short division and integral calculus. He is disconcerted to find that, after thirteen years of schooling, he is still, by any civilized standard, illiterate. Further, that a lifetime of study will never bring him to the point at which he has read enough or can write well enough. Still, he is, let us say, an intelligent and interested student with a reasonable amount of good will—most students are, fortunately. He begins to try to write essays, perhaps without ever having written five hundred consecutive words in his life before, and the first results take the form of that verbal muddle which is best called jargon. He is now on the lowest rung of the literary ladder, on a level with the distributors of gobbledygook, double-talk, and officialese of all kinds; of propaganda, public relations, and Timestyle; of the educa-

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tion textbook that is not lucky enough to be rewritten in the publisher's office. By jargon I do not mean the use of technical terms in a technical subject. Technical language may make one's prose look bristly and forbidding, but if the subject is genuinely specialized there is no way to get out of using it. By jargon I mean writing in which words do not express meanings, but are merely thrown in the general direction of their meanings; writing which can always be cut down by two-thirds without loss of whatever sense it has. Jargon always unconsciously reveals a personal attitude. There is the blustering jargon that says to the reader, "Well, anyway, you know what I mean." Such writing exhibits a kind of squalid arrogance, roughly comparable to placing a spittoon on the opposite side of the room. There is the coy jargon which, like the man with one talent, wants to wrap up and hide away what it says so that no reader will be able to dig it. There is the dithering jargon that is afraid of the period, and jerks along in a series of dashes, a relay race whose torch has long since gone out. There is the morally debased jargon of an easily recognized type of propaganda, with its greasy clotted abstractions, its weaselling arguments, and its undertone of menace and abuse. There is the pretentious jargon of those who feel that anything readable must be unscientific. And finally, there is the jargon produced by our poor student, which is often the result simply of a desire to please. If he were studying journalism, he would imitate the jargon of journalism; as he is being asked to write by professors, he produces the kind of verbal cotton-wool which is his idea of the way professors write. What is worse, it is the way that a lot of them do write. When teachers of the humanities attack and ridicule jargon, they do not do so merely because it offends their aesthetic sensibilities, offensive as it is in that respect. They attack it because they understand the importance of a professional use of words. The natural sciences, we said, are largely concerned with measurement, which means accurate measurement. In any subject that uses words, the words have to be used with precision, clarity, and power, otherwise the statements made in them will be either meaningless or untrue. Lawyers, for example, use words in a way very different from the poets, but their use of them is precise in their field, as anyone who tries to draft a law without any legal training will soon discover. And what is true of law cannot be less true of sociology or metaphysics or literary criticism. It is often thought that teachers of the humanities judge everything in words by a pedantic and rather frivolous standard of correctness. They

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don't care, it is felt, what one really means; all they care about is whether one says "between you and I," or uses "contact" and "proposition" as verbs. Now it is true that the humanities are based on the accepted forms of grammar, spelling, pronunciation, syntax, and meaning. If a man says he will pay you what he owes you next Toisday, it is useful to know whether he means Tuesday or Thursday: if there were no accepted forms there could be no communication. Teachers in the humanities are also concerned with preventing words from being confused with other words, with preserving useful distinctions among words, with trying to make the methods of good writers in the past available for writers today, with trying to steer a civilized course between dictionary dictatorship and mob rule. Some snobbery is bound to be attached to the ability to use words correctly. We hear a good deal about that. For some reason we hear less about the much greater amount of snob appeal in vulgarity. Most of the people who say "throwed" instead of "threw" know well enough that "threw" is the accepted form, but are not going to be caught talking good grammar. On other social levels there is a strong feeling that the natural destiny of those who can handle words properly is to form a kind of genteel servant class: ghost writers who turn out books and speeches for the unlettered great; secretaries who translate the gargles and splutters of their bosses into letters written in English; preachers and professors and speakers at clubs who function as middle-class entertainers. Such a conception of society is very like that of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, where the butler speaks in a formal nineteenth-century style and his wealthy young master talks like a mentally retarded child. Then again, as Henry James pointed out fifty years ago in his book The American Scene, there was a time when the absorption of the North American male in business led to the domination of all the rest of civilized life by the woman.3 The result has been that the word culture, which strictly means everything that man has accomplished since he came down out of the trees, has come to acquire a strongly feminine cast. This sense of the word survives in the silly cliches that people use to prevent themselves from thinking, such as "longhair," or, most fatuous and slovenly of them all, "ivory tower," a phrase which has become popular because it sounds vaguely female and sexual, like a calendar girl in Esquire. But this male absorption in business was the product of an expanding economy and weak labour unions: it is now drawing to a close, and in matters of culture the woman is being joined by what Henry James, with his usual delicacy, called her sleeping partner.4 Our student, with a little practice, will soon advance from jargon to the

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beginnings of prose, which means advancing from an amateurish to a professional approach to words. To make such an advance involves an important moral and psychological change. Bad writers are like bad cardrivers: what they are doing is the unconscious expression of a way of life. The purveyors of jargon are like the man who honks and hustles his way through traffic to advertise the importance of his business, or the woman who wants to hit something in order to prove that she is helpless and appealing. The good car-driver regards his or her activity as a simple but highly specific skill, unconnected with the rest of the personality. The good writer is the writer who puts self-expression aside, and is ready to submit himself to the discipline of words. In the past, and under the influence of the old faculty psychology, the different fields of study were correlated with different parts of the mind. Thus history was ascribed to the memory, poetry to the imagination, and philosophy and science to the reason. This way of thinking has left many traces in our day: it is still widely believed that a mathematician is an unemotional reasoner, and a poet a "genius," a word which usually means emotionally unbalanced. But, of course, any difficult study demands the whole mind, not pieces of it. Reason and a sense of fact are as important to the novelist as they are to the chemist; genius and creative imagination play the same role in mathematics that they do in poetry. A similar fallacy may be confusing our student at this critical point. I am, he perhaps feels, a conscious being; I know I can think; I know I have ideas that are waiting to be put into words. I wish somebody would show me how to express my ideas, instead of shoving all this poetry stuff at me. After all, poets put their feelings into words, so they can make sounds and pictures out of them; but that isn't what I want. Every step in this chain of reasoning is wrong, so it is no wonder if the reasoner is confused. In the first place, thinking is not a natural process like eating or sleeping. The difficulty here is partly semantic: we are apt to speak of all our mental processes as forms of thought. Musing, daydreaming, associating, remembering, worrying: every slop and gurgle of our mental sewers we call thinking. If we are asked a question and can only guess at the answer, we begin with the words "I think." But real thinking is an acquired skill founded on practice and habit, like playing the piano, and how well we can think at any given time will depend on how much of it we have already done. Nor can we think at random: we can only add one more idea to the body of something we have already thought about. In fact we, as individuals or egos, can hardly be said to

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think at all: we link our minds to an objective body of thought, follow its facts and processes, and finally, if the links are strong enough, our minds become a place where something new in the body of thought comes to light. It is the same with the imaginative thinking of literature. The great writer seldom regards himself as a personality with something to say: his mind to him is simply a place where something happens to words. T.S. Eliot compares the poet to a catalyst, which accompanies but does not bring about the process it is used for; Keats speaks of the poet's negative capability; Wordsworth of his recollection in tranquillity; Milton of the dictation of unpremeditated verse by a Muse.5 The place where the greatest fusions of words have occurred in English was in the mind of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare, as a personality, was so self-effacing that he has irritated some people into a frenzy of trying to prove that he never existed. If the student were studying natural science, he would grasp this principle of objective thought very quickly. There can be no self-expressive approach to physics or chemistry: one has to learn the laws of the science first before one can have anything to express in it. But the same thing is true of the verbal disciplines. The student is not really struggling with his own ideas, but with the laws and principles of words. In any process of genuine thought that involves words, there can be no such thing as an inarticulate idea waiting to have words put around it. The words are the forms of which the ideas are the content, and until the words have been found, the idea does not exist. A student of engineering may have extremely practical aims in entering that field, but he cannot get far without mathematics. Hence mathematics, though not in itself a practical subject, is practical enough for him. For a student who is going to engage in any verbal activity, the study of literature, not in itself a practical subject, is a practical necessity. The sciences deal with facts and truths, but mathematics sets one free from the particular case: it leads us from three apples to three, and from a square field to a square. Literature has the same function in the humanities. The historian is concerned with finding the right words for the facts; the philosopher, with finding the right words for the truth. As compared with the historian, the poet is concerned, Aristotle tells us, not with what happened but with the kind of thing that does happen [Poetics, sec. 9]. As compared with the philosopher, the poet is concerned, not with specific statements, but with the images, metaphors, symbols, and verbal pat-

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terns out of which all directed thinking comes. Mathematics is useful, but pure mathematics, apart from its use, is one of the major disciplines of beauty. Poetry is, in itself, beautiful, but if we think of it as merely decorative or emotional, that is because we have not learned to use it. We can build the most gigantic structures out of words and numbers, but we have constantly to return to literature and mathematics, because they show us the infinite possibilities that there are in words and numbers themselves. Sir James Jeans, speaking of the failure of nineteenthcentury physics to build a mechanical model of the universe, says that the Supreme Architect of the universe must be a mathematician.6 A much older authority informs us that the Supreme Teacher of mankind was a story-teller, who never taught without a parable. The humanities in the university are supposed to be concerned with criticism and scholarship, not with creation as such. At the centre of literature lie the "classics," the works that university teachers know they can respect, and the university student, qua student, is there to study them, not to write on his own. True, most writers of importance today are not only university graduates but university employees, at least in summer sessions. True, the untaught writer who sends a masterpiece to a publisher from out of nowhere is much more a figure of folklore than of actual literature. Still, the university does not try to foster the social conditions under which great literature can be produced. In the first place, we do not know what these conditions are; in the second place, we have no reason to suppose that they are good conditions. Just as doctors are busiest in an epidemic, so our dramatists and novelists may find their best subjects where decadence, brutality, or idiocy show human behaviour in its more fundamental patterns. Or the producer of literature himself may be a drunk, a homosexual, a fascist, a philanderer; in short, he may want things that the university cannot guarantee to supply. The university, therefore, addresses itself to the consumer of literature, not to the producer. The consumer of literature is the cultivated man, the man of liberal education and disciplined taste, for whose benefit the poet has worked, suffered, despaired, or even wrecked his life. What the university does try to do is to foster the social conditions under which literature can be appreciated. Many teachers of the humanities are anxious to stop at that point, especially those who wish that they had been great poets instead. It is natural for them to insist that critics and scholars have no real function except to brush off the poet's hat and hand it to him. But a merely passive appreciation of literature is not enough.

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As Gerard Manley Hopkins said, "The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise."7 He was a poet, but he has exactly defined, even for non-poets, the effect of great writing, which is great because it is infinitely suggestive, and encourages us not to imitate it, but to do what we can in our own way. To appreciate literature is also to use it, to absorb it into our own lives and activities. There is unlikely to be much of a gap between what the humanities will do in a new world and what they are trying to do in this one. Teachers of the humanities understand the importance of what they are doing, and in any new world worth living in, nine-tenths of their effort would be to go on doing it. Still, I think they will become increasingly interested in the ways in which words and verbal patterns do affect human lives. They are likely to follow the direction indicated by the poet Wallace Stevens in one of his long discursive poems: This endlessly elaborating poem Displays the theory of poetry, As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporize Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory Of poetry is the theory of life.8

A few years ago there was a great vogue for something called "semantics," which purported to be, not simply a certain type of literary study, but a panacea for human ills. People get neurotic, we were told, by attaching private and emotional significances to words: once they learn to use words properly, to bring them into alignment with the world around them, their psychological distresses and tensions will clear up. A minor advantage would be the abolishing of literature, where words are so thickly coated with emotional associations. Like other miraculous cures, semantics of this type achieved a great success among the hysterical, but failed to do everything it promised to do. It looks as though, as long as men are discussing matters that affect their pocketbooks, their homes, or their lives, they will continue to attach emotional significance to the words they use. Perhaps it would be better to recognize that there is no short cut to verbal accuracy, and go back to study the poets, who have not tried to get rid of emotion, but have tried to make it precise. Nevertheless, the semanticists were right about the importance of words

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in human life, about the immediacy and intimacy of their impact, about their vast powers for good or for evil. We use words in two ways: to make statements and arguments and convey information, or what passes as such, and to appeal to the imagination. The former is the province of history, philosophy, and the social sciences; the latter is the province of literature. There is also a large intermediate area of what is called rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion, where both means are employed. We are brought up to believe that words stand for things, and that most of our experience with words takes the form of reported fact, argument, and logical inference. This is a flattering self-delusion. Most of our daily experience with words takes place on a low level of the imagination—that is, it is subliterary. I am writing this on the subway, and my eye falls on an advertisement for heavy-duty floor wax. Nothing could be more honestly factual; but even here "heavy duty" is a metaphor, probably of military origin, and the metaphor, with its imaginative overtones of ruggedness, strength, and endurance, is the focus of the sales appeal. If the advertiser has something expensive or useless to sell, this subliterary appeal is stepped up. One cannot read far in advertising without encountering over-writing, a too earnestly didactic tone, an uncritical acceptance of snobbish standards, and obtrusive sexual symbolism. These are precisely the qualities of inferior literature. Then there are the other subliterary areas of soap operas, movies, magazine stories, jokes, comic strips, gossip. It is out of the steady rain of imaginative impressions from these and similar quarters that most people form their myths: that is, their notions of representative human situations, of typical human characters and characteristics, of what is inspiring and what is ridiculous, of the socially acceptable and the socially outcast. It is here that the kind of preferences develop which determine one to condemn or condone segregation, to support or decry the United Nations, to vote for Mr. Diefenbaker or for Mr. Pearson. For even election issues and current events reach us chiefly through humaninterest stories and personal impressions. For better or worse, it is through his literary imagination, such as it is, that modern man participates in society. The responsible citizen, of course, tries to get away from mythical stereotypes, to read better papers and seek out friends who have some respect for facts and for rational discussion. But he will never succeed in raising his standards unless he educates his imagination too, for nothing

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can drive bad literature out of the mind except good literature. In these days we have an exaggerated sense of the power of argument and indoctrination. "Ideas are weapons" was a once fashionable phrase, and during the war publishers carried the slogan "books are weapons in the war of ideas." But arguments and aggressive ideas have a very limited role to play in human life. They that take the argument will perish by the argument; any statement that can be argued about at all can be refuted. The natural response to indoctrination is resistance, and nothing will make it successful except a well-organized secret police. What can never be refuted is the underlying vision of life which all such arguments try to rationalize. The arguments are based on assumptions about what is worth living for or dying for; these are rooted in the imagination, and only the imagination can nourish them. The distinction that we have made between the disciplines of words and numbers does not quite correspond to the distinction between the arts and the sciences. There are arts that do not depend on words, like music and painting, and there are sciences that do, like the social sciences. The real difference between art and science is expressed by Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning: The use of (poetry) hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of Man in those points where the Nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul. . . . And therefore (poetry) was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the Mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the Mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the Mind unto the Nature of things.9

The sciences, in other words, are primarily concerned with the world as it is: the arts are primarily concerned with the world that man wants to live in. The sciences have among other things the function of showing man how much he can realize of what he wants to do, and how much has to remain on the level of wish or fantasy. In between comes the area of applied science and applied art, where the process of realization is accomplished. Architecture is one obvious place in which science and art meet on a practical basis. Art, then, owes its existence to man's dissatisfaction with nature and his desire to transform the physical world into a human one. Religion itself, when it deals with ultimate things, uses the language of art, and speaks of an eternal city and a restored garden as the

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fulfilling of the soul's desires. The human imagination, which the arts address, is not an escape from reality, but a vision of the world in its human form. Science continually evolves and improves: the scientist contributes to an expanding body of knowledge, and the freshman studying physics today can sit on the shoulders of Newton and Faraday, knowing things that they did not know. The arts, on the other hand, produce the classic or model, which may be equalled by something different, but is never improved on. The greatest artists have reached the limits of what their art can do: there is an infinite number of limits to be reached, and artists of the future will reach many of them, but it makes nonsense of the conception of art to think of it as developing. The painters in the Stone Age caverns were as highly developed as Picasso; Homer is as much a model for poets today as he was for Virgil. We have as great art as humanity can ever produce with us now. The natural direction of science, then, is onward: it moves toward still greater achievements in the future. The arts have this in common with religion, that their direction is not onward into the future but upward from where we stand. The point of contact between the arts and the human mind is the moment of leisure, one of the most misunderstood words in the language. Leisure is not idleness, which is neurotic, and still less is it distraction, which is psychotic. Leisure begins in that moment of consciousness peculiar to a rational being, when we become aware of our own existence and can watch ourselves act, when we have time to think of the worth and purpose of what we are doing, to compare it with what we might or would rather be doing. It is the moment of the birth of human freedom, when we are able to subject what is actual to the standard of what is possible. William Blake calls it the moment in the day that Satan cannot find.10 It is a terrifying moment for many of us, like the opening of a Last Judgment in the soul, and our highways and television sets are crowded with people who are not seeking leisure but are running away from it. The same is true of the compulsive worker, the man who boasts of how little leisure he has, and who speeds himself up until he explodes in neuroses and stomach ulcers. We tend to think of leisure as having nothing in particular to do: this is what the word means in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, where he is examining the traditional idea of the gentleman as the man who does not work. But even the old leisure class did possess some essential social values—courtesy, good taste, patronage of the arts—and

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a democracy has the problem of trying to retain those genuine values, while making them accessible to anyone. It is still true that liberal education is the education of the free man, and has no meaning out of the context of freedom. The really privileged person is not the man who has no work to do, but the man who works freely, and has voluntarily assumed his duties in the light of his conception of himself and his social function. The underprivileged person is (at best) the servile worker, or what Carlyle called the drudge,11 and every social advance, every technological invention, every improvement in labour relations, has the aim of reducing the amount of servile work in society. But what makes free work free is its relation to the vision of life that begins in the moment of leisure. The poet Yeats took as a motto for one of his books the phrase "in dreams begin responsibilities."12 It is also in man's dream of a humanized world that all learning, art, and science begin. As Aristotle pointed out, the words school and scholarship come from schole, leisure.13 The Bible says that leisure is the beginning of wisdom: it also says that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but the two statements are quite compatible, for religion too has its origin in leisure. Christianity illustrated this fact when it changed a day of rest at the end of the week into a day of leisure at the beginning of the week. The university illustrates the same principle, in its secular form, when it places a four-year voluntary liberal education at the beginning of adult life. We also tend to think of the rewards of leisure as individual possessions, like the love of poetry or music that fills the spare intervals of our lives with private moments of grace and beauty. But behind these private possessions lies a social possession, a vision of life that we share with others. This shared vision is the total form of art, man's vision of a human world, to which every individual work of art belongs. Most of us are seldom aware of the power of words in forming the visions which hold society together. Special occasions, like the familiar words spoken at marriages and funerals, or a critical moment in history that we happen to live through, like the summer of 1940 when the free world had practically nothing but Churchill's prose style left to fight with, are usually all that bring them to our minds. Yet any newspaper can show us how society turns on the hinges of words and numbers. The people who make fortunes out of uranium stocks owe their wealth and social prestige to an absent-minded professor, badly in need of a haircut, who scribbled down E = me2 on a piece of paper fifty years ago. The biggest names in the news at present, as far as

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space is concerned, are Eisenhower and Khrushchev, one a Republican and the other a Marxist. The Republicans owe their existence to the fact that a century ago a long-legged Illinois lawyer put a few words together that made up a social vision for the American people of genuine dignity and power, and so enabled the Republican party to stand for something. Communism owes its existence to the fact that a century ago a carbuncular political agitator disappeared into the British Museum to write a sprawling, badly organized, and grittily technical book on capitalism, which even its author was unable to finish.14 I have no doubt that the philosophy and economics of that work have been refuted many times, but no refutation will have any effect on it. Marxism is a vision of life, with its roots in the social imagination, and it will endure, at least as a vision, until another of greater intensity grows up in its place. The people who run away from their own leisure will, of course, also run away from the articulate sounds of words that would recall them to their dreams and their responsibilities. Just as a frightened child may be reassured to hear the murmur of his parents' voices downstairs, so the childish in our society turn to the books and newspapers, the television programmes and the political leaders, that supply them with the endless, unmeaning babble of the lonely crowd. If you remember George Orwell's 1984, you will recall the decisive role of "Newspeak" in that book. There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently, and that is to destroy language. The whole history of ordered public speech, from the Hebrew prophets who denounced their kings and the Demosthenes and Cicero who fought for the Classical republics down through Milton and Jefferson and Mill and Lincoln, has been inseparably a part of the heritage of freedom. In the nature of things—or rather in the nature of words—it cannot be otherwise. We naturally demand leadership from our leaders, but thugs and gangsters can give us leadership, of a kind: if we demand articulateness as well, we are demanding something that only a genuine vision of human life can provide. In the near future the university of which Dr. Bissell is now president will have a steadily increasing flow of bright young people, eager to be directed toward maturity with the least loss of time. It may strike them as a trifle irrelevant that some of their teachers should be so concerned over their failure to understand the use of the comma. But it is precisely in such foxholes that the battle is fought out between clarity and confusion, between thought and prejudice, between the truth that makes free and the bumbling of the father of lies. If the governing providence of the

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world were to go to sleep, as Plato suggests that it does from time to time; if the self-destroying legion of devils in man were to break loose; if the world were reduced to a darkness without form and void—then we could only believe or hope that an eternally creative Word would still be there, commanding the light to shine again. The human word is neither immortal nor invulnerable; but it is the power that orders our chaos, and the light by which we live.

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Greetings from the Principal 24 September 1959

From the Strand, 8 (24 September 1959): i, 3. The Strand is the student newspaper of Victoria College.

The editor of the Strand has been good enough to suggest that I might use his column to address an open letter to students. This is primarily for the first year, but the other years can eavesdrop. Now that you've got started, I trust, to work, there are a few pointers to keep in mind: 1. The university is not primarily a teaching institution. Your instructors will do all they can for you, and they like you: they've had from five to fifty years of experience with students, and if they sound cynical occasionally, they've actually acquired a good deal of respect for the average student in that time. But what you get here is education, not instruction, and in education you're strictly on your own. 2. Don't think your course is too rigid or specialized. In a world like this you have to dig deeply into one subject before you can see where it connects with other subjects. The Toronto courses, Honour and General both,1 will do everything for you that a carefully planned and balanced curriculum will do. Some universities have a system of "credits" where you wander around from Chinese to basketball coaching like a shopper in a department store, and wind up knowing nothing at all about a lot of things. If you're religious, render thanks to your Maker occasionally that you're not in a credit university. 3. Barring the odd case of genuine bad luck . . .2 one in seven or eight hundred . . . everybody who fails in an arts course thoroughly deserves to. Statistics show that about a quarter of the first year fail, but that isn't

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fate... nobody makes a policy of flunking so many. You'll hear rumours that we do, or that the registrar's office mixes up the lists, but they're only rumours; pay no attention to them. Sometimes students fail because they go into too many other activities. But more usually it's the busy students who know how to organize their time and their work. It's the people who sit around doing nothing at all who are asking for it: the students taking the Honour Course in bridge and brunch and breeze. Good luck and God bless you.

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By Liberal Things 24 September 1959

Installation address as principal of Victoria College, from the booklet By Liberal Things (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1959). Reprinted with slight changes as "The Principal's Address" in the Varsity Graduate, 8 (January 1960): 47-61; abridged version printed in the Strand, 8 (28 October 1959): 6-7. Typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box i, file 6, and 1991, box 38, file 3. In 1988 the address was reprinted, along with a sermon given at the ijoth anniversary of Victoria University, in No Uncertain Sounds (Toronto: Chartres Books, 1988). Frye's preface to this book includes the following remarks: These are two addresses of mine delivered on very specific occasions. Both are full of local allusions, some not wholly intelligible outside the Victoria community; the earlier one also has contemporary references (e.g., to the impact of the Russian "Sputnik" on the American educational establishment)1 which may be difficult for anyone not remembering the world of 1959—and by now that means everyone under thirty. But the disadvantages of local allusions have one compensation: being addressed to my own community they can be more personal and speak with a warmer conviction than if they were addressed to a group further removed from my ordinary activities. Both speeches are really sermons, although the former [i.e., the present address] is a lay sermon, addressed to a liberal arts college and stopping short at the boundary between secular and religious perspectives. Victoria College is a churchrelated arts college of a type described in the address, and such a college in my view permits more and not less academic freedom than a college that has to adopt a prudish and self-censoring avoidance of religious issues. In Canada there has never been the dogmatic severance of church and state in education that there has been in the United States, although in 1959 there was still a good deal of superstition about including religion with other academic subjects. Since then educational authorities

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have resigned themselves to accepting the fact that students at university, whether taking a course in religion taught by a clergyman or, say, a course in political science taught by a Marxist, are quite mature enough to recognize a snow job when they see one.... The reason why these addresses are being published is that my friend Gordon McLennan has consistently admired them and has devoted a great deal of energy and initiative to getting them into print (for the earlier one I should add the word "again"). I am very touched by and grateful for his continued interest.

But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand. (Isaiah 32:8)

I am deeply grateful for the good will, the friendliness, and the courtesy shown me tonight, and expect to remember them as long as I live. Apart from that, however, I am a little startled to find myself being installed: I should have thought that an honour reserved for more massive pieces of equipment, like presidents and refrigerators. At Toronto the difference between the desk and the lectern has never been a dramatic one. There has always been a pleasant confusion between labour and management, and a total absence of managerial mystique. Our administrators do not dwell in dreamlike marble halls with vassals and serfs at their side. They do not move in a broadloom hush among serried ranks of mushroom pink electric typewriters operated by mushroom pink young women. They have no bulging files of police-spy reports on students, with the blocks derived from mother-fixations coded by machinery. Above all, they do not provoke whispers among the faculty that So-and-So has "gone over" to administration, as though he had changed his religion or died in his sleep. One of my students, an American girl now a junior instructor, wrote to me and asked: "Is a Principal a Dean or a President? I disapprove of both." I explained that it meant merely a professor with a little less teaching and a few more committees than his colleagues, and that my home address, friends, and political views would be the same as before. But I doubt if she quite believed me. Of course a scholar who attempts anything but scholarship is rather in the position of a man who has volunteered to amuse a children's party: he is not sure that his really solid virtues will count for much. Of one of my predecessors, who was acting principal for one term no years ago, it was charitably remarked that "He was designed by nature to adorn the

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classic shades of Parnassus, rather than to shine as the guide and governor of a body of tempestuous youths."2 Since then, however, students have become less tempestuous, and, more to the point, Parnassus is less shady. The professor is not as protected from the world nowadays as he was, and it is more common to find scholars and teachers who, just because they are scholars and teachers, are also willing to face such problems as personnel and finance. If any informed person were asked of whom in Victoria College that was pre-eminently true, he would of course think of Dr. Harold Bennett.3 The title of principal has only recently been revived at Victoria, and apart from Dr. Walter Brown, who is better remembered as a president, it is Dr. Bennett who has given it the prestige it has. The energy and devotion with which Dr. Bennett has worked for the college would have commanded admiration from anyone; but, as alumni, staff, and students all demonstrated last spring, that admiration has its roots in a spontaneous personal affection. To this I have nothing to add, except to say that the honour that is being paid to the office of principal tonight is being paid to what is really Dr. Bennett's creation, and so, indirectly, to him. As you may see on your programmes, Victoria's crest displays a sphinx, a phoenix, and an owl, which are said to represent three of its four original faculties. They seem to me to symbolize also the peculiar genius of the Canadian people for producing unlikely and improbable organisms: I think chiefly of Confederation, the United Church of Canada, and the University of Toronto. The sphinx would be a good emblem for Canada itself, put together in defiance of all natural law, yet amazingly solid and permanent, with dominion-provincial relations forming its unsolved riddle and its inscrutable smile. The phoenix, the bird born of its own sacrifice, could well stand for a church made possible by the consenting of dissenters. As for the owl, proverbial both for wisdom and for dullness, its kinship with the academic profession has never been doubted. But if I were thinking of an emblem for the federated university, I should prefer the Questing Beast of Malory's Morte Darthur, which made a noise like thirty couple of hound—a noise not unlike the diverse but curiously consistent one that arises from our Senates and Arts Councils. However represented, the federation at Toronto keeps us reminded of two essential facts about the university. The first is that the ideal unit of student life is the small residential college. This is so obvious that some of the greatest universities in the United States, as they have grown

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larger, have gone to immense trouble and fabulous expense to develop some form of college system. Elsewhere, the network of fraternities has grown up as a substitute for the small college, or in some cases as a parody of it. The second is that the presence of four such different colleges makes a great many theories of education look inadequate. If it stood alone, University College might argue, with Sir Daniel Wilson, that impartial teaching is only possible in a secular atmosphere, and that religious foundations should keep their hands off state funds. Trinity might argue, not only with Bishop Strachan but with Matthew Arnold, that the citadel of culture naturally includes a centrally established church, and that other groups belong in the darkness of the periphery. St. Michael's might argue, with Cardinal Newman, that a university can logically choose only between being Catholic and being the mere servant of the world. I do not know what Victoria's argument would be, though I could easily produce one on request, but however it would run, the mere existence of the three other colleges would prove it oversimplified. I hold of course no brief for the present division of subjects. There were some curious mistakes in that from the beginning, and it is clear that a division which leads to the exclusion of seventeen departments and to the quadruplication of Syriac has got rather out of hand. But bigness is always a threat to greatness; uniformity is always a threat to unity; and federation is the basis of whatever resistance Toronto can make to these threats in the future. As befits a Canadian and United Church college in the Toronto federation, Victoria's genius is a practical one, full of the tolerance for paradox that practical genius demands. The roots of its tradition are in the dissenting academies of eighteenth-century England, and like them, it related itself from the beginning to a modern middle-class society, paying equal respect to the arts and the sciences. It thus had no trouble with the principle of federation, that the humanities normally function best when decentralized, and the sciences best when centralized. Its attitude to religion shows the same double-edged practical logic. Victoria has always sturdily resisted every form of religious indoctrination, including its own. "This," said the proposals of 1830, "shall be purely a literary institution . . . no system of Theology shall be taught therein"4—and it was on that basis that Methodist farmers gave up their small handfuls of spare coins to their practically unpaid circuit-riders. Yet Victoria has kept its church connection, where so many Protestant colleges have cut themselves away from their founding church, leaving behind only a

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vague religious atmosphere, like a nostalgic smell of mildew in the basement. Victoria, in short, has always taken the practical view that the only really secure way of having one's cake is to eat it. I stress this practical social achievement, because it seems to me to represent the real starting point of education. Man is born into a social continuum, a society that is already there and conditions his attitude at every point. Society acts as a hidden persuader, in which an impression may vanish in an instant and yet remain for life. As the students of comparative religion say, ritual precedes myth. We are confronted with a specific social condition or act; we participate in this first; afterwards we may theorize about it and say that what society has taught us to do is really a law of nature or a command of the gods. This principle applies also to the ritual act of going to college, in which so many young people engage every autumn. Finding out why they went is something that comes much later, if it comes at all. An inscrutable Providence has decreed that they should be at university during the mating season, and for some students, going to college is partly a sexual ritual, like the ceremonial dances of the whooping crane. More thoughtful students are fond of asking themselves and each other why they came to college, and their reasons are generally given in terms of usefulness. But the thoughtful student soon realizes that the university is not there to be useful to him; he is there to be useful to it. It does not help him to prepare for life: life will not stay around to be prepared for. My own class entered Victoria in the fall of 1929, with the stock-market crash hot on our heels. The world into which we were plunged in 1933, the world of Hitler and the New Deal and the Russian Five-Year plans, was no more like that sunny September of four years back than it was like the Bronze Age. There is no answer to the student's question, for the only place an answer can come from is an experience that he has not yet had. (I should say somewhere about here that when I say "he" I also mean "she": as the late President Smith used to say, man generally embraces woman.) The student comes to the university because it is there, and the university, like religion, like society itself, presents him with a community that he must first of all join. Much of the value of his education will depend on the prestige attached to intelligence and learning by his community— that is, mainly, by the other students. A university cannot be first-rate unless intellect, passion for ideas, long hours of work, and devotion to one's course are socially acceptable to the student body. If the vulgar attitudes to the longhair or the bookworm are repeated there, we have no

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university, but only a fresh-air camp for the overprivileged. It takes a good deal of imagination to build up a proper student community, because studying is not a social act. The only real heroes of student life, as such, are those who run their mental obstacle race alone. But in the nature of things such heroes can have no rooting sections or cheer leaders, even with the honours attached to the high standing that they usually get. Yet all great thinkers on education seem agreed that the idea of the university is not purely intellectual but, in the widest sense, social. The sixteenth century spoke of educating the courtier in courtesy; the nineteenth, of educating the gentleman in culture. No such education is possible unless the university forms a community in which these conceptions are embodied. Such a community carries with it a weight of authority far greater than the authority of state or government or even social custom. It derives this authority, not from itself, but from its cloud of witnesses, the communion of wisdom, of the thinkers, artists, and statesmen whose work it studies and carries on. The value of the student's education depends partly, too, on the form his studies take. I have a great respect for the Toronto arts courses: the Honour Courses especially seem to me to do everything for the student that a carefully planned and balanced programme of studies can do, which is a good deal. I have nothing but sympathy for the student who has to assemble a mass of credits and electives into a structure with some occult total meaning, like a Japanese flower arrangement, and nothing but contempt for the educational theory which has got him into that position. Yet I sometimes wonder, with my literary and college bias, whether a university can really do all it should for a student unless the controversial subjects, that is, the humanities, have a central place in all studies. Science tries to escape from controversy: it appeals to experiments, arguments, and facts that are as nearly as possible unanswerable. A little learning of science often breeds the notion that there are equally assured facts and arguments in every area of knowledge, if only we knew what they were. But in the humanities there is no final appeal except to humanity itself. Literature, history, philosophy, religious knowledge, political theory, are subjects in which the imagination and emotions are deeply involved: they are the subjects the student will argue about, whatever he studies, and they seem to me the basis of that social enthusiasm for learning on which the student community depends. I have spoken of society as a continuum, and the more the student is absorbed by the university, the more aware he becomes of the continuity

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of human life. Tradition becomes visible to him: the tutorial, the seminar, the informal teaching lecture that modulates into questions and discussion—all these have come down practically unchanged from the days of Plato. He finds that science and philosophy are built on the work and on the criticism of previous thinkers, that the arts recreate their own classics, that history gathers precedent and shape with every significant event. This is the most obvious contrast between the university and ordinary life, where we are aware only of a liquid and dissolving stream of events. Yesterday's newspaper goes out in the garbage, and most of our memory of yesterday goes out with it; propaganda, advertising, fashions, and most entertainment depend on our forgetting on Monday whatever was said to us last Friday. The university preserves the memory of mankind, of mature man as distinct from the childishness immersed in the dissolving present or the senility immersed in the past. It may seem strange to say that the world undervalues memory, when it is so fascinated by television programmes in which bags of gold are handed over to people with total recall. But a man with a large stock of facts is not always a student, any more than a miser is always an economist. The kind of memory the university is interested in and tries to develop is practice memory, the skill and knowledge developed by constant application, the steady repetition that goes on in the unconscious, teaching us, as the proverb says, to skate in summer and swim in winter. This is the habit of learning, in the sense used by medieval scholars when they spoke of a man who could read Latin as having the "habit" of Latin. When he studies, the student is building up these practical learning skills in himself by repeating what previous students have done before him, like an embryo summing up its earlier evolution. In the college's motto, Abeunt studia in mores, the word studia has precisely this meaning of habit or repetition. (In fact, in its original context, which is one of the naughtier poems of Ovid, it means bad habits.)5 The student's habits are formed on different levels. On the surface of his mind he carries specific facts; most of these he will forget if he has no occasion to use them later, and, like liquor permits, they are not transferable. Below this come his ideas and social attitudes, and below this again, the basis of the whole structure, is his imagination, his vision of the world he lives in and of the world he wants to live in. The whole process makes up the training of the intelligence. I have said that I do not mean by intelligence the intellect alone. Still less do I mean what is measured by I.Q. tests, the speed and accuracy of

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one's mental motor responses. I mean by intelligence the power which the disciplined mind has of arriving at a decision. Most decisions in ordinary life are settled by custom or prejudice, but even there we can see what ferocious battles in the mind may spring up in any crisis. The emotion bucks and plunges; the intuition leaps ahead and is lost to view; the imagination throws up one phantasm after another; the memory mutters and gibbers like a chained ape; the intellect urges the most reckless courses of action as the only logical ones. I know that psychology has technical terms for all this; I give the words in common use. All these powers and many others are fighting each other to exhaustion whenever a woman is buying a new hat. At university the student's mind is attacked on all fronts. The sciences demand intellect, the arts demand good taste, or disciplined imagination and emotions. The student soon finds, however, that no matter what he studies, all the resources of his mind have to be brought into play. They may be differently grouped for different studies, but they are always all there, and all necessary. It is very dangerous to assume that only the emotions can stampede the mind. When the intellect starts screaming, "If you accept this, then you must do that," the intellect must be taught to behave itself like everything else. In short, learning to think is a much more complicated matter than training the intellect. A student soon finds that learning about things is very elementary and very easy. If he is reasonably bright and has a week to cram, a small corner of his mind can usually learn enough about his subjects to get him through. But the university does not want him merely to know about things, but to know them, to realize them and make them a part of himself. This is more difficult: for one thing, it demands moral qualities, like courage and honesty. A century ago Thomas Huxley, discussing liberal education, tried to shock the highbrows of his day by describing the intellect as a "clear, cold logic engine."6 This was before the days of automobiles, and the metaphor will not commend itself to anyone who has gone into his garage on a winter morning and been faced by a clear and cold engine. Engines need heat and fuel to get anywhere, and there has never been a thinker whose thoughts were not driven by passion and desire toward an end seen by the imagination. The impact of the university rouses all the powers of the mind to fullest activity, and stirs up as much mental conflict as possible. The first casualty of this conflict is the notion we spoke of before, that the social

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cliches we hear all around us are the laws of nature and God, or magic formulas that answer all problems. The God the student thinks he believes in may only be Santa Claus; his notion of beauty may be only a vague association with the memory of something pleasant; his conscience may be only a sense of what pleased his mother at the age of four; his ideas may reflect only the chatter of his playmates. If so, he is in precisely the position of the young men in Athens asked by Socrates if they knew what justice or temperance or courage were. Of course they knew; everybody knows things like that. Except me, says Socrates: I don't know; you'll have to tell me. Two minutes later the boy finds his ideas crumbling like a ball of wet sand. As we know, the authorities soon decided that this sort of thing was corrupting youth. They may well have been right. War has begun in the student's mind, where all was quiet before, and if he does not instantly impose a peace of boredom or scepticism or sentimental faith, there is no telling where it may lead. The powers of the awakened mind are not children's toys, and the university cannot guarantee that anything it offers will be harmless. Everything depends on how the student reacts to seeing his sand castle destroyed by the first long reach of the sea. The conflict in his mind at this stage is really a war between two communities. On one side is the voice of ordinary society, offering comfort and adjustment. I am the real world, it says, and nothing you do is of any use unless it's useful to me. My ideas are woolly, but they are warm; they are sloppy, but you can relax in them. On the other side is the university and the authority it derives from art and science. In place of the familiar and cosy it offers rigorous definition, exact measurement, tough subtle arguments, and moments of austere and profound beauty. Such a community has its own attractions, to a keen student very great attractions, but the world is right in a way. Education can only lead to maladjustment in the ordinary world: that is its end and its purpose. If one's view of society has been formed by the great philosophers, one cannot be satisfied with the view of it taken by luxury advertising; it is not easy to find the tragedy of life in soap operas if one has found it in the wrath of Achilles or the madness of Lear. It follows, of course, that the more comfortable and attractive ordinary life is, the more likely the student is to think of the university as simply the means of adjusting him to it. The student who is handicapped, by [bad! health or poverty or unpopularity, has some advantage here. The lecturer facing his classroom is not dismayed by the small minority of

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slackers: they, like bacteria, can usually be identified by tests, and got rid of. The real sources of dismay are the personable, docile, polite young people, who do all that they are asked to do, and yet are somehow not students, but merely young people at college. They come from middleclass homes and have taken their seats in the classroom in the same way that British noblemen take their seats in the House of Lords, by right of social privilege. They may be operating at about ten per cent of their mental capacity, but they may not know this themselves. They are doing what they think society expects of them, and no one wants to get rid of them: one wants only to convert them to education. What they lack, from the teacher's point of view, is drive or momentum, the sense of urgency of knowledge, the awfulness of ignorance, the crucial responsibilities of the educated man, the immense gap between wisdom and ordinary savoirfaire. Such students have always been with us, and all the desperate remedies of panic have been tried to shock and startle them. Past ages have used everything from birch rods to the fear of hell; teachers today deliver harangues on complacency and appeal to the celestial publicity stunts of Communism. This last, of course, has thrown the problem into the form of a crisis. The American hare has wakened up to find that the Russian tortoise is not only close on his heels, but still has wind enough to announce with complete confidence that he will soon be in the lead. Hurt and angry, the American public has begun to ask questions of some of its educators. Who took advantage of their good-natured, shallow, anti-intellectual optimism to lull them to sleep? Who watered the stock of ideas, drained the content out of learning, cheated their children of the pleasures of intellect, crippled them for life in the arts of words and numbers, and then seized all the positions of power and influence to impose their miserable follies on future ages? Who threw up in front of this a Maginot Line of projects that do not accomplish anything, of surveys that do not see anything, of compulsory courses that do not teach anything, of pseudo-theses that do not prove anything, or prove only the self-evident, of books that do not mean anything, and are written besides in the prose style of a zoo at feeding time? And above all, what has it been done for? If it were part of an organized revolution, like Communism, one could at least understand it; but what is the point of a revolution without purpose, a subversiveness so fumbling, so witless, so well-meaning? Many culprits have been named, but witch-hunting in this area is as bad as it is anywhere else. The enemy of education in North America is

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not necessarily in teachers' colleges or in "progressive" programmes or in the work of John Dewey or in state or provincial departments. His headquarters may be in your minds, and in mine. The root of all the nonsense in our education is our stupefied satisfaction with what we call our own way of life. This is what leads us to assume that education is simply a means of achieving greater comfort and security in the world, and it is what inspires all the life-adjustment programmes and the like which pander to that assumption. Until it goes; until the prevailing attitude is a little less like the Pharisee of Jesus' parable and a little more like the publican [Luke 18:10-14], education on this continent will be radioactive with ignorance and illiterate blither. Meanwhile, the hope of democracy rests entirely on the earnest student and the dedicated teacher, and there are still too many of both for us to lose that hope. In any case, our society is beginning to admit, however grudgingly, that it must have trained minds. This, we saw, means the co-ordinating of a vigorous and noisy mental democracy, with all kinds of minority impulses demanding to be heard. Eventually the student learns how to chair his mental committee and interpret its sense, if any. The learning is painful and awkward at first, but, like all other forms of learning, it gets easier, more habitual and unconscious, as he goes on. His intellect, his curiosity, his interest, his capacity for pleasure, his imagination: all these spring into unified action as he sits down to his books, instead of quarrelling with each other and dragging him off to a movie. By this time he has solved the problem of so many freshman discussions, "Did you come to college to work or to have a good time?" He now knows how boring most good times are compared to the play of an exuberant mind. Nietzsche speaks somewhere of how fond some people are of describing thought as laborious, difficult, involved, complex.7 He adds that such people are telling us a great deal about the way they think, but very little about thought itself. Thought itself is one of the primary forms of human energy, and in its use is all the exhilaration of power. A democracy, even in the mind, must have freedom, and by learning to use his intelligence the student is learning the secret of freedom. What is freedom? Doing what one wants to do. But whatever "one" wants to do, whatever demands the co-ordinating of body or mind, must be learned. As Pope says, "Those move easiest who have learned to dance":8 only after repeated practice is one free to dance or think or even watch a football game with any comprehension. I know of no conception of freedom that means anything at all except the promise held out at the

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end of a learning process. From the baby's first stagger across the room to the retired man in his garden or workshop, the disciplined mind is constantly pursuing the liberal arts—those difficult techniques that set one free. The conception of academic freedom does not mean merely freedom from interference by the world, though of course it means that too. It means that there must be a continuous current of mental energy flowing into the world from the university, which is the powerhouse of freedom. The university stands for what humanity can do, and for what the rest of society is free to do if it tries. When the student is graduated, he represents the university in the world: wherever he is, the university is; whatever his profession, he will always be a university teacher, teaching by his example and influence every moment of the day. The university is not merely the group of institutions called universities, any more than the church is merely the group of buildings called churches. Wherever there is respect for the artist's vision, the scientist's detachment, the teacher's learning and patience, the child's questioning, there the university is at work in the world. It is natural that alumni should keep coming back to the university, and it is pleasant to have memories of a Music Club performance or a famous football game or a teacher's eccentric mannerisms or the youthful slenderness of the girl one avoided marrying. But what the alumnus is really coming back to is something hidden behind all these, something of which these are really screen memories, something he may never have seen, unless there was, perhaps, one split second when, cramming for an examination and dizzy with lack of sleep and benzedrine, he suddenly knew that something of which his own mind formed part was much more deeply involved in the nature of things than he had ever dreamed. But whether he has seen it or not, he comes back to the university because, in some mysterious way, his mind continues to revolve around the vision at its heart: the vision of what the poet Yeats calls the sages standing in God's holy fire.9 Most of you know that the verse from the Gospel of John, "The truth shall make you free," is carved over the main entrance to Victoria, and I suppose most of you know too that it refers to the union of liberal and Christian values which we struggle for inside. If you are in the college, facing the same doorway, you are confronted by a window, depicting two heads with mottoes. I suppose this indicates what the college has to say to its own people as they go out to deal with the non-Victorian part of

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society. The head on the right is clearly Plato, and the motto is from the fifth book of Plato's Laws: "Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods and to mankind" [sec. 73oc]. The head on the left is, I think, Francis Bacon, because the motto attached to it is Bacon's misquotation from Aristotle, and reads, "Nature shews herself best in her smallest works."10 I take it that Aristotle, Bacon, and the committee who ordered the window did not mean to suggest that the study of amoebas is more scientific than the study of elephants. I think they meant that the basis of knowledge is the particular experience. If science were to explain every fact in the universe except one, that one fact would clamour for admission until it had shattered the whole explanatory structure. But of course science never gets to such a position, because the experience on which science rests is continually being renewed. We cannot read the history of any science without coming to points at which the whole science up to that point seems to dissolve. New assumptions take over, and everything is reconstructed in a new light. We cannot trace these transformations to their origin. We can make up stories about them, stories about an apple falling on Newton's head or James Watt seeing the kettle boil, but we do not know at what moment the new experience drifted, a vagrant air-borne seed, into the right mental soil and took root. Nor do we know how it first grew: whether it started as a new idea, a random insight, a reaction from being crossed in love; whether it was something hoped for and expected or an unwelcome intruder. What we do know is that new experiences may come in any way, if the mind is open on all sides to receive them. That is why it is better in the long run for the mind, like society, to be a democracy rather than a dictatorship. In the creative mind, as in the creative society, there must be tolerance and a relaxing of censorship, an area for free impression, a readiness to examine and if necessary reconstruct its assumptions, an exposing of oneself to new experience in all its irrational force. Even in the mind of God, we are told, the Spirit of truth speaks not of himself, but of whatsoever he hears. The dictatorial mind, or what we usually call the indoctrinated mind, works from certain assumptions or premises which it never questions because it never becomes conscious of them. A mind like this can work very efficiently as long as its assumptions hold out, although its greatest feats are usually technological rather than radically creative. There is also a latent hysteria in such a mind, an anxiety to get rid of anyone likely to question assumptions. And the tolerant mind is not as inefficient or paralyzed as it may

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look. The greater the freedom of thought, the more concentrated and disciplined the power of action, because freedom of thought tends to eliminate impulsive, premature, or panic-stricken action. This is only true, however, if the mind is directed toward a vision of human life; if it is guided by a clear and unfaltering conception of what kind of world man should be living in. This brings us to the other motto, that truth is the beginning of every good to gods and mankind. Truth is always a beginning; it can never be the end of anything in this world, for there is no end it can come to except the mind in which it began. When the reason discovers a rational order in the universe; when the artist discovers that the world is beautiful, these discoveries are partly a matter of falling in love with one's own reflection, like Narcissus. Even when submarines swim under the pole and rockets circle the dark side of the moon, it is still the shadows of truth that are outside us; the substance is in ourselves. It is not the world that we contemplate but the world that we create which is important to us. The sources of creative power in the human mind are inexhaustible. If we could realize that they are infinite and eternal as well, and that the human mind is therefore linked in its nature and destiny with a divine mind, that would be the final motive for learning and the final guarantee of its value. It is difficult to speak of intelligence, or the disciplined action of the mind, without using military metaphors. Even in the word that Plato uses for truth, aletheia, there is also the meaning of loyalty, the sense of community in which all learning has its fulfilment. In the life of a society there comes a time when it is threatened with invasion or war. This is the point at which tolerance stops and disciplined action begins. Everything unites in the face of a common danger; those who go out to battle are in uniform, with all variety suppressed; their motives are unquestioned and their assumptions unchallenged. History is largely the record of wars, and if history is, as Byron says, the devil's scripture,11 then war is the devil's imitation of real human life. There is at present a feeling, in which we hardly as yet dare to indulge ourselves, that another war is no more inevitable than any other evil produced by human fear. Some of us think of a struggle between democracy and Communism carried on at other levels. But if the entire Communist world were annihilated tomorrow all our enemies would still be with us, in many respects stronger than ever. It would still be true that to know anything is to renounce falsehood, that to feel beauty is to reject ugliness, and that lying and

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ugliness are not mere negations, but active powers to be fought. We can hope for no better future for our students than a life of what William Blake calls mental fight or intellectual war:12 a war where ignorant armies clash with knowledge, where the children of light go out with their tiny but accurate sling-shots and Philistine giants fall in a crash of hardware. If there is any purpose or meaning in human life at all, it is to be found on this battlefield, and in the trumpets that call us to it there are no uncertain sounds.

23 Senior Dinner Address 1960

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box i, file A. An address given to the graduating class of Victoria College. The first senior dinner was given by the junior year to the graduating class of 1879. In 1892, it was held at the Arlington Hotel in Cobourg—ten toasts and thirty-one speeches were given. Later it became a dinner given by the faculty to the graduating class, usually in Burwash Hall.

The Senior Dinner is one of the events in the college that have not changed much, since the time when they were held in the front hall of the college building, and went on until half-past one in the morning, because it was felt that everyone who was not actually suffering from lockjaw ought to be required to make a speech. And in thinking over the Senior Dinners I have attended, I am impressed by the amount of gloom and foreboding that has been mixed up with all the pleasantness. My own Senior Dinner was held in the middle of the Depression, when we were about to go out into a world in which we felt that nobody wanted us. Then for six interminable years the shadow of war fell over the Senior Dinner as it fell over everything else, and then came the postwar years, when the graduating class filled the Arcadian Court in Simpsons, and one sat beside bewildered students who had entered the college twelve months before. And even now, in this age of strontium 90, buoyant and optimistic as things seem to be, we are still eyeing the world apprehensively, like a new bride with a new stove, uncertain whether it will blow up in her face or merely cook her goose. There are two features of the Senior Dinner that never change. One is the feeling of frustration, at seeing once more so many people, so well

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worth knowing, and with so pitifully little time in which to get to know them. Another is the feeling, which partly compensates for this, that nobody really leaves a college. You may, though I very much hope you will not, sever all connections with Victoria: you may not join the alumni association; you may pass up all your class reunions; you may disregard all appeals for funds; you may even send your children to Queen's. But whatever you do, the mark of Victoria 60 is indelibly branded on you for life. For you are not leaving Victoria College for the world: you are taking Victoria College with you into the world. From now on, Victoria College will be also wherever you are, and its reputation will depend on you as well as on us. What has changed over the years is the prestige of the university in society at large. In the Depression days, when a student went downtown in search of the two or three jobs available, a college degree was something he concealed like a secret vice. But during the war the public gradually realized that we couldn't win a war without the help of universities, and the reputation of the university rose accordingly. Now it is higher than it has ever been before in our generation; and the reason for it is simple enough. You can imagine how dangerous it would be to have in a complex society like ours any large group of highly intelligent people who could not read or write. Whatever else they would be, they would certainly be political dynamite. And by the year 20001 venture to say that it will be equally dangerous to have any large group in society who are not educated up to the limit of their capacities. For great social changes are bound to take place during the next forty years of your lives, and great efforts of adaptation will be required of society. The societies who are unable to make these adaptations will simply go under. And it is the university graduates to whom society will look for the kind of detachment which makes adaptation possible. If society is discussing any form of adaptation, such as the abolition of capital punishment or giving votes to the Negro, something better will be required of our university graduates than bad arguments from the Book of Leviticus. That is what the university has tried to do for you: it has taken you, middle-class Canadians living in the mid-twentieth century, and withdrawn you from that society just enough to enable you to compare it with other societies in our world, with what has been, with what might be, and with what could still be if we tried. And you have responded to this by developing your own visions of society. You have shown what your social vision is, not in what you have put down in essays and

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examinations, but in your whole behaviour as students and as human beings. Some of you may have acquired no better vision of society than the bridge table, which, like the City of God, requires four squares. Some of you may have achieved your social vision involuntarily, and with your minds on something else, like the girl who picked up a book called "How to Hug," and when she got it home and examined it found that she had bought a copy of the thirteenth volume of an encyclopedia. Some students, including some very good and keen students, turn revolutionary at college, because they are fascinated at seeing all the great ideas on which society turns, and are impressed with the amount of transformation that could take place in society. As they get older they become less revolutionary, not simply because they have got cautious and cynical, but because they have begun to realize that what has been shown them are not only the principles that can transform society, but the principles that hold it together. I cannot promise you that you will never forget all the good times you have had at college, because you may. I cannot promise you that you will never forget what you are going to put down on your examinations next month, because you certainly will. All I can say is that you have arrived at the point at which you have defined your character and your social function for the rest of your lives. The university has done its best to make sure that that point of definition has been as clear-sighted and as conscious as possible. We are university teachers by profession: you are about to become university teachers by your example and by your social position. We can be your teachers no longer: from now on we can only be your friends. But there is now an unbreakable covenant between us that goes deeper than friendship.

24

The Critical Discipline 7 June 1960

From Canadian Universities Today: Symposium Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1960, ed. George Stanley and Guy Sylvestre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), 30-7. Reprinted in OE, 29-37. Also adapted for publication in The Aims of Education, Conference Study no. i, ed. Freeman K. Stewart (Ottawa: Canadian Conference on Education, 1961), 24-32, with three additional paragraphs, given here in square brackets, and a list of suggested reading. A clean typescript is in NFF, 1988, box i, file p. This symposium, on "The Responsibilities of Canadian Universities," addressed the new phase that higher education had entered since the end of the war owing to factors such as scientific discoveries, the rivalry of Eastern and Western blocs, and the increase of population; its conclusion was that Canadian universities should remain true to their traditional purpose. The present paper deals with the relation of the liberal arts to education as a whole and to the conditions of life in Canadian society. This sounds like very familiar territory, and it is; but I am still not sure that the objectives of undergraduate teaching in this country are generally understood. I do not believe in conflicts between science and the humanities, or between religion and science; but we do have conflict when different theories attempt to explain the same set of facts. The theory of education, like other theories, should be based on the whole of its practice. We have suffered much from the theories that generalize from the practice of the kindergarten; but we should examine these theories, horrifying as they are, to understand why they arose. The liberal arts have suffered also from theories based on the practice of professional faculties, including the graduate school, perhaps the least liberal of them

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all. Then, just as some of the confusions surrounding undergraduate teaching were beginning to clear up, along came the wealthy foundations, as obsessed with "projects" as any teachers' college, and showing a marked preference for projects as disruptive of normal university routine as possible. In this situation all the millions of words that have been written about the humanities and the liberal arts fail to do much to improve either the morale of the staff or the motivation of the students. And that both need improvement is clear to such an audience as this at such a time of year as this. Many of us are university teachers who have just finished marking undergraduate papers, and are all too familiar with the baffled stare with which the Canadian youth confronts his cultural heritage. As Coleridge is prominently featured in this session of the Royal Society, we may adopt Coleridge's method of studying existing practice in an effort to see what theoretical principles may underlie it. I use the term "critical" because it seems to me that criticism, in Matthew Arnold's sense, is the only conception that will cover the whole area that we are interested in. It has become an axiom in educational theory today that the skills developed from the study of specific subjects are not transferable to other subjects. The study of Latin, for instance, is not "good for the mind" in the sense that it can directly contribute to mental efficiency in a business or professional career. This particular discovery became very popular among the "progressive" educators of the last generation, because it seemed to fit so neatly into their programme of replacing intellectual with social training. A little Latin, so the argument ran, is a dangerous thing, for all it can lead to is more Latin, which is practically a fatal thing. Such educators often assert that all emphasis on content in education derives from the old fallacy about transferring mental skills. I have no desire to defend the fallacy, but as the fallacies that replaced it were much more disastrous superstitions, the inferences drawn from its refutation may have been the wrong ones. To speak of a general mental ability developed from specific mental skills is merely a mistaken way of stating an obvious fact. The specific things a student learns or experiences do contribute, directly or indirectly, to the formation of his opinions and behaviour. All experience educates, and our social personality forms underneath our vanishing experiences like layers of chalk under a rain of dying protozoans. Primary education, in the broad sense, is concerned with acquiring the minimum of specific skills and information that one must have in order

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to live in modern society. As experience, it is being assimilated to a developing social attitude, but this is a process which is steadied by the nature of the child's society. The child's society is a primitive society, and like other primitive societies it is an extremely stable one. Its folklore, codes of behaviour, humour, and modes of speech have probably changed very little since Neolithic times. Hence primary education is, or should be, almost entirely specific and useful, and the basis of its theory is, or should be, research into the learning process. [By specific and useful I do not mean peripheral. It is a major principle of educational theory that the specific and useful is what is central to the subject. I mean such things as the simple, vivid, and concrete scientific experiments which can be understood by a child and yet illustrate many interlocking scientific principles, of the sort referred to in Jerome Dinner's book The Process of Education. I mean, in literature, the study of the myths and folk tales, the stories of the Bible and of Classical legend, which organize the whole of one's later literary and imaginative experience and yet make sense to the youthful mind. I mean the kind of history and geography that give the learner some sense of where he is in space and time—where he really is, not where he apparently is. I add this because in my own schooldays in New Brunswick there was apparently a theory that one should start with the child's immediate surroundings, hence I still carry a load of learning about the counties and county seats of New Brunswick, and the location of such places as Kouchibouguac Mountain and the Chiputneticook Lakes, that I wish very much I could forget. It was a theory, but like many theories it was only lunatic pedantry in practice. By research into the learning process, again, I mean that the way children learn has priority to all questions of the way we should teach. It is natural for educators, faced with strong resistance to learning, to assume that resistance means something wrong with the child, and to forget how logical the child's mental processes often are from the child's point of view. I recall talking to a primary grade teacher who had noticed that of the children of normal intelligence in her school who had difficulty learning to read, practically all were boys. She investigated the readers they used, and found, not to her surprise, that they were girlcentred stories, designed to adjust children to the kind of matriarchy that the simpering female in the publisher's office who had written the stories assumed to be the proper way for everybody to live. Boys who were already, in their six-year-old way, getting interested in science and tech-

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nology found such books literally unintelligible. The teacher got nowhere with her discovery, as both the publishers' lobby and the educational theory involved had to be maintained at all costs. But the incident illustrates the principle that the child's view of his own world may be less distorted than adult reconstructions of it.] In secondary education the student is old enough to notice that his social opinions and attitudes are taking shape underneath his studies. He is still immersed in a primitive society, rigid in its etiquette and in its demands for conformity; but he is now swept by moods of oppositions, ranging from rebelliousness to idealism, that seem to have a more consistent pattern in them. All his experience continues to educate him, as it did before, but he is becoming aware of an underlying conflict in his situation. On one side of him is his ordinary social environment, the world of his television set, his movies, the family car, advertising, entertainment, news, and gossip. On the other side is the school, and perhaps the church, trying to dislodge him from this lotus land and prod him into further voyages of discovery. On one side of him is a difficult theoretical world of art and science, the principles of which he has not begun to understand; on the other side is a fascinating world of technology and rhetoric, which he can already handle with some competence, and in which he must live in any case. The school has only five hours a day in which to fight the influences which keep soaking into the student from the rest of his experience, and which usually command an authority that the school cannot command. As a rule, therefore, the world of technology and rhetoric wins out, whether the student goes on to university or not. In moments of depression one feels that the majority of university students have already been conditioned beyond the point at which the university can affect them at all. [The chief aim of secondary education is to make the student as far as possible intellectually self-employed. My illustration is from the field I know, which is literature. If a student, on leaving high school, has acquired the habit of reading intelligently, the question of what he has read by the age of seventeen becomes much less important. If the emphasis is thrown, in the final year of high school, on "covering" a course to meet the demands of a university examination, the result is equally disastrous for the student who is going on to university and the student who is not. The former is left totally unprepared for the radical change in study habits demanded by the university, and the latter is exposed to all possible literary genres (apparently on the assumption that the rest of his

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life will be devoted to the Reader's Digest), but with his responses to these genres largely determined for him by the phraseology of previous examination papers. A final year devoted primarily to the task of trying to show the student how to organize his own programme of study would be a genuine introduction to the university for the student intending to go there. For the student not intending to go to university, who had acquired his high-school leaving certificate in the previous year, such a training would still be the most beneficial way of spending another year in school, assuming that it was a voluntary commitment. The real standards required for admission to the university are not measurable by examinations, and they are the same as the standards required for admission to the best life in our civilization.] The educational theories generally called progressive tried to abolish this conflict by making the school the agent of society. Education thus became a matter of social adjustment to the world one must live in. But this world, in itself, provides no real standards or values. It stands for immaturity and a cult of youth, for social values rooted in entertainment and advertising, and for emotions rooted in the erotic. Besides, the world, unlike nature, always betrays the heart that loves her. It changes very rapidly, driven on by forces that the socially adjusted cannot comprehend, and can only cope with by the fixations of prejudice and stock response. Thus understanding the world, if it is made the goal of education, is forced to become an acceptance of the world, and that in turn becomes increasingly an acceptance of illusion. The forms of illusions are familiar: there are the illusions of advertising and its status symbols; the illusions of slanted news; and the illusions of entertainment, where the "fixing" of a television programme1 or ball game is so much more emotionally disturbing than major corruption or crime. What started out as a fearless grappling with the conditions of present-day life finishes in a neurotic prison of credulity, bewilderment, and cynicism. I am speaking of the logical consequences of a theory, not of what invariably happens in practice, but it happens often enough to be a grave social danger. The university demands, first of all, that the student recognize and accept a dialectic between his social environment and a cultural environment which crosses it, so to speak, at right angles. He should understand what he must do to live in his society; but he must understand too that that society has no criteria for judging itself or one's actions within it. The criteria (or at least the secular criteria) can come only from the arts and sciences, the co-ordinated vision of the greatness and accuracy of human

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imagination and thought. The university then demands that the student devote his main energies for several years to a study of his cultural environment. This entails a voluntary commitment which includes both a physical and a mental withdrawal from ordinary society. It entails too the atmosphere of academic freedom, which means among other things that ideas and works of the imagination must be studied as far as possible without reference to ordinary society's notions of their moral or political dangers. In practice this freedom may be limited in various ways, but it is sufficiently present to make it forever impossible that any open-circuit television programme can ever reproduce the actual conditions of university teaching. For that, one must always have a closed door. In primary education only the surface of learning, the acquiring of information and skills, is ordinarily visible; in secondary education social opinions and attitudes begin to come into view. In the university the basis of the whole structure appears, in the form of a vision of what the world is in comparison with the higher society of art and science which shows us what humanity can do, the society that Arnold called culture. The university is thus a kind of social laboratory in which the most revolutionary conceptions may be valuable, not necessarily as programmes for action, but as insights into the structure of society, nature, or the human mind. This conception of a social laboratory was, I suppose, the basis of the old Classical training, where a completed civilization could be studied as a laboratory specimen of a social organism. The student often reacts to academic freedom by developing a naive radicalism or a naive conservatism. Which it is will depend on whether he is more impressed by culture's power to transform society or by its power to hold it together. One familiar feature of university practice is particularly puzzling to the student, and not only to him. The authors of a recent book, The Academic Marketplace,2 were equally puzzled by it, though they devoted the entire book to a study of it. The young man who starts out on a university staff is earning his living by teaching. Yet he is given no instruction in teaching, and is not appointed for his teaching abilities at all, but for his scholarship. Questions are unofficially asked about his classroom effectiveness, but there is something conspiratorial about such questions, like the questions about the political views of government employees. Promotion, too, is based on scholarship, and any appointment made primarily on teaching ability is generally regarded as a

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second-class appointment, just as appointments that involve no teaching are generally regarded as the juiciest plums on the academic tree. However much snobbery and confused thinking may be involved with this practice, it seems to be the assumption that in the university teaching should be left to take care of itself, that every scholar can teach, and that if he cannot teach there is merely something the matter with his scholarship. In practice, this assumption works fairly well. The majority of competent scholars are also effective teachers, and become so without benefit of any instruction in teaching. Those interested solely in teaching, on the other hand, often find that their lack of interest in scholarship increasingly isolates them from the classroom as well as from every other aspect of university life. Exceptions are less important than they seem because the really keen student, faced with an inarticulate scholar, can cut the lectures and work on his own. I am not suggesting that the university instructor is fulfilling his social function by cheating his mediocre students out of their tuition fees. I am merely saying that the university's practice of regarding teaching as a by-product of scholarship is apparently a sound one. It is clear that in many respects the university is not primarily a teaching institution at all. The more mature the student, the less the teacher becomes the dispenser of learning, and the more he becomes a transparent medium of it. In the primary grades the teacher is an apparition from a strange and mysterious adult world; by the end of secondary school he should have become a fellow student. The significance of the priority of scholarship to teaching in the university thus becomes clear: it means that in the university the relation of teacher and student is strictly subordinated to the authority of the subject being taught. In the university there is no longer any such thing as "education": there are only literature, chemistry, history, and similar subjects to be studied. The university does not ask if a man is educated: it asks only, "What does he know?" But this "what" is not, as the progressivists say, mere content, to be used as material for personal development. What he knows is literature or chemistry or history or whatever it is, and these are the organized forms of knowledge: no genuine scholarly knowledge exists outside them. The emergence of the teacher, as a professional person on a social and cultural level with members of other professions, is a result of the series of social revolutions which have produced modern democracy. In Plato and Aristotle we hear much of education, but much less of teachers as

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such, and in fact Plato says explicitly in the Laws that a well-run society cannot afford to leave anything to the teacher, but must prescribe everything he does [8o9b]. Such an attitude today would be called totalitarian. But in our society, too, we discover that a child-centred theory of education soon becomes an administration-centred theory, where the individual teacher is absorbed into the teachers' conference. The independence and autonomy of the teacher is only possible if he owes his main allegiance to his cultural and not to his social environment. To subordinate teaching to scholarship is the only way of guaranteeing the independence of the teacher within the university, and of encouraging his independence outside of it. Thus the university, so far from assuming the transferability of mental skills, assumes the exact opposite. The discipline of the subject studied becomes an end in itself in proportion as the student matures. He advances from "taking" a subject to being taken up in it. The General Course in arts assumes that an integrated curriculum, even in so specialized a world as ours, is, up to a point, possible at the university level. The Honour Course, on the other hand, is based on the assumption that any genuine discipline can be used as a centre of knowledge, the radius of expansion from the centre being the student's responsibility. Either assumption is justifiable, but that of the Honour Course is perhaps closer to this age of intellectual pluralism. But whatever may be true within the university, it is of course concerned with returning students to their social environment after graduation. Its product is the social product that we think of as the educated citizen, or what Newman called the gentleman. The word gentleman does not now mean, however, what Newman meant by it, and we badly need a word to describe the man who tries to live in his social environment by the standards and values of his cultural environment. The difference between the ordinary citizen living by purely social standards and the educated citizen aware of a cultural environment as well is, or should be, a difference in personality. It follows that the conception of personal development, so dear to the hearts of educational theorizers, is not a simple conception. The ordinary social personality is an adjusted ego, and its energies are the energies of self-expression. The shrewdness and accuracy with which this self-expression adapts itself to a social situation makes up one's ordinary practical intelligence. In all areas of the cultural environment we meet with something additional that may be called renunciation: the

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surrender of the ego to the laws and conditions of the discipline being studied. The student of science is proud of the impersonality of his subject, of its serene preoccupation with evidence and its independence of whim and fancy. The professional man is not qualified until he has gone through some ritual acknowledging the priority of the standards of his profession over his own needs and desires. Poets, from Homer to Eliot and Joyce, have consistently spoken in the same terms about poetry. It is impossible to teach the humanities properly if we think of them as ornaments or graces of ordinary social life. They have their laws and disciplines like the sciences, and must be taught as impersonally as the sciences, despite their emotional and aesthetic connections. Normally it is only after prolonged contact with a specific discipline of thought or imagination that one can face the kind of reality that detachment reveals, a reality unaffected by socially acquired prejudices or the passions of the ego. It follows that such a cliche as "teaching the student to think for himself" is not a simple conception either. In ordinary social experience, thinking for oneself is a matter of putting one's expressive energies into socially acceptable forms. In real thinking we first study a given subject long enough to enable its laws and categories to take possession of our minds, after which we may move around inside the subject with some freedom. There is no real thought outside such disciplines. Those of us who are in universities have heard the protest of the delinquent undergraduate in some such terms as this: "You tell us we should think for ourselves, and when we do you throw the book at us." It is a complicated matter to explain to such a lad that what he means by "himself" is a being entirely incapable of thought. Of course a thinker should be able to return to society with an enormously heightened power of practical decision, but by that time he has lost interest in thinking for himself. Whatever one studies at a university, whether humanities or science, one is studying a subject in a state of continual intellectual ferment, which has gone through many revolutions of perspective in the last century and is certain to go through many more in the next one. Such a mental training is becoming almost indispensable for living in a society of which great revolutions in perspective will also be demanded. Communism has the tactical advantage of a revolutionary point of view; its overthrow of previous governments is recent and it asserts to its people that it is progressing in revolution and that they are participating in history. By contrast, the democracies seem to be forgetting their revolu-

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tionary traditions, and their will to face the future seems to be sapped by a morbid fear of losing what they now have. But both religion and democracy teach us that ordinary society is highly expendable. Christianity insists that man's ordinary actions are worth very little in the sight of God. Democracy was not founded on a maudlin enthusiasm for the common man, but on an inference from original sin: that men are not fit to be trusted with too much power. Our students have been conditioned to regard such doctrines as depressing, although they were part of the vision of life that inspired Milton and Lincoln. Without the sense of expanding possibilities that such a vision brings, it is hard to see how the democracies can mentally adapt even to the social changes that will be forced on them, much less develop the creative energy to make their own. We hear much about the increased numbers of students coming to universities; and surely this great mass of potential public opinion is more important than merely a vaguely alarming statistic. Most of these students will, inevitably, be processed rather than educated, and for the really keen student in the future the great difficulty will be, not to get to university, but to get his proper education instead of the processing. I say difficulty for the student, because the initiative will be up to him. The university, by virtue of its emphasis on the cultural environment, the supremacy of mental discipline over personality, and academic freedom, has the resources for forming a bridgehead of flexible and detached minds in a strategic place in society. It should not think of doing this as an additional task, or even as a manipulating or directing of its present task. The university can best fulfil its revolutionary function by digging in its heels and doing its traditional job in its traditionally retrograde, obscurantist, and reactionary way. It must continue to confront society with the imaginations of great poets, the visions of great thinkers, the discipline of scientific method, and the wisdom of the ages, until enough people in the democracies realize that a way of life, like life itself, must be lost before it can be gained. Bibliography Plato. Republic. London: Penguin Books, 1960. Not only the supreme statement of the Socratic method in education, but the definitive treatment, as far as our own cultural tradition is concerned, of the relation of the educated mind to the structure of society.

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Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. New York: Doubleday (Anchor Books), 1959. One of the most beautiful books in the world, this is the statement of the Renaissance conception of education as embracing the liberal arts, the fine arts, physical training, and the pervading virtues of courtesy and love. Milton, John. Of Education. Cornell Studies in English, vol. 12. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928. - Areopagitica. London: Oxford University Press, 1917. These two pamphlets deal with what Milton called "domestic liberty," or freedom for the individual apart from religious and political freedom. Taken together, they illustrate how education illustrates the identity of freedom and responsibility. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Entile. New York: Dutton, 1959. The classical statement of the relation of education to reason and nature, nature being conceived as man's physical environment. American education is so profoundly Rousseauistic in its assumptions that a study of Rousseau is essential for anyone interested in it. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. New York: Rinehart, 1959. The best statement of the opposed traditional or Christian view of man as belonging to his own order of human, as distinct from physical, nature. Also the clearest statement of the distinction between liberal and other forms of learning. Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Duhring. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955. It is difficult to select one work setting forth the Marxist conception of education, but this is perhaps as central as any. As a statement of the Communist view that all education is for social revolution, it is an important document for anyone living in the democracies today.

25

Dialogue Begins October 1960

The Mike, 13, no. 2 (October 1960): i, w. The Mike is the student magazine of St. Michael's College, the Roman Catholic arts college in the University of Toronto. Frye had been asked, as principal of Victoria, to discuss the place that he felt his college occupied in the federated university; the editors envisaged his paper as the first in a series encouraging intercollege and interfaith dialogue.

In Culture and Anarchy, published in 1869, Matthew Arnold deals with the Liberal and Nonconformist proposal to "open the Universities to everybody, and let there be no establishment of religion at all." In resisting the latter part of this proposal, he remarks "that the Nonconformists have got provincialism and lost totality by the want of a religious establishment," and that their example, "America without religious establishments," only shows us a whole nation given over to provincialism.1 When Arnold wrote this, Egerton Ryerson had already won his fight to break up the Anglican monopoly on higher education in Upper Canada, and had set up Victoria College in Cobourg as his monument. Provincial that college certainly was, not because it was Nonconformist, but because it was in the provinces. No other group, religious or secular, could have been much better off in nineteenth-century Ontario, and it is clearly absurd to suggest that there would have been less provincialism if the Family Compact had maintained its stranglehold.2 Arnold's references to America, which for him would have included Upper Canada, show a profound ignorance of its social conditions, and in perspective his rationalization of the Establishment even in England looks rather mischievous. For Arnold's faith in establishment was much deeper than his faith in the established church. He wanted religion to supply the moral energy and

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passionate conviction for the larger worldly ideal that he called "culture," and he expected that its present form would disappear as soon as it had fulfilled its proper social function. A conception of religion as a part of a whole which is secular is surely one that no Christian of any communion could swallow, and it is precisely what the "nonconformist" refuses to conform to. It is, in the long run, a rendering to Caesar of what belongs to God, a setting up of spiritual authority in the state. Some years after Culture and Anarchy, Ryerson's successor, Chancellor Nelles, began the negotiations with Toronto that finally resulted in federation. In a speech which he made in 1885 he remarked, "In so far as any religious body stands aloof from the national system of education it not only deprives itself of advantages to which it is fairly entitled, but does what it can both to weaken and un-Christianize that system."3 Here is the complementary conception to Ryerson's. Church and state interests in education need first of all to be separated in order to prevent the state from kidnapping the whole educational process, whether the form of the state's monopoly is secular or bound up with an establishment. But having once been separated, Nelles wanted his Nonconformist college to go back and work within a secular university. Here a religious body proposes that its students be educated within a mainly secular structure, accepting the autonomy of the various academic disciplines, accepting the principle of complete intellectual honesty in studying them, and yet providing a means for reserving the deeper elements of faith, loyalty, and vision for a kingdom not of this world. Experience shows that a bigoted and fanatical worldly sectarianism is apt to grow up within such disciplines, especially the younger and more aggressive ones, and a religious context for higher education is a safeguard for academic freedom, not a threat to it. Nelles's conception is not only more profound and original than Arnold's, but, as the event proved, more practical. Anglican and Roman Catholic colleges were also able to federate on this basis and a Provincial University has become less provincial in consequence. Nonconformists, and Protestants generally, suffer from the disadvantage of a negative name. T.S. Eliot, while arguing along Arnold's lines for an Anglo-Catholic domination of English culture, remarks that Protestantism cannot survive the existence of what it protests against.4 I suppose no serious Protestant is seriously concerned with "surviving" Catholicism, especially now that the question of survival appears to have moved into natural theology. But he would certainly not think of his faith as based on anything remotely resembling this lugubrious pun.

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Ever since Protestantism formed a separate religious body, whatever abuses or corruptions there may have been in the Church it left have ceased to be its business. It is concerned with trying to live by a revelation from an infinite mind to a finite one. Its assumptions may be right or wrong, but they are at least consistent with the two essentials of higher education. One of these is the desire to learn, to accept what men have thought and imagined in the arts and sciences. The other is a realization that any finite human structure of knowledge is tentative, and that we should not be dismayed, but exhilarated when a whole way of looking at things blows up in our faces, like an old bottle full of new wine.

26

Push-Button Gadgets May Help— But the Teacher Seems Here to Stay December 1960

Varsity Graduate, Christmas 1960,45-7, 82. The articles referred to are "The Three R's and Pushbuttons," New York Times Magazine, 25 September 1960; and "Instant Learning/' American Weekly, 28 August 1960.

There is a good deal of discussion in the educational world today about "teaching machines." The name is semantically wrong, and has caused a good deal of unnecessary confusion. No machine can do any actual teaching: these machines are learning machines, or, more accurately, learning aids. A partially deafened person may wear a mechanical hearing aid, not because any machine can ever hear anything, not because the ear is obsolete in modern life, but because there is a hearing mechanism in the body, and if it is defective it is logical to construct another mechanism to supplement it. Teachers have always known that there is a very large mechanical element in the learning process: there is nothing startling, therefore, in the possibility that an actual machine could make certain mechanical aspects of learning more efficient. The New York Times article is a reasonable and well-balanced account of the present status of such machines in educational theory. In learning facts, where there are no rival theories or opinions, but only a right answer, the right answer can readily be built into a machine. The student is presented with a question; if his answer is right the machine takes him on to the next stage; if it is wrong he repeats the problem until he gets it right. There are two advantages to such a machine. In the first place, the student is placed in a physical posture in which he is compelled to concentrate: the machine can do a great deal to eliminate mooning, woolgathering, and the other detouring hazards of the youthful mind. In the

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second place, the right answer is confirmed (or "reinforced") immediately, and the wrong answer instantly repudiated. When a student hands in an exercise with several mistakes in it and those mistakes are corrected and given back to him the next day, the essential damage in the mistake has already been done, and the child is apt to make the same mistake over again in moments of crisis. I suspect, too, that there may be a third advantage. It is true that, as C.P. Snow says, many of the older generation among teachers of the humanities are intellectual Luddites.1 They dislike and resent gadgets by temperament, and any machine that they tangle with, such as a tape recorder in a language lab, is apt to come apart in their hands. I am one of these people myself, and I know how strong a subconscious resistance can be. On the other hand, I think the majority of the younger generation are on the opposite side, and a strong argument in favour of the use of gadgets in teaching them may well be simply the fact that they are gadgets. Professor Skinner of Harvard, a leading authority on teaching machines, is quoted in the Times article as saying, "As a mere reinforcing mechanism the teacher is out of date." Professor Skinner knows quite well that the teacher is an infinite number of things besides a reinforcing mechanism, and it is silly to break out into a rash of Orwellian fantasies about the schools of the future having no teachers but only an assemblage of clicking machinery. The teacher never was an efficient reinforcing mechanism: at no time was oral teaching ever an efficient way of imparting the purely mechanical side of learning, and the attempts to intensify it by threats and punishments merely showed how crude it was. When the printing press was invented, the human hand became obsolete as a means of providing a mechanically accurate text, but only because it had never been particularly efficient as that. Nor did hands become obsolete after the printing press was invented. The real reason for so much popular fear of teaching machines is the fear of indoctrination, especially of the unconscious variety described in The Hidden Persuaders.2 Of course such machines could be turned to sinister uses by an unscrupulous government: everything in the modern world could be. That does not alter the fact that to make the purely mechanical aspect of learning as mechanically efficient as possible is reasonable enough. Still, there is a real basis for the fear of mechanism in learning. For another major problem in education is the problem of breaking down mechanical responses in places where they don't belong. Belief in cliches and catchwords and slogans is an automatic response

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which saves the time and trouble of thinking, and this kind of misplaced mechanism is sinister and dangerous. So is dealing with the news of the day in the categories of a bad movie, which is an automatic form of retreat from the world, like taking a tranquillizer pill. This is the kind of danger represented by the American Weekly article, which gives us all the cosy illusion that one of our important educational problems is just on the point of being cured by a new push-button gimmick. Nothing is said in this article about the immense amount of controlled research and experiment that has been done on teaching machines by responsible educators. No, somebody in the Navy got this bright idea, all by himself, of building a machine which "furnishes the student with an invisible tutor, right there at his elbow" (science-fictionmiraculous-invention cliche). The Navy took a dim view of him because he was so original (genius-against-the-world cliche), but "this dynamic new concept is being extended into virtually every area of education and industry" (happy-ending cliche). That'll fix Sputnik; now we can relax. There may be further problems, but this wonder boy will take care of them (self-identification cliche): "He would like to work out a practical solution to the problem of teaching youngsters to read." So would a fair number of other people. Teaching machines in themselves are nothing to be afraid of: it is articles like this which appeal to a very mischievous kind of mechanical response.

27 Autopsy on an Old Grad's Grievance Spring 1961

Varsity Graduate, Spring 1961, 30-3. This article responds to an article by Harold Taylor, "The Private World of the Man with a Book," Saturday Review, 7 January 1961,17-19, which commented unfavourably on the intellectual climate of the University of Toronto in the 19305.

Dr. Harold Taylor, the retired president of Sarah Lawrence College, attacks in this article "the temptation of the educator" "to organize a body of knowledge for the student, leaving the student with nothing to do." Students are compelled to read "too little of too many things" "for purposes of taking examinations"; "we are asking not to know our students by what they say in writing or in speech, but to know whether or not they possess correct information"; we "take the young through an educational tour of the museums of literature, to inspire a dutiful and pious attitude to authors." He pleads for "the restoration of the personal element in modern life and in modern education," for "a sufficient number of intimate little bookshops and reading rooms" (the Saturday Review is clearly aimed at the small-town-circulating-library trade), for asking students "to determine for themselves which books are great," for a sequence in education "different from conventional chronology," and for "some version of the tutorial system." The most effective forms of teaching are casual, resulting from "leaving books around," for after all the student must "bring something of his own to the book," and "the writer must be allowed to stand on his own feet." Admirable, if a trifle vague, and perhaps not very different from what anybody else would want. Education, like religion, has developed a special style designed to be soothing and yet sound provocative. The

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thing that caught me in what Dr. Taylor calls "personal involvement with the writer" was his taking-off point. "I grew up in a city," writes Dr. Taylor, "that was culturally sterile, in a college whose curriculum lacked intellectual vitality. There were no little magazines, no experimental theatres, no dance groups, no philosophical movements, no strong views held, no centres of new effort. Those of us who were happy to know about Auden, Spender, MacNeice, Isherwood, Malraux, Faulkner, Hemingway, Melville, James, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dewey, or Marx were quite rare, and we pursued our illicit reading without benefit of curriculum or librarians. .. . We did the educational things required of us, because that was what the educators wanted. We did them well, won prizes for them. But our real lives were elsewhere." Dr. Taylor was '35 Victoria, in Philosophy and English. I was '33 Victoria, in Philosophy and English, so we both had Pelham Edgar, Ned Pratt, and John Robins in English, and G.S. Brett, Reid MacCallum, and F.H. Anderson in philosophy. I entirely sympathize with Dr. Taylor's conception of education as something "in which all sham, pretence, and intellectual hypocrisy or name-dropping is stripped away." But my experience was bewilderingly different. I had not been three weeks at college before John Robins, in the course of opening up a fascinating new world of ballad and popular poetry to his freshman class, told us about Hemingway and his brief career in Toronto, and had read us part of "The Killers." Next year came Pelham Edgar, ostensibly lecturing on Shakespeare but much more interested in the contemporary novel. From him, and from Robins, I heard about Faulkner, Melville, and the great Russians, along with a lot of other things like Ulysses, still banned in Canada. (I read Ulysses before most Canadian students did, because another Victoria professor smuggled in a copy for me from the States after the ban was lifted there.)1 But of course Pelham's favourite topic was Henry James, on whom he had written a pioneering study years before anyone else did. Perhaps, however, it is William James who is meant in Dr. Taylor's list: I learned about him, and Dewey, in the same year, from Brett's clinical analyses of modern philosophy. It is true that in a moment of irritation Brett referred to Dewey as a philosopher who had never grown up, but he still seemed happy to know about him. The third year brought Reid MacCallum on aesthetics, where the illustrations were so "far out," as we say now, that I found myself happy to know about atonal music and nonobjective painting. In the fourth year there was Ned Pratt, who among other things was a walking encyclopedia of contemporary poetry and drama.

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In all this it is the casual suggestion, the tentative aside, the parenthesis, that I remember. I remember other things too. Brett treating me with extraordinary sympathy and kindliness when I presented him with an essay written mostly out of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (a parenthesis of Professor Anderson's) and out of Spengler (of whom Brett took a low view, but whose book Hart House Library had left around). Pelham Edgar, by no means the world's most patient man, spending an hour and a half going through a blathering essay on Browning I had written and straightening out all my sentences.2 Reid MacCallum inviting students to his house, playing records for them, and giving them some notion of what to listen for in contemporary music. It was almost as though they wanted "to know our students by what they say in writing or in speech," and not simply "to know whether or not they possess correct information." They did the same for others, of course—the only favoured students were those who asked for favours. In those days, although about every third shop on Yonge Street was an "intimate little bookshop," it was still the Depression. There were many little magazines and attempts at experimental theatre (I can't answer for the dance groups, of which as I remember there were several), but they fought hard and died quickly—all but the unique and miraculous Canadian Forum, which a dozen university staff members, then as now, worked hard to keep going and up to standard.3 A few rumours also seeped through from other colleges, of how Wilson Knight at Trinity had revolutionized the study of Shakespeare, of how Gilbert Norwood had written of Classical drama with a sophisticated knowledge of the modern stage, of Charles Cochrane's mighty struggle with Christianity and Classical Culture. As for philosophical movements, there was the time of breathless excitement when St. Michael's set up the Medieval Institute and the great Gilson was lecturing in Convocation Hall. And the shy little man with uncertain English pointed out to me as Jacques Maritain also came, with his vast knowledge of contemporary French culture—not wholly wasted even in Toronto; a novel by Morley Callaghan, written about the same time, is dedicated to him.4 Dr. Taylor lists Marx among the authors he was happy to know about, but there were many grimly determined to know and spread knowledge about him. Two ferocious Communist societies, one Stalinist, one Trotskyist, established themselves on campus, and attracted a great variety of students, from the most dedicated to the freeloaders who joined whichever group seemed to have the more acquiescent women. Earle Birney's Down the Long Table recaptures the feeling of those days, when

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there were rallies in Massey Hall for Spain addressed by Malraux. Even in the more bourgeois circles that I frequented it is not quite true that no strong views were held, considering how the impact of the Regina Manifesto and the setting up of a new Socialist party had shattered the quiet.5 A meeting of the Student Christian Movement was likely to start rows between fellow travellers and others who, like one of my contemporaries, walked the streets till dawn after reading Tolstoy's Resurrection and, as he thought, discovering in it what Christianity meant. Hunger marches of unemployed on Ottawa, protests against the infamous Section 98 of the Criminal Code,6 bitter and violent debates in Hart House, where Warden Bickersteth kept an eagle eye on professional organizers trying to crash their way in—these things all involved students, even involved them personally. I recently turned up a photograph clipped from the Star showing a classmate of mine being pulled at by police while she was kneeling beside another student trying to stanch the flow of blood from his head, which had been split open by a police club. All very misguided, perhaps: certainly I cannot regret that students are doing less of this kind of thing now; but still it was history in the making, and I am sorry that Dr. Taylor's real life at the time was elsewhere. True, we had fixed courses to pass, examinations to write, and a curriculum based on the assumption that most great writers are both dead and as yet undiscovered by undergraduates. From Toronto I went on to Oxford, where, although there was "some version of the tutorial system," the curriculum was even more rigid (the English school stopped at the year 1830) and examinations even more regimented. Yet Oxford had heard of Auden and Spender and MacNeice. In fact, Oxford had educated them. I cannot help wondering whether examinations, organized curricula, and prescribed courses may not have some connection with the power of producing the kind of books that are worth leaving around. Without these things, I suspect that Dr. Taylor's carefully unqualified precepts would lead us to a parochially middle-class cultural parasitism which merely lives off the fat of the genuine universities.

28 Introduction to Design for Learning 1962

From Design for Learning: Reports Submitted to the Joint Committee of the Toronto Board of Education and the University of Toronto, ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 3-17. Reprinted in OE, 4661. Reprinted partially, in slightly edited form, as "Appearance and Reality in Education," Saturday Night, 77 (17 March 1962): 20-4; also reprinted partially in Anne E. Bertoff, ed., The Making of Meaning (Montclair, N.J.: Boynton/Cook, 1981), 191-6. As explained below, the book grew out of the work of a committee formed to bring together school and university educators in Toronto to evaluate and suggest changes to the school curriculum. Three reports (on English, social sciences, and sciences) were edited and introduced by Frye. In January 1963 the Ontario Curriculum Institute was established to continue the work. In the following reprint, some internal page references have been omitted. I

Near the beginning of 1960, some trustees and officials of the Toronto Board of Education approached a number of professors and administrators in the University of Toronto, including the present writer, to discuss problems of common interest. A loosely organized ad hoc committee began to meet during the summer, talking somewhat at random in the hope of defining a central question. There were several things that caused us some concern: the number of students not finishing high school; the number of able students not reaching university; the number of secondary school graduates unable to adjust to university methods of work; the role of grade 13 in the transitional process; and so on. But for the most

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part we were merely following the mysterious law which says that no society can flourish, or in the modern world even survive, until it learns never to let well enough alone. Even so, we were a little surprised to discover what our central question was. It turned out to be an academic question: does teaching in the schools, or at least the secondary schools, reflect contemporary conceptions of the subjects being taught? The answer was no. Changes of perspective have taken place in all fields of knowledge which teachers outside the university find great difficulty in keeping up with, and even greater difficulty in applying to their present curricula. Before we began to meet, refresher courses had been started for teachers in history and science, but these could go only so far. There was no question of the school curriculum being false in its philosophy or dangerous in its social effects; but a synoptic survey of it, in contemporary terms, did seem to be called for. The nonuniversity members of the committee pointed out that in front of the theoretical question lay a practical one. Does not the university have a heavy responsibility in the larger educational process? The university, unlike the schools, has the resources for keeping up with advances in scholarship, and hence has some obligation to make its knowledge socially effective. The University of Toronto has always assumed (correctly in this writer's opinion) that "education" as an academic subject has no place in a liberal arts undergraduate programme, and belongs to postgraduate professional training. But there is some danger that the university may withdraw too far from other educational operations. A professor is not doing all he can do to maintain educational standards merely by cursing the secondary schools for not sending him better prepared students. Perhaps he knows nothing about secondary school curricula, much less anything about the difficulties or the positive achievements of the secondary schools. Perhaps he can't teach, and so has no sense of proportion about what a good preparation would be. Perhaps he is not making a first-rate job himself of training those of his students who are going to be secondary school teachers. As all the latter have to pass through the university, the university ought to be fully aware of its own educational context. The university members of the committee of course admitted all this, and we felt that we were beginning to get somewhere. This was, so far as I know, the first time in Toronto's history that the university and the board of education had really talked to each other about education. (We have since gathered that such meetings are extremely rare in North

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American cities generally.) Clearly there was some value in breaking down barriers. But of course the real barriers to break down were those between the three major divisions of education, the elementary, secondary, and university levels, each of which tends to become a self-enclosed system, congratulating itself on its virtues and blaming whatever deficiencies the educational process as a whole may have on the other systems. How could we get these together? We discussed the possibility of a conference. But obviously any conference would have to have a great deal of preparatory work done for it if it were to reach any conclusions likely to impress the public. Eventually we began to see that it was this preparatory work which it was our business to organize. So our ad hoc committee sought and obtained the blessing of the board and the university, was formally constituted a Joint Committee and, after some changes in personnel, settled down to become a steering committee for a group of study committees of teachers. Five of these were set up, in English, foreign languages, mathematics, science, and social science, each with representatives from the Toronto elementary and secondary schools, and the University of Toronto. After four or five meetings they brought in preliminary reports which while brief indicated that full-time work might produce unusually interesting results. A grant from the Atkinson Charitable Foundation made it possible to finance a full month's work for three of them, the committees in English, science, and social sciences. Once the steering committee had decided on its proper strategy, its tactics became very simple. What we had to do was to get the best teachers we could find and then leave them alone. The three committees worked hard and long during the summer of 1961, and their reports are the substance of this book. Obviously we need corresponding surveys in mathematics and in non-English languages, perhaps, too, in art, music, and other subjects. But even without them we now have the outlines of a survey telling us a good deal about the gap, which exists in teaching as in all areas of human effort, between stated objective and actual achievement. It is easy enough to formulate the most admirable statements of aims in education ("All the ones we have seen are very nice," the Social Science report remarks dryly), and such statements enable us to see what is being done in our classrooms in some kind of perspective. There remains the question of whether the statement of aims is realistic or not, and this is connected with the state of scholarship contemporary with the subjects being taught. In reading through the English report, the only one of the three that I can

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comment on with any technical assurance, I was struck by the fact that when the authors ran into a difficulty, the difficulty was usually caused by a defect in contemporary critical theory. It looked as though there should be some regular means by which the teaching programme could be re-examined continuously in the light of advances in scholarship. So on the horizon of our immediate problem there loomed a much larger task, the outlines of which only gradually took shape. This we are now able to describe as a kind of institute of curricular research, a permanent centre where scholars and teachers are engaged in working out the implications for teaching, at all levels, of improvements in scholarship in the subjects being taught. The axiom underlying its activity would be that the ability to explain the elementary principles of a subject to children is the only real guarantee that the subject itself is theoretically coherent. The physical sciences are theoretically coherent by this test at present; literature and the social sciences much less so. II

These reports are academic in the sense in which academics themselves use that term. They do not represent any educational pressure group or interest. They are not aimed at the Provincial Department of Education with a view to influencing its policy; they are addressed to the informed public, and discuss the kind of thing that might be done. The department has two observers on the steering committee, and is interested in and sympathetic towards the work presented here, but obviously the relationship cannot be more official than that at this stage. The reports have been approved in principle by the steering committee, but not without sharp expressions of specific disagreement from some members of that committee. They do not in fact wholly agree with one another, though there is an underlying unity to them which it is the purpose of the present introduction to elucidate. If the reader also finds himself disagreeing with them, he will learn something from his disagreement that he would not learn by compulsory agreement with a mass of platitudes. They have not been written in committee jargon, but in lucid, often brilliant, prose; they are designed to be read, and read with an active and critical response. They are, in short, a candid, independent, disinterested fresh look at what we are trying to do in our education. The authors are teachers, unfamiliar with the typical stalling devices of educational bureaucrats. One of the commonest of these is the plea

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that no theory of education will be of any use until we have a statistically, psychologically, and neurologically irrefutable theory of the child's learning processes. This subject in itself is certainly important enough: the steering committee has two advisers who are experts in this field, one attached to the university and the other to the board. But, as all the reports clearly indicate, one of the essential data for research into the child's learning processes is an intelligible programme for teaching him, and every improvement in the latter changes the situation of the former. Further, the authors are good teachers, and consequently have none of the maudlin enthusiasm for the "inspired" teacher which assumes that an inspired teacher of, say, mathematics can get inspired by something which is not mathematics. What inspires a good teacher is a clarified view of his own subject. There will always be average teachers as well as average students, and what inspires a good teacher will at least help an average one. The Social Science report observes that the criteria of adequacy are the same for students going on and not going on to university: "What is good for one group is good for the other" (Si). The English report asks, "Is not what these young people have in common as human beings more important and more relevant than their differences?" (36). But these things can only be true when excellence sets the standard for mediocrity, for in education, as in religion, we may be inspired by a vision of something that we cannot reach. If mediocrity becomes a kind of censor principle setting the standard for excellence, all teachers and students at all levels suffer alike. Because the authors are writing as teachers and not as educators, their approach is pragmatic. Nevertheless one can see the reflection in them of a considerable change of emphasis in recent educational theory. This change of emphasis is something very different from what is discussed in newspapers and in popular rumour. The learned have their demonologies no less than the unlearned, and the bogey of the "progressive" educator, with his incessant straw-threshing of "teaching methods," his fanatical hatred of the intellect, and his serene conviction that everyone who is contemptuous of his maunderings must be devoted to the dunce cap and the birch rod, still haunts university classrooms. He does in fact still exist, though educators today pay him little attention and no respect. Never, perhaps, a major threat to Ontario schools, his incompetence elsewhere helped to create the power vacuum which has done much to make education more subject to political interference than the other professions. The Canadian aspect of this problem has been discussed by

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Frank MacKinnon in The Politics of Education (University of Toronto Press, 1960). The kind of vague panic which urges the study of science and foreign languages in order to get to the moon or to uncommitted nations ahead of the Communists is equally remote from the educational issues that these reports face. Human nature being what it is, serious educators would probably not have got as much public support for their efforts without headlines about Sputniks, but they could see the facts of the situation without benefit of such headlines. I recently talked to a supervisor of curriculum in an American public school who told me that he had been sent a science textbook for elementary grades, from a usually reliable publisher, which he had rejected out of hand, on the ground that it contained no science. I was gratified to hear this, but ventured to suggest that he might not have thought it a real objection to the book a few years ago. He said, "No, but we're teaching stuff in third grade now that we didn't use to touch until junior high." Hence books containing only advice on what to do if one's playmate turns antisocial, and the like, can no longer be used for "science" textbooks. This was not Ontario, but Ontario is bound to be affected by the eroding or shoring up of educational standards elsewhere. The assumption in all these reports is that the school and the teacher, qua school and teacher, have no other function than an educational one. Hence the aim of whatever is introduced into the school curriculum, at any level, should be educational in the strict and specific sense of that word. It was the confusion of educational and social functions, implicit in the motto, "The whole child goes to school," that made "progressive" theories so fatuous. The axiom that the entire school programme should be specifically educational leads naturally to questions of proportion and distribution, or of what may be called the economy of education. How much science, social science, and English is appropriate at each year of training? What is the point at which repetition ceases to be a means of sound learning and becomes discouraging and sterile? Another problem, outside the scope of these reports, is that of priorities. Which are the basic disciplines at each level, and how can we decide between the claims of two subjects competing for the same place in the timetable? We need additional reports for these questions, as it is particularly the tendency to push foreign languages further back into elementary schools that is likely to cause traffic jams in the near future. Many of the problems of the rhythm of education, which should be that of leisurely progress, a golden mean between dawdling and cramming, cannot be

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solved by theory but only by the tactics of the classroom. Yet there are questions of theory which strike their roots deeply into the structure of the subjects taught and into the nature of democratic society. From the beginning, the study committees were interested in the remarkable success of the Woods Hole Conference of 1959 in the United States, and in the book by Jerome Bruner, The Process of Educa tion (Harvard University Press, 1960), which consolidated the results of its findings.1 Dr. Bruner was invited from Harvard to visit and address the committees in February of 1961, and it was he who suggested the idea of an institute of curricular research (already alluded to). The Woods Hole conceptions of a "spiral curriculum" [52-4] and the prime importance of structure in elementary teaching have entered deeply into all the reports. These conceptions are, as we should expect, new only in context; inherently they are very old conceptions, but they have to be revived in a new form with every generation. It is doubtless true, as Bruner says, that the original thinker pushing back the frontier of knowledge and the child confronting a major conception for the first time are psychologically in very similar positions [14]. But they are not in the same context of the subject itself. The original thinker is probably (almost certainly if he is a scientist) proceeding inductively, making new experiments in a new conceptual area and drawing new conclusions from them. Once his conclusions become established, the procedure for everyone who follows him and repeats his experiments becomes deductive. The theory comes first and the experiments test it, and at last, when the theory is fully established, simply illustrate it. It follows that elementary teaching is naturally of a strongly deductive cast. Once this is realized, a great deal of time can be saved, and a great many random observations and experiences may become examples of central principles. The conception of the subject to be taught should therefore be, not a conception of content, or of so much information to be "covered," but a conception of structure. The Science report is particularly careful and successful in explaining how genuinely scientific principles can be introduced to the youngest children when made sufficiently simple and concrete, and in showing that they are no more difficult to comprehend than nonscientific or pseudoscientific activities like washing woollens or feeding pets. We are thus led to the startling but quite logical conclusion that children six years old can, and should, be studying physics, chemistry, and biology, presentations of which can be made intelligible to the six-year-old mind.

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Such principles as energy can be illustrated by almost everything a child does, and the fact that he gets warmer when he runs may introduce him to laws of thermodynamics and the principle of entropy. As the child's mind develops from the sensational to the conceptual, the things he understands unconsciously, such as how to calculate the speed and trajectory of a ball thrown at him, become translated into the language of consciousness. Thus we arrive at the principle of a "spiral curriculum" of the same structural elements of a subject being repeated at progressively more complex levels. This principle takes care of the point raised in the Social Science report (85) about the need for fresh starts and unlearning as essential in the continuity of the educational process. The English report also urges that the study of English must be literary from the beginning, and that reading texts "too low in vocabulary count, too dully repetitive, too vacuous" (27) belong to the outmoded and pernicious scheme of postponing all real education as long as possible. Increase in complexity of understanding is largely an increase in the capacity of verbalization. This fact gives the English report a more difficult situation to consider than the other two. In the first place, "English" means a literature which is one of the major arts, addressed to the imagination, and in a group with painting and music. In the second place, "English" is the mother tongue, the means of understanding and expression in all subjects. The first "English" is chiefly a language of metaphor and analogy; the second is a language of description. These two aspects of English cannot be separated. Mathematics is often said to be the language of science, but it is a secondary language: all elementary understanding of science is verbal, and most of the understanding of it at any level continues to be so. The verbal understanding of science, at least on the elementary level, is quite as much imaginative, quite as dependent on metaphor and analogy, as it is descriptive. Here is a passage from The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, by Isaac Asimov ([New York:] Basic Books; [Toronto:] University of Toronto Press, 1960), which illustrates how metaphorical a writer must become when he has to explain science to scientific illiterates: "Cosmic rays bombarding atoms in the earth's upper atmosphere knock out neutrons when they shatter the atoms; some of these neutrons bounce out of the atmosphere into space; they then decay into protons, and the charged protons are trapped by magnetic lines of force of the earth."2 This functional use of metaphor is one of the many reasons why no programme of study in English, however utilitarian in its aims, can ever lose contact with English as literature. In "English" conceived as the language of understanding and descrip-

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tion, there is an indu ve study of the phenomena of language called linguistics, which is descriptive in its approach, and there is a traditional "grammar," which starts out from a normative position, laying down accepted standards of conventional communication as its premises. One is inductive, the other deductive, in its general direction. The English report shows how completely elementary education in English has to be based on the deductive approach of grammar, at whatever stage its nomenclature needs to be learned. Hence the so-called quarrel of linguists and grammarians, as far as school-teaching is concerned, is a pseudo-problem. The structural or deductive pattern in literature is less easy to see, largely because so few contemporary literary critics have reached the point of being able to see it. The authors of the English report get little help from Bruner's book here, beyond a somewhat vague suggestion that tragedy is a central structural principle [cf. 53]. As a matter of fact tragedy is one of four modes of literary fiction, the other three being comedy, romance, and irony. Of these, comedy and romance are the primary ones, and can be introduced to the youngest children. Those whose literary tastes do not advance beyond the childish stage never learn to appreciate any form of fiction outside these two modes. Tragedy and irony are more difficult, and belong chiefly to the secondary level. The main line of the argument of the English report on this point is based on the fact that literature is highly conventionalized. The young child can be introduced to the myths, fairy tales, legends, Bible stories, which are central to our imaginative heritage, because all he needs to do to comprehend them is to listen to the story. This is not a passive response, but a kind of imaginative basic training, which those who are continually clutching for meanings and messages in the arts have not learned. As he grows older and his literary experience increases, he begins to realize that there are a limited number of possible ways of telling a story, and that he is already in possession of all of them. Hence he has, not only a sense of the structure of story-telling implanted in his mind, but a potential critical standard as well, which he badly needs in a world of subliterary entertainment.

Ill In all learning there is a radical pioneering force and a conservative supporting force, a learning that explores and a learning that consolidates. It seems to me that there are three main phases in the relationship

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of these two forces, three main turns of the spiral: a primary phase, a secondary phase, and a tertiary phase, which correspond roughly, if not exactly, to the elementary, secondary, and university levels of education. In the primary phase the consolidating or conservative force is memory. Children seem to have good memories, and many children enjoy the power of using them: like the poets of primitive societies, they have an affinity for catalogues of names, accentual verses, and lists of all kinds that can be delivered in the chanting rhythm of a child's speech. Behind whatever I know of the social and cultural effects of the Norman Conquest is a primitive mnemonic chant of "William the First, William the Second, Henry the First, and Stee-phen!" I remember encountering a small girl in California who had just "taken Canada" in school, and who saw in a Canadian visitor an approaching captive audience. She backed me into a corner and recited the names of the provinces of Canada, complete with capitals, quite correctly. A question or two revealed that she had no notion where any of these provinces were. It was unlikely that she had been so badly taught; much more likely that she had simply remembered what interested her, the roll-call of strange names, and tuned out what did not, such as their location in space. Perhaps much the same thing was true of the lad in the Social Science report, with whom I have a good deal of sympathy, who remembered the three voyages of Captain Cook but not the fact that he was an emissary of eighteenthcentury British imperialism. Perhaps in our justified distrust of "mere" memorization we underestimate the power in it that can be harnessed to education. What we are apt to underestimate, in a civilization which is almost compelled to identify education with book-learning, is the role still played in memory by oral and visual experience. Many a boy who cannot remember what countries are in South America can tell the year and make of an automobile a hundred yards away, a feat mainly achieved within what literary critics call the oral tradition. A comic strip recently made an extremely shrewd comment on such extracurricular learning. Two children in kindergarten are out for recess; a plane flies overhead; one calls it a jet, the other disagrees, and a quite technical discussion follows on the difference between jet and piston planes. The recess bell rings, and one of them says, "Come on, Mike: we gotta go back and string them beads." What is true of sensational learning is even more obviously true of practical learning, especially in practical skills and sports, where memory develops into motor habit. Elementary science has to be deductively

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taught, but it does not follow that children should be discouraged from experiment at first hand; and learning to write and to speak intelligible English are practical skills also. There is a core of truth in the principle of learning by doing, as long as "doing" is not assumed to exclude reading and thinking, and as long as motor activity is not thrust into studies where it has no business to be. The difference between a good and a mediocre teacher lies mainly in the emphasis the former puts on the exploring part of the mind, the aspects of learning that reveal meanings and lead to further understanding. In English, this means ensuring that a child knows the meaning of what he reads as well as the mechanics of reading; in social and historical studies it means understanding why things happened instead of merely that they happened; in science it means understanding central principles illustrated by what without them would be a bewildering variety of unrelated phenomena. Unless there is reason and system to give direction to the memory, education burdens the memory; and however resilient a child's memory may be, nobody is going to keep a burden in his mind an instant longer than he is compelled to do. What is merely learned is merely forgotten, as every adult knows. Those who never get psychologically beyond the primary phase of learning are apt to retain a conviction all their lives that total recall is the same thing as intelligence. Until some scandals, which however regrettable were extremely useful to educators, changed the fashion, there was a widespread belief that the "smartest" people were those who proved on television programmes to have the largest stock of information on noncontroversial subjects.3 But it was the sense of how much they themselves had forgotten which gave their audiences a superstitious reverence for those who had been unable to forget. It is important to realize that the pioneering element in the primary learning process has to do with the reasonable and the systematic, with what makes learning continuous and progressive. It is not a matter of arousing interest or stimulating a student, even to the pitch of enthusiasm. Civilized people respond readily to intellectual stimulation all their lives. Those who speak at business men's luncheons and women's clubs, from pulpits on Sunday morning or through the microphones of the CBC, find intelligent and receptive hearers. But these activities, however valuable in other ways, are not strictly educational. The sense of continuity, of one step leading to another, of details fitting gradually into a larger design, is essential to education, and no sequence of individually iso-

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lated experiences can possess this. The fact that all three reports stress the genuinely educational aspect of teaching, rather than the psychologically attractive aspect of it, is one of their most distinctive features. They do not, like so much writing in this field, fail to distinguish between interest and concentration. Because memory is the more passive element in the learning process, mediocre students tend to rely on their memories, and even good students do so for the subjects hi which they are less interested. Mediocre teachers, similarly, and examinations where the marking-schemes have been ossified by a desire to make them mechanically accurate, are also apt to stress memory at the expense of intelligence. Sometimes attempts are made, especially in science, to simplify the grasp of structure into a methodology, but we note that the authors of the Science report, like most scientists, have very little to say about "the scientific method." A scientist enters into the structure of his science, and then uses the same mixture of hunch and common sense that any other mental worker would use. Literature, like mathematics, is practically all structure, and the attempt to master it by memory forces the student to grapple with a pseudo-content, something not really there at all. A teacher who boasted of his ability to get his students through grade 13 English, would, when teaching Browning's Epistle of Karshish, ask his students how many letters Karshish had written (the poem contains the line "And writeth now the twenty-second time"). He admitted that remembering this number was not very central to understanding the poem, but, he argued, unless students had something definite to learn they just gave you a lot of boloney on their examinations. This is the kind of thing I mean by pseudo-content, and its victims are strewn all over the first-year university results in English. In the secondary phase of learning the pioneering and consolidating forces become more conceptual. The former is now the power of understanding that asks the radical questions: What good is this? How true is it? Could we get along without it? The latter asks the conservative questions: What does this mean? Why is it there? Why has it been accepted? It is particularly in the social sciences that these questions seem relevant, and the Social Science report devotes much attention to them, especially the radical ones. Even with things admitted to be bad, such as slavery or persecution, it is worth asking conservative questions about why the human race has practised them so widely and with such enthusiasm; and even with things admitted to be good, such as religion

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and democracy, it is worth asking radical questions about what would happen if we did not possess these things, or possessed them in different form. In literature the student is now advanced enough, not simply to listen to stories, but to inquire within them for real motivation and imaginative causality. Hence his questions here also fall into similar patterns: Why does the author say this? Would this kind of thing really happen? and the like. Thus the secondary phase of learning revolves around the problem of symbolism. There are realities, and there are appearances related to them. Some appearances represent the reality, as a thermometer represents the temperature or, in a different way, as a drama represents a certain kind of human conflict. Some appearances partly conceal or disguise a reality, like the appearance of the sun "rising" in the east. And some appearances masquerade as reality, like the appearance of lofty intentions in a government about to grab someone else's territory. Learning to sort out these various relationships, or in other words developing what is in the broadest sense a critical intelligence, is the main preoccupation of students on the verge of becoming adult citizens. In education properly so called, radical and conservative questions are asked within the subjects themselves. If a student asks, "What use is the conception of gravitation or relativity to physics?" or "What was the point of fighting the Crusades?" or "Why did Shakespeare put a ghost into Hamlet7." it is possible to give him a scientific, a historical, and a literary answer respectively. Asking questions about the relation of the subjects themselves to ordinary life is another matter. With young children the educational process competes on fairly even terms with the social one: the young child is interested in everything, and he might as well be interested in his education. But as he gets into his teens the growing power of his social adjustment, where he feels the immediate response of possession, and does not have to be in the humbler position of questioner and seeker, begins to fight against the learning process. This is the stage at which we may see some highly intelligent fourteenyear-old firmly closing his mind to further education, while parents and teachers stand helplessly by, knowing how much he will regret it later on, unable to make the slightest impression on him now. This is the stage too at which many questions are likely to take the form of, "What good is this subject to me when it has no place in the kind of life I now think I want to live?" or "Why should I study science (or history, or literature) when I don't particularly want to study anything?" It is impossible to

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give a student real answers to such questions, and the weary and helpless answers he does get (e.g., without science we couldn't kill our enemies with bombs or our friends with automobiles) have nothing to do with the actual "good" of these subjects. We can now see, perhaps, how serious the confusion between social and educational standards, on which the old "progressive" theories foundered, really was. It is because so many intellectually stunted lives result from it that all three reports speak out sharply about every aspect of the confusion that comes to their attention. The Social Science report attacks the "rosy cosy" view of society, of giving a child his own situation (if it is his own situation) in the ideal form of a Blakean song of innocence before he has any song of experience to compare it with. The point is that presenting the child's society to him in the form of a superego symbol is deliberately weighting social standards at the expense of educational ones. The English report says much the same thing about primary readers, and the Science report insists on the difference between science and technology, on the impropriety of calling by the name of science the various devices for providing the North American middle class with the comforts of home. I remember a word recognition test given to children in a school which drew from a middle-class group, a lower-middle-class group, and an "underprivileged" group. One of the words was "gown." Children of the first group said a gown was what mummy wore when she went to a party; children of the second group said it was what mummy wore when she went to bed; children of the third group had never heard of the word. Such intrusions of class distinctions into tests of learning and intelligence are not always easy to spot, and may in themselves seem very trifling. But the more fundamental problem of weeding social standards out of educational ones is something that requires constant vigilance and astute criticism. The principle involved is the most important in the whole process of education. Secondary learning, we suggested, revolves around the relation of appearance and reality. What education as a whole deals with is the reality of human society, the organized forms of intelligence, knowledge, and imagination that make man civilized. The middle-class twentiethcentury Canadian world the student is living in is the appearance of that society. Education, freedom, and nearly all happiness depend on his not mistaking it for the real form of society. The young student needs to be protected from society, protected by literature against the flood of imaginative trash that pours into him from the mass media, protected by

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science against a fascination with gadgets and gimmicks, protected by social science against snobbery and complacency. The crisis of his education comes when he is ready to attach himself to the standards represented by his education, detach himself from his society, and live in the latter as a responsible and critical citizen. If he fails to do this, he will remain a prisoner of his society, unable to break its chains of cliche and prejudice, unable to see through its illusions of advertising and slanted news, unable to distinguish its temporary conventions from the laws of God and man, a spiritual totalitarian. Whether he has voluntarily imprisoned himself or whether he has been betrayed by educators under the pretext of adjusting or "orienting" him, he cannot live freely or think freely, but is pinioned like Prometheus on his rock, oriented, occidented, septentrionated, and australized. The reports do not (except on 57 ff.) cover university teaching. But the presence of the university, or at least of its liberal arts undergraduate programme, in the educational process is implied throughout. Each report attempts to outline the programme of study that will be of the greatest value to a student whenever he drops out of it; and they at least imply that the more drive and energy the planning of studies has, the longer the average duration of its appeal to a student is likely to be. The university is concerned specifically with the third phase of learning, where the conservative aspect is the consciousness of the presence of one's own society, with all its assumptions and values, measured against the radical criticism of that society by the standards of accuracy, profundity, and imaginative power to be found in the arts and sciences. The detachment required for this is symbolized in a four-year physical withdrawal from full participation in society. The very small number of university graduates who really achieve such detachment, along with those who achieve it outside the university, are enough to keep our society's head above water. One hardly dares speculate about what might happen if the number were suddenly to increase. The reports that follow are witty and pointed, sharply critical, and fearless in their expression of criticism. This does not mean that the educational system they discuss is ridiculous or that the authors consider it to be so. They are criticizing something to which they themselves are completely committed. One's vision of life, like the units of one's elementary understanding of science, is a metaphor, and the natural metaphor for any responsible man's job is that of a complex machine, likely to be smashed up in incompetent hands. Contempt for the ama-

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teur critic is built into all professions: it is a part of what the late Professor Innis calls the bias of communication. And those who have places of trust in education must often feel, when reading books intended to stir up public resentment, like a farmer seeing his crops trampled and his fences broken by a hunting pack in clamorous pursuit of an enemy that he could have disposed of quickly and quietly with his own shotgun. But these reports have not been written by amateurs, and they are not indictments but specific and sympathetic suggestions. The real power that drives the educational machine, or, in our other image, the final twist on the "spiral curriculum," is the power of self-criticism in teachers, which means the renewing of the vision of the subject they teach. It is such a renewing of vision that is here presented to the public.

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The Developing Imagination 18 April 1962

The Inglis Lecture at the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. From Learning in Language and Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963): 31-58. Reprinted in RW, 80-98. Clean typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box i, file 5; 1988, box 47, file i; and 1991, box 38, file 3. In a note, NF remarks that "This paper is closely related to my introduction to thereports of the study committees appointed by the Joint Committee of the Board of Education of Toronto and the University of Toronto (Design for Learning, University of Toronto Press, 1962)" [i.e., no. 28]. The Inglis lectureship, to honour the memory of Alexander Inglis (1879-1924), was specifically linked to questions in the field of secondary education. The A.R. MacKinnon whom Frye mentions had just given the Burton Lecture on language learning in primary education (also published in Learning in Language and Literature). I am not, like my friend Mr. MacKinnon, an expert in the field with which my lecture is concerned. My own preparatory education I regarded, rightly or wrongly, as one of the milder forms of penal servitude, and it was fortunate for me that in my easygoing days I could enter school at grade 4 and the University of Toronto from grade 11. So I probably owe my present interest in education to the fact that I had so little of it. However, I have acquired the seniority which is the natural reward of survival, and I now find myself sitting on committees concerned with every stage of the education continuum from kindergarten to graduate school. I still do not know very much about what is taught in Ontario high schools, especially in the upper grades which I never reached, but I do know something of what is said at Ontario high school commencements, as I have said a fair amount of it myself. I propose therefore

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to take the commencement perspective rather than the classroom perspective, and to confine myself to the only area of learning in which I can claim any scholarly competence, which is that of English language and literature. I teach literature at the upper university levels, and in recent years have given most of my attention to the theory of criticism. In the old humanist days, when literary training was confined to the Classical languages, contact with one's own literature was left largely to what was called "taste," a by-product rather than a definite subject of education. When modern literatures became a subject of academic study, toward the latter half of the nineteenth century, the philological scholarship developed in the Classics was naturally first applied to them. Since then, scholarship in modern literature has become a flourishing enough discipline, but we have not yet evolved a literary criticism which is solidly based on this scholarship, which clarifies its central principles, brings its assumptions into the open, and provides a view of the whole subject giving proportion and context to its more restricted achievements. We have not even evolved a theory of criticism which can distinguish the genuine from the useless in scholarship itself. This distinction is left to the common sense of the scholar, which is usually but by no means invariably the best place to leave it. We still encounter students who have been awarded Ph.D.'s for theses on made-up subjects that are of no use to anyone, least of all the student. We can say that the supervisor of such a thesis has been a fathead, but in the absence of critical theory we cannot speak of academic malpractice. There is a bewildering amount of scholarship and commentary and piecemeal criticism today—far too much for anyone to keep up with more than odd bits of it—but very little understanding of the central principles of the study of literature. Our critical theory, as reflected in our teaching at all levels, is still largely the old "taste," or "appreciation," reinforced by a variety of "backgrounds," biographical, historical, and linguistic, none of which seem to contribute directly or systematically to the problem described in Wordsworth's Prelude as the impairing and restoring of taste [bk. 12]. Although most literary scholarship, good or bad, is intelligible only to fairly advanced university students, it is natural that its unpruned vine, a wild tangle of foliage with few identifying flowers or fruits, should be creeping around the schools as well, in the form of explicatory and other teaching methods. But the issues involved are more important than that. In the first place, the only guarantee that a subject is theoretically coher-

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ent is its ability to have its elementary principles taught to children. In the second place, literature cannot be directly taught or learned: what is taught and learned is the criticism of literature, and whatever is hard to understand about the place of literature in education owes its difficulty to the confusion of critical theory. I sympathize entirely with the plea for a more synoptic view of the different subjects taught to children, but how can literature (that is, criticism) enter into such a synoptic view until it has acquired a synoptic view of itself? We are asked to define a pachyderm when we are still collecting blind men's impressions of an elephant. The subject generally referred to, in English-speaking countries, as "English" means two things. It is the name of a literature which is part of one of the major arts, and it is the mother tongue, the normal means of understanding anything that is not mathematical. Mr. MacKinnon has dealt mainly with the latter aspect; my own chief interest is in the former. I am aware of the dangers of trying to split the mind up into separate faculties, but the different directions that the mind faces, so to speak, surely do need to be distinguished. The faculty addressed by English as a literature is the imagination. At least, that is what the great Romantic critics called it, and I am not aware that the conception has been altered except for the worse. The faculty addressed by English as the mother tongue is one that is often associated, sometimes correctly, with the reason. I should prefer to call it something more like "sense." It is the power of apprehending what is presented to us by experience, the recognition of things as they are. It is the reality principle that we appeal to as the standard of the "normal" in behaviour, and it is the basis of the scientific attitude to nature or the external world. The arts, including literature, are not so much concerned with the world as it is: their concern is with the world that man is trying to build out of nature, and the imagination they appeal to is a constructive power, which is neither reason nor emotion, though including elements of both. It seems to me that there are a primary and a secondary phase of learning which correspond roughly, though by no means exactly, with the chronological stages of our elementary and secondary schools. There is also a tertiary phase, which has a much less direct parallel with postsecondary education, especially in the university. In each phase there is a conservative and a radical aspect of learning, a power of consolidating and a power of exploration and advance. In the primary phase the consolidating or conservative power is memory, and the ex-

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ploring or radical power is what we have just called "sense." The memory preserves the facts transmitted in text or notebook; but facts, when really understood, are illustrations of principles, and the principles are what the "sense" attempts to grasp. The dull teacher, and the dull student, depend as much on memory and use as little "sense" as possible; and even the good student will rely on his memory to help him through the subjects in which he is less interested. What the memory holds we call content; what sense holds is structure. The good teacher is distinguished from his mediocre colleagues mainly by the efforts he makes to transform content into structure, to help his students to see significant patterns in facts, and to encourage the child to ask "Why?" with more purpose and direction than he ordinarily employs with that word. Mathematics and the physical sciences are the most theoretically coherent of all the subjects of education, and we can see the supremacy of structure to content most clearly in them. They also best illustrate the fact that the natural shape of elementary teaching is deductive. Elementary science consists of principles so well established that no experiment could do more than simply illustrate them, and almost anything the child encounters in ordinary experience, such as the fact that he gets warmer when he runs, may be used as an illustration of a scientific principle. The teaching of elementary science can be considerably simplified once its deductive shape is realized, and it can also be brought down to the capacities of the youngest learners. (Of course saying that elementary science is presented deductively is not saying that experiment and direct observation are unimportant, at any stage. I knew of one school principal who held that children should not attempt experiments, on the ground that they worked out better when adults did them; hence his students were compelled to stand helplessly by while their rivals in the next precinct were rigging up various gadgets including a burglar alarm, which, after several teachers had walked into it, finally caught a burglar.) In history, and in at least political geography, the deductive pattern is more difficult to bring out. In Spenser's allegory of the House of Alma, in The Faerie Queens [bk. 2, cantos 9-12], history is entrusted to an old man in the back of the brain called "good memory" (Eumnestes), and it is hardly possible to avoid committing to memory a large number of dates and facts and names before much of a significant pattern can be glimpsed behind them. History, as Burke pointed out long ago, is, along with politics, naturally empirical and inductive in shape, and the difficulty in fitting it into elementary education is greater in consequence. The

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process may be easier when society is committed to an a priori and deductive view of history, as the Soviet Union is. Complaints that citizens of the democracies, in comparison with Communists, do not know what they really believe in, reflect what may be ultimately a problem of elementary education. The teaching of literature in school will clearly depend for its tactics on whether literature (or criticism, as above) is naturally deductive in shape, like the physical sciences and mathematics, or naturally inductive, like history. The work I have done on critical theory has convinced me that literature is, like mathematics, mainly structure rather than content, and that the teaching of it, or criticism, can follow a deductive pattern. If I am right, the role of literature in the educational process should become much clearer, and its teaching greatly simplified. In childhood the imagination is a third force, playing a role subordinate to memory and sense in the schoolroom, if not in the child's mind. In the child's mind it is extremely active, but it is not yet a constructive power: it is still on the level of what Coleridge and other critics distinguish as fancy,1 a stylizing and modifying of the actual conditions of the child's life, a kind of primitive realism. We can see this fanciful quality in children's pictures and poems, though our critical concepts are usually too vague to separate it from anything else in the "creative" area. The word "creative" is one of the most elastic and elusive metaphors in the language, as befits its theological origin. In any case it is memory and sense that take the lead in learning the techniques of reading and writing. Those who never get beyond the primary phase of learning illustrate the child's situation in a petrified adult form. They often assume that good memory is equivalent to high intelligence, and (at least recently) that high intelligence is dramatized in the kind of television programme in which the possessor of a great deal of noncontroversial information is rewarded with encyclopedias. They also regard literature and the arts as not strictly educational, but as either "frills" on education or as fanciful, concerned with the relaxing or amusing of the mind. In their conception of society, the creative man follows the practical one at a respectful distance. They also tend to make associative judgments, attaching the content of picture or poem to their experience instead of grasping the formal unity of the work. The suggestion that the arts are radically constructive, that they cannot always be directly related to the recognition of reality, but create their own kind of reality, is one that they normally resist or resent.

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I referred above to the humanist tradition in education, a form of education based primarily on literature. The strength of humanism lay in its exploitation of a central fact about literature: that the arts do not, like the sciences, evolve and improve, but revolve around classics or models. Like most such principles, this one could be and often was frozen into a sacrosanct dogma, and those who held it in this form give us a sharp sense of its limitations. The Elizabethan Roger Ascham wrote The Scholemaster to explain how Latin could be taught by using Cicero as a model. Toward the end of his book he considers, reluctantly, the question whether Cicero really is an example of what he calls "the vnspotted proprietie of the Latin tong... at the hiest pitch of all perfitenesse." He is not slow to give his answer: For he, that can neither like Aristotle in Logicke and Philosophic, nor Tullie in Rhetoricke and Eloquence, will, from these steppes, likelie enough presume, by like pride, to mount hier, to the misliking of greater matters: that is either in Religion, to haue a dissentious head, or in the common wealth, to haue a factious hart: as I knew one a student in Cambrige, who, for a singularitie, began first to dissent, in the scholes, from Aristotle, and sone after became a peruerse Arian, against Christ and all true Religion.2

Nevertheless, the humanist theory of models worked fairly well in literary education, because it is broadly true for literature, and in addition it had the great advantage of being deductive in shape, giving the student a few central texts and extracting from them a set of principles he could apply in all his reading, and more particularly in all his writing. But, of course, the humanist theory was inadequate for the inductive sciences, where classical authority has no functional place. Humanistic education was directed toward the past: the essential standards and values already existed in certain classics, and they could be applied to present use. Its curriculum, as the quotation from Ascham indicates, could be taught with the greatest confidence in both the subject matter and the ethical validity of its classics. There they were, dignified and eminently visible. Education slowly began to change its centre of gravity from literature to science about a century ago, and this meant a change to an education directed not toward the past but toward a present and an unknown future, where anything we now know may be rendered obsolete by coming discoveries. Hence the social and moral values established by education have tended to become interim values. Many

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educators have naturally attempted to transfer the public confidence in education from the past to the present and future, from establishment to process, to new programmes of what has been alternately called education for today and education for tomorrow. But an uncertainty about the content and the purpose of education, a sense of lost values, and an uneasiness about the loss are plain for anyone to see. I am not proposing any "return" to humanism as a cure for this; still, the question naturally suggests itself: is there anything permanent in humanism, and appropriate at least to the literary part of education today, that can be reestablished within its present context? We notice that literature is, by its very nature, intensely allusive: its classics or models, once recognized as such, echo and re-echo through all subsequent ages. Whitman urged us to make less of the wrath of Achilles and develop new themes for a new world, where the Muse would be invoked to sing of the righteous wrath of an American democrat.3 But allusions to Homer in writers even more recent than Whitman carry the same weight of authority that they carried in Milton's day, and Whitman's view clearly does not fit the facts of literary experience. It looks as though that experience were not a random one, but radiated from a centre where the great classics, including Homer, are to be found. Literature revolves around certain classics or models because it is really revolving around certain structural principles which those classics embody. The problem of imitation or mimesis in literature has two aspects. The traditional imitation of nature (or action, or life, or experience) refers primarily to content, but as far as his form is concerned, what the poet imitates are the conventions and genres of literature as he finds them. This latter aspect of literature is so neglected in our teaching of it that we tend to make naive judgments on literature which assume that literary works form a kind of continuous allegorical commentary on the society contemporary with them. Thus if a dramatist writes a play without succeeding in giving it any dramatic shape, he can always say that its shapelessness reflects the chaos of our time. It does nothing of the kind, of course: what it reflects is probably the practice of a better dramatist who gives skilful illusion of shapelessness, and that practice in its turn reflects, not the chaos of our time, but a stage in the development of certain twentieth-century dramatic conventions. The humanist theory, in its earliest stages, based the study of literature on precept and example. It was the sententiae, the profound axioms of the human situation, that were especially prized in the great writers, and the

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stories they told were exempla, or illustrations of the same kind of thing. This approach puts literature at the service of certain social and moral ideals assumed to be permanently valid. No doubt it is an important function of literature, especially in childhood, to reinforce with its peculiar resonance the kind of attitudes we want our children to accept. I have been fascinated by Mr. MacKinnon's account of the effectiveness of television commercials as teaching techniques, which are also based on sententiae, in the form of advertising slogans, and pretend to have the same kind of moral urgency. Apparently Marxism, in its later or postLenin phase, holds much the same conception of the social role of literature. Granting that there are better forms of such an approach, they would still be primarily rhetorical, training the student in English as the mother tongue, and only incidentally in English as part of a major art. We need along with this a genuinely literary conception of English, based on structure rather than content, on insight rather than memory, one which will give literature its own proper independence instead of making it an adjunct of accepted modes of life and manners. One essential aspect of literary training, and one that it is possible to acquire, or begin acquiring, in childhood, is the art of listening to stories. This sounds like a passive ability, but it is not passive at all: it is what the army would call a basic training for the imagination. It is the opposite of the sententious approach, because the mind is directed toward total structure, not to piecemeal content. Concentrating on a story separates the work of the reason, which proceeds by argument and thesis, by aggression and dialectical conflict, from the proper work of the imagination, where there are no assertions and no refutations. The story-teller asserts nothing: he lays down postulates. The postulates may be, for example, that a little girl goes to sleep outdoors one afternoon, sees a rabbit run past her, sees him take a watch out of his pocket and mutter something about being late for an appointment, and follows him as he disappears down a rabbit-hole. Very well: these are the story-teller's postulates; we listen to the story to see what he does with them. We learn to suspend judgment until more data are in—a useful habit of mind in itself. We learn not to argue or raise objections before our perspective is in focus, and when all objections are still only prejudices. (The appropriate Socratic dialogue would run somewhat as follows: "But that's silly; rabbits don't talk or look at watches." "Well, they do in this story: now shut up.") If in later years we are confronted with nonobjective painting, twelve-tone music, or the theatre of the absurd, our early training should

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help us try to grasp first of all the totality of what is presented. Failing such training, we are apt to try to assimilate the work of art to the discursive and argumentative structures of words that we are more familiar with, and ask such questions as, What is he trying to get across? Why can't somebody explain it to me? and the like. The next question is what stories it is particularly appropriate for a child to listen to, and here we come back again to the fact that literature is allusive, and seems to radiate from a centre. Literature develops out of, or is preceded by, a body of myths, legends, folk tales, which are transmitted by our earlier classics. In our tradition the most important groups of these myths are the Biblical and the Classical, and it is essential to acquire some knowledge of both as early in life as possible. One reason for doing so is sheer convenience: these stories are so endlessly alluded to and commented on that one has no landmarks in literature without them. To grow up in ignorance of what is in the Bible or Homer is as crippling to the imagination as being deprived of the multiplication table. But convenience in understanding allusions is not really the important reason for knowing the sources of them. The really important reason, as far as literature is concerned, is that there are only a certain number of ways (structural principles) in which stories can be told, and familiarity with two major mythologies, the Greek and the Biblical, puts us in command of all of them. In other words, there really is a deductive principle in literature which can be exploited for educational purposes. All stories in literature are developments of fundamental fictional shapes which can be studied most clearly in myths and folk tales. The reason why writers are so persistently fascinated by myth and folk tale is not antiquarianism, but the fact that, like still life in painting, they illustrate the formal characteristics of their art most clearly. Some students of mine now in secondary schools tell me that they have had a good deal of success in teaching the writing of fiction by using the principle that I call "displacement," giving their students a myth or a Grimm fairy tale and asking them to translate each detail of it into a plausible or realistic incident, while preserving the structure intact. From familiarity with the traditional stories of our culture we may gradually acquire a sense of the categories of stories, which I should classify as four in number: the romantic, the comic, the tragic, and the ironic. Of these, comedy and romance are primary; tragedy and irony more difficult, because more ambivalent in tone. Once again, those who

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never get past the primary phase of learning seldom read anything with genuine pleasure that is not a comedy or a romance. The next step is to get a sense of structure as exhibited in the conventions and genres of literature. We notice that when we read deliberately for relaxation, we turn to highly conventionalized stories where the general structure is known in advance, such as the detective story, the Western, or the even more predictable dramas of television. The distinction between the structure and the texture of fiction, which criticism has only begun to recognize, is of major importance in determining the sequence of reading. The really difficult writers who have to be reserved for the university, such as Proust or Conrad or the later Henry James, are as a rule more difficult in texture, but keep to much the same principles of structure as the writers we are more inclined to take to bed with us. Complex writers attract a great deal of rather myopic commentary, based entirely on texture, which with a better training in structure might be less necessary for students to read, or, if they become advanced students, to write. Works of universal appeal and of great and immediate communicative power are usually simple in texture as well as structure. Hence they, or something in them, are primary in the educational sequence. The traditional humanists identified such works with the classics of Greek and Latin literatures: this identification is still going strong in Matthew Arnold's essay "The Choice of Subjects in Poetry."4 We need a broader principle of the same type, such as the real principle that underlies Tolstoy's What Is Art? In its present form Tolstoy's theory is a tissue of exclusive value judgments based on nonliterary values—in other words it is critically neurotic. But it would make a good deal of sense if transformed into an educational theory, used to establish the central texts that could be used with profit by children and others of limited imaginative experience. We have all met or heard of people of little formal schooling, who know the Bible and a few English classics and give the impression of essentially educated people. I suggest that the impression is based, not on sentimental illusion, but on the facts of literary education. And it is still possible to say that one who does not know the central classics of his own language and cultural tradition gives the impression of an ignoramus, regardless of what else he knows. In the secondary phase of education, the radical and conservative aspects of learning become more conceptual. They are now closer to the

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radicalism and conservatism distinguished by John Stuart Mill in the political thought of his day,5 and in fact they are most easily seen at work in the social and political area. In the secondary phase the radical side of the mind wants to know what good or what use an idea or institution is, whether we could get along without it, what it has to say for itself even if generally accepted. The conservative side wants to know why the idea or institution exists, why it has been accepted if wrong, what significance is hi the fact that it has existed. Thus the secondary phase revolves around the problem of symbolism, of the relation of appearance to reality, and its aim is not simply the formation of an intelligence, as in the primary phase, but the formation of a critical intelligence, the intelligence of a responsible citizen in a complex modern democracy. In this phase the growing imaginative power forms a natural alliance with the conservative side of learning. The radical side is utilitarian, aggressive, argumentative, appealing to what it regards as reason or common sense, and it is frequently anti-imaginative. It is impressed by the actuality of the present, as the conservative side is by the inadequacy of the present to what one's deeper desires demand. The imagination is no longer fanciful, and it is not yet a fully constructive power, but moves most freely among the monuments of its own magnificence. It is bound intellectually to tradition, and emotionally to nostalgia. The problem in our society recently tagged with the phrase "two cultures"6 refers to a natural division in the mental attitudes of most of our educated citizens. It is considerably oversimplifying the problem to identify the two attitudes with the sciences and the humanities respectively. In stressing the importance of myth and of Biblical and Classical stories in primary literary education, I am agreeing to some extent with the outline of an "articulated English program" recently proposed by a committee of the Modern Language Association.7 Mr. MacKinnon refers to this in passing [18], but without much enthusiasm, and it is clear that it does not, for him, solve the problem of relating literary to other aspects of education. My own feeling is, once again, that whatever separates literature from the rest of education reflects the confusion of critical theory. As long as a story is just a story, the real separation involved is the separation of fiction from fact—in itself, of course, a healthy and necessary separation. But some stories are more obviously just stories than others. The radical side of our critical intelligence may assert that the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis is on precisely the same plane of reality as the Garden of the Hesperides in Homer. But the conserva-

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tive side, aided by the imagination, realizes that the myth of creation and fall in Genesis has been and still is an informing principle of our religious, social, and even philosophical thought, whether we are conscious of its role in those areas or not. The extent to which our thinking is moulded by informing principles articulated in poetic myths is still largely an unexplored subject in literary criticism. It is most highly developed, I think, in the criticism of American literature, but the books that set it forth are difficult books, addressed to advanced scholars, and have not made much headway into the educational system. Still, most serious students of American literature are aware that Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, the tales of Poe, and others can be studied not only as works of literature but as focal points of a cultural imagination, and that as such they make American history, politics, religion, and social life more intelligible. Literary works which express these informing social myths most clearly are the works which have prior claim on the educator's attention, whenever they can be read or adapted for reading. They are not invariably the books of greatest literary value, though they always have some value: they would include, for instance, Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is of course true that a great deal of trash which passes as literature, or at least as entertaining reading, also articulates social myths with great clarity. I read many of the novels of Horatio Alger at an early age, and as I have a good verbal memory, a journey round my skull would unearth a great many pages of some of the most pedestrian prose on record. I wish very much that a surgical operation could remove it and substitute something better, but still Alger probably did me no permanent damage, as I was never inspired to adopt the virtues of his heroes, and this leads me to hope that the children of today may emerge similarly unscathed from their similar experiences. I feel that a well-planned literary education would give us a standard by which to measure such writing. By a standard I do not mean only a standard of quality or value, which any literary education worth anything at all would give: I mean also a standard of comprehension, an understanding of it not merely as bad writing but as shoddy mythology. The benefits of having such a standard of comprehension extend far beyond literature. I should think, for example, that the doctrines of Mr. Buckley or Senator Goldwater8 would have little appeal to a society in which the high school graduates knew something about the working of pastoral myth in the political imagination.

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I am well aware that what I suggest bears a close resemblance to one of the worst and most futile ways of teaching literature. This is the practice of reducing every work of imagination to a sociological document, studying Henry James or Faulkner merely as illustrating some dismal cliches about cultural decline in New England or the Old South. The emphasis I should prefer is the exact reverse of this. Historians and social scientists give most of their conscious attention to inductive procedures, the collecting of facts and evidence. They give much less attention to the conceptions that give shape and organization to the books they write, conceptions which are therefore largely unconscious, but are revealed in such things as the choice of metaphors and analogies. These conceptions are really myths, using the word "myth" in its proper sense of an informing verbal structure, and literature enables us to understand what these myths are. As I have maintained elsewhere,9 literature has an informing relation to the verbal disciplines somewhat analogous to the relation of mathematics to the physical sciences. The same principles would apply to the study of English as a foreign or a second language. Looking at English or American culture from the outside gives one a different perspective on it, certainly. French poets found not only an American but a universal cultural significance in Poe that we have been slow to discover for ourselves, and Lenin's view of Jack London has given him an importance in Russia that he has never had in his own country.10 But while the perspectives are different, they are not irreconcilably different. We are committed to our own society, but education ought to give us more detachment, to impress us with the importance of satire and denunciation and protest in a healthy culture. A study of the same culture that begins in detachment or even hostility would naturally tend, in itself, to greater sympathy or even a sense of participation. We all know, vaguely, that Robinson Crusoe is one of our educational "classics," but a citizen of Asia or Africa might spot more quickly than we the cultural myth that helps to make it a classic. Crusoe lands on his island and instantly opens a journal and a ledger, though all he has to put in the latter are the pros and cons of his situation. He domesticates some animals and ensures himself some privacy—he has no need for privacy, but an Englishman's home is his castle. He catches his man Friday and proceeds to convert him, without the slightest sense of incongruity, to his own brand of modified Presbyterianism. He is the British Empire in action, imposing its own pattern wherever it is, and never dreaming of "going native." The African or Asian is familiar with

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the social results of Western expansion: if he reads Robinson Crusoe he is seeing the same process from the inside, as a conceivable way of life. He may not like its effects any better, but he can see its causes as human and not demonic, and I doubt if education can do much more than that for the brotherhood of man. These two cultural impulses, a growing detachment from what we possess and a growing sympathy with what is alien, are equally essential in a world like ours. It is reassuring to find a naive enthusiasm for yoga or Zen Buddhism in the United States; it would be disturbing to find it in India or Japan. The members of the Athenian assemblies who authorized the expedition to Syracuse and the massacre of Mytilene did not know that their culture would come to symbolize sweetness and light, the triumph of reason and beauty over the arid fanaticism of the moral will. But such is the healing power of what is called aesthetic distance. I think that if Hellenism can come to symbolize a love of beauty, and Hebraism a moral energy,11 the cultural heritage of the English-speaking nations can also come to symbolize a sense of individual freedom which is one of the permanent achievements of human history, and will remain so however dark and troubled our future may become. But it is not for us to dwell on this: our sustained admiration must be rather for other cultures, with hope that we may give some cause, at least to posterity, for admiration of our own. There are many other aspects of literary education than those of myth and fiction which I have no space to develop. We are greatly confused at present by the notion that prose is the language of ordinary speech, and that poetry is an unnatural and perversely ingenious method of distorting prose statements. We can get a better progression if we realize that the language of ordinary speech is no more prose than it is poetry. The language of ordinary speech is an unshaped associative babble, a series of asyntactic short phrases, and it is psychologically a monologue, designed for expression and not primarily for communication. As it develops toward communication, it can be conventionalized in either of two ways. The direct and simple way is to put a pattern of recurrence on it and turn it into verse. The more difficult and sophisticated way is to put a logical pattern on it and turn it into prose. Developed techniques of verse usually precede developed techniques of prose in the history of literature, because verse is the more primitive of the two. If we listen to small children, we soon realize that their chanting speech has at least as much verse in it as prose. If we mark the essays of college freshmen, we

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soon realize that we are usually not reading prose, but a series of phrases for which the only appropriate form of punctuation is the dash. The conviction that written language is normally prose, that its unit is the sentence, and that a period goes at the end of it is one that twelve years of concentrated teaching often fails to evoke. The simplest form of literary expression, and the one most readily accessible to children, is, I should think, accentual verse, of the kind that we find in nursery rhymes, and which illustrates the affinity of poetry with dance and song and bodily energy. A lucid prose style accompanies the sense of the complete reality of other people, and its development is a long-range one. It is partly because of the rhythm of speech in childhood, and partly because of the central role of memory in elementary learning, that sequential and rhythmical catalogues, from the multiplication table to the monarchs of England, are easier for children than for most adults. In this respect children resemble the poets of primitive societies, who are culturally in a parallel situation, unlocking their word hoards to chant their memorized songs of ancestral legends, place names, neighbouring tribes, and alliterating kings. In simpler societies this power of memory is the basis of a poetic power of an extraordinarily spontaneous and plastic kind. We find it in ballads and folk tales, where motifs and refrains are constantly interchanging and developing new variants. We find it in the formulaic oral epic, with its basis of stock themes and metrical units, described in Professor Lord's fascinating book, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960). We can find it in other arts, as in some schools of Oriental painting, which develop out of what are essentially memorized subjects. Many of the strongest cultural movements of our time seem to be headed in a somewhat similar direction: in action painting, in the genuine forms of jazz music, in certain poetic developments often and not too accurately associated with the term "beat." Professor Lord has shown for the formulaic epic that spontaneity shrivels instantly at the touch of education, or at any rate of book learning, and some of the contemporary phenomena just listed seem to have a strongly anti-intellectual slant to them. Yet the analogies between the primitive and the childlike may need further exploration in an age where there are so many media of education that circumvent the normal book learning processes and cut straight through to a direct and primitive response of eye and ear. I know little of such matters, but there seems to me to be a gap between education and one important aspect of contemporary culture, and of imaginative power in

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general, that educational theory and practice have not to my knowledge yet bridged. I spoke at the beginning of a tertiary phase of education. This phase, which is considerably more of an ideal than a fact, is symbolized, and perhaps occasionally achieved, by the liberal arts programme in the university, and by the four-year withdrawal from ordinary society which is devoted to it. Here the consolidating and exploring aspects of the mind take on still another relationship. The conservative aspect is now the awareness of the society that the student is living in, the knowledge of its institutions, conventions, and attitudes which enables him to take his rightful place in it. This is the end of all that aspect of education covered by such terms as "preparation for life" or "adjustment" to it. Over against this, in the ideally educated mind, is the awareness that the middle-class mid-twentieth-century North American society we are living in is not the real form of human society, but the transient appearance of that society. The real human society is the total body of human achievement in the arts and sciences. The arts are perhaps more concerned with what humanity has done, the sciences perhaps more concerned with what it is about to do, but the two together form the permanent model of civilization which our present society approximates. This model is our cultural environment, as distinct from our social environment. The educated man is the man who tries to live in his social environment according to the standards of his cultural environment. This gives him some detachment about his own society, some understanding of the forces that make it change so rapidly, and some ability to distinguish its temporary expedients from its permanent values. It is unnecessary to labour the point that an age as revolutionary as ours, in which we have to adjust quickly and constantly to radical changes or disappear from history, needs such elements in its education. In this final phase the imagination moves over to the exploring or radical side of the mind, and comes into its own. It is now a fully developed constructive power: it is informed by what Whitehead calls the habitual vision of greatness,12 and its activity in the world around it is to realize whatever it can of that vision. It operates in society in much the same way, working from conception to realization, that the artist works on his art, which is what Blake meant by saying that the poetic genius of man is the real man.13 The immediate purpose of teaching literature to children and adolescents is not to persuade them to appreciate or admire works of literature more, but to understand them with a

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critical intelligence blended of sympathy and detachment. Detachment without sympathy is Philistinism; sympathy without detachment is accurately called uncritical. But the ultimate purpose of teaching literature is not understanding, but the transferring of the imaginative habit of mind, the instinct to create a new form instead of idolizing an old one, from the laboratory of literature to the life of mankind. Society depends heavily for its well-being on the handful of people who are imaginative in this sense. If the number became a majority, we should be living in a very different world, for it would be the world that we should then have the vision and the power to construct.

30 To the Class of '62 at Queen's 18 May 1962

Address to the graduating class at Queen's University, at a convocation at which Frye and Robertson Davies received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box r,file q. Printed, with a few errors and the omission of the first paragraph, in Douglas Library Notes [Queen's], u (Summer 1962): 5-6,11-13.

One should always say what goes without saying, so I shall say at once, speaking for my colleagues too, how sensible we are of the great honour that Queen's University has done us, and how delighted we are to be included in its distinguished list of graduates. Among my colleagues is a member of the sister college in Victoria University, Dr. Boyce of Emmanuel College,1 and this double courtesy to Victoria reminds me in particular how close the traditions of Victoria and Queen's are, both in history and in standards and ideals. We even share the same song, as I realized last fall at your installation, Mr. Principal,2 when I heard the Queen's students singing On the old Ontario strand, my boys, Where Queen's forever more shall stand.

I said to President Bissell, who was sitting beside me, "I think Victoria fits the metre better." He said, "But the statement is still true of Queen's." The graduation from university is, of course, one of the ritual points of one's life: it is a rite de passage, where the older members of the tribe hand on their garbled versions of the tribal traditions, and the younger members show their maturity by unprecedented feats of endurance. It ought

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to be a festive occasion, and in most respects it is: the major ordeals are over, and only such minor hazards remain as tripping over the chancellor's stool or sitting on a dozen roses. But the twentieth century will not allow the festivity to be unmixed with other elements. My own graduation took place during the Depression, when we were trying to find our places in a society where nobody wanted us. Then for six interminable years the shadow of war fell over the university as it fell over everything else, and now we find ourselves eyeing the world itself apprehensively, like a bride with a new stove, uncertain whether it will blow up in her face or merely cook her goose. None of you, of course, really wants a world where rigid social barriers keep the unpleasant facts of life out of your sight. In our world there are millions of people who haven't enough to eat or enough space to live in, and for some reason the fact that we have far more than we need of both doesn't inspire them with affection for us. This is not something that we can afford to ignore. It is clear that the explosion of a nuclear bomb involves us personally, whether it is set off in Siberia or the midPacific, and in the same way a massacre in Algeria is a personal outrage to us, and the segregation in South Africa is a personal humiliation to us. Only the weak and foolish would wish it otherwise: certainly nobody who deserves the name of student would do so. You may recall Haliburton's gibe, written in 1836, when he makes Sam Slick boast of a Fourth of July with fifteen million free men and five million slaves acelebratin' the birthday of liberty.3 It took one of the bloodiest wars in history and an incredible amount of suffering, persecution, and courage to get the paradox out of that remark, and not all of it is out yet. But that is what comes of excluding a large group of people from the benefits of society. If I remind you of such things, it is to point out that in many ways the twentieth century has a tenderer conscience, which means a more civilized apprehension of its own state, than previous centuries have had. It has acquired this, not by the superiority of its morals, but by the efficiency of its technology. The seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley remarked, in introducing his poems to the public, "a warlike, various, and a tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in."4 If this was true of the age of Oliver Cromwell, it can hardly be less true of the savage and snarling time that we are in now. Cowley meant, I think, that a good age to write in is an age of poets, and a good age to write of is an age of heroes, traditionally the poet's main subject. And whatever the literary merits of this age, it

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certainly must be an age of heroes, though of a new kind. The conventional hero has always been ready to die if necessary; the heroism of today must be in the form of a readiness to survive. It is natural to us to shuffle and sidle through change, to make the minimum adjustments, to keep as many of our prejudices and habits as we can. That is why the determination to survive at all costs has usually been thought of as unheroic: we may think of that terrible flash of self-knowledge in Shakespeare's coward and braggart, Parolles: "Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live."5 But we cannot merely survive or merely avoid the threat of extinction that looms over us now: to look such a thing in the face at all is in itself a major moral crisis. Canada has never seen much virtue in war and has certainly never started one, but it has shown prodigies of courage and endurance in the wars it has been caught in, and you would show them too if physical courage were demanded of you. But if it is demanded of you, it will be largely futile. The only effective heroism now is a heroism rooted in the intellect and the imagination, a capacity to look at our society without the blinkers of custom and prejudice, to distrust all our conditioned reflexes of politics, religion, and class. If a society fails to achieve such an expanded vision, it may disappear from history. If only a small minority achieve it, the society may have to go through all the agony of a revolution, most of it in the wrong direction. If its nerve fails at the crucial point, it may suffer the fate of Nazi Germany, a fate which several countries today will find it difficult if not impossible to avoid. The poet Wordsworth, in The Prelude, which tells us about the growth and formation of his own mind, says that near the beginning of the French Revolution he was in France, and found himself in the company of some aristocrats engaged in a conspiracy to join foreign armies and reconquer France for their class. He was totally out of sympathy with them, and went over his own background to discover why. The main reason, he found, was his university education: Nor was it least Of many debts which afterwards I owed To Cambridge, and an academic life That something there was holden up to view Of a Republic, where all stood thus far Upon equal ground, that they were brothers all In honour, as in one community,

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Scholars and Gentlemen, where, furthermore, Distinction lay open to all that came, And wealth and titles were in less esteem Than talents and successful industry. [1805 version, bk. 9,11. 226-36]

This, remember, was eighteenth-century Cambridge, where an outsider would have seen far more entrenched social privilege than in the Queen's of 1962. In any case, Wordsworth may give us a clue to where the 1962 class of Queen's belongs in this argument. There are two kinds of knowledge, knowledge of things and knowledge about things. Knowledge about things is what you have just been taught and examined on. For anyone of normal intelligence, knowledge about things is easily gained, which is why you are here in such large numbers. But while it's easily gained, if s also easily lost. A few years from now, what with children and business and suburbs and new friends and activities, you may find that the proof of Planck's constant or the list of Latin prepositions that take the ablative is growing a little dim in your mind, and that you can't still read with the old fluency either the Arabian Nights in the original Arabic or social science textbooks in the original double Dutch. If you have a sensitive conscience, you may wonder why your country was willing to pay for two-thirds of the cost of your education when you have, for all practical purposes, forgotten it. Perhaps there is some other continuous factor involved that makes more sense. The first step in education is to learn about the world around us, and to find our own place in this middle-class twentieth-century Canadian society. But when the class of 1962 were children the King was Emperor of India, China was a friend, Japan an enemy, and Nazi Germany ruled the most powerful empire that the world had ever seen. It seems clear that the world around you is not the real form of human society, but only the transient appearance of that society. Obviously you need to learn something, not only about your society, but about the forces that make it change so rapidly. What you have been exposed to here are mainly the arts and sciences. They, in their totality, are the real form of human society, the permanent structure underlying all social changes. I said that there was a distinction between knowledge about things and knowledge of things. Knowledge of things, or what is called wisdom, is possession. You can't lose or forget it, because it's part of what you are. It's intellec-

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tual in the sense that it's part of the operation of your mind, but it's also moral in the sense that it's part of your behaviour. This is the higher kind of knowledge which is personal and not impersonal, practical and not speculative, engaged and not detached, where the relevant categories are not truth and falsehood, but compulsion and freedom. Reason, said Milton, is but choosing.6 You may find, for instance, that some ambitious Canadian McCarthy will try to build a career on spreading slander and hysteria.7 Hundreds of people have already conditioned themselves to climb on the bandwagon of any such person as soon as he opens his mouth. At a certain point the bad argument will become the bad man, and what will be demanded from you and your education will not be objectivity of mind, but the courage to fight. It's to give you this possession of knowledge that your teachers have kept on lecturing and examining and marking essays, not because they have so much of it themselves, but because they've tried to keep in touch with the literature and science and philosophy and religion that do have it. And what little they know of such things they have tried to share with you. You have responded to this, not so much by writing the essays and the examinations, as by developing your own conceptions of society. Some of you may have acquired no better vision of society than the bridge table, which, like the City of God, requires four squares. Some of you may have achieved your social vision involuntarily, and with your minds on something else, like the girl who picked up a book called "How to Hug," and who found when she got it home that she had bought a copy of the thirteenth volume of an encyclopedia. Some students, and some very good ones, turn violently revolutionary or violently reactionary at college. As they get older they become less extreme, not because they have got cautious or cynical, but because they have begun to realize that the principles that can transform society are also the principles that hold it together. Nobody concerned with the church would say that the church was only the aggregate of buildings called churches. He'd be much more likely to say that wherever there's any genuine faith or hope or love, there the church is in some form. And nobody should restrict the idea of the university to the aggregate of institutions that give degrees. Whenever you're discussing something and attending only to the truth of the argument; whenever your conversation turns from news and gossip to serious issues and real principles; whenever you find yourself looking at something beautiful just because it's beautiful; whenever you answer

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hysteria with a firm and quiet voice, there the university is at work in society. That larger university is one you can never leave. You take Queen's into the world with you, and, whatever your profession may be, all of you without exception will be university teachers, teaching others, including your children, by your example and influence, what the university is doing in the world through you. The real meaning of an occasion like this, I take it, is not to flutter around you with advice, but to recognize that you are on the point of becoming university teachers in your own right, and to welcome you into our own company, each one of you as one of us. Your teachers can be your teachers no longer: they can only be your friends; but there is an unbreakable covenant between you that goes deeper than friendship. The company you are joining is a company whose ancestry goes back beyond the Greek philosophers and the Hebrew prophets, and it is the oldest and the most honourable company in the world.

31

The Changing Pace in Canadian Education 24 January 1963

From The Changing Pace in Canadian Education (Montreal: Association of Alumni, 1963), incorporating a few stylistic revisions made in Frye's hand in his copy of the offprint. Original text reprinted in OE, 62-73. Originally given as the second annual Norn's Memorial Lecture at Sir George Williams University, Montreal (now a part of Concordia University). The lectureship was inaugurated to honour the late Kenneth Norn's (1903-57), principal of the university from 1936 to 1956, and included among its criteria for speakers their humanitarian outlook. The reward of surviving in universities is to become an educator, and the more technical and administrative problems of education have been forcing themselves on me in the last four years or so involuntarily. One thus finds oneself in the constant position of having to make pronouncements on liberal education and related topics. These are easy enough to make, being like sermons except that they have no text and no context. But it is curious that there are so many pronouncements of this kind, and yet that there should be relatively little attempt to define the function of the university in contemporary society, particularly at a time when it is obviously changing its relation to that society. Many areas of thought today are left undeveloped through a kind of wait-and-see policy: what, for example, is the use of trying to work out a coherent political theory for a world that may blow to pieces at any moment? The attitude of the chief fireman at a burning rubber factory: "We'd best let it burn up a bit, so we can see what we're doing," is one that we find everywhere today, not least in the intellectual attitudes of students. And as a major revolution in the function of the modern university is clearly only beginning, it

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is natural that speeches about that function should be ritual rather than prophetic, concerned more with the habitual than with the impending. The university is becoming so powerful and influential in society that legislatures, churches, sport-conscious alumni, and opinionated philanthropists are no longer able to bully it with the same old zest. In this very increase of freedom, however, there is a subtle threat of a new kind. The public has become much more interested in education at all levels, including the university level; and when the public becomes interested in something, it demands as payment for its interest the right of breathing down necks. What academic freedom the university has so far been able to preserve has been preserved partly by a general lack of such public interest: it may have to be preserved by more positive means in the future. If so, it will be well to be clear in our minds what academic freedom consists of, and why its defence is important, under the new social conditions. At the same time, we have steadily increasing swarms of young people, earnest in their aims and wondering, justifiably wondering, what is expected of them by the university in particular and by society in general. Not unreasonably, they want to know what the university can guarantee to do for them, if anything, and they often find themselves baffled by the situations that they encounter. They have been, through elementary and secondary schools, taught with varying degrees of efficiency. At university they sometimes encounter, especially in the bigger universities, instructors who can't teach and are proud of it. They discover that their university instructors are given no training in teaching; they learn to teach in much the same way that a dog learns to swim, and are not promoted for their ability in teaching but for other qualities altogether. I have not myself any sympathy whatever with the instructor who regards it as a status symbol to be a bad teacher, and certainly in my own field of literary criticism it is hardly possible to achieve genuine excellence as a critic without being a teacher as well. At the same time, once the student crosses the boundary line between high school and university, he leaves a place which is primarily a teaching institution and enters one which is not; and some of his natural expectation of being taught in the same way as before is bound to be disappointed. Still less, of course, does the university have anything to do with any such aims as the improving of one's mind. Yet here again the university needs a clear sense of its own function in order to explain to the student what the limits of its teaching powers are.

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The traditional view of the university is that it is a function of the church, the classical exposition of that view being Cardinal Newman's in the nineteenth century. I happen not to believe in this account of the university's origin and function: I do not think the university is especially a medieval idea, or that it is, at least now, in any respect a function of the church. Yet the university does resemble the church in one respect, that it stands for some kind of detachment from the moral standards of its community. It needs the sense of such a detachment in proportion as it becomes involved with its community. The older type of scholar, commemorated in the comic strip figure of the absent-minded professor, did exist in nineteenth-century universities, discovered by his scout in the evening with a pile of books over his table and the lunch which he had forgotten to eat buried beneath the books. But the professor becomes managerial like other professional men in contemporary society, and there is danger of his acquiring the kind of moral insensitivity which goes with his new place in society. I am thinking of a social scientist I was talking to recently who had just been to a conference—I think in Bermuda—in a luxurious hotel where the theme of the discussion was assistance to underdeveloped nations. He remarked that the amount of money spent there on liquor alone would appreciably raise the standard of living in a South Indian village for some years. This is the kind of thing I mean by moral insensitivity. If the university, like so much of the rest of our society, falls into the habit of rationalizing its own prosperity as a kind of virtue, it will have been kidnapped by that society and will have betrayed its specific function. There is a well-known phrase popularized by Chaucer, "to make a virtue of necessity,"1 but it is equally pretentious to make a virtue of freedom, if one interprets freedom as the possession of middle-class comforts. Whenever I think about the approaching change in the social context of universities, I begin by contrasting the university today with its position when I was an undergraduate about thirty years ago. At that time it was the Depression, and the younger university instructor had approximately the social status of a door-to-door pencil salesman. There was even competition for students. I remember talking with a sardonic young woman at a reception desk in New York who told me that after she had been graduated she got a letter inviting her to enter the graduate school. This had flattered her considerably because she was by no means a model student, but she soon realized that there was an economic motivation involved. This had given her a view of society which convinced her

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that, in her own words, "Education's the biggest damn racket there is except maybe religion." The young instructor, if hired, was paid rather less than the driver of a delivery truck, and was also told that even to earn that he would have to go through the long, laborious, and expensive business of acquiring a Ph.D.—or else. Having acquired the Ph.D., he would then have to produce a regular series of publications under the general motto of "publish or perish," until, somewhere around middle age, he would finally be given "tenure," which to an American academic was not unlike an appointment to the Senate for a Canadian politician. The situation of the instructor today is a very different one. Instead of having a status of a door-to-door pencil salesman, he now has—or soon will have—approximately the social status of a free taxi in a pouring rain. It is becoming obvious that the cumbersome routine of the Ph.D., followed by the series of articles in learned journals, is no longer necessary to support his wife and children. If he shows competence in teaching in a university classroom, no university in its senses is going to let him go, whatever degrees he has. His economic motivation for becoming a scholar and producing articles in learned journals will be, not to avoid getting fired, but to become known in other universities so that he may leave his job for a better one. Then again, universities do a great deal of worrying, and rightly, about the coming population explosion of students. For some reason we hear less about another problem which is even further advanced: a population explosion in scholarship. There will be a vast increase in the number of bright young men, all busily writing and producing articles; and as a result, the general field of, say, English, which I know best, is bound to become specialized to an unprecedented degree. I can visualize within my own time departments of English in which the professor of English will be the professor of Dryden; and underneath him will be lecturers in Lycidas, fellows in Othello, and readers of Blake Prophecies. There is already one learned journal in Canada devoted entirely to the scholarly organization of Canadian literature,2 and within a short time we may look forward to definitive scholarly editions of Beautiful Joe and Anne of Green Gables,} together with definitive biographies of their authors. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, the University of Toronto Press produced relatively little in the way of books; tended in fact to disgorge the President's report early in March and call it a year. Today, of course, it is a first-rate press with a first-rate publishing list, and similar presses are now being established in universities in

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Montreal. We take this development of the university press to be normal as a university grows, but we have to multiply that by about two hundred to realize what is happening; because there are probably about that many ambitious universities all developing presses, all with distinguished lists and with people to write books for them. I have had a good many students who are now engaged in scholarship, and a constant shower of offprints keeps pouring on my desk. A few of them were people who had little vocation for university work, and whenever I get an offprint from one of them I discover the existence of a new learned journal which I had not previously heard of. But of course that will in its turn become one of the recognized journals. What all this means, among other things, is that the sense which has always been endemic in the university, a sense of a universal mutual unintelligibility among departments, is clearly going to increase as well. As a member of Section Two of the Royal Society, which covers the humanities and social sciences, I find myself unable to read even the abstracts of the papers contributed to Section Three, which is mathematics and physics. For a time, I thought that the exclamation marks in the equations of the mathematicians represented some enthusiasm for the beauty of their subject, and that there was at least that much communication possible; but I was undeceived on this point. I question whether there is anything at all to be done about this situation. I do not warm up to the notion of integrating or co-ordinating subjects. I can understand the statement that literature and mathematics are both attempts to communicate, but I feel that any such subject as "communications," designed to communicate between them, tends to become enclosed in its own special language, and merely to add one more unintelligible voice. I have similar reservations about attempts to base an entire educational curriculum on a synoptic view of the heritage of Western culture. There are colleges devoted to the study of great books which attempt to give the student a co-ordinated training in humanities, mathematics, and at least the history of science. These projects strike me as, to some extent, efforts of remedial education, which are significant partly as indicating a breakdown of the organized curriculum between kindergarten teaching, which is relatively efficient, and university education, which, if often inefficient as teaching, is relatively well informed. In a properly organized educational system, in which the sequence made consistent sense from kindergarten through to the end of high school, the student would have acquired, in however immature a way, some sense of the synoptic

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view of culture which the curriculum of great books designs to give. When he entered university he would have earned the right to specialize, and it is my experience that the majority of exceptionally keen and brilliant students at university want to specialize. University courses need not be afraid of dealing in separate disciplines intelligible only to those who have studied them. The subjects in the university have to be revolutionized from within: there is no other way of adjusting them to changes and advances in knowledge, and it is far more important for each subject to be intelligible to itself than for the different subjects to be intelligible to one another. Nobody can work out a master plan to make the student understand the relations of geology to physics, but the subject of geophysics will take its own form from those relations. The attempt to give the university student a kind of perspective on what the whole of the learned human race has done and is doing is often bound up with the desire to formulate the beliefs or the aims or the purposes of a democratic society. We are often told that we suffer from a disadvantage, as compared with Communism, in not having a set of clearly defined statements which say what we believe about society and constitute our vision of it. There is still some danger, though less than there was a few years ago, to put social pressure on universities to force them to work out and teach some kind of democratic philosophy— what kind does not matter too much as long as it is sufficiently antiCommunist. It seems to me the essence of democracy that such things should be left undefined, and that individual subjects, however difficult and esoteric, should be left to themselves. Every science is the queen of sciences, or, if it is a new science, a pawn that may become a queen. Whether the universe is pluralistic or not, there is no doubt that the world of the intellect is. In approaching the problem of the relation of the university to a democratic society, I think we need a radically different point of view. I start with the fact that there are two levels on which the reason may be employed. There is a speculative level, and there is a practical level. The speculative level is that of the knowledge of the objective world. On this level the great virtues are detachment, impartiality, and suspension of judgment. The university teaches on this level, and to the extent that the university is a moral as well as an intellectual influence, these are the moral qualities it appeals to. This kind of thinking consists in identifying oneself with a body of thought, so that one then becomes capable of adding something to it. There is no thinking on this level apart from such

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identification with a specific discipline. Thinking is not a natural process like eating or sleeping, nor a process centred in the personality, like social behaviour. It is an impersonal skill, developed by habit and practice, like playing the piano. On the level of practical intelligence, on the other hand, man is a citizen of a society, and here the relevant categories are not so much truth and falsehood as freedom and necessity. On this level the human being, as a member of a society, is first of all engaged or committed, and his intelligence on this level expresses itself primarily in the making of a choice. This is the kind of intelligence that Milton was thinking of when he said in Areopagitica that reason is but choosing. Moral as well as intellectual qualities are also different on this level. Here the personality is involved, and conflict may become personal: in a crisis, the bad argument may turn into the bad man. If a person is maintaining views about white supremacy and the inherent inferiority of the coloured races, we do not say that he is using syllogisms illogically: we merely think: "What is the matter with a man who feels compelled to argue in this way?" Suppose, for example, that some ambitious Canadian McCarthy were to try to build a career out of spreading slander and hysteria. Undoubtedly many Canadians have already conditioned themselves to climb on the bandwagon of such a person as soon as he opens his mouth. On the level of practical intelligence what is demanded of the educated person is not the ability to see facts as they are, but the courage to fight. Whoever pretends that on this level there is still room for detachment and impartiality is merely rationalizing his own cowardice. It is not difficult in practice to see how the same problems reshape themselves on these different levels of intelligence. I remember attending a meeting of social scientists a while ago and listening, as I always do in such discussions, to the metaphors. I realized that the mood was fairly cool because the metaphors were mechanical. They were talking about co-operating and adjusting and dealing with breakdowns. I realized that if they were more concerned about their subject they would start using organic or medical metaphors, and talk in terms of health and sickness. If they were still more deeply concerned, moral conceptions of good and bad would creep in, and if they were discussing something like the Nazi persecution of Jews, they would be compelled to go one step further into religious metaphors. They might have no explicit religious views of their own, but they could not avoid speaking and thinking of such things as being under the judgment of God.

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What I have been revolving around in the last few minutes is the problem described in the famous Rede lecture—C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution"—the humanist's ignorance of science and the scientist's ignorance of the humanities. I have tried to suggest why I do not think this a major problem in our society. It is not the humanist's inability to read a textbook in physics or the physicist's inability to read a textbook in literary criticism. What is important is the inability of both of them to read the morning paper with the kind of insight which is demanded of the practical intelligence. You are doubtless familiar with the book of Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, the story behind the lives of the scientists who made the atom bomb. The book begins in a kind of academic paradise at the University of Gottingen in Germany where they were living in a state of intellectual ferment and high excitement, yet oblivious to the fact that the greatest concentration of evil and malice that the world had ever seen was slowly gathering in the society around them. They were utterly bewildered when they found themselves refugees in Denmark, and in reading the remainder of the book one hardly knows which to wonder at more, their brilliance as scientists or their chuckle-headedness as citizens. The practical sense is obviously central in the process of education, but as it cannot be directly taught, it is at best a by-product of university training and not something that the university specifically aims at— apart from the fact that it can be held quite as firmly by people outside the university. The question next arises of where the practical sense is derived from: that is, where one gets the power to make choices in the interests of one's freedom. The easiest answer is in adjustment to society itself, but that clearly is a wrong answer, because society changes very rapidly; rapid change breeds hysteria, and adjustment to rapid change merely breeds more of it. In a book which many of you may have seen, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Professor Marshall McLuhan speaks of contemporary society as a postliterate society; that is, a society which has gone through a phase of identifying knowledge with the written word and is now gaining its knowledge from all kinds of other media which affect the ear as well as the eye. The ability to twitch ears is the mark of the animal which is constantly exposed to danger, and Mr. McLuhan is well aware of the extent to which the increase in such media brings with it an increase in panic. He quotes one or two examples of panic in contemporary writers, including some intellectually respectable ones, and remarks, "Terror is a normal state of an oral society, because everything is hap-

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pening to everyone all the time."4 The sense of panic is occasionally rationalized on the level of practical intelligence itself, by people who speak of commitment as though it were a virtue in itself: don't just stand there, get yourself committed. This is the attitude which was described many years ago by H.G. Wells as the attitude of the "Gawdsakers"—the people who continually say, "For Gawd's sake, let's do something."5 No, we need a better answer to the question of what the source of the authority of the practical intelligence is. One possible answer is that it is derived from some kind of overall vision of society. Every person with any function in society at all will have some kind of ideal vision of that society in the light of which he operates. One can hardly imagine a social worker going out to do case work without thinking of her as having, somewhere in her mind, a vision of a better, cleaner, healthier, more emotionally balanced city, as a kind of mental model inspiring the work she does. One can hardly imagine in fact any professional person not having such a social model—a world of health for the doctor or of justice for the judge— nor would such a social vision be confined to the professions. It seems to me in fact that a Utopia should be conceived, not as an impossible dream of an impossible ideal, but as the kind of working model of society that exists somewhere in the mind of every sane person who has any social function at all. At the end of Plato's Republic, Socrates, after having described his ideal state, asks his disciples if they think that any such state could ever be established [592b]. Those who had not, by the ninth book, either gone to sleep or fallen under the table, say that they suppose not. Socrates then says that he doesn't either, but that the wise man will always live as though he were a citizen of such a community, no matter what the society around him actually is. Very frequently, however, such social visions become the basis of revolutionary activity. This is why, as I said earlier, I distrust the tendency to define social ideals too explicitly, because to define a social vision is to make that curious identifying of religious and secular feelings that is characteristic of the revolutionary mind, especially, today, in the attitude of Communism. Communism has no God, but that does not prevent it from being a religion with prophets, revealed scriptures, a body of infallible doctrine, heresies, saints, martyrs, and shrines. Such a religious attitude results from its defined conception of social change. It is obvious that our own time is a revolutionary one, and the Communist countries spend a good deal of their time and energy arguing about which is the correct form of revolution. That is the issue which divides them whenever Russia ex-

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presses its disagreement with China by abusing Albania. There are two possible attitudes to social change: one is to think of the revolution which has happened, once and for all, in some countries and is going to happen in others; the other is to think of our society as in a constant state of change, and try to deal with it accordingly with the flexibility which that fact demands. The latter seems to me the view of social change that we are committed to in the democracies. I have a slightly different answer to the question of where the origin of the practical intelligence is. The fact that we are living in a revolutionary age means that the society around us is not real society, but the transient appearance of society. The students going to college now were born into a world in which the King was Emperor of India, in which China was a friend and Japan an enemy, and in which Nazi Germany ruled the most powerful empire that the world had ever seen. It is obvious that the twentieth-century middle-class Canadian society we belong to is too fitful in its manifestations to be regarded in any sense as the real world. I think the real society that man lives in is the society which is revealed to him by the arts and the sciences. The goal of education is social, an initiation into the form of human society that won't go away, and will not have disappeared within the next generation. It is this vision of society which operates as a kind of informing vision in human activities, as the vision of Plato's Republic is supposed to do for the disciples of Socrates. I suggest that the simplest way to characterize that informing vision of society is to identify it with the university itself, with that total body of arts and sciences which, in their totality, are the real form of society and into which the student is initiated. And yet, I have also said, the university as an institution of teaching and research cannot go beyond the speculative level of knowledge, where thought consists in identifying one's mind with a specific and highly specialized discipline. This is why it is so important to understand how much, in university education, must be left to student initiative. In the universities of the immediate future, the student's problem, despite all the limitations that universities will be forced to put up, will be not so much the difficulty of getting to college as making sure that when he gets there he will be educated and not merely processed. In the nature of things no instructor, however deeply interested in students, can take the initiative in this. The student must cultivate all the virtues of education, and the virtues of education are mainly social vices. He must become antisocial; he must make an unmitigated pest of himself in

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sitting on his professor's doorstep armed with questions; he should have the kind of maladjusted unpleasantness that goes with the genuine student's mentality. When a good student displays arrogance, it often means that he is pulling away from the kind of well-adjusted social behaviour that leads to security, popularity, and the death of the free mind. Such antisocial qualities may be forced out of a keen student by the sense that unless he develops some form of intellectual resistance, he will be, in university as elsewhere, merely sliding by smoothly on a kind of assembly line. I should hope too that the university of the future, however much it had to offer intellectually, would not be reserved for professional students only. Restricting the university to students of a certain academic standing may often be necessary, but is too simple to be a total solution to the problem of admission. I should prefer to see the university continue to be what it is now, something of a cross-section of the more intelligent and well-meaning part of the community at large. It is also, or should be, a more heterogeneous community than the student has been accustomed to. In Canada, to give one obvious example, it is a place where students from Africa and Asia can mingle in Canadian life more easily than they can anywhere else. At present the university is a centre of scholarship and research also concerned with the liberal and professional training of young people in their later adolescence, much the most bewildered and bemused period of their lives. Perhaps the next century, as society develops more leisure with automation, will see the university expanding its relation to society and less monopolized, as a teaching institution, by the routine of granting degrees. I can envisage an ideal university which would be a community which a person could enter at any time in his life, as, say, an adult with grown-up children, as both a retreat and as a place of study in which an accumulation of practical experience could be brought to bear on academic training. A university in this expanded sense would be the institution of the theory of society as opposed to practical society: it would be the clearing house of cultural and intellectual pursuits, in fact the embodiment of Matthew Arnold's "culture," which for Arnold was not merely the ornamenting of life, but the source of all genuine order and stability in our civilization.

32 The Dean of Women May 1963

Victoria Reports, 13 (May 1963): 20-1. This piece marks the retirement of Jessie Macpherson, who served as dean of women at Victoria for twenty-nine years. She had been appointed (after a brief hiatus with an acting dean) to succeed Margaret Addison, the distinguished first dean, who had been in office for twenty-eight years.

When Jessie Macpherson became dean of women in 1934, there was no great fanfare. Nobody in fact knew much about her: she was a graduate of University College and had had some experience in girls' work, but Victoria was more aware of the hole Miss Addison had left than of her replacement by this unobtrusive newcomer. But it was not very long before Victoria began to understand something of the dimensions of what it had acquired. In a few years its dean of women took an M.A. in philosophy and had joined the Ethics Department as a lecturer. A few years later she was a Ph.D., writing her doctoral thesis on the ethics of G.E. Moore, and had started up the regular academic ladder on top of her work as dean. "Brains to burn," one of her supervisors remarked succinctly when her thesis was handed in, but fortunately she has never burned any brains. Her interest in ethics soon made her realize the enormous ethical importance of psychological theory, particularly of Freud, and that too has become a special study of hers. She also developed an interest in music on an almost professional scale, being a member of the Mendelssohn Choir for some years and a pillar of the Women's Musical Club for some years after that. Her sensitivity to the other arts is reflected in the choice of pictures and sculptures in the residences, and she has done much to make Victoria what a non-Victorian member of the university once rather wistfully called a cultural oasis.

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It is hard to exaggerate the importance of these academic and cultural achievements. As counsellor to so many hundreds of young women, she has been herself a living example of the kind of person the university wants its students to become. The female undergraduate has not always been brought up to struggle for clarity of mind, and to distrust sentimentality and middle-class prejudice. But Jessie Macpherson has always realized that everybody's first line of defence against emotional disturbance is intellectual honesty; and the rigorous intellectual honesty she has kept for herself has had the deep and pervasive influence on students that no platitudes or soothing noises could ever have begun to achieve. Honesty is a product of sincerity; and it is because of that sincerity that she has been able to carry off the role of dean with such genuine dignity, a dignity which is the opposite of pomposity. She can make fun of herself, as many Annesley Christmas dinner skits have proved, but that is merely part of her sense of proportion. Through the earlier part of her administration she had the difficult and delicate task of adjusting the rules of women's residences to the changing patterns of social behaviour, aiming at a sane and relaxed discipline which would keep both the respect of students and the confidence of parents. Her achievement here has been outstanding, and we are still too close to it to realize how important it has been. To see her work in perspective is a task for the future historian of the college. Those who have been associated with her can at this point only think of all the social events that would have gone limp and flaccid without her, all the committees which she patiently steered and advised; all the gatherings in the women's residences which owed their distinction to her place as hostess; all the occasions which in one way or another depended on her and turned on her. They think of these things with such an awed gratitude that they can only keep some of that gratitude for the fact that she will continue to be, for some time yet, a full-time member of the teaching staff.

33 Convocation Address,

University of British Columbia 31 May 1963

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box i,file r. Published as "The University of the World," RW, 98-10$. Frye was receiving an honorary doctorate of letters, and at the same time an LL.D. was bestowed on Marjorie Agnew, a teacher and early graduate of the University of British Columbia.

I am of course most grateful to the University of British Columbia for the great honour it has done me, though at the moment I feel less gratitude than simple pleasure—pleasure at being admitted to a community where I have so many close and old friends. My only regret is that Miss Agnew, whom it was intended to honour at the same time, was prevented by ill health from taking her place on the platform with me. I have just come from similar ceremonies at my own university, and no matter how many of them I see, I am always deeply impressed by them. What I see from this side is something more difficult to see from yours. During term the staff does a lot of complaining about the delinquents they teach, with their late essays and their wandering wits and their general illiteracy. But they have an enormous respect and affection for them all the same, the complaints being an essential part of that affection, and that is primarily what this ceremony, for them, expresses. Students of primitive societies tell us how important is the rite de passage, the social ritual marking the transition from one phase of life to another. There are, for example, the initiation rites of passing from youth to manhood, where one of the elders of the tribe, equipped with an instrument called a bull-roarer, makes a loud and meaningless noise, for the purpose of showing the youths that they don't need to be frightened by such things any longer. You will appreciate how vast the gap is

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between these primitive youths and yourselves, and between the bullroarer and myself. In our society we have simplified our passage rites to four main groups, those connected with birth, graduation, marriage, and death, and of these that of graduation is the only one in which you are expected to be conscious enough to know what is going on. These same students tell us further that in rites of passage there are always at least two elements involved, one of separation from a past phase of life, and one of incorporation into a future one. The separation part of this rite is simple enough: what you're incorporated into is less easy to see. It's customary to say that you're going out into the world, but if you're not in the world now you never will be. You're bound to feel, quite rightly, that there is much more to this business of being graduated than merely ceasing to be where you've been. There is a whole group of words that mean one specific thing when they're spelled with a capital letter, and something much broader and vaguer when they're spelled with a small letter. If you're a capitalized Liberal or Catholic, you vote for a specific party or go to a specific church, but you can be anything and still claim to be liberal or catholic in lower case. The difference, however, is not simply between the concrete and the vague. The small-letter conceptions represent the standards or values which the specific groups are supposed to embody. The Liberal party is supposed to stand for liberal political ideas, the Catholic church for the catholicity, the unity, and universality, of God's people. It would take a pretty narrow-minded partisan to maintain that the group who belong to the specific institution and the group who meet the standards embodied by that institution were exactly the same. Now, I suggest that "University" is one of these double-standard words. Here you've been attached to a University with a capital "U," a specific institution that gives specific degrees. But people who may not know you've been here will speak of you as having been "to university," with a small "u." That means something more: it means a certain way of life that you've been in contact with, and would have been at any University. As you leave the University of British Columbia, what you are being invited to join is the lower-case university, the university of the world, as I should call it, which represents the social values that this institution exists for. This larger and broader university is not a clearly recognized conception in our society, and yet it's hidden, as an assumption, in much of what we say about that society. It isn't recognized because it's invisible. Some time ago the CBC television interviewed me on the subject of

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education in France, about which I know nothing whatever. Fortunately the main question was related to Canada. It was, should we devote our main educational efforts to producing a managerial or intellectual elite? My answer was that if society demands an elite of this kind, the universities will produce it: they must produce what society thinks it has to have. Many of our important people are university graduates, and it is no doubt legitimate enough for a University to point with pride to the important people who hold its degree. But the real elite, the really best people, are an invisible group, and nobody except God knows who they all are. Some of them have influential places in society, but most of them are diffused through and dissolved in that society, like the salt to which Jesus compared his disciples. They include the quiet self-effacing people who are busy teaching school or fixing teeth or saving money to send their own children to university, who sit through endless dull committees and board meetings because it's a public service to do so: in short, the people who devote as much of their lives as possible to keeping up the standard of culture and civilization, both for themselves and for their communities. They would include a teacher of French I know in a small town in this province, who bought herself a couple of cats in order to have somebody to talk French to in this allegedly bilingual country. They certainly include the members of this staff, who, like nearly everybody else in a Canadian university, are maintaining standards of scholarship at a weary distance from the nearest research library. So far as it is a teaching institution, the University exists primarily to recruit people for the bigger lower-case university of the world. At the same time a good many people come into the university of the world with very little formal education, and among those who have the education there is a heavy drop-out. The reason is that when you move from one to the other, you move from one kind of knowledge to an entirely different kind. Here you're exposed to knowledge about things, which is very easy to acquire, as is obvious by the number of people in front of me, and very easy to lose. It's what you produced on examinations last week, and will start forgetting next week. Knowledge about things is mainly intellectual, and it demands a good memory and a sense of detachment. Its great virtue is objectivity, the ability to see things as they are, preferably on both sides. What you transfer to the university of the world is not this, but knowledge of things. Knowledge of things is really your vision of society, and is part of what you are. It is engaged and committed, not detached; it demands moral qualities, like courage, and

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holding it is a constant test of character. To join the university of the world it is not enough merely to do one's job and mind one's business. To maintain the standards of culture is a fight, and a fight with enemies. It doesn't take long to discover who the enemies are: they are the people whose vision of society is that of a mob, who are dedicated to hysteria, slander, persecution, segregation, and hatred. In some places the enemy has become so strong that the university of the world has been actually destroyed or driven underground. The institutions called Universities are still there: they still teach arts and science and train for professions and grant degrees, but their degrees are no good any more, because the essential social reason for producing them no longer exists. A few years ago I was invited by my colleague Professor Roy Daniells to this campus, where I spent a pleasant summer teaching a course in Paradise Lost. One of the things about Paradise Lost that startles and amuses students is the curiously domesticated life that Milton ascribes to Adam and Eve in Eden. They are suburbanites too relaxed to bother putting on clothes, preoccupied with their gardening and their own sexual relations, delighted when an angel from the neighbouring city of God drops in for a cold lunch, exchanging news of their own activities for news of what goes on in the big world, about which they are mildly but not excessively curious. The atmosphere is rather like a New Yorker cartoon of a nudist camp with a naked retired colonel sitting in a leather chair with a drink and a cigar and reading the Times. That strikes us as grotesque because we think of the original state of man as savage, emerging from an animal life by imperceptible stages. But Milton stands for that greater, older, wiser tradition which tells us that the original state of man was civilized, and that the suburbanite is closer to the core of human nature than the orang-utan is. If man's original state is civilized, it is natural to assume that he actually lived in the first place in cities or gardens, which is why Christianity clung to the historical interpretation of the Garden of Eden myth as long as it could. But most of us today feel rather that man's original state is not to be understood by his past, but by his present and his future, just as the original state of the acorn is not the pellet in the ground, but the oak tree it is trying to become. If you find this hard to understand, you need to develop your imagination, preferably by reading literature, and you can learn a great deal about it from your own British Columbia literature. If you read, or reread, the second story in Ethel Wilson's Equations of Love, Lilly's Story, you will read a very simple account of how

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a girl puts up a gallant fight for herself and her child against her own background. Its meaning is less simple: its meaning is that a person's real character is revealed, not by what he has been or done, but by what he is trying to make of himself at any given moment. Next, I suggest you read Earle Birney's radio play, Trial of a City. Here the annihilation of Vancouver has been decided upon by some mysterious tribunal, and everyone who appears to defend the city shows that there is no reason in the world why this should not be done. Fortunately not all the reasons are in the world. The point is that man can always be condemned by his own past. What we have done becomes, forever, the property of the accuser of mankind, and as long as we assume that the future consists only of the logical consequences of the past, we can look forward to nothing but disaster. This brings us, of course, to the chief preoccupation of our time, the apocalyptic explosion. We have certain mechanisms set up that, in a few minutes, can kill half the human race and destroy the value of living for the other half. And yet, others say, if we don't set this bomb off, we shall have a population explosion, where the world will become so crowded that having a large chest expansion will constitute an act of aggression. Shall we suffocate with life or with death? It is merely ignorant to imagine that this problem is original with us, and the answer to it is in the Book of Deuteronomy. "Behold, I have set before you today life and death; therefore choose life" [30:19]. The "therefore" is inserted not because it is logical, but precisely because it is illogical, the irrational choice that refuses to face the consequences of one's actions. I imagine that, population explosion or not, you will see, in the remainder of your lifetime, a tremendous expansion of the University, in the specific sense. True, university authorities at present seem to be in an exclusive mood, concerned largely with discussing safe methods of student control. They have to: their budgets are limited and their staffs are being much too slowly processed through our graduate schools. But exclusiveness is not the answer; even raising standards is not the whole answer. I think already one can see how far and how fast the university is developing a new relation to society. Our language often operates in a way that conceals the changing facts of life from us, and we often continue to think of words in the sense we're accustomed to after they've ceased to bear that meaning. I remember a movie of my childhood called So This Is College, the theme of which was the rivalry of two football players for the same girl. There was one

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academic reference in it: one of the heroes arranged to meet the girl in front of the English building. This put him one up on his rival, who apparently didn't know where the English building was. Two minor characters were inserted for comic relief, a professor and a dean. It has taken the public a long time to outgrow this vulgar notion of "college" as a playground for spoiled children. We have tried to counteract it by stressing the traditional conception of university life, which includes leisure, youth, withdrawal from society, personal contact with teachers, and the like, and certain aspects of university life will, I hope, always be like that. But there is an immense amount of university work that has a quite different significance in society, and we can't go on indefinitely calling it university extension. I imagine that before long the universities may combine with other educational bodies and media into a vast teaching network that will cover as much of human life as, say, parks do of well-planned cities. Perhaps we shall see them open, not merely to young people in the sex-dazed period of late adolescence, but to adults with the leisure.and willingness to explore once again the world of the mind. In such a world the gap between the specific University and the university of the world would be less obvious, but it would still be there. I have spoken of what you are about to be incorporated into, but this is a rite of separation too. I think there is an impressive significance in the fact that the University requires you to leave it. No church and no political party would ever admit that you can be graduated from them: they will always demand your vote and your allegiance. Of course the University expects you, as alumni, to retain some loyalty and connection with it, and you should: there is no point in throwing away what is part of your own identity. But it also dismisses you, because, while the reality it conserves lies mainly in the past, it knows that your reality is always in the future, always beginning in the present moment, and that you move toward and not away from the discovery of your original state. Like a Spartan mother, it sends you out to stand or fall by the power and skill it has tried to give you: it is not careless of your fate, merely careful of your freedom.

34

The Principal's Message Fall 1963

From the Victoria College student Handbook in the Victoria University Archives, dated by internal evidence to 1963: w, 33. This was the booklet distributed to each incoming student in first year.

Victoria was never planned from a blueprint. It grew, like Topsy, and it holds together by vitality, not by logic. It started out as a small liberal arts college in Cobourg. The advantage of a small college is that everybody feels as though they belonged to it, and the process of education is personal, as education always should be. The disadvantage of a small college is that it's not a great university. Victoria is now part of a great university. Its problem now, with 1,700 students and going up, is how to remain a small arts college which will be a real academic home. So far, it's done this with success, though it's not easy to explain just how it has done it. It has something to do with the fact that the character of Victoria is being formed all the time by people you may never see, such as professors in subjects you don't take. For a week or two, you may wonder what good your registration in Victoria will ever be to you, if you happen to be in a course that hardly ever takes you to the college. You will always feel a great loyalty to Toronto, which can give you one of the most highly respected B.A. degrees in the world. Victoria doesn't compel you to do anything at Victoria, but it's here for you if you want it. If you're like most Victoria students, you will want it. We have hundreds of alumni who took practically no work at Victoria, but feel as much a part of the place as the newel post on the staircase. This policy of being there if you want it runs through everything

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Victoria does. It runs through its attitude to religion too, on which the editor has asked me to say something. Victoria is neither a church college, where everybody has to attend chapel, nor a secular college with no chapel. It has a religious connection for those who want it. Those who have other connections, or none at all, are equally welcome, and have been ever since the place was founded. Some students come to college feeling that if you have a strong religious faith you don't need to be intellectually honest. They could be wrong. Others come thinking that nobody can possibly have an open mind except an agnostic. They could be wrong too. Students get to respect each other's convictions: that's what education is about. Victoria respects every conviction as long as it's in a state of growth. Whatever you think you think, there's more growing ahead of you; and when you're involved in a process that can never stop, you may begin to wonder what words like "infinite" really mean.

35 We Are Trying to Teach a Vision of Society 13 December 1963

From the Educational Courier, 34 (January-February 1964): 21-3, with the adoption of three minor changes marked in Frye's hand on his offprint. A clean carbon typescript is in NFF, 1988, box i,file p. This was an address given at the first annual meeting of the Ontario Curriculum Institute (OCI), which had been established in November 1962 as a result of the efforts of the joint committee of the University of Toronto and the Toronto Board of Education (see no. 28). Frye was a member of the Board of Governors of the institute and served on its programme committee. Unfortunately, the institute's work came to little, partly because of a lack of funds. As early as 1964 the William Davis government, committed to a programme of educational expansion, suggested that the institute form part of a proposed Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE); in April 1965 the OCI endorsed the idea in principle, and shortly thereafter began to wind down its affairs. The Courier was the official publication of the Ontario Public School Men Teachers' Federation and the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario. This issue also included the addresses of Dr. J.R.H. Morgan, new director of the institute, and R.W.B. Jackson, head of its programme committee, alluded to by Frye in his paper. This is the second year that you have come together to express your interest in and support for the Ontario Curriculum Institute. The institute is committed to a good deal of long-term and unspectacular work, without exciting headlines or astonishing discoveries to report very often. Your interest is a tribute to the importance of the institute; it is also a considerable, if unconscious, tribute to yourselves. If you had been people of limited imaginations and illiberal views, you would have said:

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"Surely education has enough of a genius now for making unnecessary surveys and writing up unreadable reports. Why set up a mill just to grind out more unnecessary surveys and more unreadable reports?" It would not have been a sufficient answer merely to point out that our reports are in fact readable and the areas they cover essential. There is still the question: is there any point in setting up a new organization for an old and hackneyed problem? You have answered the question by coming here. Like everybody else with a serious interest in education, you are tired of hole-in-corner patchings and random tinkerings with a curriculum that you have lost confidence in as a whole. These ready-made and fragmentary improvements may be necessary, and they may give an impression of being practical. But they are not really practical at all. At our present stage in education the only practical thing to do is to get a new theoretical conception of the whole problem. You have understood this, and you have shown that you understand too why we want to work on a big scale. Curricular research which has the resources to smash through on a broad front is qualitatively different from any kind of piecemeal curriculum reform. The most elementary and obvious fact about the institute is the cooperation it has set up among the three major bodies: the elementary schools, the secondary schools, and the universities. To these we hope to add, as soon as possible, technological and adult education. The mere fact of this co-operation has attracted a great deal of interest and excitement, both here and in the United States. Whenever I find myself in a group of American colleagues and am introduced as Professor Frye of Toronto, the company nods wisely and says, "Oh, yes, that's in Ontario where all the new things are happening in curriculum research." It was my job to write tp university people to ask them to serve on our science and second language committees. We were late in asking them. They wrote back and said: "We had planned other things for our summers: we wanted to do our own research and it is hard to give that up. But this is important: we are coming on your committee." And besides arousing interest, co-operation in itself can do immense good. As long as French and English, Protestant and Catholic, middle-class and working-class do not know each other, they make up cliches about each other. It used to be that one could hear the most ignorant and prejudiced cliches about the universities in high schools, and about high schools in university senior common rooms. But this is cracking up on all sides, and nobody regrets its passing.

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There is much more to be said about the institute, however, than simply the co-operation it brings about. It is also an educational focus in which each aspect of education becomes aware of its own context and its own identity. The institute wants to work out curricula based on the way that the child actually learns, instead of projecting on the child some halfbaked adult mystique, whether it claims to derive from Dewey or from Whitehead, from William James or from Mortimer Adler. And because it has this ambition the elementary schools find in the institute their own identity. Again, the institute wants to get contemporary views of the subjects taught across to secondary school students with the least possible loss of time. Because of this ambition, the secondary schools find in the institute their own identity. Again, the institute must be an academic body with full academic freedom: Dr. Morgan explained this morning why it must be free from the control of even the most benevolent and well-meaning of governments. And because it must be academic, the universities find in the institute their own identity. So far, we have been working without a director, on a limited budget, and with a small committee of seventeen acting as director, as board, and as all the supervising committees. Starting next year, we shall have a full board of thirty members; Dr. Morgan has assured us that we shall get the money we are after, and we now have a director. At the end of this month Dr. Morgan moves from the position of chairman of the board to the position of director, and this is why Professor Jackson was expressing so much enthusiasm about the immediate future. According to Aristotle, there are four causes for everything, and these causes answer the questions, "How? What? What with? and Why?"1 The framework of the causes in which the institute is set consists of four questions: How do we teach? Whom do we teach? What do we teach? And why do we teach? The question "How do we teach?" raises the matter of teaching methods. This is certainly an interest of ours, but it is a subordinate and secondary interest, because the question of what should be taught always has priority over it. The question of how we teach never becomes primary in education except under the pressure of panic or ignorance. Once we know what, the how takes care of itself, and as the how of teaching is an art, most of it can only be taught by experience. As for the question "Whom should we teach?" the ideal answer, in a democracy, is "everybody." Ideally, everyone should be educated up to the limit of his or her capacity or limits. To have a large group of intelligent people in society not so educated is humiliating to them and

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very dangerous to the society. But just because the answer is so universal, the problem cannot be solved by confusing the different aspects of it: by confusing, for example, university education with adult education, and flooding the universities with people who do not want to go there. Here again, as with teaching methods, panic and ignorance are apt to take charge. If a kindergarten teacher were to say that her essential function was to think up projects for keeping children busy and out of mischief, you would not think much of her philosophy of education. Yet we are constantly reading in newspapers and journals that with the threat of automation and the closing down of the unskilled labour market, we must think up pretexts for keeping millions of people busy and out of mischief. It is the what and the why of education that are the primary concerns of this institute. The two things are closely related. What we teach, we assume to begin with, is the essential subjects as they are now known. But these are taught in the light of two principles: that the society we live in is becoming more unified all the time, and that it is intellectually pluralistic. I do not think that the problem of two cultures is a serious problem on an intellectual plane: it does not worry me that humanists and scientists, engaged in scholarly research, should be unintelligible to one another. But they are both living in the same world: their duties are equally the duties of adult citizens living in an adult democracy. If I had to characterize the content of education in a phrase, I should say that what we are trying to teach is a vision of society. There are many perspectives on this vision, but the vision itself is one of community, and provides the context and the fulfilment for each approach. I cannot explain this last remark without taking up the final question, "Why should we teach?" When I spoke of a vision of society, I did not mean by society the phantasmagoria of current events, the things that happen on Monday and are forgotten on Tuesday. This world has its own kind of reality, but it is not the permanent form or the real structure of society. A world in which the presidency of the United States can be changed by one psychotic with a rifle is not real enough for an intelligent person to want to live in it. Professor Jackson spoke of the excitement of the future today, and I think many of us feel that we are at a historical moment in education, when a completely new age is about to dawn. But the future will disappear into the bowels of time like the past, and it is rather to the permanent and invisible present, the world behind the world of current events, the world that won't go away, that I want to

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direct your attention. This is the form of society, the vision of what humanity has done and can do, that is revealed by the arts and sciences and by the great professions that mediate between them and the public. Because we are trying to explore this world, we have joined ourselves, in our own quiet and I hope unpretentious way, to the company of witnesses described by St. Paul [Hebrews 12:1]: to the society, older than the Hebrew prophets or the Greek philosophers, of those who have devoted their lives and energies to fighting for the sanity and the dignity of mankind.

36 Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship 29 December 1963

From StS, 90-105. Originally published in PMLA, 79, no. 2 (May 1964): 1118, without the notes; seven paragraphs reprinted as "Elementary Teaching" in Prose Models: Canadian, American, and British Essays for Composition, ed. Gerald Levin et al. (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 56-9. Frye's speech was given at the General Meeting on English at the convention of the Modern Language Association, Chicago. The session was chaired by Marjorie Hope Nicolson and also included Francis Keppel, former dean of education at Harvard, speaking on the contribution of the U.S. Department of Education, which he now headed. I start with the obvious starting point: the gap between teaching and scholarship. For the most part, the conceptions of the arts and sciences which are presented to children in school are not those that contemporary scholars regard as being in fact the elementary principles of those subjects as now conceived. I think it was the mathematicians who first realized that the elementary mathematics taught in schools reflected conceptions of the subject that were centuries out of date. They have begun to do something about this, and to try to develop a curriculum for mathematics which will present, in a logical sequence, a contemporary view of what mathematics is. Other subjects, including English, remain uncoordinated, based on what are at best ad hoc principles. At one end there are the techniques for teaching children to read, which are said to be very efficient when they work, and at the other there are the survey courses of the first year in university, designed to give a student some notion of the chronological order in which the great classics got written. I think it should be possible to work out a curriculum for the intervening

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stages which will treat literature as a progressive and systematic study, and which will furnish the student with something of tangible and permanent value at whatever stage he drops out of it. It seems to me that, as with mathematics, the first procedure is to make sure that the literary sequence makes sense in itself, regardless of its relations with other subjects, even in elementary school. The relation with other subjects is certainly important and essential, but must come later in consideration. It has been said that this is an age of criticism: it is certainly an age of great self-consciousness about critical methods. A good many new "schools" of criticism have developed in recent years, seeming to have little in common beyond the ability to disagree with each other, and to provoke positive and negative responses which seem equally confused. I think myself that we shall see much more unity in contemporary criticism when we realize that most of these new schools are also new teaching methods, each of them finding its own centre of gravity at some stage of teaching. Students of linguistics, for example, naturally develop a special interest in the beginning stages of a language, and we notice that a significant number of scholars in this and related fields have devoted attention to kindergarten and grade i reading programmes. The so-called "New" Critics seem to have a particular centre of gravity in the upper years of high school and the lower undergraduate years, to which such textbooks as Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry naturally belong. My own interest, for the last dozen years, has been in a synoptic theory of criticism. I have been trying to relate the different techniques of criticism to one another, and if you read my Anatomy of Criticism you will see that one of the first things I complain about in that book is the absence of a coherent teaching programme for English. But I have also a more specific interest, derived from my study of Blake, in criticism by means of myths and archetypes, which leads to a special emphasis on conventions, genres, and the principles of literary structure and imagery. I think that this approach also has a particular centre of gravity in the teaching programme, one which comes somewhere between the end of elementary school and the beginning of high school. Some of my students have carried my critical principles into the teaching of English in schools, and they seem agreed that the logical place to begin studying myths and archetypes is grade 9. One of my colleagues at Victoria College has written a handbook on mythology designed for grade 9,1 the reception of which seems to establish the point. It is obvious that random patching of the existing curricula, though it

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may have a practical look, is no longer practical. The only thing that is practical now is to gain a new theoretical conception of literature. The source of this new theoretical conception is contemporary criticism; the application of it to an articulated English programme still awaits us. Most of our difficulties in teaching English result from an immature scholarship that has not properly worked out its own elementary teaching principles: most of the difficulties in our scholarship result, even more obviously, from deficiencies in the teaching programme. The establishing of a coherent curriculum for literature, and for English in particular, would give us a fully revived art of rhetoric, corresponding to the humanistic and Classical training that most of our great poets have had in the past. I hardly need to emphasize the benefit this would be to writers, in making them more secure in their techniques and more readily communicable to their public. Its effect on criticism itself will be even happier, as it will make rather less of it necessary to read. This last is not altogether a joke. The coming population explosion of students is a serious problem, certainly, but it is trifling compared to the real horror that awaits us in the immediate future: the population explosion in scholarship. With the greatly increasing numbers of university presses developing, of critical journals being subsidized, of bright young people eager to write for both, of a growing number of elementary and secondary school teachers taking a more academic interest in their subject, it will be essential to develop a literary education which can deal with this more selectively. Even granting that the motive for scholarly production in the immediate future will be the desire to become better known and attract better offers, rather than the necessity of feeding one's wife and children, still the new journals and publishers' lists must be filled somehow, and deans will continue to want lists of publications to base promotions on. There will, of course, always be a steady flow of genuinely new research and information, and of genuinely new critical insights. The young scholar and critic can never be in the happy position of the young poet, not feeling any compulsion to read anything except his own works and those of his close friends. But for a critic trained early in all the essential critical methods, not every academic exercise in criticism will be something to "keep up with" or list in a bibliography for students; and the better one's own literary education, the more quickly one can see how much of contemporary scholarly production one already knows. One would also hope to see the field of scholarship itself become more decentralized, as new techniques of criticism grow to

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maturity. The rigidly Wissenschaft framework of the Ph.D. is no longer applicable for many of the critical methods that are now appealing to students of literature; and the provision of alternative degrees in graduate schools would probably save a great deal of time and heartbreak for many such students. The first thing that university teachers want to know is: what is important in the pre-university study of literature? Most of us, when we complain about our freshmen, base our complaints on the theme of information or memorized knowledge: our students don't know enough; they haven't read enough; the chronology of literature is a vague haze in their minds; some of them could hardly distinguish Chaucer from Tennyson except by the spelling, and so on. But if students don't have enough information, it is a simple enough matter to supply it or provide the sources of supply. The trouble is that what they learn they learn within a mental structure of habits and assumptions, and university comes much too late in a student's life to alter that structure. For example: many students come to university assuming that convention is the opposite of originality, and is a sign that a poet is superficial and insincere. If they are writing poetry themselves, they are apt to get bristly and aggressive about this assumption. They can't be writing in a convention that all their friends are writing in: they must be conveying unique experiences, because their poems say that they are. Here is a result of illiterate teaching that makes the most scrambled nonsense out of all literary values, yet nothing can really be done about it. We tell them at university that literary sincerity is quite different from personal sincerity, that it can only be developed by craftsmanship working within a convention, and that it is the function of convention to set free the power of expressing emotions, not to provide formulas for ready-made emotions, though it may do this for dull writers. They listen; they understand; they may even believe; but the effect on their mental habits is very like the effect of schoolmarm English on the little boy: "Dar ain't no 'ain't you/ is dey? It's 'aren't you/ ain't it?" Or, again, I am at an educational conference listening to a speech by a high authority in the field. I know him to be a good scholar, a dedicated servant of society, and an admirable person. Yet his speech is a muddy river of cliches, flowing stickily into a delta of banalities at the peroration. The content of the speech does not do justice to his mind: what it does reflect is the state of his literary education. It is not that he has never read good literature, for he has the literary tastes that one would expect a

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cultivated man to have. But he has never been trained to think rhetorically, to visualize his abstractions, to subordinate logic and sequence to the insights of metaphor and simile, to realize that figures of speech are not the ornaments of language, but the elements of both language and thought. And because his main scholarly interests lie outside literature, he has never been compelled to make up for these deficiencies himself. The result is that he is fluent without being articulate, and cannot break out of an armour of ready-made phrases when he tries to express his real convictions. Once again, nothing can now be done for him: there are no courses in remedial metaphor. The greatest fallacy in the present conception of literary education is the notion that prose is the normal language of ordinary speech, and should form the centre and staple of literary teaching. From prose in this sense we move out to utilitarian English on one side and to the more specialized literary study of poetry on the other. Few subjects can be more futile than a prose-based approach to poetry, an approach which treats poems as documents, to be analyzed or summarized or otherwise translated into the language of communication. The root of the fallacy is the assumption that prose represents the only valid form of thought, and that poetry, considered as thought, is essentially decorated or distorted prose. When we suggest that young people try writing poetry, what most of them immediately produce are discontinuous prose statements about their emotions, or what they think their emotions ought to be, when confronted with the outside world. This is not merely because they have been taught to read poetry as a series of statements of this kind— "all that guff about nature," as one freshman expressed it—it is rather that they assume that all verbal expression derives from the attempt to describe something, and that poetry differs from prose, as a mode of thought, in being an attempt to describe subjective emotions. The main principles of a coherently organized curriculum are simple enough, but very different from the one just mentioned. Poetry should be at the centre of all literary training, and literary prose forms the periphery. In a properly constructed curriculum there would be no place for "effective communication" or for any form of utilitarian English. We still have textbooks on effective writing produced by people who have no notion how to write, mainly because they are trying to be effective about it, but one hopes that the market for them will disappear in our time. The styles employed by journalists and advertisers are highly

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conventionalized rhetorics, in fact practically trade jargons, and have to be learned as separate skills, without much direct reference to literature at all. A literary training is a considerable handicap in trying to understand, for example, the releases of public relations counsels. I am not saying this just to be ironic: I am stating a fact. I remember a New Yorker cartoon of a milkman who found the notice "no milk" on a doorstep, and woke up the householder at four in the morning to inquire whether he meant that he had no milk or that he wanted no milk. I suspect that the milkman was a retired teacher of English: certainly he reflects the disadvantages of being sensitive to the nuances of expression. A literary person confronted with most of the verbal technologies of our time is in the position of a genuinely intelligent student confronted with an intelligence test which grossly oversimplifies its categories and calls for an arbitrary choice of half-truths. He is sure to fail the test simply because he is more intelligent than the creature who designed it. The primary function of education is to make one maladjusted to ordinary society; and literary education makes it more difficult to come to terms with the barbarizing of speech, or what Finnegans Wake calls the jinglish janglage.2 The connections of literature are with the imagination, not with the reason, hence the ideal in literature is one of intensity and power rather than of precision or accuracy, as in science. There can be no intensity without precision, but to aim directly at precision is trying to seize the shadow. Poetry is one of the creative arts, in the context of music and painting, or rhythm and pattern. The rhythmical energy of poetry, its intimate connection with song and dance, is the elementary basis of its appeal, and the primary aspect of it to be presented to children, along with its affinity with the concrete and the sensational, its power of making things vivid by illustration, which has traditionally been expressed in the formula ut pictura poesis. I am certainly no expert on the teaching of children, but it seems obvious that all such teaching has to follow the child's own rhythm of thought and development, and not project on him some half-baked adult mystique, whether that mystique claims to derive from the antiintellectual left or the anti-anti-intellectual right. And it is clear that children recapitulate, as we should expect them to do, the experience of primitive literature, and turn most naturally and easily to the abstract and the conventionalized, to riddles, conundrums, and stylized jingles.

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The authors of The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren quote an unremarkable verse: Mrs. White had a fright In the middle of the night, She saw a ghost eating toast Half-way up the lamp post

and append the comment of a nine-year-old critic: "I think what's so clever about this is the way it all rhymes."3 Later, in speaking of the child's fondness for tongue twisters and multiple puns, they remark, "it takes children a long time before they cease to be amazed that one word can have more than one meaning."4 One would hope that this amazement would last the rest of their lives. The speech of a small child is full of chanting and singing, and it is clear that the child understands what many adults do not, that verse is a more direct and primitive way of conventionalizing speech than prose is. This principle, that the physical energy and concrete vividness of verse should normally be presented earlier than the more complex and adulterated rhythm of prose, affects the training in both reading and writing. It is difficult to know how a child thinks, but it is less difficult to know how he talks, once one has gained his confidence, and how he talks might afford an educational clue. Any child who has talked to me has addressed me in an uninhibited stream of burble for which the nearest literary counterpart is the last chapter of Ulysses. This chapter has no punctuation, and neither has a child's speech. Surely in teaching writing one should begin by trying to channel this free current of verbal energy and start giving it some precision as it goes along. To teach a child to write as though he were deciphering something from Linear B, proceeding from word to phrase, from phrase to sentence, from sentence to paragraph, is to ensure that what he eventually writes will be a dead language. Good writing has to be based on good speech, and good speech is a logical, though complex, development from natural speech. It is a striking feature of our culture that so much creative activity in literature, as in music and painting, should be either explicitly academic or explicitly resistant to education, a culture either of Brahmins or of Dharma bums. In Canada these two aspects of literary culture have reached a curious schizophrenia in which a constant polemic against academic poetry is carried on by poets who are nearly all employed by

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universities. It seems to me that the source of the feeling that education inhibits spontaneity may be somewhere in the region I have just indicated: in the reversal of the natural rhythms of thought and expression which a prose-based literary education is only too apt to produce. In its concrete and sensational vocabulary, in its use of simile and metaphor, in its functional employment of pun, ambiguity, and assonance, poetry is a method of thought as well as a means of expression. It is a primitive and archaic method of thought in many ways, but for that very reason needs to come early in one's education. One of the most obvious features of poetic thought is that it is categorical. Primitive poetry delights in catalogues, long lists of strange names, the names which are potent in magic, which are the keys to history, which summon up the deeds and loves of heroes and gods. This love of lists and catalogues runs through English literature from Widsith to Tolkien, and is something we find recurring in the history plays of Shakespeare, in Paradise Lost, in the Blake prophecies, in Whitman and Melville. It seems to me that there is much in the child's mind which responds to this primitive appeal of unlocking the word-hoard. A Canadian poet, James Reaney, has written a series of twelve eclogues in imitation of Spenser, in which the speakers are geese. The July eclogue is a dialogue between a goose named Anser, who is a progressive educator and consequently hates and distrusts all education, and an older goose named Valancy, named after a nineteenth-century mythopoeic Canadian poet, who tries to explain, in imagery derived from an unlikely mixture of the examination room and the Resurrection, what the kind of education he has had has meant to him: VALANCY: When I was a gosling he taught us to know the most wonderful list of things. You could play games with it; whenever you were bored or miserable what he had taught you was like a marvellous deck of cards in your head that you could shuffle through and turn over into various combinations with endless delight. At the end of the year we each made ourselves little huts of burdock leaves, lay down on our backs with large stones on our bellies and recited the whole thing over to ourselves forwards and backwards. Some of the poorer students were in those huts till November but even those to whom it was an agony, when they at length did know that they knew all that a young goose was supposed to know, the moment when they rolled the stone away and climbed out of their burdock hut—it was as joyous a moment as if they had been reborn into another world.

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ANSER: Well, well, well. Might I ask just what this reviving curriculum was? VALANCY: Who are the children of the glacier and the earth? Esker and hogsback, drumlin and kame. What are the four elements and the seven colours, The ten forms of fire and the twelve tribes of Israel? The eight winds and the hundred kinds of clouds, All of Jesse's stem and the various ranks of angels? The Nine Worthies and the Labours of Hercules, The sisters of Emily Bronte, the names of Milton's wives? The Kings of England and Scotland with their Queens, The names of all those hanged on the trees of law Since this province first cut up trees into gallows. What are the stones that support New Jerusalem's wall? Jasper and sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, Sard, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, Chrysoprasus, hyacinthine and amethyst.5

What this passage also indicates is that these lists of names do not remain merely lists, as they did in the mind of the Major-General in The Pirates ofPenzance, "in order categorical." They become the elements by which the imagination learns to control the natural world. The teacher needs to have the principle clearly in his mind that it is the function of literature to assimilate the natural world to the human world, chiefly through the associations of analogy and identity, the two modes of thought that reappear in literature as the simile and the metaphor. This is why poetry has so deep-rooted an affinity to correspondences and cosmological constructs of all kinds: to a universe where seven planets breed seven metals in the soil, where there must be twelve months of the year because there are twelve signs of the zodiac: four elements, and therefore four gospels, four points of the compass, and four quartets. Categories of this kind are neither obsolete science nor exploded superstition, but structural principles of literature. A keen student who discovers at university some such book as Tillyard's Elizabethan World-Picture may well feel that the Elizabethans possessed some kind of key to poetic language and thought that we have lost because we have lost sight of the gate it would open. But the world of The Faerie Queene is not essentially different from the world of Dylan Thomas or Yeats or Eliot, and there is no reason why the poetic world-picture should not be equally accessible to our own time. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance these sche-

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matic constructs had religious, philosophical, and some scientific validity as well. Since the Romantic movement, they have had more troglodytic connections with occultism, comparative religion, and more recently with certain branches of anthropology and psychology. One very important principle that contemporary criticism can contribute to the teaching of English, I think, is the principle that these constructs are part of the structure of literature itself, are an essential part of the teaching of it, but do not need to be projected on or derived from any other aspect of thought or culture. There is an odd paradox in the teaching process which sounds, at first, as though teaching were an art of noble hypocrisy, like the noble lie of Plato's state. There can be no sense of excitement or discovery, no glimpsing of new worlds of the mind, without dramatizing for the student a mental attitude that is inductive and empirical, putting the learner into the same psychological position as the most original of thinkers. Yet the teacher, while he presents his material to his students inductively, needs to have a deductive scheme in his mind to which his inductive presentation is related. In the teaching of science, for instance, nobody questions that a student should be trained in experimental methods and encouraged to experiment for himself at every stage. Still, the actual principles of science taught in at least pre-university levels are principles so solidly established that the experiments simply illustrate them: in other words the teacher of science thinks of his subject deductively, though he does not so present it, at least at first. So with the teaching of English. In teaching writing the inductive process appears as the feeling of self-expression, the power of developing a new skill, the growing sense of mastery in making all those strange new words say what one means. The teacher's role is to encourage this feeling while at the same time keeping a deductive frame of reference behind it. The teacher may, and should, have had some training in linguistics, and may share the purely descriptive and empirical attitude which that subject quite rightly takes to language. But learning to write is also a deductive and normative process: it requires a knowledge of systematic grammar and of the niceties and distinctions of verbal expression. In a world of vague speech where, as has been said, a disinterested judge is one who goes to sleep on the bench, the teacher of English must fight for and defend these inherited subtleties of language. Not to do so is to betray the subject, and both teacher and student need the support of a proper dictionary, one that says, loudly and frequently, "Most people

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get this wrong." I do not know what role the nomenclature of grammar plays in the study of it, at what stage it should be learned, or how much of it is really essential, but of its central importance there cannot be any real question. When I was an undergraduate I was continually answering examination questions about style. When examiners ran out of other things to ask, they demanded that we discuss with specific examples the style of Spenser or Sir Thomas Browne, and the desperate appeal to be specific did not conceal from us the fact that this was what we called a "shovelling" question. Today we are less concerned with style because we know more about the real basis of style in rhetoric and the principle of decorum. In the secondary school I should hope to see the study of grammar expand into the study of rhetoric, in the traditional sense of that word, the advance of the power of expression keeping pace with the growing realization that there is a finite number of rhetorical devices and of ways of constructing a sentence. I often think of the enthusiasm with which E.K., Spenser's editor, seized on the line from January, "I love a lass (alas, why do I love?)," and called it "a pretty Epanorthosis . . . and withall a Paronomasia."6 It cannot be said too often that it was this kind of technical interest and competence in rhetoric that made Elizabethan literature possible, and created a public for it. Here again, I do not know what role nomenclature, which is a formidable aspect of rhetoric, should play in the study of it. I know only that there ought to be enough words to think with. As Wallace Stevens says, "Progress in any aspect is a movement through changes of terminology."7 But even without an elaborate terminology, it should be a simple matter for grade 10 to analyze the rhetorical devices in any highly conventionalized writer, such as James Thurber or S.J. Perelman. As for the teaching of literature, it is obvious that a good deal of it should consist in reading and listening to stories. The stories of Biblical and Classical mythology should clearly have a central place in all elementary teaching of literature, so that the student is thoroughly familiar with them, as stories, before he embarks on the more systematic study of mythology that I have assumed would begin with high school. I suppose that incorporating Biblical myths into a comparative study of mythology in general might, in some parts of the country, mean circumventing or ignoring the screams of superstitious voters.8 In any case, all through elementary school a student should become gradually aware that stories come in certain conventional shapes. I think of stories as divisible into

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four mythoi or generic plots, the romantic, the comic, the tragic, and the ironic, and I hope that this division would be useful here, or some more adequate one. It seems to me that comic and romantic stories are the ones to stress in elementary school, and that tragic and ironic ones, which are most easily understood as divergences, reversals, or parodies of the other two, should be reserved for later study. It seems to me also that the analogies and resemblances that the young student finds in all his literary experience from Shakespeare to television are what should be stressed: they are more fun to identify9 and easier to remember than differences. Besides, the differences are mainly in value, and value judgments can wait. In fact they must wait, because they cannot be taught. When the student has reached high school he should be aware of the recurring or conventional images of poetry, or what I call archetypes. There are two great structures underlying poetic imagery, the cyclical and the dialectic. The cycle of nature, running through the phases of the day, the year, the circulation of water, the generations of human life, and the like, stretches like a backbone across the whole of literature. The separation of images into the contrasting worlds or states of mind that Blake calls innocence and experience, and that religions call heaven and hell, is the dialectical framework of literature, and is the aspect of it that enables literature, without moralizing, to create a moral reality in imaginative experience. The full understanding of these two structures is complicated for the teacher, but their elementary principles are exceedingly simple, and can be demonstrated to any class of normally intelligent fifteen-year-olds. Analysis of this simple kind is, in my opinion, the key to understanding, not merely the conventions and the major genres of literature, but the much more important fact that literature, considered as a whole, is not the aggregate of all the works of literature that have got written, but an order of words, a coherent field of study which trains the imagination quite as systematically and efficiently as the sciences train the reason. If the teacher can communicate this principle, he will have done all he can for his student. The reason for studying myths, in a course in literature, is that myths represent the structural principles of literature: they are to literature what geometrical shapes are to painting. The reason for studying mythology is that mythology as a whole provides a kind of diagram or blueprint of what literature as a whole is all about, an imaginative survey of the human situation from the beginning to the end, from the height to the depth, of what is imaginatively conceivable. This is ultimately the

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kind of deductive framework that, ideally, the teacher should have in mind. It seems clear too that the study of theme and structure is simpler, more fundamental, and logically earlier than the study of texture and ambiguity, which can easily lose sight of its controlling principles if it is begun too early. On looking over an anthology of poetry used in Ontario high schools, I notice that it gives a prominence to such poets as Masefield, Gordon Bottomley, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, and others which is absurdly out of proportion to their actual importance as poets. The reason is, of course, that they are the talky poets, who write versified prose, and therefore, it is assumed, students brought up to believe that prose is normal verbal utterance will find them easier to understand. I should hope that students of the future would be brought up on ballads, Elizabethan songs, Shakespeare sonnets, Donne, Blake, Emily Dickinson (the Grandma Moses of poetry), Wordsworth's Lucy poems, and similar foolproof introductions to poetic experience, so that they would regard vigorous rhythm and metaphorical thought as the simple and direct form of utterance. The anthologist obviously believes that genuinely modern poetry is too difficult because it has moved too far from the ordinary public. What he ought to believe is that the ordinary public is difficult to reach because it has moved too far from the simplicity of poetry. However, the anthology I am looking at also contains a poem by Campion: There is a garden in her face Where roses and white lilies grow; A heavenly paradise is that place, Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow. There cherries grow which none may buy Till "Cherry-ripe" themselves do cry . . . Her eyes like angels watch them still; Her brows like bended bows do stand, Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill All that attempt with eye or hand Those sacred cherries to come nigh, Till "Cherry-ripe" themselves do cry.10

The note in the back of the book says only that this is an example of the strained and exaggerated language that love poets of that day used. I

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would have students trained to realize, by the time they got to this poem, that it was about the Garden of Eden and the Garden of the Hesperides, and that it was written in a convention which had been identifying gardens with female bodies for centuries. Also that every detail in the imagery, such as the roses and lilies of the second line, belonged to a standard poetic language to be found in literally thousands of other poems. I should hope, too, that they would understand this, not as esoteric information, but as a normal part of the grammar of poetic expression, as the way poets write when they know their business, whatever age they happen to live in. Again, I do not know where or at what stage the chronology of English literature should be mastered by a high school student. Certainly it is difficult to remember that Milton influenced Keats unless one possesses the inference that Milton came earlier. But there is a complicating factor in modern education which hardly existed even a decade ago. It used to be that English literature was thought of as a cultural heritage which stretched back to Beowulf, and to Homer before that, and that the tradition of this inheritance was central in the understanding of it. So it is. But the perspective changes when we realize that Chinese and Arabic and Indian poets also use the language of the imagination, the same language except that they might speak of a lotus where a French or Italian poet would speak of a rose. In a world like ours the expansion of one's literary culture is not necessarily into our own tradition at all. This fact makes it even more essential to learn the grammar of the imagination which all literature employs. As Thomas Traherne says, "Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages."11 A generation ago the sense of tradition in literary culture was so strong that there seemed almost to be a necessary connection between literature and the conservative temperament, or at least some nostalgia for the past. Tradition is as important now as it ever was, but it is less exclusive: the vast shadow of a total human consensus in the imagination is beginning to take shape behind it. I am not worried about how students are going to find time to learn about the conceptions of literature that criticism is developing. For every hour of new knowledge we can get rid of at least another hour of wasted time. I am not competent either to discuss a much more serious question: where and how we are going to find teachers able to teach literature in a genuinely systematic and progressive way.12 All I can say is, first, that the difficulties, however enormous, are no reason for abandoning the attempt, and second, that giving some sequence and coherence to the

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literary curriculum is in the long run a simplifying rather than a complicating process, of more benefit to the mediocre as well as to the inspired teacher. Certainly the best teachers, at least, will not remain any longer than they can help out of touch with contemporary views of their own subject. What I do urge, as a final word, is that teachers should understand something of the practicality of literary training, at every stage of development. We begin by teaching children to read and write, on the ground that that is the most practical subject in the world, illiteracy being a problem on the same plane as starvation and exposure. But when we get to literature we tend to talk about it as though it were one of the ornaments of life, necessary for the best life, but a luxury for the ordinary one. It is essential for the teacher of literature, at every level, to remember that in a modern democracy a citizen participates in society mainly through his imagination. We often do not realize this until an actual event with some analogy to literary form takes place; but surely we do not need to wait for a president to be assassinated before we can understand what a tragedy is and what it can do in creating a community of response. Literature, however, give us not only a means of understanding, but a power to fight. All around us is a society which demands that we adjust or come to terms with it, and what that society presents to us is a social mythology. Advertising, propaganda, the speeches of politicians, popular books and magazines, the cliches of rumour, all have their own kind of pastoral myths, quest myths, hero myths, sacrificial myths, and nothing will drive these shoddy constructs out of the mind except the genuine forms of the same thing. We all know how important the reason is in an irrational world, but the imagination, in a society of perverted imagination, is far more essential in making us understand that the phantasmagoria of current events is not real society, but only the transient appearance of real society. Real society, the total body of what humanity has done and can do, is revealed to us only by the arts and sciences; nothing but the imagination can apprehend that reality as a whole, and nothing but literature, in a culture as verbal as ours, can train the imagination to fight for the sanity and the dignity of mankind.

37

Foreword to The Living Name 1964

"Foreword" to The Living Name: A Tribute to Stefan Stykolt from Some of His Friends, ed. W.J. Stankiewicz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), vii-ix. Stefan Stykolt (1923-62), who was born in Poland and educated at Harvard and Cambridge, was associate professor of Political Economy at Toronto, and former managing editor of the Canadian Forum. Like the other contributors to this book, I knew Stefan, and will always remember him because I knew him. I knew him first as an undergraduate, when he was active in so many of the student doings around Victoria College. He was particularly interested in the debating society, a significant interest in itself. Debating was the main nonathletic student activity in most universities down to the early years of the century: then it declined sharply to a minor activity, as something managerial, something with presidents and secretary-treasurers, took over the structure of student life. This change had occurred at Victoria College before Stefan's time, in 1930, when the Debating Parliament was replaced by the Union as the central student organization. I think the change was also a change in the whole relation of the university to its community. The prestige of debating implies a world in which ideas are important and in which different social attitudes, whether conservative or liberal, are shaping a progress towards some actualization of an idea. It was this older and more traditional conception of the university that Stefan adhered to, both then and later. At the same time, as far as his impact on Victoria College life was concerned, he was a portent of something then new, but fortunately increasing: a student with a wider and more cosmopolitan background and interests than most of the Southern Ontario high school

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graduates who make up the main body of students at Toronto. The natural direction of development, in university education, is towards a more cosmopolitan viewpoint, and the presence of such people as Stefan in undergraduate life makes the goal more visible to others. My next association with Stefan was on the Canadian Forum, where he succeeded me as editor. Here again was a deep commitment to something that may look at first like a lost cause, but stands for something permanent and deeply traditional. The decline of the journal of opinion is in society what the decline of debating is in the university: the sign of a corresponding decline in the belief in the reality of ideas, in the role of dialectic in shaping history, in the sense of the social function of the disinterested intelligence. The Canadian Forum is the only Canadian survivor of a once flourishing type of periodical which was equally interested in literature and in politics, and which thought of social phenomena as essentially things of the mind. It has never been a subsidized academic journal, but has depended on the unpaid and part-time support of academics like Stefan. Stefan's intellectual commitments were all the more impressive in that they sprang from a rather cautious and conservative temperament. He was not an angry young man, plunging into argument and opinion as modes of aggression: he invariably acted as one of a community. The world today does not want born leaders so much as it wants potential leaders, people who will lead if it is their job to do so, but whose primary instinct is to fulfil their function in their community, whatever it is. It was this kind of leadership that Stefan had, and it is the only kind that commands a loyalty which is rational and not merely emotional, a loyalty of friends and colleagues and not of followers. Of this loyalty the present book is evidence. The last time I saw Stefan was at a meeting of the Council of the Faculty of Arts and Science, when the mark of death was already on him. My own feeling of sadness was shared by Stefan's other friends, but not, I suspect, by him. The mournfulness of death is a matter of the survivors feeling sorry for themselves and for each other. When a young man dies in the full tide of his powers, there is a feeling of outrage as well as of sadness; it is an excuse to call the ways of Providence in question. That is a normal human reaction, and is checked only by our total ignorance of what those ways are. We know of no immortality except a continuing memory in one's own community. This is all that the present book in itself stands for, and it is all that Stefan's own words claim or expect. Yet

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probably, if we could see to the depths of our own minds, we should find there an unshakeable conviction that, somehow or other, nothing of permanent value is lost. Certainly I think that that conviction was in Stefan's mind as he quietly went on with his work in those brief last days.

38

Education—Protection against Futility 21 May 1964

Convocation address at the University of Manitoba, where Frye received an honorary LL.D. From the Alumni Journal [University of Manitoba], 24, no. 4 (Summer 1964): 4-7.

On an occasion like this there are always two things to be said which it is both a duty and pleasure to say. One is to express, on behalf of my colleagues as well as myself, our sense of privilege at becoming honorary graduates of this university, and our deep obligation to your Senate for the distinction it has conferred on us. I feel a close sympathy with a man I met in England who was moving out to a job at Port Credit, which is a dozen miles southwest of Toronto. He was particularly pleased because he had heard that Port Credit was west of Toronto, so he assumed that it would be near Winnipeg, and he would get the best of both worlds. Geographically, there are some difficulties in this, but educationally he was quite right; I always think of the University of Manitoba as a nextdoor neighbour, or did until recently, when buildings at Sudbury and Lakehead began to obstruct the view. The second thing to be said is a warm congratulation of all the graduands in front of me. You have reached a definite stage in your careers, comparable with birth, marriage, and death, and, in striking contrast to these other three events, you have reached it in a relatively conscious condition. The life of an undergraduate student is a very difficult one, because university students are socially and physically adults, while intellectually they are children. It is because they are willing to admit the immaturity of their minds that they come to college. Many bright young people drop out of their education at the earliest

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legal chance, and they often do so because they cannot endure the humiliation of continuing to be children in one area. At sixteen we are physically mature, socially at our most adaptable, and intellectually at the point of knowing all the answers. Surely that is the time to start one's encounter with the world, to go out and kill the dragon of the world's indifference to one's remarkable qualities. You dodged the dragon and came here instead, and all the people on this platform honour you for doing so. The four years at college are supposed to prolong the state of innocence, and they have some of the compensations of that state. The university is an artificially protected world, where you can study the great human constructs of art and science in a controlled situation. But you have eaten enough of the tree of knowledge to make it time for you to lose your innocence. By this time you are supposed to have an intellectual maturity to match your physical and social maturity. When you came here you knew the answers: now you know that there are no answers, and that the advance of knowledge consists only in moving through a graded series of questions. All answers are a deception and a cheat: it is to help you realize this that examination papers are demanded of you as the price of your degree. And yet the taking of your first degree may after all be a much less crucial event than it appears to be. There was a time when the task of a convocation speaker was much easier. If I were speaking to you a generation ago, I could start by assuming that all mankind was facing in the same direction, that is, forward. Human beings, I could say, had been progressing as long as they had been human: they could do nothing but progress, because they had been evolving for so long before that. So, I would conclude, after four years of standing to attention, you are now ready to take your own small but unique part in humanity's relentless onward and upward pilgrimage from the slime to the sublime. But in 1964 you may find this vision of human destiny a trifle simple-minded. It is perhaps not an accident that the word "excelsior," originally a motto for this upward climb, now means a form of stuffing designed to avoid direct contacts in experience. We think of modern science as beginning in the opposition of Galileo's view that the earth moves to that of the inquisitors that it stays put. But the opposition was not so clear-cut. Galileo only said that the earth moves: he never claimed that it was going anywhere in particular. This progressive view of graduation assumed that the movement from seminar to suburb was the last advance you could make. Most of you are

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much better adapted to suburbia, and of course when an organism has finally become adapted to its environment, it stops evolving. The weakness of this view was rather in the assumption that it is possible to leave a university. Some of you may make the gestures of leaving the University of Manitoba: you may drop all connection with your classmates, move to other parts of the world, and remain deaf to all appeals for alumni reunions and financial contributions. But only the most coarse-fibred of you will do this. The more sensitive will realize that the University of Manitoba is now your alma mater, a Latin phrase which means, in modern English, your mother fixation. Like Galileo's earth, you are committed to revolving around it, as the original source of your own light, for the rest of your lives. Being graduated, then, is simply a matter of changing one's educational context. Wherever you go or whatever you do, the network of education will be all around you. It will take such a bite out of your income tax that you will be a supporter of education in any case, and have only the choice of being an involuntary or a well-informed one. It is becoming plainer all the time that education, like social services, cannot be confined to strategic spots: it is a womb-to-tomb activity, and there is no point at which we are free of it. This has always been true, but it is now much more obviously and physically true. Half a dozen new universities are due to appear shortly in the environs of Toronto, some of them needed by the increase in population, others inspired by the Madison Avenue principle that status symbols are the first necessity of life. Similar developments are taking place everywhere, including of course Manitoba. Your neighbourhood, wherever it is, is likely soon to be boasting and boosting a new university, and you will be expected to take an intelligent interest in its development as it grows, from the stage of opening its library with a shelf of textbooks and an old copy of Time, to the stage of acquiring a second shelf of books and appointing a Dean of Graduate Studies. The problem of staffing all these new universities is a formidable one, and even some of you who have been voted least likely to succeed by your classmates may find yourselves instructing in them. And, behind all this, with automation and the shrinking of the work week, looms the gigantic spectre of adult education, a phantom so huge that no one dares to look it in the face. There are many things that can happen to the human race before the end of the twentieth century. One of them is extermination: another, according to a great many theologians, including, as I remember, Isaac

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Newton, is the millennium.1 We may perhaps assume that what will actually happen will fall somewhere between these two extremes. If so, one very probable feature of life in the near future is an increase of leisure on a scale that has been, up to now, unthinkable. This is a familiar problem, but I touch on it because it is an educational problem. Until now, the stock question to ask about anyone was, What does he do? We are entering a world in which this question is becoming much less important. The shorter the amount of compulsory working time, the greater the amount of leisure, and the more leisure there is, the less important the difference becomes between what we make our living at and what we do for interest. The crucial question is becoming rather, What is he? and we have no standards as yet for answering that question. The growth of leisure will tend, I think, to make it more obvious that humanity is divided into two main groups: those who are living and those who are waiting to die. The practical value of your education, then, if I am right, will be in the help it gives you to decide which of these groups you will belong to. You can see, then, how false it would be to tell you that the gates of the University of Manitoba are clanging shut behind you, and that you are embarking on a great adventure in an unknown world. You are not going anywhere. You are re-entering the world of education: there is nowhere else to go, and no place to hide. I sincerely hope that nothing will happen to you, of any interest or importance, except educational things, for nothing else can, except disasters. It would be even less true to speak of your joining the forward march of humanity. There is no progress in human life as such: the march of progress applies only to such things as leukemia and suburban bungalows. There is genuine progress only in education, and the progress in that is a continual rediscovery of ignorance. Those rare moments when the authority of great poetry or music stuns one into silence, or when the structure of everything one has known or believed in breaks down and we are brought back once more to an unborn world of limitless possibilities—these are the great moments of the mind, and they are not moments of achievement, but of a fresh beginning. A graduation ceremony, like this one, symbolizes the recurring moment when we are ready to begin our lives again. The university does not train your intelligence to prepare for ordinary life. It tries to help your intelligence realize that it lives in a greater world than ordinary life does. It cannot protect you against what the world calls failure; but it does try to protect you against real failure, which is futility.

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The moment when you enter the world of intelligence is the moment when the university comes to a focus in you and is embodied in you. In that moment you are aware of a greater world than the rest of life can provide, a world where there are no clocks to tick away one's life, and where the vision is altogether different from the one that ends in silence and the dark.

39 The Classics and the Man of Letters Winter 1964

From Arion, 3 (Winter 1964), 49-52. This questionnaire, sent out to a number of "men of letters" (including professional writers, critics, and scholars, all of whom were in fact men), was the first of several by which the editors of Arion hoped to explore, as they put it, "the quality and kind of existence that the Classics lead today." 1. What influence have the Greek and Latin classics had upon your creative and/or critical work? Has that influence been good or bad, extensive or insignificant? Has it grown or declined in the course of your career? The day after I wrote my last examination I went and got some Loeb Library texts and started reading at them, with the feeling that I had ended the compulsory time-waste period and was at last able to educate myself properly. The influence of the Classics has grown steadily since that time, and if my work is any good, the influence has been good. 2. Would you advise a young writer or critic to get himself a Classical education? If yes, why? And what kind of Classical education would you recommend? I think most young critics should start as I did, picking up some Latin and Greek as soon as they have finished jumping through the hoops and turning Ph.D. cartwheels to amuse their elders. By that time they're old enough to know what they're interested in and what to look for. 3. Claims are still made for a living continuity between Graeco-Roman civiliza-

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tion and our own. If these claims are anything more than familiar cultural gestures, at what levels, and in what contexts, can they still valuably be made? The Greek and Latin civilizations formed the basis of a humanist education for so long because they were completed civilizations: they could be studied as laboratory specimens of culture, with a detachment impossible in studying one's own. Hence it was possible for a Classical education to breed a liberal attitude; an education based on the contemporary can develop only a managerial one. 4. How far can the Classics live meaningfully within our culture, and our literature, when so few people have a real command of Greek and Latin? Can translations take the place of the original texts? (Obviously, not absolutely. But is there some sort of sliding scale—i.e., Plato and the historians can survive in translation; the dramatists and lyric poets cannot?) What value is there in the kind of knowledge of Greek and Latin which a literary man may acquire for himself, as he learns German or Italian? Is there any real value in struggling ignorantly through a difficult ancient text? I think, short of taking the time to learn to read Greek and Latin, one should use translations for everything, keeping a wary eye out for what ought to be read more intensively. For a critic, and perhaps for a poet too, nothing can replace the kind of intensity that reading a text in a difficult foreign language can provide. There is a great deal of value in struggling "ignorantly" through a difficult ancient text—one's ignorance obviously diminishes to some extent in the process. See Appendix. 5. If the Classics can to some extent survive in translation (see question 4 above), what sort of translation do we mainly want? Translations which offer "an English poem" for a Greek or Latin one? Or translations which offer a literal account of what the original "says"? Poetic translations of Classical poetry are all right as a literary exercise or technical tour de force. As a guide to the poetry itself they're an abomination. What the inexperienced student finds to be most poetic about them invariably turns out to be the pseudo-Swinburne or whatever it is in the translator's rhetoric. No translation of anything worth reading is of any real value except as a crib to the original, and so translations for the general reader ought to be as literal as possible.

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6. If it is true, or arguable, that modern [criticism] (i.e., criticism after Pound or Eliot) has functioned with only slight reference to Greek and Roman literature, is this because the Classics are not deeply relevant to modern literary and literary-critical problems? Or because there have been so few to urge their relevance? I don't understand this question: surely what Pound and Eliot did was enormously to increase the sense of the immediacy of Classical literature, and "criticism after" has followed in their wake. Eliot pointed to the importance of Frazer, who's a Classical scholar, and I'd say that Gilbert Murray and Jane Harrison and Cornford and several others have done an immense amount for the criticism of English literature. 7. Since the Romantic period, Greece has provided the cultural myths which had previously been provided by Rome. Is this still a Greek period? Or has there been anything in the way of a Roman comeback? There's a good deal of snobbery among Classicists about the superiority of Greek to Latin, an attitude which carries on the old snooty view of medieval Latin. For the student of English literature, the true gods are Jupiter and Venus; it's silly to insist that Zeus and Aphrodite have any existence. 8. European writers and artists spent many centuries working over, domesticating, "imitating" the various modes and genres of Roman literature (and Greek, to a lesser extent). Is there anything still to be done? Or have the Classics simply been used up? This question is false in its assumptions. Things don't get used up in literature. There's exactly as much Homer available now as there was in Aeschylus' time. 9. Much of this struggle (see question 8 above) went into finding formal equivalents for Classical forms (e.g., the Spanish lira or Marvellian stanza for the Horatian stanza; the heroic couplet for the elegiac or hexameter line, etc.). Is this in any way relevant to the modern writer's formal interests? Formal equivalents are a random and minor form of Classical imitation, though of course a skilful and learned poet can make many discoveries

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here. I think it's more rewarding to take a more flexible view of form in general. The writer of fiction, for example, can learn a great deal from, say, Petronius or Lucian, if he realizes that what they wrote was a valid form of fiction, and still is, even if it wasn't "novels." 10. In the past, Greece and Rome have provided valid cultural myths. Can these myths, or any new comparable mythologizations of the ancient world, survive our much greater historical knowledge? This question is also false in its assumptions. Any historical knowledge which attempts to supersede a valid cultural myth ceases to become genuine knowledge. In literature, as in painting and sculpture, the Classics no longer have a monopoly of tradition; the poet is as free to be influenced by Chinese or Arabic as by Latin. 11. What has been the effect of the Musee Imaginaire metaphor by which Greece and Rome are no longer two uniquely privileged, paradigmatic father-cultures, but simply two cultures among many? Liberating, or destructive? See the previous question. The expansion of tradition and influence has been immensely liberating, but Greek and Latin are still our direct ancestors, and have a privileged position. One's father isn't somebody else's father. The point is that the Classical languages are informing principles in our own language, and hence affect our thinking in a way that Chinese or Russian won't do for centuries, if ever. We can't think, in the full sense of trying to express oneself verbally, without shuttling between abstract and technical language. And, for better or worse, abstract language in English is Latin and technical language is Greek. 12. Students were formerly taught Latin and Greek literature, but not English literature. English literature has now taken their place, so that where people once read Homer and Horace at school and then found them echoed in Milton and Pope, they now read Milton and Pope at school and painfully work their way back to Homer and Horace. What are the effects of this altered perspective? The effects are that it takes much longer to get a genuine literary education. One works, as the wording suggests, from the complex to the simple, from the elaborations to the naked principles. This is Matthew

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Arnold's point in the Preface to the Poems of 1853. There is nothing whatever to be done about it, except be aware of it and get to the simple principles as quickly as possible. 13. What one Greek or Latin author do you personally, as man or writer, turn to most often ? It's difficult to give any answer to this. As a critic, I'm struggling with a technical subject. And as there are no technical words except Greek ones (see question 11 above), I suppose I turn most frequently to Plato and Aristotle, simply because they have the words. If I had nothing to do but read, the answer would be very different. 14. Who in your opinion is the biggest, most inflated Greek or Latin bore? For a scholar there is no such thing as a bore: there are only relevant and irrelevant writers. I don't consider Plautus a great poet, or Cicero a major thinker; but I feel their vast ramifying influence on the Renaissance a subject of endless fascination. 15. How valuable in your opinion is the Classical education offered today at both the undergraduate and graduate level in the American (or British) university? Is the instruction offered pertinent to the needs of the able student who is not professionally interested in Classics (i.e., who wants a good general education and has no intention of becoming a Classicist)? What are its merits? Its deficiencies? There are excellent and imaginative books in Classical scholarship which would interest any serious student of any literature. And I know a few professors of Classics who understand the wants of non-Classical students of literature and give special courses briefing them quickly and relevantly. Otherwise the general attitude seems to be that if a professor of Classics in the modern world is going to waste his sweetness on the desert air he might as well be a cactus, prickly and unapproachable. 16. Classical studies are sometimes accused of being so concerned with philological skills (text criticism, literary history, etc.) that they neglect literary questions altogether. If this is true, does it matter? What, in your opinion, should be the relation between scholarship and criticism at the graduate level?

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See above. It's a most unhealthy situation in which professional Classicists are pedants and people with a serious literary interest in the Classics are amateurs. It does seem to me that most of the really essential philological work has been done, and that a career in Classics without a serious literary interest is pretty unrewarding. But I suppose that in an educational system like ours it's as hard for a Classics student to get a literary education as it is for a student of literature to get a Classical education. Appendix (cf. no. 4) This is a transcription of my own pencilled notes in my copy of Prometheus Bound [by Aeschylus], the opening speech of Kratos (first eleven lines). I don't have a Greek typewriter, so I don't reproduce the text. The reason I exhibit this document is to illustrate the kind of superficially focused interest a student of English literature, who has no specialized knowledge of Greek, can get from "struggling ignorantly through a difficult ancient text." Chthonos is a thematic word in this play. Leorgon means wretch, miscreant, villain; it carries the etymology of audacious or all-daring. Cf. pharmakos in Aristophanes and elsewhere. line 6. Cf. the way that Milton's mind jumps from "adamantine chains" to "penal fire," Satan being a kind of inverted Prometheus.1 line 7. Explicit association of fire and instruments of production as well as, of course, the arts. Hence the force of the word pantechnouin the next line. line 8. Thnetoisi is mortals in the full sense of "dying ones." line 9. The words hamartias and diken are difficult for a reader who has inherited a Christian framework of thought, where they mean sin and righteousness. Here they bind together religious, moral, political, even physical ideas. line 9. Tremendous clashing noise in the lines, with the alliterative d's: how far is the assonance of pedon (i), petrais (4) and pedals (6) intentional? line 10. How close is tymnnida to tyranny? Cf. line 224. line i. line 5.

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In Blake Prometheus is Ore and Hephaestus the Spectre of Urthona; the fall of Prometheus is the cause of Hephaestus' honour, as the word anthos (7) shows; cf. Jerusalem I. Kratos is speaking, of course, and implies a total antithesis between the human,2 which is right in a context of power, even though the antithesis isn't resolved.

40 Charles Bruce Sissons, 1879-1965 June 1965

From Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada, 4th ser., 3 (1965): 173-5. Charles Bruce Sissons, B.A., LL.D., F.R.S.C., professor emeritus of Ancient History in Victoria College, University of Toronto, died suddenly on May 27,1965. He was born at Crown Hill, Ontario, on September 4,1879, was educated there and at Barrie, and entered the University of Toronto, registering in Victoria College, in the class of 1901, where he was graduated with the Gold Medal in Classics. A brief career in public and high school teaching followed, and he was principal of Revelstoke High School from 1904 to 1908. He joined the Classics staff at Victoria College in 1909 as lecturer in Ancient History and Classics. He remained at Victoria College, with the appropriate promotions, until his retirement in 1947, when he became professor emeritus. In 1913 he married Anna Normart, of Pennsylvania, and he was the father of four sons. His scholarly career, in the limited sense, began fairly late in life, and was established by his monumental Life and Letters of Egerton Ryerson, of which the first volume appeared in 1937 and the second in 1947. He had previously written a life of Ryerson for the Makers of Canada Series in 1930, but this work superseded it and is still a landmark in the history of education in Canada. Egerton Ryerson was the first principal of his alma mater Victoria College, and it was natural that he should be commissioned to write a History of Victoria University, which appeared in 1952. A collection of Ryerson's letters to his daughter was edited by him in 1955, under the title My Dearest Sophie. He then turned to a closely related interest, the secular and religious elements in Canadian education. In

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this field he had written Bi-lingual Schools in Canada as early as 1917. The result was Church and State in Canadian Education (1959), which surveys the country province by province and deals historically with the theme. His autobiography, Nil Alienum, appeared in 1964, shortly before his death. Whatever the complexity of the material he had to deal with, he was always a fine, even a distinguished stylist, writing with great charm and with a sense of accuracy which showed itself as clearly in the choice of a phrase as in the organization of facts. Nil Alienum, in particular, is one of the finest Canadian autobiographies of recent years. His work was recognized by the award of the degree of LL.D. from the Universities of Ottawa and of Toronto, and by his election to the Royal Society in 1948. In 1952 he received the Tyrrell Medal for History, Dr. Tyrrell himself journeying to Quebec in his ninety-third year to make the presentation. This account of his scholarly career does not begin to do justice to his versatility or his importance as a man in public life. Throughout his university life he took an active part in Senate and Council debate, and was particularly respected for his expert knowledge and understanding of the principle of federation, which is so important an aspect of the Faculty of Arts and Science at Toronto. He clarified many issues in this field, and fought hard for academic freedom, being a central figure in the defeat of two foolish and arbitrary attempts to restrict it, one an attempt to discharge a brilliant historian and the other an effort to prevent some students of German origin from being enrolled through the federated colleges in the university.1 His efforts to prevent the neglect of his own subject by educational bureaucrats are also of considerable historical importance. He was a close friend of two prominent Canadian politicians, J.S. Woodsworth and E.C. Drury, and throughout his career was a person whose advice was frequently sought, chiefly on educational matters, by the provincial government of Ontario. In his autobiography he rather deprecates his personal influence on the U.F.O. regime of 1919-23, but was clearly close to many of its central figures.2 He was secretary of the Ontario Housing Committee in 1918-19. In 1920 he bought a farm at Orono, Ontario, and continued to run it with great efficiency until his death. Here again he was often involved in local political and educational issues. He took a keen interest in athletics, and coached the Victoria soccer team for many years. But his main athletic interest was in mountaineering, in which he achieved a distinguished record, ascending several peaks in the Rockies and making the first ascent of Mt. Cirrus in

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1939. His Classical interests naturally took him to Greece, where he also climbed Mt. Olympus in deep snow in 1933. From 1917 to 1921 he was on the executive of the Alpine Club of Canada. He remained in excellent health until the end, and only a day or two before he died he wrote a lucid and authoritative letter to a newspaper on the subject of bilingualism in education. Full and well rounded as his life was, it is difficult to think of him as gone: as his colleague Professor Gilbert Norwood said in a congratulatory ode written on the occasion of his retirement from active teaching: cessas? at miserere iam studentum quorum saecula multa te sodalem, te doctorem habuere, te parentem.3

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New Programmes 1965

This is the section written by Frye in Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto: Report of the President's Committee on the School of Graduate Studies, 1964-65 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 41-2. President Bissell had established the committee to examine and make recommendations concerning the academic, administrative, and financial arrangements of the School of Graduate Studies in the University of Toronto. The chair was Professor Bora Laskin (Law); Professor Ernest Sirluck, associate dean of the School of Graduate Studies, was also a member. In every graduate school some subjects are better covered than others, and sometimes important subjects are underdeveloped or not dealt with at all. This committee has already made reference (in chapter i) to certain gaps in graduate offerings at the University of Toronto. The submissions to the committee have included proposals for new Master's programmes, one in nursing and one in hygiene or public health. Other possibilities occur; for example, dramatic studies is not offered as a degree programme anywhere in Canada. For the most part it is beyond the competence of this committee to make recommendations about gaps or neglected areas. There are, however, a few exceptions to the committee's sense of restraint, and it deems it appropriate to speak about them, especially since they illustrate its view that the School of Graduate Studies should be sensitive to the existence of gaps in coverage and always be ready to encourage as well as to entertain sound proposals designed to close them. The first case on which comment is in order is that of religious studies, where the university has a large and fully competent group of scholars

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who are willing and anxious to engage in a regular graduate programme but whose work has been confined so far mainly to the professional theological degrees which, as such, are outside the university's jurisdiction. One reason for the confinement is doubtless the hypnotic effect of sections 7 and 112 of the University of Toronto Act which, in effect, prohibit the teaching of religion in the university as such. At present the theological faculties of Emmanuel, Trinity, Wycliffe, and Knox are co-operating in a unified graduate programme leading to the Th.D. The theological faculty of St. Michael's College has recently proposed to take part in this programme. Such a group of scholars could well form the nucleus of a regular M.A. and Ph.D. programme in religious studies in the graduate school. To this could be added, as President Kelly of St. Michael's College suggested to the committee, scholars in Judaism, Islam, Oriental religions, or in such departments as anthropology, philosophy, or psychology. Such a group would probably operate as a centre or institute rather than as a single department. It would be broad enough to encompass comparative religion, but it would be unfortunate to set it up in a way that would discourage a student from finding his subject of research, if he wished, in the academic fields now included in the Th.D. programme. The clauses in the University of Toronto Act are based on the principle of the separation of church and state, and are designed to avoid a situation in which academic credit might depend on a profession of faith in religion. In the opinion of this committee, they cannot be interpreted as prohibiting the academic study of religion, at least at the graduate level. To interpret them in this way would be as foolish as to try to abolish the Department of Political Economy on the ground that some students might get indoctrinated with Conservative or Liberal ideas.

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Report on the "Adventures" Readers 9 March 1965

From the typescript in NFF, 1991, box 36, file 3. This was a report written by Frye at the request of Harcourt, Brace, and World to evaluate their series of readers, and it led to his being asked to supervise the preparation of a new series that followed his principles, Literature: The Uses of the Imagination. I

There are two kinds of mythology that education has to deal with. One is cultural mythology, or literature proper. This presents the human situation, not as it appears, as a dissolving flux, but as it really is, in its permanent forms. To reach this kind of reality its rhythms have to be more concentrated, its imagery bolder, and its conventions at once more stylized and more varied, than anything we can use for ordinary experience. But society also produces a social mythology, the purpose of which is to persuade its citizens to be docile and obedient, and accept certain values and standards. Social mythology is the area of popular literature: its aim is stock response, not the developing of the imagination. A fully developed social mythology consists of two parts: an idealized or nostalgically recalled past, or popular tradition, and a sentimentalized present. The "progressivist" theory of education of a generation ago asserted in effect (because it didn't actually know what it was talking about) that children in school should learn as much social mythology as possible, and as little as possible of everything else. This aim has been rudely shattered in mathematics and the sciences, but there is still no such subject as literature in school, hence the place where the teaching of literature ought to be is still a progressivist's haven. The grades 7 and 8

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readers (it may be inaccurate to refer to them in this way, but their titles are too much alike) are concerned with presenting a social mythology. They are not interested in literature, but in Americanism. They present a mythological past in terms of what critics call a "pastoral myth." Certain mythical figures loom out of it, some of them named, like Franklin, Jefferson, or Washington, and some general, like the pioneer, the hunter, and the cowboy. Certain pastoral themes, the animal story, the exploring story, the nearly disastrous but ultimately successful quest, and of course the Western story, recur over and over. Phases of history, the Indians, the Revolutionary War, the opening up of the West, the reminiscences of the 18905 (I notice that the Civil War is touched very lightly), are presented in a nostalgic form. In the foreground is the present, a happy clean world of fun-loving middle-class children, embodied in a number of gee-whiz stories in which the reader is expected to identify with the main character. The rest of the world, including the rest of the United States, hardly exists at all: there are travelogue stories about "other lands," where the people are slightly different from Americans: they should be understood and respected, but of course not lived with. Kindness and consideration for others are placed in a context of superiority, not of equality: one feels tender about animals and the handicapped. Blindness is almost an obsession in these readers, and Helen Keller, conceived as a triumph of difficult adjustment, is their patron saint. It is a peculiarity of American social mythology that its mythology of the past largely contradicts its mythology of the present. American pastoral myths, for all their ready-made emotionalism, contain themes which are unusually sensible compared to what most of the rest of the world has. According to them, self-reliance and independence are primary virtues; tolerance, which is really intellectual independence, and the ability to think and act for oneself were what built up the country and will continue to build it. A literary education could get somewhere with these assumptions. But no adjustment-myth can possibly believe in freedom or independence: if it did it would cease to become an adjustmentmyth. The compilers of these books show immense ingenuity and skill in finding the kind of material that presents what Design for Learning calls the "rosy-cosy" womb-world of benevolently authoritarian contentedness.1 They train the student in stock response, not in imagination; they teach students to respond to advertising and propaganda, not to analyze them. The grade 7 book ends with a calendar in which the student is told to make ritual genuflections at the right times of year to the veterans, the

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memory of Washington, and, with a particularly maudlin emphasis, to Christmas, doubtless because Christmas shopping is so important in the economy. The literary piece de resistance of the grade 7 book is naturally Dickens's Christmas Carol. The grade 8 book ends with a group of stories presenting a rather sticky Momville moralism, some of it genuine, but all of it concerned to oil the machinery of American middle-class society. In other words, the compilers are concerned primarily to find a good level of popular literature for presenting a social mythology. The resemblance between these readers and the Reader's Digest is shattering: I had innocently thought that people read the Reader's Digest because they believed it to be an abridgment of contemporary magazine articles, not because they found it a comic-book monthly version of a school reader. They also resemble strongly (even to the choice of selections) the bedside book which Mr. Conrad Hilton has substituted for the Gideon Bible. In the grade 7 book, Benjamin Franklin is presented as a "lazy" man—that is, as a man whose main ambition it was to work for the technological comforts of the modern home. Edison is, more plausibly, presented in the same way, and God has similar ambitions for his Americans in the Thanksgiving section. The Western pioneers and Indian shooters, the great scientists, everything admirable in the past, is seen as leading up to a world of comfort and security, where the main outlet for adventure is in operating the technological machinery. Education of this type is really an education through narcissism: it is not an accident that a section entitled "Understanding Yourself Through Reading" is illustrated by a picture of a girl staring at herself in a mirror. The editors know very well the preoccupations of a teenager's mind: the mores of the basketball team and the school paper, love of animals, resentment at parental authority combined with a conviction of its ultimate benevolence, and they have hunted high and low—chiefly low—for stories which hold up mirrors to those preoccupations. There is an unconscious irony in one of the best things in the grade 7 book, a Burmese folk tale in which a disillusioned bird who has learned to talk, and to think for itself, remarks to a parrot: "Man loves to hear only his own thoughts repeated. He is not interested in truth or wisdom from any other source." At the bottom of this page the student is asked if he agrees with this. He'd better. It follows that actual literature is conceived as something that should be approached very cautiously—poetry, in particular, is treated as though it were boiling oil. In the first place, I see nothing in the grade 7 book that could not be understood by a normal child in grade 4, and proportion-

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ately with the other books. In the second place, the readers assume a bias of mind which is not merely subliterary but antiliterary—quite rightly from their point of view—and practically everything referred to, to awaken the student's interest, is outside literature. There is a continuous disintegration of literary experience itself: the student is never encouraged to compare anything with anything else for similar literary qualities. Reading the poetry selections, it is difficult not to feel that the aim is to inoculate the student with enough poetic experience to make him immune to it for the rest of his life. You start with limericks, and practise writing them; then you go on to versified doggerel expressing something in the stock-response area; you keep feeding in something anti-intellectual from Riley2 or Kipling from time to time just to keep the student reassured; and finally you get to a few easy and mainly very short actual poems, most of them still not read as poems but as symbols of Americana. Fiction is approached in the same way. The stories are supposed to be read entirely for content: stories about an eleven-year-old landing a plane, about a baseball game, about breaking in a colt, about acting in a play, are regarded as different because the content is different. The content is thus being used hypnotically to distract the student's attention from the monotony of the form. The manuals make it clear, to a detached reader, that the student is to be endlessly prevented from seeing that he is really reading the same story over and over again. I have often said myself that of the four forms of fictional experience, tragedy, irony, comedy, and romance, comedy and romance are the basic ones, and should be presented first, because children respond to them readily, and people with childish tastes never read anything else. But that remark is coming home to roost: the concentration on facile comedy and romance forms in these readers is so stifling that I am no longer sure I was right. The idea expressed in the word "adventures" in the title is not that self-reliance and courage are necessary for the imaginative exploration of literature. The adventures are throughout regarded as narcissistic or fantasy-adventures. The good student of science is proud of the impersonality of science, but literature is never presented as having any authority: it provides only amusement and "something to think about"— what, is never said. Apart from the readers themselves, the student is assumed to read nothing but more of the same. It's wonderful to be able to curl up with a good book, is the idea—the student is never expected to feel that it might be even more wonderful if a good book curled him up.

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There is a constant fear of going over the student's head, and a constant babble of apologies and warnings from the surrounding material and the manuals if there is any danger of doing so: there is no feeling that if something is over a student's head he might conceivably stretch his neck. The effort to popularize literature, when made so determinedly, can only end, if it succeeds, in preventing the student from ever enjoying anything except popular literature. Two aspects of popular literature excluded from these books are the sexy and the violent. No educator wants either, and I suppose there are practical reasons why not merely the sexy but the sexual is missing, silly as it seems to keep pretending, in these days of precocious dating, that the teenager's world is a sexless one. Still, the sexlessness and the relentless folksiness of these readers does make it clearer to me why so much of the popular adolescent taste in reading is so prurient and sadistic. Sex and violence are associated with adult books, the books one reads outside of school or after one has finished school. It seems to me that a little more concentration on serious literature would make this kind of reaction less automatic. I understand the principle of supplying a good deal of reading material. The idea is that the little so-and-so's will at least have to tackle a sixhundred-page double-column book a year if they do nothing else. Such reading leads to a superficial fluency, given a sufficiently low level of difficulty. At best it can lead to knowledgeability, even to some degree of cultivation. What it can't do is to make the student articulate, and of course the failure of literary education on this side of the Atlantic, as compared with the other side, to make the student reasonably articulate at fourteen has often been commented on. For articulateness, the student needs a great deal of slow and highly concentrated reading, with heavy emphasis on the formal qualities of what he reads. This is the only way of keeping the mind active while practising reading skills. Everything in these readers assumes a passive mind, a tabula rasa: the student is encouraged, not to analyze, but to meditate, in other words to make stock responses. He's asked if he likes a character in a story or finds him believable: he's not asked if he thought the story worth writing in the first place. He's asked if he agrees with the main point; he's not asked why the author is pushing the point, much less why the editors are pushing the author. The grade 8 book has Frost's Stopping by Woods, and remarks: "To others the experience may seem simple and unimportant, biit for us it has a deep meaning." It seems to me that a superficial

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definite meaning is better than trying to kid oneself that attaching no meaning to it at all is what makes it profound. Of course immense expertise has gone into these books. The editors have carefully "researched" all their material, and know that it's exactly what the average student at that age level most readily responds to. This is the criterion throughout: a section in the grade 9 book, "Man's Conquest of the Air," is described as a "thematic unit." It is not there because it is even in the wildest imagination a literary thematic unit: it is there because it's something kids will be interested in. But if we once think of literature as a subject, which the student learns in the same way that he learns geography or history or physics or algebra, all this expertise shrivels into something of very little importance. In the grades 9 and 10 books there is still the same steady insulting of the student's intelligence, the same desperate fear of the intellect and imagination, the same reliance on automatic external stimulus, the same feeling that genuine literature is radioactive, and needs a heavy lead blanket of the folksy, the tee-hee whimsical (e.g., Every Dog Should Own a Man, by Corey Ford, reprinted from This Week), the facile-picturesque (e.g., Hawaii, by James Michener, reprinted from Holiday), and a whole section comfortingly labelled "Just for Fun." ("No one has said that poetry must be serious and difficult to understand, but that is the opinion of some. Where's the proof? There are poems written simply to amuse you, and poems that might even make you laugh.") The distinction between the serious and the solemn is not understood by the editors, nor passed on to the student. We begin with a gee-whiz story, Dive Right In, about a diving adolescent with stage fright, reprinted from Boys' Life, published by the Boy Scouts of America. The student is coyly told, for the second time in these readers, that the author is female, and in the manuals teachers are urged to make sure that students understand this. Then we proceed to an O. Henry story, a Sherlock Holmes story, Guy de Maupassant's Necklace, and various imitations of their mousetrap plot formulas. These things might be all right in a better context, but where they are they suggest the specimens in some handbook for writing short stories designed to be sold to people who can't write short stories. The editors arrive with an audible gasp of relief at the nonfiction section: "in recent years more and more readers have been turning to it for the rewards it holds." The remark betrays an uneasy awareness that the popular-fiction market is rapidly going broke, and the material here draws, as above indicated,

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from more solvent magazines that are still handed out on planes by stewardesses. One extract, a nature piece, begins with three sentences quoted from Thoreau. Is Thoreau himself so utterly inaccessible to a fourteen-year-old mind? Apparently, because even the grade 11 book gives barely more than three sentences from Walden. The poetry section beats the track of the earlier ones, even to the point of reprinting some of the same deplorable limericks. There is no suggestion that the student has learned anything about poetry from the earlier books, as, of course, he hasn't, and so we begin all over again, reading poems about Washington and Lincoln for content, poems about animals for stock response, lots and lots of light verse, six lines of Blake which "present[s] a point of view in an unusual manner—and also give[sl you something to think about," and finally some specific approach to four poets. There follows drama: a gee-whiz television play, where the characters "will seem like old friends to you from the instant you meet them," and presented very convincingly as a second-hand experience of television, a melodrama, and finally the remains of a badly slashed Romeo and Juliet. One gathers from the manuals that this last was included because the student is now mature enough to realize that guidance counselling and parent-children relationships may occasionally break down. Then the editors cut a steak out of Great Expectations. The reading list at the end says that David Copperfield and Dombey and Son are "'must' reading for those who would deepen their friendship with this author," but there is naturally no suggestion that the poor cheated little bastards might conceivably want to read the rest of Great Expectations. The same inflexible determination to make the student into a subliterary product, part of the captive audience of the mass media in their present facile commercialized form, persists in the grade 10 book. But it is becoming clearer that this is done, not so much through the choice of selections themselves, as through the establishing of a context for them. For instance, the second story in this reader is an Agatha Christie. Now there's nothing at all wrong with reading Agatha Christie, but for anyone studying literature, the imaginative effort needed to follow a whodunit is so easy that one reads such a story for relaxation. Here, it is proposed to make the same mental effort for her that is proposed for Chekhov a few pages further on. This means that the context, the reading centre of gravity, is being formed on the subliterary or relaxed level. I thoroughly approve of getting the student to see that there are close similarities in structure between great stories and trivial stories, and I

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approve also of not rushing or pushing value judgments in teaching. But it is a great mistake to assume, as these readers constantly do, that the entertaining and the relaxing are always the same thing. Again, it is in the poetry where this process is at its clearest. It is an impressive negative tribute to the power of poetry that these editors are so frightened of it, so anxious to distract the student's mind with light verse, giving tentative homeopathic doses of real poetry instantly smothered in a context of doggerel, and finally leading up to a great revelation of three poets abysmally below the level of the four in the previous volume: John Masefield, for narrative movement, Phyllis McGinley, for wit and observation (A Girl's-Eye View of Relatives is the chief work featured), and, for think pieces, Kahlil Gibran. We complete here the vicious circle indicated earlier. The editors not only assume that their students are antiliterary, but share their attitude. For where the conscious aim is subliterary, the unconscious aim must be antiliterary. The Thanatopsis Club in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street did a lot better than this. We might have expected the book to conclude with something on the level of an uncut Pride and Prejudice or Scarlet Letter, but we have given up expecting by this time, and merely note resignedly a "slightly abridged" version of Silas Marner. My general conclusion about the first four of these readers, then, is that they contain a great deal (or a gray deal, as speakers say) of carefully researched material and show much ingenuity, even a kind of perverse erudition, in having collected it. Considered purely as guides to the study of literature, they are beneath contempt. The illustrations, mostly the work of slick magazine artists, help to give the impression of synthetic gift-wrapped groceteria packages. As for the supplementary material, there is little to say about it that doesn't belabour the same points. The programming books seem to represent a genuine teaching possibility, but are mainly confined to grammar and elementary rhetoric. From the point of view of literature there is, quite literally, nothing to programme. One of the most curious features of these readers is their continuous discontinuity, their persistent and lethal weakening of the memory. Each volume not only ignores its predecessors, but the other parts of itself, and is broken down into "units" with no sequential connection among themselves. Even in points of detail this is true. Certain gestures in a literary direction are made from time to time: there are Homer extracts in the grade 9 book and a bit of Arthurian material in the grade 10 one (I don't much object to taking some Arthurian material

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from White's Sword in the Stone, even in its later spoiled version, though the reasons for doing so are silly). But these materials are employed simply at random: there is no planning about their use, nor any crossreference from one book to another. It seems pointless to have the story of Atlas and Hercules in the grade 7 book, and Paul Bunyan stories in the grade 8 book, without anything to show any structural connection between them. The grade 7 book has, early on, a story about a boy and a pet snake, the point of view being sympathetic. Well, what is the relation among imagination, fact, and convention (e.g., the Eden story) in our attitude to snakes? Couldn't we compare or contrast the villainous cobra in the Kipling story later in the same volume? Why not illustrate the earlier story with D.H. Lawrence's snake poem instead of with a totally irrelevant sonnet of Keats? The idea behind the emphasis on content is apparently that it's possible to concentrate on stylistic details to the point of not taking in the content. But these readers pay so little attention to structure that they miss out on content too: their analyses often remind me of Mark Twain's recipe for carving fowls in the German fashion: "Use a club, and avoid the joints."3 The grade 9 book has a gosh-mom story by Dorothy Canfield about a girl who gets over her resentment at her parents by finding that she has to treat her dog in much the same way that they treat her. The story thus turns on a "counterparts" structure like the one in Joyce's Dubliners. But this doesn't come through in any of the supplementary materials (it isn't very clear in the writing either, but let that go), and here and elsewhere the student isn't led to realize that the essential point of a story is always the point of its structure, not of what it says. The next two books are compelled to be literary, and so are automatically much better. The American one shows the unhappy squirming of editors who want something modern without too much sex or naughty words. There's no way out of that: it would be less noticeable, however, if there weren't such a reluctance to let go of the roughly contemporary and tackle something that presents historical barriers. The approach could be in considerably greater depth: in other words there is still a quite needless fear of spraining the student's brain. There is no reason why one of the great Melville stories could not be read at this stage, no need to be timid about Emerson and Thoreau, no point in ignoring Howells and Henry James in favour of O. Henry and Finley Peter Dunne, no sense in eliminating Eliot and Pound and Wallace Stevens from the poets. In short, the book is as subliterary as it can reasonably be, but it

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can't reasonably ignore the whole American imaginative heritage; it doesn't, and to that extent I approve of it. It's fine to have things like the Lincoln Second Inaugural, but the Faulkner Nobel Prize speech would indicate the place of literature in life—perhaps even the Vanzetti death speech might diversify the cosy political togetherness.4 The final book on English literature is really quite good, though with a better background it could afford to be a bit more experimental and show something of the imaginative unity of English literature as well as its historical perspective. And I don't see why Chaucer has to be modernized for grade 12. Otherwise, I should think that this book was a fair introduction to university English and a fair literary education in itself, and the programming book and the manual both have something real to bite into. I have naturally a conservative temperament, and wonder first of all if the first four readers couldn't be rescued by being pulled together a bit. After all, I don't really care how much gosh-mom tripe is there as long as the core of a literary education is there too, and can't be avoided. For instance, the biographies are invariably, with the exception of Dickens and Mark Twain, about remarkable personalities who weren't writers, or weren't primarily writers—when they were writers of importance, like Benjamin Franklin, this side of them is largely ignored. Why couldn't they be replaced by genuine writing personalities, like Milton or Byron or Melville or Samuel Johnson? Why shouldn't occasional reference to things literary be made in the teaching materials? The grade 7 book has a story about Laplanders which says that as the people in the story can't write, and have a long and complicated list of things to remember when they go into a village to shop, they put the list into an improvised song. That's a literary fact of the highest importance, and links with the ballad material also used in the same book. And above all, couldn't the bibliographical sections be employed to suggest to the really bright students that they might find more serious versions, structurally speaking, of the types of things they're reading? In a genuinely imaginative adventure story, such as Stephen Crane's The Open Boat, or a genuinely reflective story about an adolescent, such as Willa Gather's Paul's Case, the student will soon find himself in a different world from all this hey-fellas cuteness. But somehow I don't think this kind of patching up will work. The distrust of literature goes too deep, the literary cores are too soft and mushy, the discontinuity is too radical, for any such salvaging operations. I suppose I ought to say what kind of books I think I could approve of.

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I had no notions when I began reading, and have formed a few hazy ones only by way or reaction to what I have read. I have no reason to suppose that what I should like is what is in the least practicable or marketable. I'm not sure that I like the One Big Package anyway, even if it were a literary book. Ontario has actual books, some of them kept for life, and I prefer that pedagogically. However. II (Appendix) The revolt against progressivism is well under way, but I expect that literature will be about the last subject introduced into the school curriculum. For the teaching of genuine literature in a genuinely critical way is a profoundly subversive procedure, far more so than the teaching of mathematics or science. It is not easy to embark on a programme of unsettling stock responses in their stockiest period, apart from the constant danger of stirring up a hornet's nest of parental and clerical anxieties. Besides, unlike the mathematicians, the humanists have, not simply to introduce new ideas, but to restore something of a point of a view that, however outmoded now, was in its day more workable than the one that destroyed it. Hence humanists must run the risk of being thought of as reactionaries. The superstition about creating an antidemocratic "elite," again, often rationalizes the resistance to serious teaching. There is no such thing as "an elite": democracy is a society of specific and decentralized elites, in other words skilled workers, people particularly good at certain jobs, and whenever anything is seriously taught it creates such an elite. Some schools take nothing seriously except the football team and the school band, but they create elites for them. We now spend a lot of effort trying to find elites, mainly among two groups, the intelligent and the creative. Those particularly good at literature are the imaginative, a group which overlaps a good deal with the other two but is by no means identical with either. As there is now general agreement that gifted children need not be held back at the pace of the dull or the unwilling, we may perhaps be ready to face the possibility that some students are actually imaginative, and really want literature. One's first impulse is to say that while social mythology is doubtless an important subject, and ought to have readers provided for it, in an ideal system of education it would be called citizenship or life situations or something and not confused with the study of literature. To some extent this is true. There seems to me to be a real place for handbooks of

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general information and awareness, for popular biography, popular science, aeronautics, Americana, and the like, read primarily for content. But I imagine that there are other readers, assigned to different subjects, which contain most of what may be worth saving on nonliterary grounds in the present ones. At the same time, there is a real relation between social mythology and literature. In an ideal system of education the student would not be encouraged to accept social mythology rapturously as the fibre of his very being, but critically and with detachment, as something he may or may not believe but in either case has to live with. Nothing can provide this detachment except a study of literature that concentrates on the formal qualities of literature. My ideal programme would not start with "topics," or with themes, or with Noble Notions, or anything at all outside literature which literature is supposed to be illustrating. What this does is to make works of literature into allegories of these external things. The choice of selections is no longer made freely on grounds of literary merit, but is hampered by a theory which demands that they fit into it. It is because these readers are so determined to see the reading process as an aspect of American mass culture that they have to confine themselves so largely to the kind of hikids boloney that does illustrate mass culture. No, I should start with a rough-and-ready generic distinction, made purely for convenience, among the three main literary areas, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction: I should then begin at the centre of literature and work outwards from there. In the grades 7 and 8 books I would lay a heavy emphasis on the hard core of simple metaphorical poetry that is a foolproof introduction to the poetic experience: ballads, folk songs, Elizabethan songs (with music occasionally, as with American popular songs here), Burns, Blake, Emily Dickinson, the Wordsworth Lucy poems, and the like. I would show too how poetry can imitate the sounds and movements of life, from the swift galloping of the Ghent to Aix ride or the Charge of the Light Brigade to the drowsiness of lullabies. The records could be most effectively used for this purpose, in a way they are not used now. It doesn't matter if the student misses some of the words in a recording as long as he can hear the effects of alliteration, rhyme, resonant vowels, and all the varieties of speed and rhythm. Some poets can be quite a revelation on this point when they read their own work, and not only Dylan Thomas. The student can hear the difference in movement between anapests and spondees without having to learn these words, and he can sense the fact that poetry exists independently of words in a book, and is movement

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and sound in its own right, from blank verse drama to beats reading against jazz. In grades 9 and 10 I would stress more the precision of meaning that poetry can give with formal verbal patterns, the sense of wit and orderliness we get from good light verse or from, say, Swift or Pope or A.E. Housman, from seeing words moving along in disciplined lines. The definiteness and exactness of meaning in all genuine poetry would need stressing: I doubt if students respect poetry when they think it's just dropping an emotional stone in a pool to see waves moving. After that, in the 11 and 12 books, one would feel free to use tougher material, from the metaphysical poets to the moderns. By that time the student will have realized that poetry represents a quite natural way of thinking and feeling, and will be less dismayed than exhilarated by its difficulties. Fiction, similarly, would start with a strong dose of myth, legend, folk tale, fairy tale, from Biblical, Classical, Norse, American, and other sources, constantly calling attention to similarities in structure. From there it would expand into more realistic stories, the main area of the grades 9 and 10 books, where again the principles of story-telling, of building climaxes and concealing surprises and the like, are what the teaching should stress rather than the actual content of the story. The similarities between folk tale and Tom Sawyer, between fairy tale and Dickens, between myth and a great many popular stories, would show the student something of the structure of fiction, and of principles of structure that remain constant through all ages and cultures. The grades 11 and 12 books would then feel freer to use more complex and symbolic fiction from Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and the moderns, without feeling that they were doing something esoteric or horrendously hard. Nonfiction would stress the study of rhetorical devices, without necessarily having to learn the complicated nomenclature of rhetoric and of the different figures of speech. In the Gettysburg address or the Preamble to the Constitution certain effects are produced by rhythm, repetition, the use of simple language (remembering that the simple is not the commonplace) and imagery. Humorous writers, such as Thurber or Perelman, should also be studied carefully, but again as highly stylized writers, with certain rhetorical devices that make them funny. It won't kill their appeal to study them as technicians: that's another silly superstition. This is also the area in which the student should begin to realize that a literary training is also a social and moral training. For the student is continually being assaulted with words all day long: in adver-

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tising and in propaganda, particularly, certain verbal rhetorical appeals are being made to him all the time, and constitute an assault on his mind which ordinary literary teaching ignores and gives him no help with. To be trained in the analysis of the use of words is the only way of giving the student anything to defend himself against these assaults. The person with a literary education can look at every effort to get at him, to appeal to his emotions or imagination, whether it's phoney as a magazine ad or as genuine as the Gettysburg address, critically and with detachment, ready to respond if what prompts the response has authority, ready to resist if it hasn't. For additional features, I would have a good deal of biography, but biography of writers, as aforesaid. I would have historical sketches and charts, not only of English and American but of all literature back to Homer and the Old Testament, so that the grade 12 book won't have to do all the work of putting things into chronological order. I would have special articles on the Bible, on Classical literature, on certain periods of history important for English and American literature. I would give a good deal of attention to the histories of words. The present readers occasionally note the source of a word of Latin origin, which is all to the good, but the histories of such words as "check," "chancellor," "tawdry," "melancholy," "parchment," contain an immense amount of condensed history, and can give the student an insight into the use of words that nothing else can do in the same way. This could develop into some real knowledge of the history of the language, and of the precise ways it has changed its form from at least Chaucerian times. I would have illustrations which, like the better ones in these readers, gave independent visual experiences, such as contemporary paintings, and did not merely try to do the student's own imaginative work for him. It is obvious that no series of readers, even though they did teach a subject called literature systematically and progressively, would be very effective unless they went hand in hand with a constant writing programme, in which the student was encouraged to try out for himself everything he encountered in his reading. Suggestions about this are made in the present readers and manuals too. But in my opinion laying stress on practising a specific craft would give better results than encouraging self-expression. Some time ago I asked myself why I had gone into English when there were other subjects—music, for example, and later philosophy—that interested me rather more in my youth. I finally traced back a decisive

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experience to grade 11, when the Board of Education in New Brunswick made a mistake (from its habitual point of view) and put the second, or seventeenth-century, volume of Palgrave's Golden Treasury on the curriculum. They hurriedly yanked it the year after, and put some tripe on in its place, but not before I had been exposed to the early poems of Milton, to Herrick and Marvell, to Vaughan and Herbert and Ben Jonson and Lovelace (Palgrave didn't like Donne). I don't say that young people today can get the feeling of wonder and delight that I had by repeating my experience. But I do say that the best literature has the best chance of reaching the best students.

43 Speculation and Concern 22-3 October 1965

From StS, 3^-55. First published in The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality, ed. Thomas B. Stroup (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), 32-54, with a few minor gestures to the occasion and without notes. This was a lecture presented at a conference entitled "The Humanities and the Quest for Truth" at the University of Kentucky, celebating its one hundredth year. The aim of the conference was to consider the distinctive contribution the humanities make to an understanding of reality, the context being established by the question raised in C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." As I understand it, I am being asked to discuss the question, What do the humanities provide for human culture that the sciences do not provide? My own field is literature, and literature seems to belong to two groups: the creative arts, including music and painting, and the verbal disciplines, including history and philosophy. Both may be regarded as humanities, but we have to distinguish them even when we associate them. The question itself is, I suppose, legitimate enough: it is, I take it, simply a matter of trying to indicate the different functions of different things. It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to contrast the arts and the sciences without a good deal of oversimplifying and making some false or halftrue antitheses. There may be some value in oversimplifying the contrast, if one has to do that to make it at all: a more serious difficulty is that nobody is likely to approach such a problem with his mind fully made up, his convictions firmly held, and his tentative and exploratory notions outgrown. In what follows I am thinking aloud, expecting the kind of indulgence that is accorded to such improvisation.

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It will not have escaped your notice that I have so far said nothing except "harrumph." But there is something to be said for the convention of beginning with an apology, or topos of modesty. This kind of question is often called, as I have just called it, a "problem," and one expects a problem to be solved. A genuine problem is a specific formulation of experience that can be adequately stated in other terms: to use a common analogy, it is like a knot in a rope that can be untied or retied without affecting the identity of the rope. A question like this is only metaphorically a problem: it is actually a subject of study, and the word solution is not appropriate. All I can do with a subject of study is to individualize it, to make a suggestion or two about how it looks from the standpoint of a literary critic who is living in the mid-twentieth century. As a subject of study, the question can hardly be called new: a whole line of philosophers from Hegel onward have beaten their brains out over the difference between the knowledge of science and the knowledge of what the Germans call Geist, and over the methods and techniques appropriate to the study of history or sociology as distinct from biology or chemistry. It is an appropriate question for a centennial celebration, because it was one of the liveliest issues being debated a hundred years ago. The level of debate has not improved notably in tone since then. No contemporary treatment of the subject known to me matches the lucidity of Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics, published in 1867, or the amiable and urbane discussion of Arnold and Huxley about the proportioning of humanities and sciences in the curriculum of a liberal education. A few years ago we had the Leavis-Snow dispute, where neither contribution was in the least amiable or urbane, and where it is hard to say which of the two documents was the more stupefyingly wrongheaded.1 Other essays purporting to defend the humanities have all too often a querulous and self-righteous air, like that of a strip-tease performer who informs a newspaper reporter that while all the other girls just take off their clothes, she is an authentic artist. And so, after more than a century of giving answers to the question of what is distinctive about the humanities, it is still quite possible that the real answer is "nothing at all." Freud concludes his Future of an Illusion by saying: "Science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us."2 He was talking about religion, but he may be unconditionally right, beyond the limits of his context, and everything nonscientific, except possibly the creative arts, may be only prescientific or pseudoscientific. And the arts may be

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an exception only because their function may be a purely ornamental or decorative one. This conference, after all, deals with "The Humanities and the Quest for Truth," and the arts not only never seem to find truth, but do not even appear to be looking for it very seriously. The best way to approach our question, I think, is to begin by reversing it, as Freud's phrasing suggests. What does science provide for human culture that the arts and the humanities do not provide? The traditional answer, and doubtless the right one, is "nature." What I am saying here is that science gives us nature, not the understanding or conception of nature. This may only be bad grammar, but I mean something more than understanding. The human mind can operate in different ways, but one very obvious way for it to operate is as a subject. That is, it can start by saying: Here am I, and I am here. Everything else is there. As soon as the mind does this, nature springs into being, like Athene from Jove's forehead, and reality appears to the mind as objective, as a field. It seems to me that it is peculiarly the function of science to objectify reality, to present the world in its aspect of being there. The world of science is the world of space: as has often been noted, science deals with time as a dimension of space. The subject itself becomes an object in this process, for there is nothing inside the scientist, from the structure of his spine to his infantile complexes, which is not also available for scientific study. Everything is there: nothing is really here except the consciousness with which he studies nature. And this consciousness, or scientific intelligence, is ideally disembodied. The theory of physics, for example, has been complicated, in its more rarefied aspects, by the fact that the scientist possesses a body, and cannot comprehend nature without physical contact. To see the world as an objective field of operation is also to quantify reality, to make it something measured rather than simply seen or heard. Isaiah praises a God "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance" [40:12]. In science man takes over this traditional function of God, replacing the divine balance by the mathematician's equations. Because science deals with reality as objective, there is no such thing as subjective science. What this means in practice is that science stabilizes the subject. It assumes a mind in the situation that we think of as sane or normal, ready to accept evidence and follow arguments. Thus science assumes a mind to some extent emancipated from existence, in the state

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of freedom or detachment that we call clarity. The sense of truth as an ideal, and of the pursuit of truth for its own sake as a virtue, goes with the process of objectifying reality on which science is founded. The word truth itself carries with it the sense of a recognition of what is there. So does the sense of facts as given, as irreducible data to be studied in their inherent arrangements instead of being arranged. There may actually be no facts of this kind, but it is important to pretend that there are, that facts lie around immovably where they have been thrown, like rocks carried down by a glacier. As Wallace Stevens says: The arrangement contains the desire of The artist. But one confides in what has no Concealed creator.3

What science stands for in human life, then, is the revolt of consciousness against existence, the sense of his own uniqueness in nature that man gets by drawing his mind back from existence and contemplating it as a separated thing. The animal is immersed in existence without consciousness; the human being has consciousness, and consciousness means being capable, up to a point, of seeing existence as external to oneself. Of course, to withdraw from existence means to stop existing, and some philosophers, notably Sartre, even go so far as to associate consciousness with nothingness or non-being. However, it seems clear that conscious human beings can externalize their world and still go on living. Human existence, then, is a complex, of which consciousness is one of many functions, and the concentrated consciousness that produces science is a stylizing or conventionalizing of human behaviour. I do not wish to suggest that science is founded on a narrowly empirical view of the world: that its end is only to describe and understand what it sees. The physical sciences at least are not simply descriptive, but are based on prediction as well: they see their phenomena in time—or their version of time—as well as space, and their end is rather a vision of nature under law. It is not the experiment but the repeatable experiment that is the key to the understanding of nature in the physical sciences, and the repeatable experiment is what makes prediction possible and gives to science a prophetic quality. Telepathic communication, poltergeists, mediums, have been approached experimentally and certain typical phenomena recur, but the experiments are not repeatable (except where they are fraudulent),4 no laws can be established, and so science

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applied to such things never gets off the ground. Where the phenomena are unconscious or where the units involved are small and numerous, like atoms, molecules, or cells, so that there is no practical difference between the highly probable and the certain, the language of science is primarily mathematical. From the natural sciences we move toward the social sciences, where the phenomena are relatively large, few, and complicated, like human beings. Here prediction on a statistical basis is as important as ever, but, except for some specialized aspects, the repeatable experiment is no longer at the centre of the study. In proportion as this is true, the subject tends to be organized verbally rather than mathematically. We then move into what are generally regarded as the humanities. History and philosophy are almost purely verbal, nonexperimental, and nonpredictive. But accuracy of statement, objectivity of description, and dispassionate weighing of evidence, including the accepting of negative evidence, are still required. Hence a scientific element is still present in them that distinguishes history from legend, philosophy from rumination, and, as I think, literary criticism from a good many of the activities that go under that name. From there we move into the creative arts proper, where the requirements even of accurate descriptive statement and the basing of conclusions on fair evidence are no longer made, or at least not in the same way, and where therefore we may feel that we have finally escaped from science. But except for the arts, which pose separate problems, all scholars, whatever their fields, are bound by the same code of honour. All of them have to be as scientific as the nature of their subjects will allow them to be, or abandon all claim to be taken seriously. The philosophers who moved from Kant and Hegel towards the establishing of modern historical and sociological methods were largely preoccupied with the question of boundary lines. At what point does Natur turn into Geistl Precisely where do the methods that work in the physical sciences cease to become effective or appropriate? But it is surely possible that there are no boundary lines at all, and that this whole way of looking at knowledge as divided into two complementary bodies is wrong. The crudest form of this view is the one that I call the heart-ofdarkness theory. It is a type of argument that used to be fashionable in natural theology (perhaps still is), and has been transferred to the humanities from there. There have been theories among religious apologists that religion, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, or the dancing fairies of Milton's Nativity Ode, belongs to a dark preserve of mystery on which

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the sun of science has not yet risen. Religion, according to this approach, deals with whatever seems at the moment to be beyond the capacities of science: creation at first, then the origin of life or the human soul, then moral values, and so on—it has to keep moving fairly fast, like the lunatic in Blake's Mad Song, to make sure of staying in the dark while science pursues it. Even yet there is a strong popular belief that if we once get hold of something that "science cannot explain," whether it is extrasensory perception or the principle of indeterminacy or finding underground water with a hazel twig, we have a guarantee of free will and immortality and the existence of God. The basis of such notions, when applied to the arts, is the assumption that if science deals rationally, factually, impersonally with an external world, the arts can only deal with an inner world of emotion, personality, and value. This really reduces itself to the assumption that if science is objective, the arts must be subjective. But subjective art is as impossible a conception as subjective science. The arts are techniques of communication: they are fostered by schools and groups and depend on convention quite as much as science does. In fact there seems to be nothing that is really subjective except a rebellion against the stability of the attitude toward the world on which science is based. It is very tiring to keep on being open to involuntary sense impressions, to be detached and clearheaded, to weigh evidence and fit judgments to it, and very easy to relapse into an emotional colouring of experience, such as we get from day-dreaming or bad temper or private memories and associations. But however important and normally human in itself, the individual's emotional colouring of his own experience is not what the arts or the humanities are primarily concerned with. So whenever I read critical theories that begin by saying, in effect, "Poetry is whatever mere science isn't," I flake out very quickly, because I know that some version of the subjective fallacy is about to follow. The genuine basis of this complementary view of the arts and sciences is the distinction, already glanced at and most elaborately set out in Bergson, between time as externalized by science, where it is really a dimension of space, and time in its other form of the continuous awareness of one's own existence.5 This latter does elude science, so here is something that science cannot explain. But nothing else can explain it either, so that is not much help. All explanation contains some traces of scientific method, unless the explanation is really a clouding up of the question, like the doctor's explanation in Moliere that opium puts people

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to sleep because it has a dormative faculty.6 But while the direct awareness of being cannot be explained, it can, up to a point, be expressed, and this expression is the basis of the arts. The role of art, then, is primarily to express the complex of human existence, humanity's awareness of being itself rather than its perception of what is not itself and is outside it. This self-awareness is neither subjective nor objective, for man in himself is both an individual and, no less essentially, a member of the society which is partly inside him; and it is neither rational nor irrational. It does not quantify existence like science: it qualifies it: it tries to express not what is there but what is here, what is involved in consciousness and being themselves. The arts, then, belong to the phase of experience that we have learned to call existential, to an awareness that cannot be external to itself nor have anything external to it. The production of art is, of course, a stylizing of behaviour like the production of science. As far as the actual man doing the work is concerned, I doubt whether there is any essential psychological difference between the artist and the scientist, any "creative" factors present in one that are not present in the other. Both have to use the entire mind; both have much the same difficulties in getting that very complicated machine to work. But when we consider the finished product only, it is clear that the arts do not stabilize the subject in the same way that science does. Emotions, repressed or mythopoeic elements in the subconscious, the manipulating of data, the summoning up of controlled hallucinations (as expressed in the traditional phrase about poetry, ut pictura poesis), all have a function in the creation of art. The stabilized subject of science is usually identified with the reason; the unstabilized subject is normally called the imagination. The individual artist is a representative of human imagination, just as the individual scientist is a representative of human reason. But at no point, qua artist, is he outside the human world we call culture or civilization, just as the physical scientist, qua physical scientist studying "nature," is never inside it. I speak of course of the arts in the plural because there is a group of them: music, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, perhaps others. The dance, for instance, is in practice a separate art, though in theory it is difficult to see it as anything but a form of musical expression. It seems inherently unlikely, at the time of writing, that we have yet to develop a new art, despite all the strenuous experiment that there has been, some of it in that direction. Marshall McLuhan says of the new media of communication that "the medium is the message," and that the content

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of each medium is the form of another one. This surely means, if I understand it correctly, that each medium is a distinctive art. Thus the "message" of sculpture is the medium of sculpture, distinct from the message which is the medium of painting. But, as McLuhan also emphasizes, the new media are extensions of the human body, of what we already do with our eyes and ears and throats and hands. Hence they have given us new forms or variations of the arts we now have, and the novelty of these forms constitutes a major imaginative revolution in our time. But though distinctive arts they are not actually new arts: they are new techniques for receiving the impression of words and pictures. Of these arts, literature is the art of words, and words are also the medium for the humanities and much of the sciences. This suggests that the arts, besides being arts, may also be informing languages for other disciplines. A painting or a poem is a construct: you look first of all at the associative factors in it, the things that make it hold together. But besides having paintings we have pictures of things: that is, there are things outside painting that we understand pictorially. For centuries philosophers expressed themselves in words, taking words for granted, forgetting that there is an art of words, not realizing that the verbal basis of philosophy constitutes a philosophical problem in itself. It seems to have been only in our own time that philosophers and logicians have really tried to become aware of the limitations of form (as distinct from the mere pitfalls or fallacies) inherent in the use of words. Even now their interest seems to be mainly linguistic rather than properly literary, and some philosophers are so ignorant of the source of their own subject that they regularly use "literary" in a pejorative sense. It is obvious that words lend themselves very readily to being an informing language for a descriptive discipline. Literature was not, up until the Romantic movement at least, regarded as the most impressive thing man does with words, the more objectified structures of theology and philosophy being regarded as higher in status and coming closer to what is called the quest for truth. As compared with music, or even painting, there is always some reference to the outer world implicit in every use of words. Even if in the future we leave painting to the chimpanzees and music to chance, I do not see how literature can ever lose its kernel of externalizable meaning. And yet the capacity of words for informing other disciplines is not unlimited. Compared with mathematics at least, words are incurably associative: multiple meanings lurk in them and the structures of grammar twist them into nonrepresentational forms. It seems more likely

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that words have a certain radius of descriptive power, and that it is important to determine the approximate limits of that radius. The other arts seem to differ widely in their powers of being able to inform other studies. Painting and sculpture, like literature, can be employed to represent the external world, and, again like literature, their descriptive or representational aspect has had more prestige in the past than their associative or constructive aspect. We can understand what their informing capacity is if we think not only of painting but of the pictorial arts, including illustrations, sketches, blueprints, diagrams, and models, and not only of sculpture but of the sculptural arts, including three-dimensional models. Some modern painters and sculptors, such as Miro or Giacometti, indicate the inherent relation of their arts with diagram and model very clearly. In some areas, such as geometry, the pictorial and the mathematical overlap, and of course the role of diagram in the sciences, as in the structural formulas of chemistry, is of immense importance. The question of whether light consists of waves or particles is surely, to some extent, a picturing problem. In my Anatomy of Criticism I have raised the question of the role of diagram in verbal thought as well [335-7]. But to what extent and in what ways the pictorial and sculptural arts inform the humanities and sciences I do not know, nor have I read anybody who did know. Music, on the other hand, has often been said to be the existential art par excellence, the hieratic, self-enclosed expression of "pure being" with no relation to an externalized order of any kind. Perhaps this is because it is, as Mrs. Langer suggests,7 the art of "virtual time," the closest expression of the continuous awareness of being which is the core of nonscientific experience. Or perhaps it is only because, up to the rise of electronic music, the music we know has been founded on a set of conventions as arbitrary as chess. On my piano as I write this is a sonata of Clementi called Didone Abbandonata: we are supposed to think of the story of Dido while we listen. The finale is a rondo beginning with what for Clementi is a sharp discord, a minor ninth, and the movement is hopefully marked "con disperazione." But it soon collapses into the ordinary rondo structure, and by the time we reach the second subject it is clear that poor Dido has been abandoned once more. A greater composer would have been more tactful or created a more compelling musical mood, but that is why the mediocre example illustrates more clearly my point, which is that music is not an informing art: it sets up a powerful centripetal force that resists being drawn into the structure of

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anything outside itself. We do use metaphors from music a good deal ("harmony," "overtones," and the like), and the old fables about the music of the spheres suggest that music may have an unsuspected informing power about it. Perhaps the myth of heaven as a place where harp playing is a compulsory cultural accomplishment will come true, and the theology and metaphysics of the future will be understood musically rather than verbally. When I read or try to read Heidegger I get the same feeling that I get when trying to read Finnegans Wake, of language dissolving into a mass of associative puns, and language of this kind is surely heading in the direction indicated by the squeals and groans of electronic music. If words can be used both to construct an art and to inform some of the descriptive disciplines, there seems no reason why we should not think of mathematics, which informs so much of the physical sciences, as an art too. It is a self-contained construct like the arts, and I do not see how it is possible to frame a definition, or even a description, of the arts that would include the five I have listed and exclude mathematics. But mathematics is the art of numerical or quantitative relationships, and so it has a unique capacity for giving order and coherence to the sciences, of providing their descriptions and experiments with the repeatable element of law. In contrast to the other arts, it stabilizes the subject on the "rational" level, as science does, and is so constantly informing the physical sciences that it is often regarded as simply a part of them. Hence some of the more speculatively minded scientists and philosophers are occasionally surprised to discover that nature has a mathematical form. Of course it has: they put it there. And because it informs science so readily, mathematics practised as an art in its own right is a rare and esoteric achievement, though its tradition can be traced from the semioccult use of it associated with the name of Pythagoras down to the later work of Einstein. The rise of modern science involved a new way of looking at the external world which is most lucidly set out in Locke, though it had been there at least since Galileo. According to this the world has secondary qualities which are experienced by sensation, and primary qualities independent of such experience, which can only be weighed and measured. This distinction has a rough but significant analogy to the role of words in rendering the external world as compared with the role of mathematics. Mathematics is the language that can render the world of primary qualities: words never lose their connection with human

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action and human sensation on which the two primary categories of words, verbs and nouns, are based. To the extent that an electron, for instance, is given a name and made a noun, it becomes a potential object of perception, unlikely as it is that it will ever be an actual one. The radius of verbal information, then, apparently runs between the human body and its environment as perceived and experienced by that body. The nonliterary function of words is thus, in the broad Kantian sense, critical: words can be used to explain the human situation, instead of merely expressing it as literature does, but they always remain connected with that situation. The conception of science, as a systematic understanding of nature under law for which the appropriate language is mathematics, is of course a relatively recent one. For thousands of years before the great scientific explosion of the last few centuries, thinkers had been making constructs of the outer world, mainly verbal and pictorial. In these constructs the associative characteristics of the arts from which they were derived are very obvious. Poets find it much easier to live in the Ptolemaic universe than in ours, because it is more associative; modern poets turn from science to occultism because the latter still features associative patterns. Very early the two great containing conceptions of the scientific attitude made their appearance: "substance," or the objectified world visible and invisible, and "soul," the ideally disembodied intelligence which contemplates it. These parents then peopled the world with various offspring, ideas, essences, universals, atoms, and the like. The great difficulty with using words, when attempting to deal with primary qualities, is the readiness with which words adapt themselves to what we may call, altering Whiehead's phrase, pseudo-concreteness.8 Adam named the animals because he could see them, but, as Theseus says in Shakespeare, it is just as easy to name airy nothings, to bestow nouns on and make verbal objects out of things that are not there, or cannot be proved to be there.9 Again, the prestige of the subject-object relationship meant that attempts to express what is genuinely existential, the human situation itself, could take the form of the metaphorically objective. The conception of a spiritual world is a metaphorical verbal object of this kind. With the rise of modern science, words have become more limited in their range. Metaphysics seemed for a time to be taking the form of a verbalized general science, expressing for its age some sense of what scientific activity as a whole is doing. It is more at home, however, with the assumptions on which scientific work is based, because those as-

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sumptions are part of the human context of science, and so they can be dealt with critically, which means verbally. The principle of a metaphorical object is of central importance when we try to see what the place of content is in the arts. The activity of consciousness, of externalizing reality, is always part of the whole existential complex. The aspect of painting that reproduces or "imitates" an outer world exists in painting, as, so to speak, a metaphor of externality. Even music has, in the witty and paradoxical form of "programme" music, a metaphorical external world of this kind, and literature has it in everything that we call realism. We are constantly using quantitative expressions (e.g. "I love you very much") as metaphors for things that are not quantities. Aristotle, who approached the arts from a scientific point of view (one of his most illuminating comments on art is in the Physics),10 spoke of the arts as imitative of nature. But as soon as we examine this conception of imitation, the notion of a continuous relation to the external world begins to dissolve, and we can see that "nature" exists in art only as the content of art, as something that art surrounds and contains. So while science deals with the consolidating of what is there, the arts deal with the expanding of what is here; the circumference of science is the universe, the circumference of the arts is human culture. In our time the sense of cleavage between the expression of what is here and the study of what is there is very sharp. We tend to feel that whatever is objective or external belongs only to the spatial world of science: every other "there" is a metaphor derived from that spatial world, and such metaphors no longer carry much conviction. Theology, for example, or at least the Protestant versions of it that I am more familiar with, is now trying to come to terms with the fact that nothing it is talking about is actually "there." God is certainly not "there": he has been deprived of all scientific function and he has no status in the spatial world of science, including the temporal world that can be divided and measured. So whatever the present or future of theology may be, it cannot be the queen of sciences as we now think of science: science deals only with It, and can take no part in an I-Thou dialogue. For a long time, of course, it was assumed that the study of nature was also the study of a revelation of God, the order and coherence of nature being assumed to be the result of divine design. This view was contemporary with the view that the models of human civilization themselves, the city and the garden, were also of divine origin. But just as man came finally to believe that he had created and was responsible for his own

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civilization, so he came also to believe that the real basis of science was the correspondence of nature and human reason. Whatever is there in nature, the mind can find something in verbal or mathematical reasoning that will explain, assimilate, or inform it. "The external world is fitted to the mind," as Wordsworth says.11 So although nature is an externalized reality, it is not, for science, an alien one. In fact science, as a form of knowledge, could even be thought of as a gigantic human narcissism, the reason falling in love with its own reflection in nature. Whenever there have been antiscientific trends in human culture, they have usually seized on some aspect of this principle, though their target has been less science itself than the kind of essential philosophy that preceded it. Existentialism, for example, insists that if we think of the external world as a human world, certain elements become primary that are carefully kept out of science: the imminence of death, the feeling of alienation, the pervading sense of accident and of emptiness, and the direct confrontation with something arbitrary and absurd. Once we take away from externality the rational structure that we have put into it, it becomes what Milton calls a universal blank.12 All science is founded on the equation A equals B, where A is the human reason and B the rationally comprehensible element in nature. The existentialists may be described as the people who have discovered that if A equals B, then A minus B equals nothing. We notice that existentialists have some difficulty in making their philosophy self-sufficient. Most of the best of them have incorporated it into a religious attitude, and of the atheistic ones, Heidegger went along with the Nazis and Sartre has recently collapsed on the bosom of the Church Marxist. It looks as though the attitude, along with whatever antiscientific bias it may have, belongs in a larger context which is normally either religious or revolutionary, or both. That larger context is a view, found in very different forms in Blake, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and D.H. Lawrence, which might be paraphrased somewhat as follows: Reality is primarily what we create, not what we contemplate. It is more important to know how to construct a human world than to know how to study a nonhuman one. Science and philosophy are significant as two of the creative things that man does, not as keys to the reality of the world out there. There is a world out there, but science sees it as a world under law, and no vision under law can ever give us the whole truth about anything. Science moves with greatest confidence, and makes its most startling discoveries, in a mechanical and unconscious world. If we remove science from its context and make it not a mental construct but

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an oracle of reality, the logical conclusion is that man ought to adjust himself to that reality on its terms. Thus moral law imitates natural law, and human life takes on the predictable characteristics of nature as science reveals it. What begins as reason ends in the conditioned reflexes of an insect state, where human beings have become cerebral automata. The real world, that is, the human world, has constantly to be created, and the one model on which we must not create it is that of the world out there. The world out there has no human values, hence we should think of it primarily not as real but as absurd. The existential paradoxes help us to do this, and they thereby reduce the world to the tohu-wa-bohu [Genesis 1:2], the waste and void chaos of a world which man has once again to create. In science applied to the human world, that is, in applied science and technology, we see the mathematical shape of science itself, from the pyramids of Egypt and the highways and aqueducts of Rome to the chessboard cities and cloverleaf intersections of our day. For Blake, and in some degree for Lawrence, these mathematical shapes in human life are symbols of aggression: human life is at its most mathematical and automatic in military operations, and in Blake the pyramid, and more particularly the "Druid" trilithon, the ancestor of the Roman arch, are symbols of imperialistic hysteria and malevolence. Every advance in technology is likely to cause an immense legal complication in life, as the automobile has done, and the sheeplike panic-stricken stampeding of modern life, of which the totalitarian state is a by-product, is part of a technological way of life. Popular fiction has been exploiting the figure of the mad scientist for over a century, and there really does seem to be such a thing as mad science: psychology used to enslave people, nuclear physics used to exterminate the human race, microbiology suggesting even more lethal methods of trying to improve it. However, even in their most antiscientific pronouncements such writers as Blake and Lawrence seldom if ever say that science is the direct cause of the sinister will to slavery in modern times. They say rather that man has lost his nerve about taking charge of his own world, through a false theory of knowledge in which he is "idolatrous to his own shadow," as Blake says,13 and that this loss of nerve expresses itself as a perversion and parody of science. The world out there is real, but if we deify its reality, if we make it an object of imitation, it takes on the outlines of Satan the accuser, belittling us with its vast size in time and space, contemptuous of our efforts to be free of its colossal machinery. The contrast I am paraphrasing is more conventionally phrased in

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other writers, and is often put into the form of an antithesis between values and facts. But the word value still has something prefabricated about it, a suggestion of something immutable laid up in a Platonic heaven. It is man's right to create his world that must be safeguarded, and every creation is likely to require a transvaluation of the past. Besides, values are really for the most part still forms of law, and do not get us out of our dilemma. The same is true of the moral categories of Kierkegaard, the "ethical freedom" of the man who has passed beyond speculation.14 It would be better to use the existential terms engagement or concern to express the contrast between a reality which is there to begin with and the greater reality which, like religious faith or artistic creation, does not exist at all to begin with, but is brought into being through a certain kind of human act. Science is increasingly a communal and corporate activity. The humanities are more individualized, and the arts are intensely so: schools and isms in the arts are a sign of youth and immaturity, of an authority not yet established in the single artist. When we think of the scientist as voyaging through strange seas of thought alone, as Wordsworth did Newton, we are probably thinking of him primarily as a mathematician. We are, in contrast to Communist countries, extremely permissive about a writer's loneliness: we allow our writers to retire into what sometimes seem very neurotic fairylands, because they may also be areas of the unstabilized imaginative vision. The result is that communication in and from the arts is a slow and cumbersome business, and that is why we need the dimension of criticism, the vision of artists as a society engaged in a communal enterprise. As soon as we take this critical perspective on literature, we see that literature is organized by huge containing conceptions which establish the literary societies and the family resemblances among large groups of writers. We call these containing forms myths, and it is in these myths that the nature of man's concern for his world is most clearly expressed. Our own age expresses itself chiefly in the ironic myth, and irony marks the ascendance of a technological society and the tendency of man to imitate the natural law outside him. It is in the ironic mode that the writer deals with the human situation as though it were external to him and as though he were detached from it, and in this mode that he sees human behaviour as mechanized, frustrated, and absurd. If one were to say to almost any serious contemporary writer, "But I don't like the characters and situations you present to me," he would almost certainly

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answer, "That's because I'm trying to tell the truth as I see it." In our day the writer defends himself in language parallel to the language of science and other objective disciplines. These myths also inform the structures built out of words that exist outside literature, that is, in general, the humanities. Existentialism, with its conceptions of anguish, nausea, and the like, is an ironic philosophy, a fact which accounts for the lack of selfsufficiency I spoke of before. Irony, in literature, is a sophisticated myth, best understood as a frustration or parody of the more primitive comic and romantic myths in which a quest is successfully accomplished. These romantic and comic myths are those that inform Christianity and the revolutionary myth of Marxism. Earlier in this paper I quoted from Freud's Future of an Illusion. Religion was a subject Freud had a Freudian block about, mainly because he wanted to be a law-giving Moses in his own right, contemplating the back parts of his own God. As a literary critic, I am interested in the fact that Freud and Marx are the two most influential thinkers in the world today, that both of them developed an encyclopedic programme that they called scientific, and that nine-tenths of the science of both turns out to be applied mythology. These mythical expressions of concern, in which man expresses his own attitude to the culture he has built, are subject to a disease of thinking which is best called anxiety, in the Freudian and not the existential sense. We often find that those who are committed to a religious or revolutionary faith have a peculiar difficulty in being intellectually honest in their arguments: their commitment wants to twist and manipulate facts, to maintain tendentious lines of reasoning, to rationalize or simply assert things for which there is no evidence. The record of Christianity is full of persecutions in the name of absurdities, and Marxism is also an anxiety structure, with a sensitive nose for heresies and deviations. The reason for this kind of anxiety is, again, a failure of nerve, a refusal to accept the fact that man continually creates his world anew, a desire to have it fit something outside itself. What is outside, in this sense, cannot be in space: it can only be in time, a pattern established in the past, or to be established in the future, to which all facts and discoveries somehow must be adjusted. In the sciences it is possible to carry on one's studies with an undeveloped sense of concern. There are scientists who irritably brush off the suggestion that what they are doing may have momentous consequences for good or evil, and that they should be concerned for those consequences. A sense of concern would make such a scientist more present-

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able as a human being: it would also unite him to the community he lives in, and work against the dehumanizing tendency inherent in all specialization. There is no way of overcoming the barriers of specialization, no way of making a Romance philologist and a solid-state physicist intellectually intelligible to each other. But they are united by being both citizens of their society, and their realization of this makes both Romance philology and solid-state physics liberal arts, studies that liberate mankind. In science this social concern affects the scientist as man, but not so much qua scientist. But in the humanities the great poetic myths are also shaping forms: in history, in philosophy, in criticism, a scientific detachment and a humane engagement are fighting each other like Jacob and his angel. That is why the humanities are difficult to characterize, not only in methodology, but even as a distinctive group of studies in themselves. To sum up, then: it does not seem to me that the really important difference between the humanities and the sciences is in the difference in their subject matter. It is rather that science exhibits a method and a mental attitude, most clearly in the physical sciences, of a stabilized subject and an impartial and detached treatment of evidence which is essential to all serious work in all fields. The humanities, on the other hand, express in their containing forms, or myths, the nature of the human involvement with the human world, which is essential to any serious man's attitude to life. As long as man lives in the world, he will need the perspective and attitude of the scientist; but to the extent that he has created the world he lives in, feels responsible for it and has a concern for its destiny, which is also his own destiny, he will need the perspective and attitude of the humanist.

44

The Time of the Flood December 1965

Frye's report as principal, from Victoria Reports, 15 (December 1965): 5-6. The title is an allusion to the college song, in which Victoria is said to have stood "since the time of the flood" on the old Ontario Strand (see no. 30 n. 2).

The year opened with the admission of approximately 800 to the first year, bringing the undergraduate total to nearly 2,400. From the outside this may look as though more and more money were being poured into Victoria's coffers, with more and more students paying fees to the college. The actual picture, as most of our alumni know, is exactly the reverse of this. Student fees are a small percentage of the income a college needs to meet its essential expenditures: the Bladen Report puts it at 27 per cent.1 More students mean great increases in appointments to the staff, as large classes have to be increasingly subdivided. The annual staff gathering with wives this year was too large to be contained in Alumni Hall. And the problem of accommodating more students involves the college in the extensive building programme of which the Academic Building now going up in front of the college is the most recent example. The difficulty of multiple applications makes the opening of term a statistical nightmare for the registrar, who must calculate how many students to admit in order to get the number prescribed by the Council. Over 1,200 were thus admitted: this is a problem which goes along with the great expansion of university population. Fortunately, freshmen these days are a very serious-minded group, and the senior class did a superb job of organizing the orientation programme, which has expanded from a weekend into a week. This year, for the first time, the prize-giving had

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to be divided between the regular Charter Day Convocation2 and a special ceremony for the first year held in the new library, with Mr. Peter Middleton, VCUC president, acting as master of ceremonies. Charter Day itself was made memorable for the principal by the appearance of his old Oxford classmate Principal Douglas LePan as speaker at the dinner. Student activities have proceeded on their normal course, with the football team trampling all opposition into the mud for the eighth consecutive time. Of the nonathletic activities, perhaps the Drama Group is the most pioneering, with lively noon hour sessions to packed audiences reading from nineteenth-century melodramas or performing such works as N.F. Simpson's The Hole. Debates have not fared so well: the first one, "Resolved that student apathy is the fault of the system rather than the individual," achieved an unmistakable decision when no one turned up and it had to be cancelled. The Bob, recovering from the bad luck of opening on black-out night,3 was a great success. This year the students have decided to reduce the Strand to a bulletin, and to enlarge Ada Victoriana and give it more of its traditional role as a recorder of the college scene. The first issue was distributed to the guests of a little ceremony in the Students' Union, when the VCUC Reading Library of Contemporary Literature was opened. What may be called the Berkeley spirit has now spread to the student body of Victoria College. The VCUC is bristling with suggestions of involving student participation in all college activities that concern them, including representation on various bodies that have not previously thought in such terms. There are many references to the "paternalism" of the university structure, and many persuasive arguments about the stake that students have in college life. Mr. Peter Middleton, referred to above, appeared before the Victoria College Council and presented a statement to it along these lines. All this is a welcome sign of student interest in what is happening to them at college: the next stage, of course, would be to work out some effective machinery for establishing continuity of student representation from year to year.

45 The Instruments of Mental Production i February 1966

From StS, 3-21, where it stands as the first essay in the first section, that establishing the context of literary criticism. Originally published in the Chicago Review, 18, nos. 3-4 (1966): 30-46, and reprinted in The Knowledge Most Worth Having, ed. Wayne C. Booth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 59-83; notes added in StS. This was an address given at the University of Chicago's seventy-fifth anniversary liberal arts conference on the topic "What knowledge is most worth having?"

The question assigned is, "What Knowledge Is Most Worth Having?" but I want to quarrel with assumptions in that question. In the first place, the knowledge of most worth, whatever it may be, is not something one has: it is something one is, and the correct response to such a question, if a student were to ask it, would be another question—"With what body of knowledge do you wish to identify yourself?" In the second place, the phrase "most worth" is apt to introduce comparative value judgments into areas where they are irrelevant. Whenever students ask me if I would advise them to "take" sociology or anthropology, ancient history or modern history, a science option or a language option, I realize that there are no objective answers, and no possible means of arriving at any. The answer depends on what criteria they adopt, but not on anything in the structure of knowledge itself which I or anyone else can demonstrate to them. I suppose there is such a thing as practically and inherently useless knowledge, that is, subjects without content or founded on false assumptions, like palmistry or the racial theories cherished by the Nazis; but the danger of a student's being deflected by them is remote. The knowledge of most worth, for a genuine student, is that body of knowl-

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edge to which he has already made an unconscious commitment. I speak of an unconscious commitment because for a genuine student, knowledge, like marriage, is too important a matter to be left entirely to conscious choice. Conscious choice is for the uncommitted, and for those the standards employed in the choice can come only from various factors in their own lives, such as a picture of one's future career, a sense of what one is good at, a guess about the market value of one kind of knowledge as compared with another, or simply the kind of instinctive preference that it is not really necessary to rationalize. I begin by separating general education and scholarship, which are not integrally connected. Intellectually, the world is specialized and pluralistic, and learning, like the amoeba, can only reproduce by subdividing. One may organize colloquia around general topics like communication, and get specialized scholars to "communicate" with each other in an unsubstantial Eucharist. Scholars may do this kind of thing under pressure, but for the most part they will do it dutifully, like voting, and not with the exhilaration that they would get from discussing their own specialization with some of the very few people in the world who share it. Actual scholarship is esoteric, almost conspiratorial, and the principles of academic freedom require that it should be left that way. The scholar qua scholar is responsible only to his subject. Students should not try to "evaluate" him as a public performer in the classroom; administrators and private foundations should not harass him by telling him that he ought to learn more about different fields; journalists and politicians should not repeat silly cliches like "ivory tower" to describe his intellectual home. In an age when the word "dialogue" has acquired so potent a charge of verbal magic, it is worth reminding ourselves that in Plato, who seems to have invented the conception, dialogue exists solely for the purpose of destroying false knowledge. As soon as any genuine knowledge (or what Plato regarded as such) is present, the dialogue turns into a punctuated monologue. What the world of scholarship requires is not two but at least a hundred and two cultures, all more or less unintelligible to one another, and the improvement of scholarship is toward more and not fewer. What I have just described is the routine of scholarship only. Its patron saint is Sherlock Holmes, who never failed to solve any problem put before him because of the purity of his dedication to scholarship. Sherlock Holmes rather resented the fact that Watson had never read his little monograph on the distinguishing of 140 varieties of cigar ash, but when

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Watson told him that the earth was a globe revolving around the sun, he remarked that that was an irrelevant piece of information that he would do his best to forget. But of course many other things go on as well as the routine of scholarship, notably a process of mutation and metamorphosis. Subjects regroup themselves and other subjects take shape from the shifting relations of existing ones, as geophysics takes shape from a new relation of geology and physics. It is in these moments of regrouping that the great genius, with his colossal simplifying vision, gets his best chance to emerge. I wonder if anyone of Freud's stature could emerge from psychology now: there might be a feeling that he was an armchair theorist who had not served enough time in laboratory routine to be a proper professional psychologist. The Freuds of the future are more likely to emerge, as Freud himself did, from a point of mutation at which psychology begins to turn into something unrecognizable to its scholarly establishment. But these mutations occur from within existing disciplines at a certain stage in their inner development: they cannot be planned or even directly encouraged from the outside. General education is a social and not primarily an intellectual matter, and has no authority over productive scholarship. All discussion of it must be related to the state of society and the needs, desires, and ideals of that society. There is a body of information and skill that everybody has to know and possess in order to participate in our complex society, and the question is how far up, subjectively in life and objectively in the structure of knowledge, such a body extends, or can profitably be extended. We may assume that we can distinguish two levels in general education: an average or elementary level and a cultivated level; roughly, the difference between being able to read and write and being able to read with some depth and direction and write with some articulateness. At present many believe that raising people to the cultivated level on a huge and unprecedented scale is not merely desirable in itself but a necessity if our civilization is to survive. There has always been a practical distinction between what is important, like cathedrals, and what is necessary, like privies: in our day the important seems, possibly for the first time in history, to be becoming necessary as well. Ever since Adam was thrown out of Paradise and told to go and till an accursed ground, the most important distinction in human life has been the distinction between labour and leisure. By labour, here, I mean the whole productive aspect of society, the accumulating and distributing of food and the means of shelter and the more specific wants of a settled

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social order. According to Veblen, Adam soon tires of tilling the ground and compels Eve to do it instead, confining his own activities to hunting and fishing and thereby beginning a "leisure class," the class that is defined as superior because it contributes nothing to social production.1 When leisure and labour become personified as an upper and a lower class, the conceptions of waste and alienation come into society: alienation for the worker, who is cheated out of nearly all the fruit of his own labour, and waste for the leisurely consumer, who can put nothing to productive use. American democracy has blurred these social distinctions and has replaced the leisure class with the affluent society, but it has not thereby lessened the feelings of waste and alienation. The sense that society, considered in its producing and distributing aspect, is something cheap and ignoble, that it is not worth loyalty, that many of its products are absurdities and that operating its obsessively busy machinery is spiritually futile, is at least as strong as it ever was. And this time there is nobody to hate, no tyrants or silk-hatted capitalists or swaggering lords, no one essentially different from ourselves whom we can relieve our feelings by abusing. In a society devoted wholly to labour, leisure would be thought of as merely rest or spare time: if there is continuous leisure, it becomes idleness or distraction. Idleness and distraction are reactions against the unpleasantness or dullness of labour: they make up for the time wasted on work by wasting time in other ways. A life divided only between dull work and distracted play is not life but essentially a mere waiting for death, and war comes to such a society as deliverance, because it relieves the strain of waiting. It is generally realized that idleness and distraction are very close to the kind of boredom that expresses itself in smashing things, and hence there is a widespread feeling, which is at least a century old, that mass education is needed simply to keep people out of mischief. This is not a very inspiring philosophy of education, nor one at all likely to effect its purposes. Education has nothing to do with this vicious circle of labour and idleness: it begins in that moment of genuine leisure in which Adam is neither tilling the ground nor going fishing and leaving the real work to Eve, but remembering his lost Paradise. Even as late as Milton, articulating the dream of a lost Paradise is still the definition of education. More prosaically, we may say that education is the product of a vision of human society which is more permanent and coherent than actual society. When the students of today were babies, the King of England was

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Emperor of India, China was a bourgeois friend, Japan a totalitarian enemy, and Nazi Germany was ruling as powerful an empire as the world had ever seen. It is clear that what we think of as real society is not that at all, but only the transient appearance of society. A society in which the presidency of the United States can be changed by one psychotic with a rifle is not sufficiently real for any thoughtful person to want to live wholly within it. What real society is, is indicated by the structure of the arts and sciences in a university. This is the permanent body of what humanity has done and is still doing, and the explanations of why the world around us changes so suddenly and so drastically are to be found only there. A theory of education, then, implies a theory of society: a theory of society demands the construction of a social model, and all social models, as Max Weber remarks, have something Utopian about them.2 Conversely, all Utopias are really embodiments of educational theories. We cannot discuss educational theory simply in relation to an existing society, for no educational theory is worth anything unless it can be conceived as transforming that society and, at least to some extent, assimilating it to its own pattern. The moment of leisure, as I have defined it, is that moment which can come only to a fully conscious human being, when he is able to draw back from his activities and compare what he is doing with what he would like to do, or could conceive as better worth doing. This is also the moment at which the sense of a need for education begins, for our words school and scholarship, as Aristotle pointed out, are connected with schole, leisure.3 That is why I spoke of education as something that has for its ultimate goal the vision of an ideal, that is, a theoretically coherent and permanent social order. In moral terms, we could call this the pattern of the just state. This leads us to the traditional conception of education that we have inherited from Plato. Plato divides knowledge into two levels: an upper level of theoretical knowledge (theoretical in the sense of theoria, vision), which unites itself to permanent ideas or forms, and a lower level of practical knowledge, whose function is to embody these forms or ideas on the level of physical life. What I have referred to in my title as the instruments of mental production consist of the arts, and we may see the major arts in Plato's terms as forming a group of six. Three of these are the arts of mousike: music, mathematics, and poetry, and they make up the main body of what Plato means by philosophy, the identifying of the soul of man with the forms or ideas of the world. The other three are the

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imitative or embodying arts, the arts of techne, painting, sculpture, and architecture, which, along with all their satellites and derivatives, unite the body of man with the physical world. In the just state this conception of education is reflected in a hierarchy in which a philosopher-king, supported by guards who have been educated from his point of view, is set in authority over the artisans or producers. Poets who desert their heritage and try to make their art a technical or imitative art have no place in such a state. The Platonic conception of the relation of education to society is a revolutionary one: the shape of a just society, as education conceives it, is so different from that of society as we know it that the two cannot coexist: one is bound to regard the other as its enemy. When the conception was revived in the Renaissance, it was modified by a more accommodating outlook. Renaissance education still forms a vision of the permanent form of society, and theoretically, the most important person to impart this vision to is the ruler. Society is best off when its king is a philosopher-king, and the ideal of education is the institute of a Christian prince. In this view, however, the education of the prince does not radically alter the existing structure of society: it merely illuminates it. The model here is Xenophon's Cyropaedia rather than Plato's Republic. But, as is shown in Machiavelli, the actual prince is much more likely to be a man of force and cunning than of wisdom: an incarnation of will, not of reason. Hence in practice the social role of education is more likely to be found in the courtier, the servant and adviser of the prince. The Renaissance had, besides, inherited a medieval tradition in which the most highly educated people were more likely to be clerics than princes, and hence, in the temporal sphere, confined to a similar supporting and advisory role, a civil service rather than a directing power. The collision between revolutionary and accommodating views of the just state is clearly set out in More's Utopia, in a dialogue between More and his friend Hythloday, who has been in Utopia. Hythloday has returned from Utopia with a Platonic revolutionary view: only the most drastic recasting of Europe into a Utopian mould will do any good to a society in which the "commonwealth" is actually a conspiracy of the rich and powerful. More himself, in the first book, displays a different view: Hythloday should, he suggests, come to terms with existing society, at least to the extent of using his Utopian vision in an advisory capacity— informing, modifying, improving, and rationalizing the structure of that society, and doing what practically can be done toward assimilating

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sixteenth-century Europe to a more coherent vision of life. The attitude here is closer to Aristotle's conception of justice than to Plato's,4 yet included in it is a Christian and Augustinian view that is a logical extension of Plato. If the philosopher-king seeks an identity of his immortal soul with a world of immortal forms, he will eventually have to abdicate as king, as full identity would belong to a contemplative rather than an active life. The ultimate form of the just state can only be embodied in a church or monastic community where the real philosopher-king is God. More's Utopia thus has the same elusive relation to the Christian church that it has to sixteenth-century Europe. There is a real relation to both, along with an underlying antagonism that goes equally deep. The Renaissance, then, carried on the traditional conception of education as a vision of the just state, but it had ready at hand a powerful practical method of achieving it. This was humanism, the study, not of an ideal civilization, but of an actual one which, having disappeared, could be studied in its ideal form as a structure of arts and sciences. This was an educational instrument of a kind foreshadowed by Plato when he went from his vision of the just state in the Republic to its sequel, the story of the civilization of Atlantis learned by the Athenians from the older civilization of Egypt. To a considerable extent Roman culture was humanistic in the sense of recreating an earlier Greek culture in its own context, and the Renaissance followed the Romans in recreating a Latinized Classical culture in their context. The genuine humanists studied the Classics, not as immutable cultural forms in another world, but as informing cultural principles in their world. The Classics, in their totality, including Vitruvius on architecture and Columella on agriculture5 as well as Virgil and Cicero, made up a coherent structure of knowledge that, properly applied, could transform Renaissance society into something like its own pattern of coherence, as the "embers of forgotten tongues," in Milton's phrase,6 kindled a new flame, and the old Roman Empire became renewed into the Holy Roman Empire, the temporal power of Christian Europe. At its best, the study of Classical culture promoted a liberalism of outlook that might otherwise have been impossible in ages so heavily burdened with religious and political anxieties. The Greek and Roman cultures could be studied with a genuine detachment, as the student was committed neither to their religions nor to their political views, and hence was able to separate the ideal or permanent structure from the historical one. The humanist conception of education, as late as Arnold and Newman,

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still envisaged a roughly Platonic society on two levels. On the lower level were the producers and artisans, the workers and tradesmen, and those who were concerned with the practical and technical arts. On the upper level was an aristocracy or leisure class, freed from the necessity of contributing to social production. The function of education, on this higher social level, was to transform a leisure class into a responsible ruling class, trained in the arts of war and peace, the knowledge of Plato's guards and of his philosopher-king. The arts of peace were primarily the musical arts in Plato's sense: they had expanded into the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages, but had retained their associations with music, mathematics, and literature. The "music" part of it, of course, never did have much to do with what we now think of as music, but was rather a branch of speculative cosmology. The supremacy of Classics and mathematics, however, was maintained for centuries in university curricula. These arts represented a permanence that the technical arts could not match: buildings crumble, even monuments of perennial brass can disappear, but books, while individually expendable, have a unique power of self-perpetuation. Hence a book culture and the study of words and numbers can be used to build and rebuild the permanent forms of society, to establish the sense of continuity that is the genuine control of the social order, statesmanship as distinct from "policy, that heretic,"7 as Shakespeare calls it, which merely swims on the stream of time. By the nineteenth century, humanist education had to meet the challenge of an entirely new conception of society. This new conception was, once again, clearest in its most revolutionary and Utopian form, as, first, the ideals of the American and more particularly of the French Revolution, and, second, the goals of the socialist revolutionary movement as set out by Marx. This view, like that of Hythloday in More, regarded the relation of the upper to the lower level of society as essentially predatory and parasitic. The education that made the ruling class feel responsible was thus primarily a rationalization of their power: it constituted what Marx calls an ideology. In its fully developed form society would be identical with productive society: it would consist entirely of workers and producers. According to Carlyle, who expounded a good deal of this attitude while trying to reverse its movement, the real distinction is not between cultivated leisure and work, but between genuine work, as the expression of the energy and intelligence of man, and the two forms of anti-work that corrupt society. One of these is the idleness, or dandyism as Carlyle calls it, of an unworking aristocracy; the

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other is drudgery, the menial and degrading results of exploitation and the mechanical division of labour. The distinction between genuine work and drudgery, the subject of a recent study by Hannah Arendt,8 is developed in Ruskin and in William Morris: Morris is of particular interest to us here because he thinks of the technical arts as the instruments of social revolution. Architecture and the so-called minor arts, the arts mainly of graphic and pictorial design, are for Morris the forces that transform a society of exploitation into a society of workers and producers. Faced with this social change, the defenders of humanist education were thrown back, often in spite of themselves, on a conservative view of society, one that emphasizes the permanent values of aristocracy, leisure, cultivation, and of the social conception that Newman calls the "gentleman." Even as late as T.S. Eliot this association of humanism and social conservatism persists. In Arnold there is a remarkable attempt to separate the ideal of leisure and cultivation from the members of the dominant class who normally embody it. The fact that he describes the former as "culture" and the latter as "barbarians" indicates the strength of the effort. Like the humanists of the Renaissance, Arnold gives the primary place to the study of the Classics, though only because he thinks of them much as Morris thinks of the arts of design, as the living powers of imagination that transform a class-ridden society into a classless one. But he shows an uneasy awareness of the dwindling number of people who think of the Classics in this way, and the growing number of those who either reject them outright as "dead tongues" or accept them mechanically as mere symbols of social status. In those whose bias was toward science and technology, notably Huxley and Herbert Spencer, we find a liberal view of education halfway between the conservative humanist one and the radical socialist one. Here society is assumed to be primarily a producing society, and the student to be preparing for absorption into a society of producers. Production involves a struggle with nature, and so science, the direct study of nature, comes into the foreground of education. The values of humanistic education, being leisure values, are to be thought of, in a producing society, as spare-time values, not transforming society but refining and ornamenting it. The specific humanist reason for choosing the Classics as the basis of literary education thus no longer holds: from this point of view, there are no values in the best Greek and Latin literature that cannot be obtained from the best English literature. Huxley and Spencer were, of course, primarily interested in the new doctrine of evolution,

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and they thought of evolution as in part a process in which man is constantly being educated by nature. For the most part he is educated reluctantly, involuntarily, and with his mind distracted by his own fantasies, an inattentive and unruly child of Mother Nature. As Huxley says: "The question of compulsory education is settled so far as nature is concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and passed long ago. But, like all compulsory legislation, that of nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. . . . Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out why your ears are boxed."9 We see that Huxley's Mother Nature is much like any harassed Victorian mother with a large brood of children, except that she is unusually taciturn: she never scolds, she only whacks. But she is not always a mother: she is a white goddess, and if man accepts her discipline and frames his education on her pattern, he may in time become her lover, even, for brief moments, her master. From this nineteenth-century view has mainly descended the conception of liberal education as a preparatory period, in which the student is allowed four years to get some perspective on the society around him. After that, in the standard phrase of commencement oratory, he is ready to go out into the world, conceived as a world of more or less productive activity, where he will use the small percentage of what he has learned that is relevant to what he is doing, use an even smaller percentage to help ornament and cultivate his spare time, and let the rest gradually erode. A decade or so after graduation one may still have cultivated tastes, but as a rule one can no longer read the Arabian Nights so fluently in the original Arabic, or social science textbooks in the original double Dutch. This conception of education is based on a Rasselas myth of a youthful prison-paradise, a playpen, as Robert Hutchins calls it,10 followed by a descent to the Egypt of practical life. It will be seen that this view of liberal education has a basis that is really antiliberal: a grimly utilitarian standard is the logical response to it. This standard is modified in various ways: some things are good in themselves, their own ends as Newman says, and we have to think of the values of education as including them too. Or, more obviously, a knowledge of the more permanent principles of the arts and sciences turns out to be more practically useful than the kind of technical training that becomes obsolete as soon as one has learned it. But as long as we accept, even unconsciously, a vision of society in which the machinery of production assumes an overwhelming and inescapable urgency, our de-

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fences of the liberal arts and sciences will continue to have a panicstricken tone in them. There is residual panic even in the question of what knowledge is most worth while, for in the time-word "while" lurks the thought "so little time," with its suggestion that a pathetically small part of one's life is spent in acquiring knowledge. The conception of society as consisting functionally only of workers and producers was one of the great nineteenth-century contributions to thought. But considering that it has become a stock response to say that the main problem of the twentieth century is the problem of leisure, surely we need to develop a view of education that incorporates this problem. The natural drive of the producing society is not democratic but oligarchic or managerial: it increases inequalities of privilege instead of reducing them, and in itself is no longer capable of leading us to the vision of the just state. Today, the machinery of production appears to be steadily declining in the proportion of time and attention that it requires. I am not speaking of automation, which is not a cause but an effect of this process: I mean simply that the proportion of work to leisure which according to the Book of Genesis was established by God himself on a ratio of six to one is rapidly changing in the direction of a ratio of one to one. This makes for a social situation in which dull, meaningless, and exploited labour is less inevitable, and hence idleness and distraction are less inevitable as reactions against it. We are accustomed to thinking that everyone needs to be functionally related to his society through the work he does. But if leisure comes to occupy so much of so many people's lives, the question of finding a social function in leisure becomes increasingly important. This is already a problem of some urgency with women, as middle-class housewives are the obvious victims of a machinery of production so overefficient that it can only continue to operate by turning as many people as possible into full-time consumers. We appear, then, to be entering a period in which work and leisure are not embodied in different classes, but should be thought of as two aspects, nearly equal in importance, of the same life. Every citizen may be not only a Martha, troubled about many things, but a Mary who has chosen the better part [Luke 10:38-42], and the question, "What does he know?" becomes as relevant to defining one's social function as the question, "What does he do?" The vast network of educational and cultural activities which includes schools, universities, churches, theatres, concerts, art galleries and museums, adult education programmes, and many other things, such as

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recreational and physical education, which I cannot deal with here, is thus gradually taking shape as the other half of society. Some countries, including Canada, have a nationalized programme of television, radio, and films, which is, or is supposed to be, more educational in its aims than the so-called private media that are conscripts in the army of production. One would hope to see an increasingly large proportion of such media desert advertising for education, or, at least, become more concerned to guide than merely to reflect public taste. One would hope to see the present notion disappear that mass media must be controlled either by propaganda or by advertising, that the former means totalitarianism and slavery and the latter democracy and freedom. The confusion of the liberal and the laissez-faire is still very much with us. One would hope to see the machinery of production operated with less hysteria through the gradual elimination of superfluous goods, including the waste products of war. These are Utopian hopes, but without Utopian hopes there can be no clear vision of social reality. In such a society it would be appropriate that universities should no longer be almost wholly concerned, as teaching institutions, with young people in the few lucid intervals that occur during four years of the mating season, but would make a place also for adults who could keep dropping into the university at various periods of their lives as an intellectual retreat. In this social context, the question of what knowledge is worth while would not have the implication that knowledge is obtained mainly during a period of preparing for life. Life will not stay around to be prepared for, nor, in a world where the coding, housing, and retrieving of information is itself one of the biggest activities there is, can life be conceived as anything apart from a continuous learning process. The essential aim of all early education should be the inculcating of a lifetime habit. This takes me back to my original remark that for a genuine student the knowledge of most worth is the subject to which he has already committed himself. One would normally expect that the subject which forms a student's "major" would be the basis of a permanent interest in that subject. It is one function of general education, I should think, to establish a context for special cultural interests. Every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge, and general education should help the student to see how this is true for his chosen field. It is obvious, as was also said at the beginning, that a cultivated and well-informed interest in a subject is something different from scholarship, with its dependence on research libraries and laboratories. As the

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somewhat sinister phrase "productive scholar" indicates, scholarship is part of the army of production: the scholar is not necessarily, qua scholar, an educated man at all, and he works in an area where the division of labour is at its most thoroughgoing. The editor of Shakespeare and the chemist live in different scholarly worlds, and proposals to make the humanist memorize the second law of thermodynamics and the scientist a speech from Macbeth will not bring them together. What brings them together is social, not intellectual, the fact that they are both citizens of their society with a common stake in that society. The only knowledge that is worth while is the knowledge that leads to wisdom, for knowledge without wisdom is a body without life. But no form of knowledge necessarily does or cannot do that: the completing of the structure has something to do with one's sense of the place of knowledge in the total human situation, ideal as well as actual. Because we have tended to think of leisure as occasional or preparatory, and leisure-time activities as merely filling up the cracks of a busy life, the creative arts, which are particularly the symbols of cultivation, have never reached their true educational proportions. I think that what is true of scholarship is also true of the creative arts: those who paint and write and compose are, again, producers. The process of liberal education seems to me to be concerned more with understanding and responding to the arts than with producing them, though of course this is a matter of emphasis, not of definition. As Castiglione showed for the Renaissance courtier, the artist needs to be complemented by the cultivated amateur, who represents the social vision of an educated public that has some idea what to do with the artist's work. Hence education in the arts is primarily critical: it struggles to attain a conscious knowledge and understanding of a kind that is normally detached from the creative process itself, though it should be as useful to the creative artist as to anyone else. The chief deficiency in today's literature, for example, is not the lack of good writers, but the lack of a reading public sufficiently large, informed, and articulate to establish the real social importance of the good writer. The importance of the creative arts becomes obvious in proportion as social leisure increases: they are the primary elements of the cultivated life and of all social ideals. But their importance does not stop here: they are also, in the phrase of my title, the primary instruments of mental production. We have seen that two arts, literature and mathematics, held a leading place in Platonic, medieval, and humanistic conceptions of

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education, and their place today is as central as ever, although the Classical literatures are now reinforced by the modern ones. The contemporary reason for their importance is that the arts of words and numbers are not only arts in themselves but informing languages for other disciplines. Words inform the bodies of knowledge that we call the humanities, as well as most of the social sciences; mathematics informs the sciences, more particularly the physical sciences. I suppose the scientific part of general education would be general science, and it is always something of a tour de force to make science accessible and profitable to the unspecializing student. But, of course, the more the student understands of the language of mathematics, the less difficult the tour de force has to be. I think that literature, the art of words, has a similar relation to the other verbal disciplines, and that the shape of the arguments of the controversial subjects, religion, philosophy, political theory, is ultimately a poetic shape. Education is concerned with two worlds: the world that man lives in and the world he wants to live in. It would, of course, be nonsense to say that the former was the business of the sciences and the latter the business of the humanities and the arts. But it is true that science is primarily the study of the order of nature, the world that is there: it is true also that the form of the world man wants to live in is revealed by the form of the world he keeps trying to build, the world of cities and gardens and libraries and highways that is a world of art. We come closer to their relation if we say that the two great divisions of liberal knowledge embody two moral attitudes which are also intellectual virtues. The distinctive intellectual virtue of science is detachment, the objective consideration of evidence, the drawing of rational conclusions from evidence, the rejection of all devices for cooking or manipulating the evidence. Such a virtue is most obvious in the sciences that are founded on the repeatable experiment. But even in fields that are nonexperimental and nonpredictive, such as history, the scholar needs the same kind of detachment and is bound by the same code of honour to the extent that the nature of his subject permits. Only in the creative arts, perhaps, is one free of the scientific code, and only there because detachment is replaced by a kind of craftsmanship that is psychologically very similar. But in the arts, particularly the literary arts, we become aware of many human factors relevant to them but not to science as such: emotion, value, aesthetic standards, the portrayal of objects of desire and hope and dream as realities, the explicit preference of life to death, of growth

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to petrifaction, of freedom to enslavement. Literature is not detached but concerned: it deals with what is there in terms of what man wants and does not want. The same sense of the relevance of concern enters into many other verbal-areas, into religion (where the concern is "ultimate," in Tillich's phrase),11 and a great deal of philosophy and history and political theory and psychology. It extends into most areas of applied science, and if it does not enter pure science as such, that is only because the detachment of science is the aspect of concern that is appropriate to science. And just as the language of science seems to be largely mathematical, so the language of concern is verbal, but verbal in a certain way. Briefly, the language of concern is the language of myth. Myth is the structural principle of literature that enters into and gives form to the verbal disciplines where concern is relevant. Man's view of the world he wants to live in, of the world he does not want to live in, of his situation and destiny and heritage, of the world he is trying to make and of the world that resists his efforts, forms in every age a huge mythological structure, and the subjects I have just listed form the main elements of it. I call it a structure, and sometimes, as in the Middle Ages, it really does seem to be one, the extent to which the Middle Ages unified its mythology being a source of great admiration to later times. In our own day we are more aware of variety and disagreement in our mythology, but the connecting links are there, and it is a part of the task of general education to try to expose them. Many of those who are engaged in building up this mythopoeic structure—poets, theologians, philosophers, cultural historians—keep eagerly scanning the physical sciences for formulae that they can annex, thereby showing that scientific evidence confirms their world-picture. In the eighteenth century there was great religious, philosophical, and poetic excitement over the world-view that Newton had developed, though on analysis it was not so much his actual science which caused the excitement as the fact that Newton, who himself had speculative interests, had thrown out such suggestions as that space was the sensorium of deity,12 in addition to framing his laws of motion and gravitation. Evolution, similarly, set off a great wave of mythopoeic speculation ranging from Bernard Shaw's creative will13 to theories about society that had much more to do with Malthus than with Darwin. Various conceptions borrowed from Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg have been used to decorate more recent world-pictures, and the law of entropy, taken out of its thermodynamic context and applied to the entire universe, gives us a

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cosmology sufficiently pointless and lugubrious to sound very modern in this existential age. These examples are somewhat discouraging: they all seem to me to be phoney, and I doubt if any of them would be regarded, in the sciences that suggested them, as founded on a genuine and well-proportioned knowledge of those sciences. I would even risk the suggestion that the physical sciences have never contributed anything to the mythopoeic world-picture except through misunderstanding and misapplication. If that is true, then the moral is clearly that science is its own world-view, and should be distinguished from the mythical one, even though it may be another mythology. Any cultivated person can become acquainted with both without trying to reconcile them, and without suffering from schizophrenia through failing to do so. Doubtless the world we see and the world we create meet somewhere at some point of identity, but keeping the two eyes of knowledge focused on that point seems better than a Cyclopean single vision. It is particularly in the religious area of the mythical vision that this is true. There is a natural impetus of religion towards idolatry: the instinct that created gods out of nature in primitive life still keeps trying to project God from human concerns into the order of nature. The God of nature is dead, because he was never alive, but the fact that there is no time and no place for God in the scientific worldview does not refute the religious aspect of the mythical one. I am not, of course, speaking of philosophical efforts to co-ordinate scientific world-views in themselves, which form a different kind of activity. And what I am attacking, in any case, is not the integrating of myth and science, if it can be done, but the forcible conversion of science to myth. I spoke of detachment and concern as the virtues of the two attitudes, but for each virtue there is a corresponding vice. The vice of detachment is indifference: the feeling that one's immediate concern is separable from the total human concern—that a man can be an island entire of himself. The indifferent man, in science or business or whatever, does what seems useful to himself at the moment, and disregards the suggestion that it might be harmful to society, or even to his own better self. The trouble with indifference is that it cannot remain indifference. The only forms of human reality are life and death, and if the hopes and dreams and desires and values of humanity which are essential to life are rejected, life itself is rejected. Sooner or later indifference must be conscripted by aggression, and find its fulfilment in war, in the promotion of death on a total scale.

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The vice of concern, on the other hand, is anxiety. We have anxiety when a society seizes on one myth and attempts to pound the whole of knowledge and truth into a structure conforming to it. The simplest statement of this kind of anxiety is the remark attributed to the Caliph Omar, when about to burn the Alexandrian Library, that all the books in it either agreed or disagreed with the Koran, and were therefore either superfluous or blasphemous.14 Similar anxieties dominated Christian Europe for centuries, and provided more than enough evidence that the desire to persecute was an essential part of them. Marxism forms the same kind of anxiety-myth today, and it too has its Omars demonstrating that all forms of knowledge are either consistent with it or wrong. Hysterical anxiety-groups on the extreme right in American life also work in the direction of setting up a myth of "Americanism" as the criterion for all statements of fact or opinion. It is generally felt that such groups exert a subversive influence on American culture which is out of all proportion to their numbers, to say nothing of their intelligence. If so, then something is lacking in the educational resources of the saner part of the country. To sum up: the instruments of mental production are the creative arts and the bodies of knowledge they inform. These bodies make up two larger bodies, mythology and science, man's view of his own destiny and his view of the world around him. These larger bodies are distinguishable, but not separate, and the moral attitudes that make them possible, concern and detachment, interpenetrate in all knowledge. Mythology in particular, on the level of general education, forms an initiatory pattern of education: understanding the traditional lore of one's society. The basis of it is social mythology, the cliches and stock responses that pour into the mind from conversation and the mass media, including school textbooks. The purpose of social mythology is to create the adjusted, that is, the docile and obedient citizen, and it occupies an overwhelming proportion of American elementary education. I think this is the source of the deficiency I have just noted: the myth of the American way of life does not distinguish the reality from the rationalized facade of that life. Above social mythology is the mythical structure formed by the humanities and the vision of nature afforded by general science, the purpose of which is to create the informed and participating citizen. Above this is the world of art and scholarship, which is to be left to shape itself, and acknowledged to have the authority to reshape the structure of general education below it at any time. Where an initiatory

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mythology controls the whole structure of education, as it did in medieval Europe and does now in Communist China, tolerance is a negative virtue, a matter of deciding how much deviation is consistent with the safety of the myth. Where art and scholarship are autonomous, tolerance is a positive and creative force, the unity of detachment and concern. When I say that education is the study of society in its stable and permanent form, I do not, naturally, mean an unchanging form. I mean that genuine society preserves the continuity of the dead, the living, and the unborn, the memory of the past, the reality of the present, and the anticipation of the future which is the one unbreakable social contract. Continuity and consistency are the only sources of human dignity, and they cannot be attained in the dissolving phantasmagoria of the newspaper world, where we have constantly to focus on an immediate crisis, where a long-term memory is almost a handicap. The term "liberal" applied to education, again, reminds us that there is not necessarily any principle of freedom in political democracy, in economic laissez-faire, or in the separation of state and church. All these may be signs of a measure of freedom in society, but they are not sources of it. There can be no freedom except in the power to realize the possibilities of human life, both in oneself and for others, and the basis of that power is the continuing vision of a continuing city.

46

Speech at a Freshman Welcome 19 September 1966

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box i, file x, headed "Summary of speech given by Dr. Northrop Frye at Freshman Welcome, Monday, September igth." The speech was given by Frye as principal of Victoria College to welcome the incoming class of 1970. This is an exhilarating and buoyant time to be coming to university, which for us is a pleasant change from years of war, depression, McCarthyism and other hysterias, and a feeling that the university was fighting a hostile world. Now that society wants the university, coming to college is participating in history, and what with automation and the increase of leisure, you may well be among the shock troops of a cultural revolution. The distance between pupil and teacher diminishes as the former gets older: by the end of high school the teacher should be a fellow student. Here you run your own show: the president and I speak to you through the courtesy of your own students' organization. You are physically and socially mature. You are, of course, intellectually immature. So are we, on the staff; so is everybody. In the intellectual world the only mature people are those who are willing to admit their immaturity. You did admit it, which is why you are here, and we honour you for doing so. A good deal has been said about conformity in education, especially in the secondary schools. But, first, a lot of education consists in learning how to get along in society, how to come to terms with what society thinks it knows and believes it believes. Second, there is really no such thing as a nonconformist. What we hope for is not the nonconformist but the individual, the person who can handle social conventions without

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being ruled by them. We ask you to detach yourselves from society just enough to see the great ideas and conceptions that run it; the engine room of the world is here, and here you can compare what society is with what it might become, in the accuracy of the sciences and the imaginative discipline of the arts. You cannot learn without developing moral qualities, such as courage and honesty; and the importance of your education is not in how much you learn, but in the clarity of social vision you attain. If you should fail and drop out, remember that you have only not met an objective and arbitrary standard: don't think of yourself as "a" failure, or assume that we're no longer interested in you. If you're a versatile person with many interests, remember that every choice eliminates all other choices, and that your obligations are obligations only because you have chosen them. If inner resistances develop in you to the maturing process, remember that panics and tensions exist in us too, in a world where knowledge advances so rapidly. Where so much excitement surrounds the university, you should guard against the feeling that everybody is on the march except you. There has to be a place for organic growth in the learning process: in other words for dither and confusion. Is society's hostility to the university really over? Your instructors may tell you things casually, as established facts, and yet be only a few hours away in a jet from countries where they might risk a jail sentence for telling students exactly the same things. As long as man's fear of life is deeper than his fear of death, there will always be a tendency for society to degenerate into a mob, moved only by prejudice and hysteria and hatred of the individual. According to Christianity God himself was a victim of such a mob. We are not in a cosy white and black melodrama: we ourselves are involved in crime and corruption. There are millions of people who admire what we have, and fully intend to get it, but don't particularly admire what we are. Their pressures and others may increase the fears of our own society, and people are not at their best when frightened. What one "does" with a university education in the modern world is to return to one's community and devote one's life to trying to build up a real society out of it and to fight the mob spirit wherever it is. Creating such a society is the main meaning and purpose of human life, and your specialized preparation for it begins here.

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The Knowledge of Good and Evil 27 October 1966

From StS, 22-37. Originally printed in The Morality of Scholarship, ed. Max Black (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 1-28; also edited as an English text for Japanese students by Ariyoshi Mizunoe, Frye's paper was one of three read at the formal inauguration of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, on the general question, as raised in Lionel Trilling's essay "The Two Environments" (1965), of the justification of the humanities. In the eighteenth century there was some confidence that, in Samuel Johnson's words, no new discoveries were to be made in the field of morality.1 But new discoveries continued to be made elsewhere, most remarkably in science, and these have had their effect on our conceptions of morality as well. The development of science emphasized the value of the "scientific method," but most expositions of that method turn out to be not so much methodologies as statements of a moral attitude. To achieve anything in the sciences, one needs the virtue of detachment or objectivity. One starts out with a tentative goal in mind, but on the way to it one must consider evidence impartially and draw only the strictly rational conclusions from that evidence. Cooking or manipulating the evidence to make it fit a preconceived idea works against detachment. And though we may say that detachment is an intellectual rather than a moral virtue, it becomes increasingly clear as we go on that such a distinction is without meaning. The persistence in keeping the mind in a state of disciplined sanity, the courage in facing results that may deny or contradict everything that one had hoped to achieve—these are obviously moral qualities, if the phrase means anything at all. The triumphs of these virtues in modern civilization have naturally,

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and rightly, given them a high place in our scale of values. They are most clearly displayed in the physical sciences, which are so largely informed by mathematics, but as the social sciences developed, they too felt the powerful pull of detachment, and so they became increasingly behaviouristic, phenomenological, and restricted to what can be observed and described. At present it may be said that the principle, which is also a moral principle, that every discipline must be as scientific as its subject matter will allow it to be, or abandon all claim to be taken seriously, is now established everywhere in scholarship. Thus in the general area of the "humanities," history is a subject which can doubtless never be a science, in the sense of being founded on repeatable experiments, informed by mathematics, or leading to prediction. But there is a scientific element involved in the choice of historical evidence which distinguishes history from legend, and prevents, say, a British historian from including Atlantis, Merlin, and King Lear in his purview. Again, if the historian is attempting to set up a system of causation in his history, he will avoid indefinable causes and restrict himself to what he can observe and describe. And while one historian may believe in something incredible to another, such as the resurrection of Jesus or the miracles of a medieval saint, the sense of a predictable order of nature is so strong that the incredulous historian will set the pattern for his colleague. That is, whatever any reasonable and welldisposed historian finds incredible is likely also to be historically unfunctional in the work of another historian who believes it. Similarly, literary critics are slowly and reluctantly beginning to realize that the evaluative comparison of literary works and traditions gives us no knowledge of literature, but merely rearranges what we already know, or think we know. Whatever gives us knowledge of literature has, like genuine history and genuine philosophy, a detached and objective element in it that distinguishes it from elegant rumination. The hope of developing an axiological science in criticism, as elsewhere, remains so far only a hope. As for religion, its resistance to the same pressure has been long and stubborn, but is visibly collapsing. For long it was felt that the religious mind, like the White Queen in Alice, specialized in believing the impossible. The present tendency to "demythologizing" in religion means, first, that beliefs which are contradicted by the plainest evidence of history or science, such as the quasi-historical fantasies of the AngloIsraelites or the "fundamentalism" that translates the hymn of creation in Genesis into a textbook of geology, are intellectually wrong. Consequently, because of the way that such beliefs shut doors in the mind and

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prevent the whole mind from coming into focus on anything, they are in the long run morally wrong as well. In all areas of knowledge we distinguish the observed fact, which depends on sense experience, from the context of the fact, which depends not so much on reason as on a sense of convention about what is, at the time, felt to be reasonable. Truth in religion is increasingly felt to be something that conforms to scientific and scholarly conceptions of truth, instead of being thought to reside primarily in the miraculous, or in the transcendence of other conventions of truth. Demythologizing is a very inappropriate, not to say foolish, term for what is actually mythologizing, as any withdrawal of religious structures from ontological assertion is bound to transform them into myths. This process has now reached a crucial stage. As the principle of objectivity as the guide to truth continues to make its way, certain types of conceptions, which do not lend themselves to observation, tend to become unusable. What reality can now be attached to the word "God," if it no longer means anything objective? Is it a word that can still be used, like "mind" in psychology or "life" in biology, as a kind of metaphorical signpost, pointing to things that manifest themselves as complexes of observable behaviour? If so, what complexes? Or is it a word that depends solely on projection or hypostasis, like such terms as devil, angel, god with a small "g," daemon, or (in most contexts) soul, which can only be asserted to exist? It is so fatally easy to name things that are not there: the lion and the unicorn have exactly the same grammatical status. Or, finally, is the conception of "God," which has never been anything but a nuisance as a scientific hypothesis, simply a dead word, like "ether" in physics, which does not even need a Michelson-Morley experiment to knock it on the head?2 The case of religion is of particular importance in discussing morality in scholarship, because our traditional morality has been bound up with religion, and religion with belief in the existence of a personal God. In Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy (1611), the word "atheist" also means what we should now mean by a psychopath. Anyone at that time who renounced a personal God would be assumed to have renounced every moral principle as well. Today, most responsible theologians would agree that the statement "There is a God" is of very little religious and no moral significance. It is clear that the conviction we began with, that no new discoveries are to be made in morality, was premature, even if we are still only at the stage of unmaking some of our old discoveries. In the creative arts the virtues of detachment and objectivity do not, at

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first sight, seem to apply. The artist is not bound to evidence and rational deduction: he makes a functional use of emotional and even repressed factors in his mental attitude which the scientist as such must sublimate. Yet the cult of objectivity has been very strong in the arts, too, for over a century, especially in literature. Zola thought of his novels as applied sociology; Flaubert and Joyce recommended an Olympian detachment as the only position worthy of the artist; even the poets insisted that writing poetry was an escape from personality. If any serious contemporary writer were attacked on moral grounds, his defence would almost certainly be based on the moral virtue of detachment. He is trying, he would say, to tell the truth as he sees it, like the scientist. Such a defence would relate to content, but, in form, perhaps the craftsmanship of the artist, his effort by reworking and revising to let his creation take its own shape, is what corresponds in the arts to the scientist's objectivity. Art being also a mode of communication, the artist's personal emotions have only a typical or representative status in his art. The permeation of ordinary scholarly life by the same virtue is marked in the deference paid to impersonality. A scholar is supposed not to write or to read an unfavourable review with any personal application; his friendships are not supposed to be affected by theoretical disagreements; students are instructed that "failure" means only not meeting an objective standard, and does not refer to them as human beings. It is significant that the personal appropriation of knowledge is not considered the scholar's social goal. The scholar whose social behaviour reflects his knowledge too obtrusively is a pedant, and the pedant, whatever the degree of his scholarship, is regarded as imperfectly educated. Yet there is a widespread popular feeling, expressed in many cliches, that the pedant, the scholar who does not accurately sense the relation between scholarship and ordinary life, is in fact typical of the university and its social attitude. The forward impetus of the scientific spirit backfires in the public relations department: the disinterested pursuit of knowledge acquires, for its very virtues, the reputation of being unrelated to social realities. The intellectual, it is thought, lives in an oversimplified Euclidean world; his attitude to society is at best aloof, at worst irresponsible; his loyalties and enmities, when they exist, have the naive ferocity of abstraction, a systematic preference of logical extremes to practical means. A fair proportion of incoming freshmen, in my experience especially women, though mildly curious about the scholarly life, are convinced that it is an "ivory tower," and that only a misfit would get

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permanently trapped in it. I call this popular view a cliche, which it clearly is, but the cliches of social mythology are social facts. And what this particular cliche points to, rightly or wrongly, is the insufficiency of detachment and objectivity as exclusive moral goals. The scholarly virtue of detachment, we said, is a moral virtue and not merely an intellectual one: what is intellectual about it is its context. It turns into the vice of indifference as soon as its context becomes social instead of intellectual. Indifference to what? Indifference, let us say, to what we may call, with the existentialists, concern. By concern I mean something which includes the sense of the importance of preserving the integrity of the total human community. Detachment becomes indifference when the scholar ceases to think of himself as participating in the life of society, and of his scholarship as possessing a social context. We see this clearly when we turn from the subject itself to the social use made of it. Psychology is a science, and must be studied with detachment, but it is not a matter of indifference whether it is used for 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. The challenge of concern may come in many forms, and from either a revolutionary or a conservative attitude. Marxism has done much to popularize the view that all social detachment is illusion. On the other hand, Burke laid down a programme of pragmatic and short-range concern in opposition to revolutionary tendencies of his time which he described as "metaphysical," a deductive effort to force human destinies into conclusions from large and loose premisses about the rights of man. Such conceptualizing of social activity tends to sacrifice the immediate for the distant good: it achieves a detachment from the present situation which is really only indifference to it. The kind of progressivism that says, "If we shoot a hundred thousand farmers now, we may have a more efficient system of collectivized agriculture in the next generation," or, "We need something like a nuclear war if we are to stabilize the population explosion," is an example of the kind of indifference that Burke had in mind. It is clear that concern and morality are closely connected: morality, in fact, in the sense of the kind of obligation that enables man to preserve his relation to society, is the central expression of concern. What we have to determine is to what extent concern is a scholarly virtue, and whether or not it is, like detachment, a precondition of knowledge. Traditionally, morality has been primarily the safeguarding of the community against

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all attacks on it. Its ultimate sanction is the giving up of the individual life to preserve the social one, whether in war or in capital punishment. But the safeguarding of the community is not the whole of concern. Concern includes a dialectical value judgment: the assumption that life is better than death, happiness better than misery, freedom better than slavery, for all men without exception, or significant exception. Human life is socially organized and cannot achieve its goals without such organization, yet any given society may bring death, misery, or slavery on many or even the majority of its members. A man who feels such concern can thus never wholly repudiate nor wholly support his particular society: there must always be a tension between one's loyalties and one's projected desires. Traditionally, however, what I have called the dialectic of concern has been strictly subordinated to accepting one's own society. In proportion as this is true, society incorporates the dialectic of concern in a class structure wherein one class derives a greater share of leisure, privilege, and personal liberty from the labour of the rest of society. The same pattern appears in religion, where the division takes the form of heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. As long as the dialectic of concern was assumed to be completed in another world, the class structure of this one could be accepted as a necessary transition to it. To that extent the instinct of Western Europe was sound in regarding Christianity as the palladium of its social structure. A more radical tension has begun to develop since, say, around Rousseau's time. It was probably Rousseau who brought out most vividly the contrast between what civilization demands and what man most profoundly wants. Since then, the reconciling of the dialectic of concern with the social structure has tended to take one of two forms, depending on whether the general-will side or the noble-savage side of Rousseau's thought is stressed. One form, clearest in Marxism, calls for a revolutionary movement from the depressed part of society to put an end to the perversion of concern in the social structure, along with its religious projection. The other, which has taken hold in America, calls for the maintaining of an open society to resist any such revolution, on the ground that it would merely set up a new establishment, and one much harder to dislodge. The traditional assumption that man can do nothing without a specific social organization takes different forms in our day. One of these is the sense of the futility of individual effort, which in turn leads to a rationalizing of "commitment" or "engagement," that is, attaching oneself to

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something that looks big and strong enough to get somewhere on its own. The attraction of Communism for many European intellectuals is usually rationalized on this basis. You obviously can't lick them, the argument runs, so you'll have to join them, or their most powerful enemy. Yet the expression of concern seems morally much more clearcut when it takes the form of a minority resistance movement, like the resistance of the French to the Nazis, of the Hungarians to the Communists, of Negroes to white supremacy, of the Vietcong to the Americans. It is still more so in proportion as the cause appears quixotic, hopeless, futile, or abandoned by others. Those who die for their country in war help to preserve the life of their community in time, but the hopeless cause is invisible, though believed by its martyrs to be present. In religion, an invisible but present heaven may be the guarantee, so to speak, of the reality of the community to which martyrdom bears "witness" (the original sense of martyr). The apocalyptic visions of the Phaedo and the New Testament make the deaths of Socrates and of Christ more intelligible. But even without religion the nonparticipating expression of concern, when carried to the point of death, has an intense moral challenge about it. The self-cremating of Buddhist and American conscientious objectors to the Vietnam war is an example. The Nuremberg and other Nazi trials even raised the question whether a (necessarily hopeless) resistance to the demands of a perverted social order was not only morally but legally binding, and whether one who did not make such a resistance could be considered a criminal. It was feared at the time, no doubt correctly, that the nations who prosecuted these trials would not show enough moral courage to respect this principle where their own interests were involved. In contrast, the more powerful the social structure, the more apt one's loyalty to it is to modulate from concern to concerned indifference. The enemy become, not people to be defeated, but embodiments of an idea to be exterminated. The real growing-point of concern, we have indicated, is not the mere wish that all men should attain liberty, happiness, and more abundant life, nor is it the mere attachment to one's own community: it is rather the sense of the difference between these two things, the perception of the ways in which the human ideal is thwarted and deflected by the human actuality. If there is no moral concern for all humanity, and only concern for one's own society, then concern is reversed into anxiety, which is the vice of concern, as indifference is the vice of detachment. Anxiety in this sense is a negative concern, a clinging to the accustomed features of

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one's society, usually connected with a fear of something that has been made into a symbol of the weakening of that society. Every social change, even the most obvious improvements, like abolishing slavery or giving votes to women, or the most trifling novelties in fashion, stirs up anxieties of this sort. Religion is a particularly fruitful source of such anxieties, which it inherits from the primitive anxiety known as superstition. Those who are not capable of faith have to settle for anxieties instead. The wider concern based on the preference of life, freedom, and happiness to their opposites is, as we have just called it, a projection of desire. The source of all dangers to social routine, real or fancied, is man's feeling that his desires are not fulfilled by his community. And when we think of the individual man in this way, as a potential disturber of society, we tend increasingly to think of him, not as reasoning man or feeling man, but as sexual man. Eros is the main spokesman for the more abundant life that the social structure fears and resists. When we begin to think along these lines, we soon become aware of the extent to which social anxieties are preoccupied with channelling and sublimating the sexual energies. We begin to understand why certain overt expressions of sexual activity, such as public nakedness or "four-letter words," provide an automatic shock to such anxieties. This familiar Freudian view of anxiety has developed an unexpected social importance in the last decade, when American life has begun to show some contrasting parallels with Communism. The programme of Marxism calls for a separation of social loyalty from the ruling class's defence of its privileges, and attaches loyalty to a "proletariat" or group of dispossessed. The contrasting social movements in America have recently taken on a strongly Freudian cast, in which "beat," "hip," and other disaffected groups attempt to define a proletariat in a Freudian sense, as those who withdraw from "square" or bourgeois anxiety-values and form a society of the creative and spontaneous. Associated with them are novelists and poets who emphasize the sexual side of human activity, sometimes with a maundering and tedious iteration. Considered as moralists, such writers are attempting to destroy or at least weaken the anxiety-structure founded on sexual repression. It is becoming apparent that concern is a normal dimension of everybody, including scholars, and that for scholars in particular it is the corrective to detachment, and prevents detachment from degenerating into indifference. It remains to be seen what its relationship to the learning process is. It seems obvious that concern has nothing directly to do

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with the content of knowledge, but that it establishes the human context into which the knowledge fits, and to that extent informs it. The language of concern is the language of myth, the total vision of the human situation, human destiny, human aspirations and fears. The mythology of concern reaches us on different levels. On the lowest level is the social mythology acquired from elementary education and from one's surroundings, the steady rain of assumptions and values and popular proverbs and cliches and suggested stock responses that soaks into our early life and is constantly reinforced, in our day, by the mass media. In this country most elementary teaching is, or is closely connected with, the teaching of "the American way of life." A body of social acceptances is thus formed, a myth with a pantheon of gods, some named (Washington, Franklin, Lincoln), others anonymous (the pioneer, the explorer, the merchant adventurer). This body of acceptances gradually evolves into a complete mythology stretching from past golden age to future apocalypse. Pastoral myths (the cottage away from it all, the idyllic simplicity of the world of one's childhood) form at one end of it; stereotypes of progress, the bracing atmosphere of competition, the threat of global disaster, and the hope of preserving this life for one's children form at the other. Such a popular mythology is neither true nor false, neither right nor wrong: the facts of history and social science that it contains are important chiefly for the way in which they illustrate certain beliefs and views. The beliefs and views are primarily about America, but are extended by analogy to the rest of the human race. Such social mythology expresses a concern for society, both immediate and total, which may not be very profound or articulate, but which is a mighty social force for all that. Similar social mythologies have been developed in all nations in all ages: contemporary Americans, in fact, have an unusually benevolent and well-intentioned one. Above this is a body of general knowledge, mainly in the area of the humanities, which is also assimilated to a body of beliefs and assumptions. This forms the structure of what might be called initiatory education, the learning of what the cultivated and well-informed people in one's society know, within the common acceptances which give that society its coherence. Initiatory education enters into the university's liberal arts curriculum and is reinforced by the upper strata of the mass media, ranging from churches to the more literary magazines. In our society, the structure of initiatory education is a loose mixture of ideas, beliefs, and assumptions, different in composition for each person, but

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not so different as to preclude communication on its own primarily social level. It forms a body of opinion which I call the mythology of concern. By a myth, in this context, I mean a body of knowledge assimilated to or informed by a general view of the human situation. Some myths in this sense are pure expressions of belief, like the myth of progress. Some are beliefs which are not so much true as going to be made true by a certain programme of social action: this is the sense in which Sorel generally uses the word, and it also characterizes the myth of Marxism, according to the Theses on Feuerbach.3 The traditional picture of scholarship as an intensely specialized activity, motivated by detachment and the pursuit of truth for its own sake, is correct as far as it goes. The arts, and the detailed research which is scholarship in this more restricted sense, emerge out of initiatory education like icebergs, with an upper part which is specialized and a lower part which is submerged in the scholar's general activity as a human being. The mythology of initiatory education is not itself scholarship in the restricted sense, but its upper levels modulate into a scholarly area of great and essential importance. The scholar is involved with this area in three ways: as a teacher, as a popularizer of his own subject, and as an encyclopedist. That is, if he happens to be interested in conspectus or broad synthesizing views, he will spend much or all of his time in articulating and making more coherent his version of his society's myth of concern. A great deal of philosophy (in fact, this is often supposed to be philosophy's role), of history, and of social science takes this form. Relatively few such myths are so firmly embedded in the facts as to be actual hypotheses, capable of being definitely proved or disproved; their importance is rather in their effectiveness in extending the reader's perspective. The mythology of concern, taken as a whole, is not a unified body of knowledge, nor is the knowledge it contains always logically deduced from its beliefs and assumptions, nor does one necessarily believe in everything that one accepts from it. But it does possess a unity none the less, and those who have most effectively changed the modern world—Rousseau, Marx, and Freud have come up at different tunes during this discussion—are those who have changed the general pattern of our mythology. The world of scholarship, in the restricted sense, is too specialized and pluralistic to form any kind of overall society. Each scholar, left purely to his own scholarship, would see the human situation only from his own

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point of view, and the resulting sectarianism would probably destroy society, as the confusion of tongues led to the abandoning of Babel. Hence the importance of having an area of scholarship intermediate between general information and the pursuit of detailed research. It is essentially an activity of exploring the social roots of knowledge, of maintaining communication among scholars, of formulating the larger views and perspectives that mark the cultivated man, and of relating knowledge to the kind of beliefs and assumptions that unite knowledge with the good life. But it is equally important to recognize where this kind of scholarship is. There is a persistent belief that the unifying of the different fields of scholarship is the final aim of scholarship. But in an open society the unifying of the myth of concern should never be carried to the point of losing the sense of the autonomy of scholarship. A completely unified myth of concern tends to assume that it already has all the important answers, that whatever scholarship has yet to disclose will be either consistent with what is now believed or else wrong, and that it has the right to prescribe the direction in which scholarship is to go. In this situation the myth of concern becomes an anxiety-myth. The mythology of the Middle Ages was much more completely unified than ours, so much so as to inspire envy in every age since, down to the revival of Thomism in the last generation. Yet it fought hard for its fictions: the resistance of authority to scholarship did not stop with Galileo, and it is hard to believe that it has stopped now. Marxism is also a myth of concern which has become an anxiety-myth when it has been politically established. It interferes less with the autonomy of science than with the arts and humanities, which are more likely to develop rival myths of concern. Its interference with the sciences, for one thing, has usually been disastrous. An extreme example, now officially repudiated, was Lysenko's genetics, whose proponent revived a curious neo-scholastic method of arguing, first proving the correct attitude to genetics out of Marx and Lenin, and then asserting that this attitude would be found to fit the facts when the facts were examined.4 Extreme right-wing groups in America, working, of course, mainly on the level of stock response, also attempt to set up a myth of "Americanism" as a criterion for all cultural activity that they get to hear about. When art and scholarship are left autonomous, it is assumed that all unification of knowledge is provisional, and that new discoveries, new ideas, and new shapings of the

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creative imagination may alter it at any time. The open society thus has an open mythology; the closed society has a controlling myth from which all scholarship is assumed to be logically derived. One reason why our myth of concern is not as well unified as that of the Middle Ages is that all myths of concern are anthropocentric in perspective, and physical science, at least, refuses to have anything to do with such a perspective. The physical scientist finds his subject less rooted in the myth of concern than the philosopher, the historian, or the theologian. The latter find it more difficult to separate their subjects from their social commitments: they may even find it something of a struggle to preserve intellectual honesty in their arguments, to let facts speak for themselves and avoid twisting them into the directions called for by their commitments. But the physical scientist's enemy is more likely to be indifference than anxiety, and even a genuine interest in the social context of his scholarship has some unexpected barriers to surmount. Naturally the main outlines of the scientific picture of the world are a part of our general cultural picture, and naturally, too, any broad and important scientific hypothesis, such as evolution or relativity, soon filters down into the myth of concern. But scientific hypotheses enter the myth of concern, not as themselves, but as parallel or translated forms of themselves. An immense number of conceptions in modern thought owe their existence to the biological theory of evolution. But social Darwinism, the conception of progress, the philosophies of Bergson and Shaw, and the like, are not applications of the same hypothesis in other fields: they are mythical analogies to that hypothesis. By the time they have worked their way down to stock response, as when slums are built over park land because "you can't stop progress," even the sense of analogy gets a bit hazy. If a closed myth like official Marxism does not interfere with physical science, we have still to remember that physical science is not an integral part of the myth of concern. We have spoken not merely of scholarship but of the arts also as needing autonomy if society is to preserve its freedom. The reasons why the arts are included belong to another paper, but the role of literature in the myth of concern is relevant here. It is an ancient belief that the original framers of the myth of concern were the poets, acting as "unacknowledged legislators," in Shelley's phrase.5 In literature the dialectic of concern, the separation of life, freedom, and happiness from their opposites, expresses itself in two tonalities, so to speak: the romantic and the ironic visions. The romantic vision is of the heroic, the pleasurable,

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the ideal, of that with which one feels impelled to identify oneself. The ironic vision is the vision of the anguished, the nauseated, and the absurd. Besides these, there are the two great narrative movements, the tragic and the comic, which move towards the ironic and romantic cadences respectively. The ironic vision is the one which is predominant in our day, and its features of anguish, nausea, and absurdity have been deeply entrenched in the contemporary myth of concern. We have noted the importance of detachment in scholarship and its close connection with the scientific method. Science is based on a withdrawal of consciousness from existence, a capacity to turn around and look at one's environment, which is perhaps the most distinctively human of all acts. It is the act that turns the experiencing being into a subject, confronting an objective world from which it has separated itself. The ironic vision is, so to speak, a detachment from detachment: it recognizes the emotional factors of alienation, loneliness, and meaninglessness lurking in the subject-object relationship which the activity of science ignores. The heart of the ironic vision, however, is the vision of the kind of society that such a solitude creates, a society unable to communicate and united only by hatred or mutual contempt. Perhaps the most concentrated form of the ironic vision is what has been called the dystopia, the description of the social hell that man creates for himself on earth, the society of Orwell's 1984, Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Huxley's Ape and Essence, Kafka's In the Penal Colony, where the individual finds his identity in seeing his own selfhatred reflected in the torment and humiliation of others. The goal of the romantic vision is less easy to characterize. Although we should expect it to be the opposite of the ironic vision, some form of social heaven or city of God on earth, it is certainly not, at least not in literature, that anxiety-ridden form known as the Utopia. It is rather the happy and festive society formed in the final moments of a comedy around the marriage of the hero and heroine, where the "hero" is not, as a rule, an exceptionally brave or strong person, but only a modest and pleasant young man. It is rather the idyllic simplified world of the pastoral, where the hero is a shepherd with no special pretensions, except that he is also a poet and a lover. We notice that what we feel like identifying ourselves with in literature tends to be social rather than purely individual, a festive group rather than an isolated figure. Even the tragic hero who is necessarily isolated by the action—Achilles or Beowulf or Hamlet—seems to regard his heroism not as something that

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marks him off from others but as something that he has contributed to his society. It is not the characters but the brave deeds of great men that the Homeric heroes wish to emulate. If they die, they look for nothing more for themselves than the bat-like existence of a shadow in Hades: their reputation will be their real immortality. It seems a cold and thin immortality, and yet perhaps there is something in this final trust in fame that is more than a "last infirmity," more than the mere wistful pathos it appears to be. It is becoming clearer that the impulse which creates the mythology of concern and makes it socially effective is a central part of the religious impulse. Religion in this sense may be without a God; certainly it may be without a first cause or controller of the order of nature, but it can never be without the primitive function of religio, of binding together a society with the acts and beliefs of a common concern. Such an impulse starts with one's own society, but if it stops there it sets up a cult of stateworship and becomes perverted. We know in our own experience how our mythology of concern works against exclusiveness: all genuine concern recognizes the claims of Negroes to full citizenship, for example. Yet the kind of problem represented by the disabilities of Negroes is much broader in scope, as many suffer from similar disabilities who are not Negroes, and if we make the symbol of coloured skin an end in itself, like some of the proponents of "black power," we merely set up a new kind of anxiety. The force that creates the myth of concern drives it onward from the specific society one is in to larger and larger groups, and finally toward assimilating the whole of humanity to the ideal of its dialectic, its concerned feeling that freedom and happiness are better for everyone without exception than their opposites. All national or class loyalties, however instinctive or necessary, are thus in the long run interim or temporary loyalties: the only abiding loyalty is one to mankind as a whole. If this were the whole story, the myth of concern would end simply in a vague and fuzzy humanitarianism. But in proportion as one's loyalty stretches beyond one's nation to the whole human race, one's concrete and specific human relationships become more obvious. A new kind of society appears in the centre of the world, a society which is different for each man, but consists of those whom he can see and touch, those whom he influences and by whom he is influenced: a society, in short, of neighbours. Who is our neighbour? We remember that this question was asked of Jesus, who regarded it as a serious question, and told the story

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of the Good Samaritan to answer it [Luke 10:30-5]. And, as the alien figure of the Samaritan, in a parable told to Jews, makes obvious, one's neighbour is not, or not necessarily, a member of the same social or racial or class group as oneself. One's neighbour is the person with whom one has been linked by some kind of creative human act, whether of mercy or charity, as in the parable itself; or by the intellect or the imagination, as with the teacher, scholar, or artist; or by love, whether spiritual or sexual. The society of neighbours, in this sense, is our real society; the society of all men, for whom we feel tolerance and good will rather than love, is in its background. We have spoken of the religious impulse as one that creates social ties, and that is as far as we can take it here. The universal good will to men which is one logical form of its development is one that could be expressed by statistical formulas, like the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But the sense of a society of neighbours takes us beyond ethics and values into the question of identity. It would perhaps be a reasonable characterization of religion to say that a man's religion is revealed by that with which he is trying to identify himself. Throughout civilization there runs a tendency known in the Orient as "making oneself small," of being modest and deprecating about one's own abilities, and being much more ready to concede the abilities of others. Some of this is self-protective hypocrisy, but not all of it is. When we think about our own identity, we tend at first to think of it as something buried beneath what everyone else sees, something that only we can reach in our most solitary moments. But perhaps, for ordinary purposes at least, we may be looking for our identity in the wrong direction. To identify something is first of all to put it in the category of things to which it belongs: the first step in identity is the realization humanus sum. We belong to something before we are anything, nor does growing in being diminish the link of belonging. Granted a reasonably well disposed and unenvious community, perhaps our reputation and influence, what others are willing to think that we are, comes nearer to being our real selves than anything stowed away inside us. In the imagery of Blake's lyric, one may be more genuinely a "clod," something attached to the rest of the earth, than a separated "pebble."6 In an ideal community there would be no alienation, in the sense used in Marx's early writings: that is, one's contribution to one's community would not be embezzled, used by others at one's expense. In such a community perhaps we could understand more clearly why even the tragic heroes of

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literature attempt to identify themselves with what they are remembered for having done. In the society that the mythology of concern ultimately visualizes, a man's real self would consist primarily of what he creates and of what he offers. The scholar as man has all the moral dilemmas and confusions of other men, perhaps intensified by the particular kind of awareness that his calling gives him. But qua scholar what he is is what he offers to his society, which is his scholarship. If he understands both the worth of the gift and the worth of what it is given for, he needs, so far as he is a scholar, no other moral guide.

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A New Principal for Victoria December 1966

From Victoria Reports, 14 (December 1966): 8. This piece announces the appointment of Dr. J.E. Hodgetts to succeed Frye himself as principal in January 1967.

The principal of Victoria College will hold that position only until the end of the calendar year of 1966. At present he is also acting president, during the six months' leave that President Moore was granted by the Board of Regents last spring, the first leave he has had since becoming president in 1950. I shall (now that I have announced my resignation I can slide into the first person) continue as acting president until April, but on January i I shall be succeeded in the principalship by Professor J.E. Hodgetts. Professor Hodgetts is a graduate of Victoria College, and, like Victoria itself, comes from Cobourg. In his graduating year he won a Rhodes Scholarship, although, his year being the unlucky one of 1939, he was unable to take it up. He has, however, had many similar distinctions since, including fellowships from the Royal Society, the Canada Council, and the Nuffield Foundation. His graduate work was done at the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate in 1946 in Political Science. His academic career has been mainly at Queen's, where he quickly rose to the headship of the Department of Political Studies and a special professorial chair. In 1965 he became a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and will remain associated with that department. He is the author of a great many articles, a book on Canadian administrative history, Pioneer Public Service (1955), and is the editor, with Principal Corry, of a standard text, Democratic Government

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and Politics [1946], now in its third edition. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1963, and was editor of Queen's Quarterly from 1956 to 1958, this last being an activity which brought him into touch with scholarly work in many disciplines, especially in the humanities. Even if I were not personally counting the days until he arrives, I should still be delighted that so distinguished a scholar was taking the office, an office which I imagine he was impelled to accept by his loyalty to and affection for his alma mater. Things will be well for us while he is principal.

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The Question of "Success" 2 February 1967

From The Meaning of Success: Centennial Lectures (York Central District High School Board, 1967), 11-17. One of four public lectures sponsored by the York District High School Board at Thornhill Secondary School, in which a rabbi, an academic, a businessman, and a sociologist reflected on changing notions of success. The speaker immediately preceding Frye, Rabbi Stuart Rosenberg of Beth Tzedec Congregation, had spoken of the dangers of a cult of success based on appearances, and on the need for the acceptance of failure. The assigned title of Frye's lecture was ''Success through Intellectual Achievement." The title of this lecture is not mine, and I have the same reservations about the assumptions in that title, and the same sense of the ambiguity of words like "success," that Rabbi Rosenberg has already expressed so eloquently. I think, in the first place, it would be nonsense to speak of a man as a success. For one thing it would be bad grammar. You can only succeed in extremely limited and specific things. If you are shooting on a rifle range and aim at a bull's-eye and hit it, you succeed, but that is the point at which it stops. If, of course, a man makes his living out of shooting on rifle ranges and hits hundreds and hundreds of bull's-eyes, then you can say by a kind of transferred metaphor that the man who does that is a success. But it isn't a conception which can ever be an attribute of a person. When I went to school I had to read a bad poem which informed me that in the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as fail. But now every September I have to welcome a class of seven or eight hundred youth to Victoria College, of whom somewhere between a quarter and a third are statistically predestined to fail next June. And so I tell them: a

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good many of you are going to fail your examinations, and what that means is that you are not going to get 50 per cent on an exceedingly arbitrary standard. So if you fail your examinations, don't draw the inference that you are a failure, because failing to do something says nothing whatever about you as a human being. The failures of this world are evil people; there is no other kind of failure. Similarly, a success is not what anybody is; it is what other people think he is. And consequently the reality of success depends on the amount of coherence in society. That is, an irresponsible, chaotic, or incoherent society will naturally produce successes who are, by any sane standard, phoneys and frauds. And, in every society, including ours, there are elements which make for coherence and there are other elements which make for confusion. For example, if some dreary crank announces that he is a neo-Nazi, the mass media all fall on him in a dense black cloud and spread his picture over the papers and give him interviews and blow him up to the point at which he becomes something like the Leader of the Opposition. Here you have society in one of its typically irresponsible moods, masquerading under the guise of free speech and a free press, but actually doing something that is a witless and mindless piece of mischief-making. I have similar reservations about the phrase "intellectual achievement." I am not sure that anyone does achieve anything in the world of the intellect. I suppose that writing a book is an intellectual achievement, or at any rate publishing one may be. I have finished eleven books so far, but I have never finished any of them with the sense that I had succeeded or that I had achieved anything. I always finish them with a sense that they were simply being abandoned, and that I had once more got to the point which also is well described by Rabbi Rosenberg—the point at which I could begin again. One of the prominent figures in the French Revolution was asked what he did, what he achieved in the French Revolution, and he said: "J'ai survecu"—I survived.11 think that remark was full of a profound wisdom. We participate in our society in somewhat the way that we go swimming. The first thing you do is dive in, and thus you become totally involved with the world that you enter. It is a very curious world, a world where you can't breathe, you can't see very well, and where all you hear is a roaring noise in your ears. This is the world where the medium is the message; this is the world where communication forms a total environment. Now when communication forms a total environ-

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ment, nothing is being communicated. That is, nothing intelligible is being said by A to B: there is merely an ambience of noise. There are only the cliches and slogans and prefabricated phrases and masses and masses of news. You realize that this total involvement is going to drown you before long, and the thing to do is to get the part of you that can think and breathe and see and hear up to a different level. Swimming is, in fact, a remarkable example of success through intellectual achievement, because it is an operation in which you are supporting yourself in an alien element by keeping your head in a higher world. The more we read human history the more we distrust the cliches of success and achievement. I suppose one of the most resonant successes or achievements in the modern world is the discovery of America. It always seemed to me profoundly ironic that the fishermen and sailors on the coast of the Bay of Biscay knew all about the existence of America, where they used to fish off the Grand Banks and cut timber off Newfoundland, but that it was left for the wild-eyed and obsessed Columbus, who was convinced that the Orinoco River rose in the Garden of Eden, to make the discovery. And this kind of irony is seldom absent from human history. A more important aspect of intellectual development is that it is possible for society to develop in coherence. I do not think, as I say, that any man can be called a success; I am not at all sure that any man ever succeeds. But I do think that society, or what Rabbi Rosenberg calls Israel, can come to a certain point of increased coherence and common sense. In a coherent society what a man does is derived from what he knows, and that is really the principle towards which a modern democracy evolves. Originally we had a society in the shape of a pyramid with a supreme ruler at the top and a chain of personal authority extending down from him, with aristocrats who ruled society simply by the accident of birth. Even as late as the Napoleonic War you had boys of twelve and thirteen given commissions in the British Army and screaming their orders to their men in unbroken voices, because they were gentlemen's sons. They learned their duties from their sergeants, who also picked up the pieces after the army had suffered what the British armies usually did suffer. This conception of the social pyramid, of course, has left us with the conception of leadership: that the further up you are in this pyramid and the less company there is around you, the more of a success you are. It seems to me, on the other hand, quite clear that society is trying to

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outgrow the conception of leadership—that it is trying to evolve to a point at which everybody's social function will derive from a certain kind of knowledge or expertise, and where the professional ruler is somebody that we no longer have much time for. I think of the university, of course, as the model of society. It is the part of society that I know best. I have sat on many committees and been written many letters connected with the choice of administrators of universities, presidents, and deans and others of that gentry. The committee and the letter always begin by saying, "What is he like as a scholar?" and only after that question has been answered do they go on to the next step, "How good is he going to be as an administrator?" The result is that the university is a community of professional scholars and amateur administrators. We wonder what would ever possess a scholar to take an administrator's job. He takes it because he knows perfectly well that the university dies of cancer if its administrators are not scholars, if they do not know what the idea and the function of the university are. Once you admit to a university a caste of professional elite administrators you no longer have a university. The conception of the amateur governor means that at the centre of society we have the extremely reassuring spectacle of an institution dedicated to a certain amount of inefficiency and muddle. This is the pattern, the model of the democratic society. This is how we select the governors of a democracy, when a number of well-meaning and confused Canadians gather at the polls in order to send some more well-meaning and equally confused Canadians to Ottawa. When they get there they haven't much idea what to do, and that is how democracy works, in its curious stumbling illogical fashion. A society like this cannot produce a great man. One feels that if one points to a very obvious example of a great man, say Winston Churchill, there is something archaic about that kind of greatness. One feels, in short, that the really great man is normally a tragic figure. In watching the funeral services for Churchill on television, it struck me that perhaps a whole phase of human history was closing at that point, and that at any rate one would hope that we would never again get into a position like the summer of 1940, in which that kind of leadership was necessary. It seems to me that this conception of intellectual achievement, as simply the conception that man is defined by what he knows, rather than by what he does, is something which is obviously growing on us at this particular time. We have been brought up by the nineteenth century to

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think of society as consisting essentially of producers, of workers, and of everybody else as having no particular social function. In this conception of society leisure is really a form of spare time, of idleness or distraction, and if you have a leisure class which has nothing to do in particular, they are regarded as merely a class of parasites. This is the conception which most of us in my generation were brought up with, and it made its way into our conception of the university too. That is, we naturally assumed that university for undergraduates was a preparatory period in which the young were being trained to deal with life, and, after that, they would go out into the world and deal with it. But of course life won't stay around to be prepared for, and also this was a notion which is congenial to the normal tendency of the adult to think of the adolescent as a rudimentary and primitive form of himself. But I think that the attitudes of undergraduate students today have undergone a considerable and to me a very welcome change. They no longer feel that they are spending their time at university preparing themselves for something else more important. They feel that they are fully participating in their society by being students, and, if they think that, they are right. In our day, in short, there is gradually forming a kind of leisure structure in society, a structure consisting of the schools, and the universities, as well as the churches, the theatres, the museums, the art galleries, and so on, all of which take on an increasing importance as the working week shortens and more and more of one's life becomes devoted to leisure. I have already hinted that such things as idleness and distraction are not really leisure. The kind of thing that we see on our highways and beaches on weekends is not leisure but a running away from leisure. It is the refusal to face the challenge to one's inner resources that genuine leisure poses. Genuine leisure is really a form of education, because there is nothing that man does in his leisure time which does not depend on some kind of acquired skill, whether it is a sport, or reading, or a pursuit of a hobby. This means, therefore, that education takes on an increasingly formative element all through a person's life and not merely in those four feverish years of the mating season when one takes one's first degree. I was interested in Rabbi Rosenberg's comments on neighbours. He gave an illustration from Judaism; I'd like to give one from Christianity. You recall the question, "Who is my neighbour?" was asked of Jesus, that Jesus took it to be a serious question, and that he told the story of the Good Samaritan to answer it. The use of this alien figure, the Samaritan,

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indicates I think that for him one's neighbour is not, or not necessarily, a person in the same nation, the same class, the same ethnic or religious group as yourself. Your neighbour is the person to whom you have been linked by some kind of creative human act, whether it is an act of love or charity or mercy, as in the parable itself, or an act of intellect or imagination, as in art and scholarship, or simply of tolerance and good will, which I take it is love of one's neighbour at a certain distance. But, in any case, a society of neighbours in this sense would be a coherent society. It would not be geographically coherent, because the neighbour of a scientist may well be another scientist working on the same problem on a different continent, and the neighbour of a novelist writing about Mississippi may be somebody reading him in China. But if it is not geographically coherent, it is imaginatively coherent, and a society of neighbours would be a coherent society, of the kind that I spoke of at the beginning. I said that success is not what a man is but what other people think he is, and you notice that all through the history of civilization there has run a certain convention which in Oriental countries is known as "making oneself small." This is the convention of modesty, of being rather selfdeprecating of one's own abilities and being as generous as possible about the abilities and virtues of other people. Some of this, of course, is only self-protective hypocrisy, but by no means all of it is. It seems to me that it indicates a very significant part of our real personality. We often feel that we are really in two parts, that there is a part of us which is turned outward to society but is not our real self. Our real self, we feel, must be something private and hidden—somebody, something, which the rest of the world doesn't see and which, after the third or fourth drink, one's wife doesn't understand. But it is possible that we may be looking for our real self in the wrong direction. Perhaps in a coherent society, that is< a society where there was a reasonable amount of good will and a lack of envy, one's reputation and influence, or what other people were willing to think that one was, would come closer to being one's real personality than anything that was stowed away invisibly inside one. It seems to me inevitable that any person who is at all objective and honest would not be a great man in his own eyes. To himself he would probably be a rather poor creature, and he would be most conscious of his deficiencies. What would keep him going would be rather his relationship to other people, and it is possible, as I say, that his social personality is his real self, granted a sufficiently coherent and responsible society.

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I have spoken of societies which have a chain of personal authority which are like pyramids in shape and which go from a great man or ruler down to the commoners. Similarly there are societies which believe in open discussion and argument, and there are societies which have closed systems of belief which are imposed on everyone. A Marxist society is a closed society in this sense; it is a structure of belief which is compulsory for all members of the society. Medieval civilization was also a closed society, and also a structure of belief which everyone had to accept. A society with a closed structure of belief always develops a certain elite class, a general elite. In the Middle Ages this elite consisted of clerics; in Marxist countries today it consists of people who understand both the principles of Marxism and the way that the existing power structure wants Marxism nationalized. But a democracy, I take it, has nothing to do with the creation of an aristocracy of intellectuals of this kind. It seems to me that what our society is trying to develop is rather a society where everybody is a member of some kind of elite, where everyone derives from his social function some kind of expertise, something to contribute to society that nobody else has in quite the same way. And so, I take it, success in society, if society could ever achieve it, would be not in efficiency in production (including the production of works of the intellect); it would not even be a society with a great achievement in culture, in scholarship, in the arts. It would be rather a society which derived its activity from an intellectual vision, a vision of love and creative power, a sense of what humanity could do. The society which acts in the light of what humanity can do will at least understand what such a phrase as "success through intellectual achievement" means.

50 A Meeting of Minds December 1967

From the University of Toronto Graduate, i (December 1967): 11-13. This article gives Frye's thoughts on Marshall McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology, established in 1963 to advance the study of the effects of technology on society and culture. The centre had an interdisciplinary staff and offered a credit course, conducted by seminars, applicable to any degree in the university. Allan Anderson, who had written an article on the centre for this edition of the magazine, asked Fryefor some comments and tape-recorded his answer. He later sent Frye a transcript that was returned next day unchanged except for a few connecting phrases. Every university has a tendency to develop its departments by subdividing like the amoeba. The scholar, who is naturally a specialist, tends to develop out of his subject a speciality that separates him even from his own colleagues. The farther he advances along his path, the more he is inclined to isolate himself. As this natural tendency of scholarship does not lead to any great progressive enlightenment of the students, subjects and departments occasionally need to be shaken up and regrouped in new ways. The colloquium is one treatment sometimes applied when symptoms of cultural disintegration reach a depressing stage, but I have not much faith in it; it tends to become a series of monologues, and extremely miscellaneous in subject matter and range. I have joined several colloquia of that kind and eventually they all turned out to be just one more thing to go to. Centres and institutes are far superior as adhesive agents in an academic community seeking insurance against or a cure for fragmentation.

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The centres make use of some basic theme or interconnecting idea to get people in different disciplines to confront one another, each hoping to find in allied or even foreign fields central ideas that could be related to his own enterprise. A centre which has both members of staff and students, and which has people working on specific theses with supervisors, can be effective in building up a new approach to and a new perspective on the conventional subject matter. Institutes are somewhat more pragmatic, although here too—the Institute of Bio-Medical Electronics being a good example—different disciplines may rub together and generate new thinking.1 In the main, in a university, centres are experimental devices for regrouping the traditional subjects. There should be no cause for worry if some of the experiments don't work out, and if the mortality rate is fairly high. Others will appear. Centres are bound to go on as a means of trying to get perspectives on the interrelationships of knowledge. The Centre for Culture and Technology points up another important role for this kind of academic structure. While I think it would be a good thing to have such a centre whether Marshall McLuhan were on the campus or not, his peculiar originality justifies associating a centre with him. A scholar who is a serious and original thinker has a good deal of the charismatic leader about him. The great majority of scholars in the university are quite happy with being in one of the departments in one of the traditional disciplines, but every so often one is enough of a lone wolf for the university to want to create space around him and let students have access to him simply for what he is in himself, and for his ideas. It is particularly important for Marshall McLuhan to have this kind of space around him because he is a very enigmatic and aphoristic type of thinker, an easy person to distort and misunderstand. On the periphery there is a large McLuhan rumour which says, "Nobody reads books any more—Marshall McLuhan is right." This, of course, is something of an oversimplification of what a quite important person has to say. So I think it is important for the university to have a structure that will permit serious and dedicated people to get a bit closer to him, not only to understand him, but so they can work out their own ideas in some kind of reference to his.

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Higher Education and Personal Life 1968

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 2,filegg. These notes for an unidentified paper are marked "1968" in an unknown hand, and reflect the concerns and phraseology of that time. Inadequacy of phrases like "dedication to the pursuit of truth." Truth often means only truth of correspondence: i.e., the relation of the structure of words A to the body of phenomena B, as perceived by the student C. This criterion of truth is also the scientific one, which attempts to escape from controversy, in the sense that it appeals to incontrovertible evidence. At the same time, all truth of correspondence, including scientific truth, is produced by a society, and the extent to which it is not Reason but rationalization of certain social attitudes may still be discussable. Certain other subjects cannot escape from controversy because they are really structures of concern: that is, they are preoccupied with defining visions of human life in which the desirable and undesirable are relevant considerations. These subjects, for reasons to be elaborated in the paper, are all mythological, and include large parts of religion, psychology, philosophy, literature, anthropology, and political theory. The teaching and discussion of such subjects make up the centre of liberal education. Two extremes have to be avoided. Every social attitude is in origin a group attitude, unless the person who holds it is a mere crank: it is part of a social trend or pressure, and in origin is likely to be strongly prejudiced, based on insufficient knowledge. As knowledge grows, the attitude becomes more individualized

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and objective, though not necessarily withdrawn from the social group. Liberalization, in education, has everything to do with this process of individualizing social attitudes as they become more mature. Similarly, a young artist is likely to start out as a member of a group or school, becoming more of an individual as he increases in authority. One extreme to be avoided is to base education so strongly on discussion of general issues that students come simply to repeat their prejudices, without feeling that there is a steady advance in their knowledge. The exaggeration of the virtues of what I call the mystique of the seminar belongs here. The other extreme is to think so exclusively in terms of growing, and therefore increasingly specialized, knowledge that the teaching operation is slighted and students are treated as though they ought to be only potential graduate students. The ideal, of course, is the student who is informed and concerned, who can correct his prejudices or re-examine his assumptions without paralyzing his ability to participate in social action, and who can support issues without relying on the cliches and half-truths of activism. The present age is a revolutionary one, but the revolutionary quality is different from that of the Marxism of thirty years ago, at least in the West. Marxism accepted the work ethic, and it would regard such things as Negro segregation or the Vietnam war as by-products of a class struggle. It regarded its solutions as rational and scientific, and the imagination of the artist, for instance, had to be subordinated to "social realism." The revolutionary feeling now is rather one that questions the moral basis of the work ethic itself, and that regards emotions and visions of society and race prejudice as the real enemies or allies, to be fought with or against. This is a situation in which the creative imagination of the artist plays a more central role. The university ought to be regarded as being in modern society what the church formerly was: the institution most centrally concerned with spiritual authority. Literature is the central subject for the study of concerned mythical structures. The student ought to come into college with a proper background in literature, including a large contemporary element, which has been taught entirely without censorship and similar anxieties. If he has been made to study Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations not because they are good novels worthy of study but merely because they contain

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no bad words, the university instructor will be under a considerable handicap. The nature of twentieth-century irony, as largely concerned with defining the undesirable society, but also as an imaginative demonstration of the inadequacy of simplistic attitudes. Possibility of the regrouping of arts courses, e.g. the separation of the history of philosophy and the history of science into a group of historical disciplines. Students want "contemporary relevance," and need to learn that nothing is relevant to the contemporary world except the past, where the principles that make the present change so rapidly are to be found. I note in technological colleges and in high schools a great increase in the demand for controversial subjects, philosophy, literature, political theory, psychology. The myths of concern include religion, which in practice can only be taught in most cases through the medium of literature or history. Distinction between an "open" mythology which has no canon and where commitment to social action does not cut off the possibility of discussion, and a "closed" mythology which imposes a compulsory structure of belief.

52 The University and the Heroic Vision 14 May 1968

From the Wascana Review, 3, no. 2 (1968): 83-7. Typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 2, file gg, one with holograph corrections, one retyped. Given as a convocation address at the University of Saskatchewan.

My memories of Saskatchewan go back a long way, and are not confined to the university. It was a very important part of my education when the United Church assigned me to a mission field in this province, where I rode around to three charges on top of a horse named Katy, who was slightly older than I was, and whose trot made my progress over the field resemble the emotional graph of a manic-depressive. I think most Canadians realize that Saskatchewan is not a province like other provinces. It has been, at least since the Regina manifesto of the CCF, a kind of experimental station in Canadian life. We have learned from its Arts Board a great deal about how to integrate the cultural to the political life of the country, and its medicare programme has, in the long run, proved most enlightening to an indispensable but sometimes socially confused profession. Stranger and more puzzling messages are heard from Saskatchewan too: there was the voice of one crying in the wilderness of Prince Albert over a decade ago,1 and there have been more recent ones even harder to understand. If one thing about education is obvious today, it is that it is a lifetime activity. One can no longer begin a speech of this sort with, "You have finished your studies and are now ready to go out into the world," with its offensively patronizing assumption that your undergraduate career has been a delayed adolescence. It might be equally patronizing, but it would make more sense, to say, "You have made a good beginning to

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your studies, and the world is now ready to come in to you." The door you go through today does not lead to the world: it leads to another schoolroom, and so on throughout your life. This is true even of those of you who do not go on to other universities. The continuity of education is so much a matter of course now that many people think that it hardly matters any more where one takes one's first degree. I happen not to believe this: I think that the University of Saskatchewan will remain a focal point for you, and will always command a special loyalty and affection from you. I think this ceremony today symbolizes something of unique importance, something that nothing else in your life can match. For one thing, you cease to be an undergraduate, whose natural impulse is to change everything in sight, and become an alumnus, whose natural impulse is to keep the university the way he remembers it. Certain changes in perspective result. Some of you will be discovering what a classroom feels like from the teaching end. If you have been complaining about a dull instructor mumbling through uninspired lecture notes, you will soon be in a position to see how the poor bastard got that way. It is generally thought that you will become more conservative, too, as you get older. Unless you are very unlike any other students I have ever known, most of you are fairly conservative now. I think what happens is not that you become more conservative, but that you become more aware of the invisible continuities of existence. The less our experience of life, the more dependent we are on the news, and the news tells us only of what changes. We read in the papers that women can now achieve an unprecedented sterility by taking pills, and that a new sexual morality is about to come upon us. The emotional factors in a sexual relation, and such moods as jealousy and possessiveness and wounded vanity, remain exactly as explosive and unpredictable as they were hi the garden of Eden. But the papers will not tell us that: we have to learn it ourselves from experience. Again, the news media talk so much about hippies that we begin to wonder if we are not moving from a Roundhead culture to a Cavalier one, from a society dominated by suburban matrons and junior executives and cocktail parties to a society dominated by flower children in city ghettos and pot sessions, where the acid head has replaced the ulcerated stomach as a status symbol. Somehow I doubt that the change is so extensive. A very conventional friend of mine once remarked to me rather wistfully that he wished he had known that he was one of the rebellious flaming youth of the roaring twenties. Probably he did know, but had the sense not to believe everything he saw in the papers.

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It is thirty-five years since my own graduation. Time has not brought me wisdom, but it has turned thirty-five years of future into thirty-five years of past. I know that many of you are confused about the future of the world you are in, and what I can offer is a different set of confusions. Your time is a revolutionary one, as was also my own time. But, even for those most bitterly opposed to Communism, my time was dominated by the conceptions and categories of Karl Marx, and your age seems to me to be an age of post-Marxist revolution. The most left-wing issues of my time, the support of labour against management and united fronts with Communism, look like very right-wing issues now. The Soviet Union has proved to be evolving, not towards a classless society as its supporters claimed, nor towards a police state as its opponents claimed, but towards much the same kind of bourgeois conglomerate as America. At the same time, we are asked to look with a tolerant and understanding eye on such trends as Black Power and French-Canadian separatism, whose affinities are obviously closer to the fascist movements of a generation ago, that drained so much of our best blood before they collapsed. It looks as though the revolutionary movement of your time is not so much economic as psychological in its basis. It does not fight for the workers against the exploiters: it attacks and ridicules the work ethic itself. It does not see Negro segregation or the Vietnam war merely as byproducts of a class struggle: it sees the emotions and prejudices involved in these issues as central, and as the real enemy to be fought. It seems very strange, to one of my generation, that there could be so much opposition to the Vietnam war and yet so little talk about profiteering and armaments lobbies. Naturally there are many new dangers in this change of direction. One is the element of anarchy, of protest for the sake of protest, of smashing things out of the boredom of an affluent society, of parading and demonstrating and fighting the police without noticing that one's social role is becoming that of an unpaid actor in a television newsreel. In my visits to the United States I have also noticed a certain amount of what seems to me to be McCarthyism in reverse: professors accused of "racism," for instance, and investigated by tribunals on which their accusers are prominently represented. One very important difference between your age and mine, of course, is that revolutionary developments today have directly involved the university itself. Not to make any reference to this, in 1968, would be almost a dereliction of duty. The movement known by the inept name of "student power" started off in a quite intelligible way. Undergraduates

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began to understand that in coming to university they were fully participating in society, and so in the university as well, and that they were not simply being trained for something else more important. They also understood what I said a moment ago, that everyone today has a lifelong stake in education, and never "goes out into the world" in the old sense. As a result they have demanded recognition as active and not merely passive members of the university community. I imagine that undergraduate and graduate students will quite soon gain the fullest possible measure of participation in authority, so far as anybody in a university has any authority. But I have three footnotes to add to that statement. First, I think the average age of students will go up sharply as more and more people in their thirties or over come into the university for refresher courses and adult education programmes. I expect a good deal of adulteration of the student body, so to speak, which will give a very different appearance to the student's role in university government. Second, it may sound insufferably smug to say that a student's first duty is to study, but if I do say so I am merely applying to students the same principles that I should apply to all other members of the university, who are also students. When anyone is considered for a deanship or a presidency, one of the first questions asked about him is, "How good a scholar is he?" It sounds absurd to associate a man's administrative ability with his specialized knowledge of a scholarly discipline, but the question is relevant none the less. If he has never been a scholar, he doesn't know what a university is or what it stands for, and if he doesn't know that, God help the university that gives him a responsible job. Similarly, in considering student opinion it is relevant to inquire whether the opinion is that of a real student or merely of Joe Doakes at college. (If he is at college: some "student power" movements have been organized by drop-outs.) Thirdly, as student representatives come to be elected by the student body as a whole, their presence on university boards will make very little practical difference to the operation of the university. That may sound cynical, but it isn't. When people were agitating for votes for women sixty years ago, it was frequently said that when all the votes of that pure and noble sex were dumped on the electoral market, politics would become much cleaner, and corrupt political machines would disappear. Nothing of the sort happened, naturally; yet if I had been active then I should have supported votes for women on grounds of general human fairness, and on the ground that it is silly and dangerous to create unnecessary proletariats.

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One can see the point of protest and demonstration, even of violence, as a means of sobering a too complacent establishment. An establishment's natural view of an insurgent group, whether they are Negroes in the South or students in a university, is that they are really just children. Yet it is fairly clear that students of university age are physically and socially mature; they may be intellectually or spiritually immature, but in those areas we are all in much the same boat. Recently, in a women's college, it was discovered that one of the students was living with her boy friend in a state of highly unoriginal sin. The brass brooded over this situation for some time, and finally decided that she would not be allowed to use the students' cafeteria. The absurdity of the in loco parentis view of undergraduates could hardly be better illustrated. But once a social movement starts, it begins to evolve in its own way, and the methods employed to start it go out of date very quickly, or take on other contexts. In the original Berkeley demonstration most of the students involved were Grade A students and the faculty support behind them was overwhelming. But when we reach Columbia we find sharp divisions in student and faculty opinion, professional organizers, a tiny activist group claiming to represent the majority of students, peripheral social issues dragged in, and a deliberate provoking of counter-violence. In other words, the university is no longer the real target. The issues have spread far beyond it, and the actual development of the university will, I think, have increasingly less to do with whatever demonstrations may continue to take place within it. Is there any moral in these observations? In the last thirty-five years there have been countless heroic acts, in every part of the world and from people in every walk of life. It is because of such acts that civilization is still in business. These acts have been acts either of heroic selfsacrifice or of heroic self-restraint. The self-restraint has been particularly notable in the three great murdered men of our era: Gandhi, Kennedy, and King. But I can think of no revolutionary movement designed to bring a future society into being (apart from China, where so much is still unresolved) that has not been entirely mistaken about what the future was to be. The only certain thing about the future, apparently, is that it will cheat and disappoint those who try to grasp it. Meanwhile, you have got far enough in your studies to begin to see what the point of education is. It is not in anything we know: most of what we learn we either forget or misunderstand, so far as it is something we think we possess. What education does is to increase the

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significance of the present moment. It brings us into contact with the powers of the human imagination, as it embodies itself in science, philosophy, religion, the arts. These powers transcend our own egos, and they need no drugs to help them. Imagination is not fantasy: what it produces is really and permanently there, and the creative mind is not the subjective or withdrawn mind. It is not anything we do with these powers; it is what these powers manifest through us, that is important. The heroism of sacrifice and restraint is a heroism to be admired and imitated, because it is action born of the present, full of the significance and the value of what we now have, of what we now see to be real. We are becoming less and less satisfied with slogans like "My country right or wrong," with uncritical loyalties and unexamined motives. In a world like ours courage and wisdom tend to become much the same virtue: the heroic vision must also be the educated vision. But in all education it is the power of what is studied, not the student's power, that brings freedom and life to light. It is in the great things that man has made and thought that man still lives, for one more day at least, and while he lives they give his life a radiance beyond his knowing.

53 Convocation Address,

Franklin and Marshall 9 June 1968

Address given to the graduating class at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on the occasion of Frye's receiving an honorary degree. From a typescript in NFF, 1988, box 2, file ii, marked Revised Convocation Address. Much the same address was given to the graduating class of Loyola College, Montreal (now part of Concordia University). The Loyola address, delivered on i June 1968, had minor differences of wording and a few more substantial variants which are indicated here in endnotes. Typescripts with holograph corrections of both addresses are in NFF, box 2, file hh. The address to Loyola was printed as "Education as Immersion and Struggle" in RW, 105-11. I am deeply grateful to Franklin and Marshall College for the great honour it has done me. I am also very pleased to be in a position to extend congratulations and good wishes to the graduating class of Franklin and Marshall College. It is true, of course, that that position is not so easy a one to be in, in 1968. As a literary critic, I am much concerned with symbols and with conventions, and a graduation ceremony like this one is both symbolic and conventional. We spend a lot of time playing games, where certain rules are set up and certain illusions agreed upon. Some of these games are contest games, like tennis or writing examinations; some are ritual and ceremonial games like this one. Everything about this occasion—the processions, the gowns, the speeches, the conferring of degrees—is part of an elaborate symbolic let's pretend. You will not feel tomorrow any different from the way you feel today, but nevertheless we are pretending that today you cease to be a student, whose natural impulse it is to change everything in sight, and that tomorrow you will be an alumnus, whose natural impulse it is to keep the college the way he remembers it.

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So much for the symbolism: what about the convention? A literary critic must have a great respect for conventions; but it is also true that some conventions get worn out, and become only a subject for parody. And the convention of a graduating ceremony is, or usually has been, that this is the time when you go from learning into living, when you leave the shelter of these ivy-covered walls of learning and go out into the hurly-burly of the busy world. You know quite as well as I do, what preposterous nonsense this is.1 I don't think you would react very favourably to the suggestion that up until today you have been some kind of retarded adolescent. The world of learning and the world of living are not two worlds: learning and living are the same process. You have been in the world all along, or at least you have if you are ever going to be, and you are not going anywhere next year except into more education. Some of you will soon be discovering what a classroom feels like from the teaching end. You will find that teaching, like any other public performance, cannot be indefinitely better than its audience. If you have been complaining about some dull instructor mumbling his way through a lot of predigested lecture notes, you will soon be in a position to understand how the poor bastard got that way. But you will not be in a different world. The statement that you have finished your preparatory studies and are ready to take on the responsibilities of adult life always was silly. In 1968, a year of unprecedented student unrest, it is intolerable. But if so, how did such a sentiment ever get to be a convention? I think the answer takes us back to the beginnings of universal education. About a hundred years ago there was a lot of optimism about, and a strong disposition to believe in progress. And the development of universal education seemed to be one of the few really convincing arguments for progress. It was beginning to do away with the injustice of a society in which education was only for a privileged few, and, more important, it seemed to be the beginning of the end of child labour in industry, one of the worst forms of exploitation in modern times. For once in his long, stupid, muddled history, man could be reasonably sure that in adopting universal education he was heading in the right direction. So he was, obviously. Other reforms followed. Mass education meant a more professional interest in the educational process itself. The teacher needed something more in the way of preparation than merely a Latin grammar and a taste for sadism. As the older aristocracies declined, it became clearer that the real natural aristocracy, the group of those who really have a right to be fed and sheltered and cosseted by the rest of

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society, are the children. And so, in the twenties and thirties of this century, optimism combined with the lazy, good-natured anti-intellectualism of American life to produce a kind of education that prolonged the play period and postponed all serious study as long as possible. As a result more and more years in school seemed to be needed for adequate training. The undergraduate course became increasingly a remedial one, and I remember courses that were also unmistakably remedial creeping into the graduate school. If such tendencies had continued to spread unchecked, we should have been assuming by about the year 2000 that a Ph.D. in English literature was a minimum requirement for passing a literacy test. In my own undergraduate days, back in the thirties, the more privileged and middle-class students drifted from high schools into college with very little sense of intellectual change. The university was in loco parentis, but its parental role was indulgent and permissive. I travel a good deal in this country, and I still discover liberal arts colleges that seem to be left over from this period, devoted to football games, beauty queens, and fraternity dances, with a pleasant illusion of education supplied as one of the amenities. There were also strong economic pressures in favour of reducing the numbers of new recruits to business, industry, and the professions. So two decades ago Robert Hutchins of Chicago could say, with some truth, that a good deal of American university education was a vast playpen designed to keep young people off the streets,2 and, more important, off the labour market. During the 19505—it seems a very long time ago now—everyone in university teaching complained about the "apathy" and "conformity" of the student body. I remember a girl saying to me then, with exasperation in her voice, "But what do they want us to get excited about?" And, indeed, why should they not have been apathetic and conformist? They never had it so good. What we did not notice, all through this period, was that the whole operation involved was, in one of its aspects, at least, a kind of benevolent segregation. We3 were keeping children in a world of their own, and because that world was centred on the school we assumed that all students, of whatever age, belonged in that separated world, too. Thus we were unconsciously creating a social proletariat out of the very people we loved so much. A proletariat, in the Marxist sense, is a body of people in society who are excluded from the benefits that their own labour entitles them to. We were giving students benefits and opportuni-

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ties, but denying them a sense of social function. Some of them began to feel that what they wanted was not something we could give them, but something they could earn for themselves.4 The public reaction to the 1957 Sputnik, and the fear that Russian education might be winning a decisive aspect of the cold war, provided a climate of opinion in which a certain amount of rethinking of education could take place. Educators were beginning to get bored with their own follies and ineptitude: the students, of course, had always been bored. So more attempt was made to respect the intelligence of students, from grade i up. The result seems inevitable enough now, but was wholly unexpected when it occurred. University students, not being fools, drew an obvious inference from the change in attitude. If education was so important, then they were fully participating in society by being students. If so, why were they being treated like children and segregated from the world of adult responsibilities? The Berkeley demonstration was an echo of the slam of the door at the end of Ibsen's Doll's House a century ago. Students in the twentieth century, like women in the nineteenth, felt that they had been locked up in a doll's house, and they wanted out. We have, I said, been creating a proletariat out of our student body, and consequently we have a revolutionary situation on our hands. We always do, sooner or later, whenever we create a proletariat, whether of students, women, Negroes, or industrial workers.5 All revolutionary situations develop a certain automatism, continuing out of habit after their immediate goals have been reached. But once such proletarian groups get reabsorbed into the community, their revolutionary drive slowly but inevitably burns out. The small organized minority that creates the revolutionary situation becomes less important and the conservative majority becomes more so. This happened with the feminist revolution of the last century, after women gained the vote, and I think it is occurring now in the universities. "Student power" is a meaningless phrase: the university is not a power structure. Student representation on governing bodies is not hard to arrange; but once arranged, their presence there will make very little practical difference to the operation of the university. I think again of the analogy with the earlier feminist revolution: when women were agitating for the vote, it was widely predicted that when all the votes of that pure and noble sex were dumped on the electoral market, politics would become much cleaner, and corrupt political machines would disappear.

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Nothing of the sort happened, yet it was certainly right to give women the vote. Already, both here and in Europe, student agitation has merged into other kinds of social agitation and bigger revolutionary movements, and the university itself is rapidly ceasing to be the real target of student protest. And to the extent the university still is the target, it is so only by being identified with society in general, so far as society represents authority, or what is called an establishment. The feeling that North American society is not worth loyalty, that most of the products of an industrial society are either trivial or sinister, and that its work ethic is a fetish and not a real moral value, is very strong, and undoubtedly growing. Some of it, like the hippie movement, takes an anti-intellectual form; but most of it is the direct product of education itself. It is the social function of education to make one dissatisfied with one's environment, to compare the bumbling and bungling of the world around us with the precision and profundity of what, in the arts and sciences, the human mind shows itself capable of doing. Hence it may well be a sound instinct that makes students inquire whether education can really only be possessed by the pursuit of degrees, the grading of degrees by examinations, the feedback of lecture notes, and other symbols of social conformity and routine. I hope and expect that before long, in the relationship between students and teachers, there will be, on both sides, more frankness and less hypocrisy. But if there is more frankness and less hypocrisy, then teachers do not have to pretend, out of politeness, that students are more mature than they ought to be. I have known a great many mature students, and a depressing lot they are, with their self-assured air of being now exactly what they will be in thirty years. Granted that the in loco parentis conception of the university is out of date and most of the applications of the conception absurd. It does not follow that it should be replaced with an impersonal contractual relation in which the university takes no care to try to protect the student against the consequences of his inexperience. Again, at the present moment it may sound insufferably smug to say that a student's first duty is to study, but if I do say so I am merely applying to students the same principles that I should apply to all other members of the university, who are also students. When anyone is considered for a deanship or a presidency, one of the first questions asked about him is, "How good a scholar is he?" It sounds absurd to associate a man's administrative ability with his specialized knowledge of a scholarly discipline, but the question is relevant none the less. If he

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has no sympathy with scholarship, he doesn't know what a university is or what it stands for, and if he doesn't know that, God help the university that gives him a responsible job. Similarly, in considering student opinion it is relevant to inquire whether the opinion is that of a real student or merely of Joe Doakes at college. The path to genuine maturity, of course, runs through education itself, and education is a continuous process, where routine, repetition, practice, and habit have a decisive and creative role to play. Many teachers in the university dream of a life devoted solely to scholarship, with no students to teach, essays to mark, or committees to attend. One or two may reach such a nirvana, but, in general, scholarship cannot be pursued in a social vacuum. Similarly, many students dream of a college without the routine of examinations or essays, where education is a series of seminars that are exciting existential happenings, and where the great issues of life are tossed around like medicine balls. This happens occasionally in one's college career, but would not happen at all unless it were occasional. We hear a good deal about "tradition" in universities, but tradition does not mean a mere fixation on the past. It is rather an expression for the continuous nature of education itself, which begins in the accepting of a cultural heritage as it flows down to us like a stream at our feet.6 There are two kinds of neurosis which are usually found together: wherever one is the other is never far off. One is the fixation on the past that I just mentioned, the dread or panic of change, or the effort to call back something remembered, or thought to be remembered, from one's earlier life. The other is a fixation on the future, the willingness to throw away anything in the present in order to bring something better into being. I can think of no social movement designed to preserve a tradition which succeeded in actually preserving that tradition, and I can think of no revolutionary movement designed to bring about a different future that has not been entirely mistaken about what that future was to be. The only certain thing about the past, apparently, is that it has gone; the only certain thing about the future is that it will cheat and disappoint those who try to grasp it. The point of education is not in anything we know. Most of what we learn we either forget or misunderstand, so far as it is something we think we possess. What education does is to increase the significance of the present moment. It brings us into contact with the powers of the human imagination, as it embodies itself in science, philosophy, religion,

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the arts. These powers transcend our own egos, and they need no drugs to help them. Imagination is not fantasy; what it produces is really and permanently there, and the creative mind is not the subjective or introverted mind. It is not anything we do with these powers; it is what these powers manifest through us that is important. The real meaning of tradition is learning from the past how to live in the present. And the real meaning of revolutionary action is learning from what could be to see more clearly what is there. It is in the light of that present vision that we apply our practical intelligence to the world. This is real knowledge, as distinct from the false knowledge that we get from news media, propaganda, and advertising. False knowledge acts on what we think other people think, or can be made to think. This country has been shamed and sickened by a series of political murders, and all thoughtful citizens are trying to oppose the violence which seems to have inspired them. I don't think that assassination, as distinct from private murder, is directly a product of belief in violence as such. I think it is a product rather of belief in publicity, a belief that the more outrageous an act is, the more it will do for one's own interests. Hideous and psychotic as it is, assassination is a logical way of applying the principles of false knowledge. False knowledge is the most dangerous enemy of our society, and it is people like yourselves, who have been exposed to the real thing, who must fight in the front line against it. False knowledge leads to anarchy and despair, just as true knowledge is the life-blood of civilization. In the great things that man has made and thought, man still lives, for one more day at least, and while he lives they give his life a radiance beyond his knowing.

54

Book Learning and Barricades 4 August 1968

From Book World, the literary supplement of the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, 4 August 1968, i. Frye was responding to a telegram from editor Byron Dobell asking him to reply briefly, for a symposium, to the following two questions: "If you are or were teaching this coming fall, would you change your reading list in any way to reflect student dissent on campus, and why?" and "Is such dissent and political action a sign of something good or bad, in your opinion, for the course of university education?"

I think the present wave of student unrest is the result ultimately of the public reaction to the 1957 Sputnik. Before that, everybody in university teaching complained about student apathy. A new sense of the social importance of education grew up, and university students, not being fools, drew an obvious inference from it. Clearly, they were fully participating in society by being students. Why, then, were they being treated like children, and shut out of all decision-making, both inside and outside the universities? We had unconsciously been making a proletariat, in the strictest Marxist sense of a group denied the place in society that their work entitled them to, out of the student body. We always have a revolutionary situation, sooner or later, whenever we go through this stupid and foolish procedure of creating unnecessary proletariats. At the same time I think student unrest is a temporary movement, analogous to the feminist revolution of sixty years ago. If we compare the Berkeley demonstration with the Columbia one, we can see that student protest movements are becoming merged in other forms of social protest, and that the university is rapidly ceasing to be the real target. I teach English literature mainly, and if I changed my reading list

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I should change it on pedagogical grounds and not with reference to student unrest. Narcissus, looking for things to "identify" with in order to fall in love with his own reflection, seems to be a bad model for literary study, at least beyond childhood.

55 The Social Importance of Literature -L7 September 1968

First published in the Educational Courier, 39 (November-December 1968): 19-23. The present text is from OE, 74-82, which more closely follows the paragraphing and expression ofFrye's typescript. An abridged form was published as ''Student Protest Has Shallow Roots/' Toronto Star, 19 September 1968,7. Two typescripts—one with holograph corrections, one a retyped copy— are in NFF, 1988, box 2, file pp. Given as an address to the Canadian Association of School Superintendents and Inspectors.

I will be talking about the university because the university is what I know, and I shall leave it to your many years of professional experience to translate what I say into the context of your immediate professional concern. I think that the difference in contexts gets less all the time, and that in particular at the present moment we are turning a corner in the rapprochement between the different groups of people concerned with the educational process. I should like to start with a fairly concrete situation, and one which is being exploited ad nauseam in the news: that is the question of what is euphemistically called student unrest in the universities, and which impresses some people as being rather a kind of cult of bumptiousness. The student unrest is of course partly kept alive by the mass media, in pursuit of their general policy of making up the news and of going into a trance whenever they hear the word controversial. Students are instinctively docile, but this time they appear to be docile in relation to other things than the university itself. In this situation the staff attitude is very confused. Every university teacher worth his salt has a great affection for his students, and although he has, if he has a social conscience, always been very vigilant against threats to academic freedom, it has, in my

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experience, never occurred to any university teacher that the threat to academic freedom might conceivably come from the student body itself. Those who take the side of the student include a great many earnest and dedicated liberals, who are trying hard to emphasize the genuinely liberal elements in the student protest. Others are less scrupulous people who feel that they can, by fishing in these troubled waters, get a shorter cut to public attention than is afforded by scholarship. The author of a recent article on "The Student as Nigger" is clearly one of those,1 and I think that the students have been making a mistake to regard such writers as being on their side. One does have to realize that there is a core, along with much that one has to sympathize with, of something anti-intellectual in student unrest. The kind of student who used to say, "Are we responsible for this on the examination?" can now rationalize his question by saying, "I feel that what I have been exposed to lacks contemporary relevance." There are many complaints about the process of taking down notes from a lecture, and then, in the stock phrase, "regurgitating" these lecture notes on the examination. But this process, whatever its limitations, still does not prevent the student from thinking for himself, even about his lecture notes. On the other hand, the regurgitation of the cliches and the slogans and the half-truths of social activism does tend to cut off free and flexible thought, and the process of re-examining one's own assumptions. At the same time the movement is an important one, and we have to try to look into its causes with some care. Naturally one thinks first of all of the general frustration with a society in which the world's greatest democracy, the country which is bound to lead the democracies of the world, can only offer us Nixon, Humphrey, and Wallace as choices for their chief executive. There was a time, back in the 19505—it seems an eternity ago now—when everybody was complaining about the apathy of students, and I can remember a girl saying to me then, with exasperation in her voice, "But what do they want us to get excited about?" Well, of course, students are now being told on all sides what they ought to get excited about, but the real cause, I think, is of a rather different kind. We come closer to it when we realize what a loss of commitment there has been to the economic goals of society, and how the whole process of developing a professional or business career has been questioned in its moral basis, in a way it was not questioned, even in my own student days, when there was a very lively and highly organized Marxist group on the campus. This means that the so-called "New Left" is by no means the same as

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the old Marxist Left, as is clear from all the newspaper reports of student protest movements in Columbia, Paris, and elsewhere. The old Marxist Left accepted the work ethic quite as completely as Henry Ford, and it is the work ethic itself that is now being attacked and ridiculed. Again, the modern leftist student, if he is protesting against Negro segregation or the Vietnam war, does not think of those things as a Marxist would do, as merely by-products of a class struggle. He sees rather the emotions and prejudices involved in these issues as primary and as the real target to be fought. Consequently, the new protest movement is anarchist, rather than Communist; it is much more deeply concerned with the imaginative and the emotional and it raises even more directly the question of the vision of society which one should have here and now. One difficulty with the Communist movement, as you remember, is that it conceived of the revolution as the means to an end, the means being a proletarian dictatorship, the end a classless society; and there is always a tendency in all such movements for the means to take the place of the end, and for the end to disappear. The new movement of social protest is much more concerned, as the nineteenth-century anarchists were concerned, with goals of direct action, and their attitudes are much harder to argue with. It is no good even calling them absurd, because absurd is also an in-group word now. But I think that the real cause is to be sought rather in the history of education as it has developed in this country and our Western civilization, over the last century. As universal education came to be regarded as more and more the necessary condition of a civilized and democratic society, naturally a great many more people of professional competence came to be involved with education, and it was soon realized that, in order to teach, one needed rather more equipment than merely a Latin grammar and a taste for sadism. In this process, of course, while the basis of elementary education remained, in theory, accessible to everyone, the pyramid tended to become more selective as it went up, and in, say, the twenties of this century, the universities were still regarded, very largely, as middle-class playgrounds. This meant of course that the institution of the university could hardly be questioned by students. The psychological effect of the new university, the sense of universities as something in process, was almost unknown to students of my generation during the Depression. Then came various crises, of which perhaps the most obvious one, from the newspapers' point of view, was the reaction to the Sputnik in 1957, when a sense of the importance of education in society

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suddenly became strongly and emphatically dramatized. What we did not notice, all through this period, was that by treating students with so much affection and creating the kind of community that we had been making out of the universities, we had also been making, unconsciously, a proletariat out of the student body. A proletariat, in the Marxist sense, is a group of people excluded from the benefits of society to which their efforts entitle them. We were showering students with privileges, and yet, at the same time, carefully excluding them from the general process of adult society. Students, not being fools, drew an obvious inference from the reaction to the Sputnik and other such developments. They said: "Well, if we are students, then we must be fully participating in society, simply by being students. And, if so, why are we being excluded from society and from its responsibilities?" This meant of course the decline, to the point of collapse, of the conception of education as a preparing for life. The present-day undergraduate no longer believes that he is spending four years of college sitting around waiting for something more important to happen to him. He realizes that he is in just as real a world at college as he is ever going to be, and, if he is an intelligent student, he also realizes that the educational process is never finished and that his teachers are, of course, students too, assuming that a student is a person who does not know enough about a subject and wants to know more. Along with this decline of the notion of preparatory education goes the decline of what I might call initiatory education, that is the aspect of education that has to do with learning the rituals of society. This is a matter of great importance when you have an elite, and in, for example, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the process of learning certain social rituals, although it was not featured on the curriculum, nevertheless was a very important part of the whole educational process. In our own society, where the conception of a governing elite, recruited from a certain class of society, is being so sharply and radically questioned, it is obvious that this conception of education as, in part, an initiation into social rituals has also collapsed, and other conceptions of education have to take its place. I have perhaps already indicated that I feel that the movement of student protest has rather shallow social roots, and does not have a very long-time career ahead of it. The analogy to student protest is not anything like the Negro movement or anything genuinely rooted in longstanding social injustices. The analogy is rather to the feminist revolution

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of about fifty years ago. When women were agitating for the vote, it was widely predicted that when the women got the vote, the democratic machinery would be cleaned up, and when all the votes of that pure and noble sex were dumped on the electoral market, corrupt political machines and ward-heelers and things of that kind would disappear. Nothing of the sort happened, and yet, if I had been active then, I think I should have supported votes for women on grounds of general human fairness and on the fact that it is silly to create unnecessary proletariats in society. Whenever you have a proletariat in society, you always have, sooner or later, a revolutionary situation. Student representation on university bodies is not difficult to arrange, but I think that, as with the women's vote, it will make very little difference in practice. And yet I think that I should support the movement, again on general grounds of fairness. I think too that the situation between teacher and student will be re-established (so far as it has really been disturbed), perhaps with a greater frankness on both sides. There is at present a great deal of prejudice against the teaching lecture as a form of education, on the ground that it suggests an active teacher and a passive student. There is correspondingly a great development of the mystique of the seminar, in which the myth of a fully participating and articulate student occupies a prominent place. But I think that in a short time the teaching lecture will re-establish itself, in the seminar and outside it, as the normal method of instruction in a university. Again, when relations are re-established on the basis of greater frankness, it will not be necessary for the teaching or the administrative staff to pretend, out of politeness, that students are more mature than they ought to be. I have known a good many mature students, who were as undergraduates exactly what they were going to be forty years later, and a most depressing lot they were. If we examine the curve of student protest from Berkeley to Columbia, we can see how it has worked itself out. The demonstration at Berkeley was carried through by Grade A students almost entirely and the staff support behind it was overwhelming. By the time we reach Columbia we have professional organizers brought in from outside, a very sharp division in the student body itself, an equally sharp division in the staff, and a number of social issues raised which are peripheral to university affairs. I see a good deal of danger in this, of hardening the cleavage between the protesting students and the kind of student who has social goals which may be conventional, but which are still legitimate. It seems

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to me that the university is rapidly ceasing to become the real target of social protest, and the protest is actually moving out of the university in other social areas. The university is, of course, a good place in which to carry out social protest, because it is a flexible and tolerant place, and occupationally disposed to argument. As the private said when he saluted the sergeant-major, "You'll do to practise on." But in all activist situations there is likely to develop what we know familiarly as the "weand-they" mentality, where "they" become, from the students' point of view, something authoritarian and established and to be described in solid metaphors. That is, the Establishment is a structure, and however much corroded with dry rot and the death-watch beetle, however near to collapse it may be, it is still to be thought of as something solidified and frozen. On the other hand the freedom of the individual is associated with liquid metaphors, of getting things stirred up and the like. Neither of these metaphors really covers, of course, the situation they are describing. Recently there was an interview printed in the Varsity between the editor of the Varsity and President Claude Bissell.2 The editor was the author of the article, and although he was clearly trying to give himself the best lines his success was not unequivocal. After a more than usually incoherent remark about authority President Bissell finally said, "What do you mean by authority?" and the student said, "Authority is other people telling me what I have to do." Now I can understand that this should be the conception of authority held by someone whose habitual reactions are still clearly those of an adolescent. But neither President Bissell nor any other responsible officer of the university is fool enough to think in terms of an Institution, with a capital I, which has to be kept running in working order without regard to the human lives concerned with it. The answer to the student's question about authority—what he wanted, of course, was simply unrestricted electives to study whatever interested him—is that interest is not enough for an educational process. That is, there are many things that are interesting, many things which are profitable, but which are nevertheless not educational. Teach-ins, for example, are entertainment of a very high quality but they are not a form of education. We cannot have education without incessant repetition and practice, drill, and going over the same things over and over until they become automatic responses. The kind of authority that the university is interested in is the authority which is inherent in the subject being studied: the authority of the

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fruitful hypothesis as opposed to the crackpot notion; the authority of the great imaginative classic as contrasted with the mediocre or the merely sensational. Authority of this kind is not a limitation of freedom; it is merely the completion of freedom. Every subject studied in the university or elsewhere is a structure to be entered into, and if the university insists on certain compulsory prerequisite courses, the compulsion is not the compulsion of a truant officer: it is simply the compulsion inherent in the subject itself. In the present climate of opinion it may sound insufferably smug to say that a student's first duty is to study, but if I do say so I am simply applying to students the same principles that I would apply to any other member of the university, the other members also being students. Whenever a person is considered for a senior administrative appointment at a university, the question is always asked, "How good a scholar is he?" If he has no idea what scholarship is, he has no idea what a university is either. Consequently the administrative staff, the teaching staff, and the undergraduate body are all involved in the same process. What seems to me to be an even deeper fallacy in this kind of argument is the notion that freedom is subjective, in the sense of being related to an individual. The genuinely individual protester is a rather rare bird: he is usually a crank, though once in a hundred years he may be a genuine prophet. But, on the whole, protest is the expression of a social attitude, and is not subjective, in the sense that it is geared to some kind of social feeling. One of the most important things in a democracy is to keep such a social attitude from embodying itself in a power structure so that it cuts off all further freedom of investigation. I feel that our attitudes towards education have been very largely dominated by a conception of reality which is confirmed by reason and by experience. That in itself, of course, is reasonable enough. There is such a thing as a right answer and a wrong answer, and the right answer is usually the one in the book, though by no means invariably. This conception of reality as embodied in reason and experience is, of course, particularly congenial to the sciences. And the sciences, however essential and central in the educational process, can also be congenial to an authoritarian society simply because science tries to escape from controversy—it appeals to evidence in which there is no room for argument. That is, I take it, the goal of the scientist's investigation: to have his hypothesis confirmed by experience. But we should remember that there are two kinds of reality.

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There is an objective reality confirmed by reason and experience, and there is another kind of reality, which does not exist to begin with but is brought into being through a certain kind of construction or creative activity. Let us take as an example a work of art, the reality of a picture, of a book, of a musical composition. The fact that the painter's or the composer's or the writer's vision is a genuine vision is confirmed by the existence of the work of art, but this work of art cannot be said to be either right or wrong. In other words, the arts belong to a conception of reality in which reality is something that man makes, something that man constructs himself, so that when the issue is raised about the rights and wrongs of such reality, we have to raise the question of what our vision of society is in the largest sense. The humanities and the arts and many other areas of knowledge cannot escape from controversy because in them there are fewer right and wrong answers. There can only be discussion over conflicting visions of what society's goals should be, and of what kind of world man should make for himself. For man is in two worlds: there is the world that he sees around him, and which science interprets, and there is a world that he makes for himself and wants to live in. That world is governed by a vision of which the arts and the religions and similar areas of knowledge are the instruments. When there are no rights and wrongs and no end to controversy, there can only be a kind of continuous discussion in which gradually, if the conditions are right, the liberal, the flexible, and the tolerant begin to make headway against the bigoted, the anxious, and the superstitious. The humanities in general, the arts and I would say religion too, are the subjects which deal not with external realities studied by the reason, but with something which should be called, rather, concern with man's fundamental questions about his whence and his whither, his nature and his destiny, and above all, the kind of society that he wants to live in. It seems to me that the arts, and more particularly literature, are the obvious vehicles of education in concern and in social vision. Religion is also involved in concern, and Paul Tillich speaks of ultimate concern,3 that is concern about man's relation to eternity, as being the special area of religion. But while in theory it is an excellent idea to teach religion, in practice religion is attached to a number of social groups, and consequently the teaching of religion bogs down into insoluble problems of teaching Christianity to Jews and the like. The study of literature is a training in a constructive

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and imaginative vision of man's own sense of his social goal. In that sense, literature belongs with the sciences in the centre of the educational process. The teaching of literature is, I think, subject for its effectiveness to two conditions. One of those is very difficult to meet; the other is widely regarded as impossible. The first condition is that literature should be taught as a subject like other subjects: it has its own systematic progression within it, just as mathematics has, and the study of literature should never be corrupted or adulterated or weakened by the study of what is not literature and has simply been thrown into the English curriculum because there seems no other place to put it. The second condition is that literature at all levels needs to contain a large contemporary element, because historical imagination is a difficult thing to develop in students, and such literature should be fully contemporary and taught without censorship and without moral anxiety. Nothing infuriates young people so much as the feeling that they are being excluded from adult conversation on grounds which they regard as frivolous. I feel that Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations are admirable novels, well worthy of sustained study, but the mere absence of bad words or explicit descriptions of the sexual act does not seem to me a valid reason for studying books even on that level. The study of literature, as I define it, is not a panacea; it is not a cure; it does not solve social problems. What it does is to base education on the sense of a participating community which is constantly in process and constantly engaged in criticizing its own assumptions and clarifying the vision of what it might and could be. The teaching of literature in that sense, and in that context, seems to me to be one of the central activities of all teachers and educators in their continuous fight for the sanity of mankind.

56 Research and Graduate Education in the Humanities 21 or 22 October 1968

An address given at a meeting of the Association of Graduate Schools in San Francisco, from Journal of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Association of Graduate Schools in the Association of American Universities, ed. W. Gordon Whaley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968): 37-43. Reprinted in OE, 101-8. A typescript with holograph corrections, and a clean retyped copy, are in NFF, 1988, box 2, file qq; there are also numbered paragraphs headed "Notes for a paper to be read in San Francisco, 1968," in NFF, 1988, box 2, file pp. Frye later used his paper as the basis for a twelve-page submission to the Commission to Study the Rationalization of University Research in Canada, now in NFF, 1988, box 4, file n. At this San Francisco meeting Frye spoke as part of a panel on research in the humanities consisting of himself, Frederick E. Sontag (professor of Philosophy, Pomona College), and Carl E. Schorske (professor of History, University of California, Berkeley). Dean Virgil K. Whitaker (dean of the graduate school of Stanford University) was chair of the panel and of the subsequent discussion. In the present text, Frye's speech is followed by a partial summary of the discussion based on the description in the Journal; the summary of Frye's contributions, set off in quotation marks, is quoted directly from the Journal. The humanities used to be regarded by administrators with a good deal of favour as low-budget departments. It was not long ago that when a dean of humanities presented his needs to his president, he would be met with a glazed eye and a reference to Mark Hopkins and his log.1 Of course, there are aspects of the humanities which are extremely expensive, one obvious example being archaeology, on which some types of humanist scholarship are heavily dependent. But, for the most part, the

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expenses of supporting research in the humanities consist of a paradoxical development: first, building up the library, because the humanities usually get the lion's share of the library budget, and, secondly, providing travel grants to bring scholars to better libraries. The immense resources, technological and otherwise, of modern libraries, which can bring so many streams of modern learning to the scholar's doorstep, are, of course, useful only to the scholar when he knows what he is looking for; but if he is doing original research, he probably doesn't. He still has to be turned loose in the British Museum or Library of Congress with a sense of serendipity which has been built up by his previous experience of the subject. One of the things that is not always realized about the humanities is the relative novelty of serious critical work. If I may give an example from personal experience, the first major problem that I attempted as a critic was an exposition of the meaning of those long didactic poems of William Blake which he called prophecies. They were written by Blake between 1788 and 1822, and the first serious study of them, which was Foster Damon's, came out in 1924.2 Previous to Damon's study, there had been, I suppose, well over a hundred books on Blake and countless articles and essays, to say nothing of thousands of incidental references, but there was nothing in this material, so far as I know, which was worth anything to a student working in this field. It was no more of use to him than treatises on the geocentric Ptolemaic universe would be to a modern astronomer: consequently, no devices of "information retrieval" from pre-Damon material would be of any help. The question arises, why is there this curious novelty about so much serious critical work in the humanities? One reason, I think, is the survival of the superstition that the students of the humanities are custodians of values, that it is all very well for scientists to study mere facts, but, after all, it is values which make man, give him a dignity above the other animals, and it is the humanists who know about them. I have always attacked this notion that the end of criticism is the developing of value judgments. It seems to me that the study of literature is, first of all, a categorical and descriptive study, a study of what is there. It has been only very gradually that the inhibition caused by the sense of the importance of value judgments has begun to wane. First of all, there was the profound humanist belief that the only languages and literatures worth studying were those of the Latin and Greek cultures. It was at that stage

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of the humanistic cultivation of values that the Bodleian Library at Oxford got rid of its Shakespeare Folio, which it later on had to buy back again at a very considerably advanced price.3 In the next stage, the modern languages were admitted to the serious humanities, but the study of their literatures was largely confined to a select canon of approved writers. Some years ago I was visiting another university and a man who did most of the ordering for the English department came in to me. He had a chance of buying a large amount of literature of the Gothic Revival Period in the 17905, that is, the horror stories of the Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe period, and he wanted to know what he should do about this. I said, "Grab it at once." But he hesitated because he felt that this material wasn't really good enough from a literary point of view to justify spending all that money. Of course, the study of the Gothic novel is very much "in" at present, and I imagine he now greatly regrets having passed up this opportunity. As time goes on, more and more things, which in the terms of the conventional value judgments of a generation ago were regarded as unimportant, become more and more integral to the serious study of literature. After having digested the modern languages, the humanities are now trying to digest the practical arts, including film. At the same time popular literature, children's literature, popular magazines, hard and soft pornography, and other peripheral material pushes itself inexorably into the literary critic's purview. Consequently, the use of a criterion of values as a means for discouraging research is on its way out, but I suppose that not long ago, and perhaps even still in some quarters, a person who would say of a minor poet of the past that his voluminous works have long since been forgotten would feel that he was paying an indirect compliment to his own taste and judgment. What he is actually saying, of course, is, "I know that this man wrote a great deal, but I have been too lazy and incompetent to look into it, much less put a graduate student on the track of it." In short, there undoubtedly is such a thing as "junk," but for the purposes of buying for a library "junk" is not definable in the conventional terms of literary values. I mentioned archaeology as an example of a discipline related to the humanities, and certainly in archaeology it is much more fun to turn up a priceless work of art from the past than to go sifting through pots and the rubble of brick and the excreta of long-dead dogs. Nevertheless, an archaeologist who is looking for buried treasure instead of studying the

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past belongs, not in the tradition of the scholars, but in the tradition of the grave-robbers. The humanist who is obsessed by values is in much the same position. Of course, a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, there was a certain existential reason for this emphasis on values. It was one thing to decide to commit a large part of your life to making a concordance to Shakespeare or to collating the manuscript variants in Chaucer, but would you want to do that for a swatch of medieval homilies or for the kind of Elizabethan dramatist who was prolific around 1580? But now that we have computers and various machines like the one invented by Professor Hinman of Kansas for collating texts, that particular kind of choice is a less decisive one than it used to be. The more mechanical jobs of criticism can now be looked after in more efficient ways. When Professor Douglas Bush produced his book on Classical mythology in the Renaissance a generation ago, he tells us that he had started out by making an immense number of observations about the treatment of some Ovidian myths like the Pyramus and Thisbe story in minor Elizabethan poets. He regards this work as a waste of time and says that the only way in which he can atone for his youthful follies is to keep his information to himself. He says, for example, "Not even the exalted consciousness of knowing more about Pyramus and Thisbe than anyone else gives warrant for setting down here a detailed comparison of countless versions of the tale, from notes compiled in my lusty youth."4 But I suspect that this information is not really too trivial to be passed on: I think perhaps it may indicate an area where some kind of mechanical or other adult audiovisual aid might be of some assistance. In any case, the humanist finds that what was regarded highly in its day is just as important as what is regarded highly now, and that the more of a scholar he becomes of a certain period, the more clearly he understands why certain works were valued highly in their day. That brings us around, of course, in a full circle, to the question: what about works of criticism themselves like the ones I mentioned, the books which deal with the prophecies of Blake before 1924? What use are they? It seems to me that they are of very considerable value. One of the jobs I had to do was to write a history of Blake scholarship, and it was a fascinating exercise to see how long people had stared at what was straight in front of them and had refused to focus their eyes and minds on it. In other words, one can learn a great deal about the anxieties and obsessions of a time which takes a great writer so long to come into his

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proper heritage of recognition.5 So in a sense you can't miss in the humanities. If your book is any good, it's a contribution to scholarship; if it's no good, it's a document in the history of taste, and has its importance there. In the nineteenth century, when the modern languages became a respectable subject of academic study, a philological tradition, emanating mainly from Germany, set up a kind of quasi-scientific procedure in dealing, not only with philology, but with other literary and critical problems. Around the turn of the twentieth century was the time when a number of learned journals, often with philology in their titles, Modern Philology, Studies in Philology, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and so on, were founded. About a generation later, around the 19305, there came a strong reaction against this, and, instead of the philological journals, we began to get a crop of new journals with review in their titles, like Kenyan Review, Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review, which were committed very largely to critical problems and to a more direct commentary on literature. When I write an article in my own field I send out some offprints to friends, as a kind of personal correspondence, but am only occasionally asked for an offprint by another humanist. But I remember on one occasion making an address to a group of psychiatrists.6 The address I gave was printed in a psychiatric journal, and I got several hundred requests for offprints from all over the world. It was no surprise to me to learn that people working in such disciplines as psychiatry worked with offprints and abstracts and progress reports more than with books. But it had never struck me before how comparatively small a percentage of humanists' work is really based on research articles. I am speaking, of course, primarily of critical students of literature. The humanist's instinct seems to be to wait for the book: if he comes across a good article he assumes that it will take the form of a book later on. The question then arises: why has there been a reaction against the learned journal article and the growth of a tendency on the part of the student of literature to return to the book as his main tool of research? I think the reason is that anyone seriously concerned with literature is seriously concerned with problems of criticism, that criticism is an activity which forces one to think in large and configurated patterns, and that a full-length book is the only means of providing such patterns. It is obvious, for example, that any scholar in the humanities tackling a new field in the humanities is going to begin reading the essential books in

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that subject. His patterns therefore tend to be large complexes of patterns, and the question of delimiting the subject in order to write within the fairly limited scope of a research article has to come later. For example, it would have been entirely impossible for anyone interested in Blake's prophecies to have written an article on them of more than peripheral interest or to have done a Ph.D. thesis on them until enough of the essential books had appeared to set up the central complexes of the critical problems involved. There is, of course, a superstition in our time that this complex, configurated, and, in a sense, mythical thinking is something that can only be brought to us from the new media. I happen to be on a board7 in Canada concerned with communications, and this board had a committee of policy report to it which recommended that the board should issue publications from time to time. The sentence with which it began this recommendation read: "Despite the disadvantages inherent in the linear representation of a world that is increasingly simultaneous, print still retains its medieval authority." This sentence, I suppose, is typical of the kind of nitwitted McLuhanism which is confusing the educational scene. McLuhan himself, of course, is another matter, but I think that even he fails to distinguish between the actual operation of reading a book, which is linear, turning over pages, and following the lines of type from the upper left-hand corner to the lower right, and the effect of a book on the mind as a unit, once read. As that, the book is, and in the foreseeable future will remain, the indispensable tool of the scholar in the humanities. The reason, then, for the reaction against the philological journal is in part that this kind of scholarship was felt to be concerned with matters extrinsic to literature. If you wanted to delimit a subject in order to write an article or do a thesis on it, you had to choose not so much something within the central critical confines of literature as something in the historical or the biographical background of literature. The reaction of what was called the "new criticism" (which is called "new" because it cannot be traced much further back than Plato, who is full of it) insisted on the central critical problems, beginning with the explicatory reading of the text and going on from there. When you raise the question of what is the meaning of a work of literature, there are really two answers. There is a whole range of meaning which lies outside the work that you are reading and outside literature—the meaning which is to be found in the historical or the

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biographical background of which the work of literature is fundamentally a document. This is the concern of historical critics and of certain essential critical interests like the history of ideas. Then, again, there are other questions of meaning which relate literature to the arts. I suppose one area would take in the subject known as "aesthetics" in the sense of the unified criticism of all the arts. But that subject has not been developed yet and not many philosophers who are interested in aesthetics are technically competent as critics in any of the arts. There are, however, two types of literary context within literature itself. One is the context of language, which is the one that used to be dealt with by comparative philology and is now by linguistics. The other is the type of criticism which sees the work of literature in the context of literature, that is, which studies such matters as conventions and genres and the way in which one work of literature is linked with another. There is, of course, a great deal in this study which is historical, but it is not a purely historical study. That leads one to the fact that literature is inside a different kind of framework from that of the sciences. It has always been a principle of the arts that the arts do not improve; they do not advance or progress as time goes on; poets don't get better and better. What they do is produce the classic or model, and the critic (although criticism I think does progress and does advance and improve in its understanding) is bound to a kind of spiral movement, returning over and over again to the central masterpieces of literature, finding more and more depth in them and more and more relationship with other literary works of relatively less importance. The relations, from this point of view, of literature are with certain aspects of religion, political theory, anthropology, psychology, and, in general, with that whole area which I should call "mythology," and which, I should say, deals with the study of what the existentialist people have taken to calling "concern." Man lives in two worlds. There is a world around him, which he tries to understand and know more about, and which is the particular preserve, I suppose, of the physical sciences. There is also the civilization that he is trying to build and live in, and this, because it concerns him to know what kind of a world he is going to live in, is the peculiar province of these interrelated studies which I have been calling "mythology" and of which literature is a central part. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the student going to university in Oxford or Cambridge was exposed to an intensive treatment in

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Classical culture and might then be sent off to be something like a colonial administrator in India. From the point of view of, say, a contemporary student activist, nothing could be less relevant to life or to his own future career. My colleague, Mr. Sontag, will be saying something about relevance in a moment. And yet, you know, the Classical training of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, in fact, a study of another kind of mythology, from which the student was sufficiently detached to look at objectively. He could study the religion of Classical times without being committed to the religion. He could study the political movements of Greece and Rome without feeling himself a partnership in them. And yet at the same time he realized how deeply concerned, not only the people of that time, but he himself was in such questions. There could have been worse trainings for work in India, or any other different civilization. In general, two characteristics of the humanities, which I think are of particular relevance to our discussion here, emerge from what I have been saying. One is the immense difficulty of limiting a Ph.D. topic in the humanities, because of the large, complex, configurated pattern of interconnected problems which criticism poses. For a keen student in the humanities, it is almost impossible to prevent the Ph.D. thesis from becoming at least the ghost of his first book, and so blocking up and preventing anything else he is ever going to do. But this is, it seems to me, a kind of a built-in occupational hazard, and no easy answers are possible. The other is that teaching has a kind of functional role in the humanities which I think is distinctive of the humanities. All teaching of the humanities follows the general outlines laid down by Plato. We begin with dialogue, which is one of the great magical terms of our time. But we notice that whenever there is "dialogue" in Plato, the discussion is usually either indecisive or else somebody is talking nonsense. And as somebody, generally Socrates, begins to get hold of something else, which is not dialogue, but dialectic, that is, a particular argument advancing in a particular direction, the dialogue begins to turn into monologue, and the others follow his leadership. And we end in a kind of Darwinian mutation, where those in the symposium who have been weaklings and flaked out earlier are now lying under the table in a state of insensibility, along with a few survivors who, with Socrates, are still engaged in the silent contemplation of the form of the good.

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Summary of Discussion Dean Whitaker described the general conclusion reached by the three panellists: that the goal of the humanities is to bring the best wisdom of the past to bear upon the present; that our traditional disciplines are inadequate as a way of accomplishing this; and that a reorganization of studies is needed. Dean Michael Brennan, of Brown University, remarked that, though panellists talked of interdisciplinary study, in fact scholars in the humanities were becoming ever more specialized, narrow, and nit-picking. In the modern languages, he felt, they were "trying to uncover more and more obscure authors that they can pull apart and dissect." The summary describes Frye's response as follows: "Professor Frye did not deny that some of this probably occurs but he felt that the reverse is also true. Sometimes those in the humanities avoid pursuing obscure minor writers as a retreat into 'conventional value judgments of their times/ and they fail to teach the authors who are the most appealing to their students. He cited the case of a former student working on Rider Haggard and 'some of the thriller writers of the Victorian age.' Professor Frye thought the student's very conservative, conventional department had no notion of what advantages the student was getting out of a study like this, and he referred to his earlier example of Damon's Blake study. He felt that 'going behind the reverent names of the past whose relevance is beyond question is not necessarily a pedantic occupation but an intellectually revolutionary one.'" After a few more comments, Dean S.D.S. Spragg, of the University of Rochester, asked whether topics for Ph.D. theses in the humanities were running out. "Were students being forced to choose more and more detailed aspects of well-known figures or required to unearth more and more obscure authors and works?" "Professor Frye, speaking particularly about the study of literature, said he felt the trend of literary criticism had undergone such a change in focus during the last thirty years that the whole matter 'doesn't exist any more except as a superstition which revives in every generation of graduate students.' The assumption behind the idea that more and more minor topics have to be chosen is that scholarly research in literature has to be done all at one level. But, as he had said in his earlier remarks, 'literature is continually being studied in renewed depth and at every stage of renewed depth new kinds of interrelationships make their appearance.' For example, psychology and anthropology are now seen to be relevant to the study of literature in a way in which they were not seen as relevant thirty years ago. Thus, if a student should feel that he is being asked to

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do something not worth doing, he should certainly change his supervisor and perhaps his university." Professor Schorske agreed with Frye, alluding to the many marvellous thesis topics to be found in History. Dean Robert Wolverton, of the University of Illinois, then raised the question whether proposals in the humanities would be scrutinized more closely than those in the sciences, as the public generally acknowledged that scientific research was simply beyond their understanding. "Professor Frye interpreted this as being a question of whether research in the humanities was thought important and Dean Wolverton replied yes, that was the general intention of his question. Then Professor Frye reaffirmed Professor Schorske's point that there is no lack of excitement in topics in the humanities. There is sometimes second-rate research done as a means of getting a degree, he agreed, but is this not true in the sciences as well, he asked?"

57 The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University 7 November 1968

From The Ethics of Change: A Symposium (Toronto: CBC, 1969), 44-55. Reprinted as "Rapid Change Means Lowered Intellectual Sights," University Affairs, December 1968, and in DG, 156-66, without the first paragraph. Reprinted partially in Middlebury News Letter, 44 (Autumn 1969): 4-6, and as "Why the Youth Revolution Isn't," Financial Post, 7 December 1968, 13. Clean typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 2, files rr-tt, and NFF, 1991, box 38, file 3. Originally given as a talk at a symposium at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, to mark the installation of John J. Deutsch as principal and vice-chancellor. The symposium included talks by four participants: Frye, novelist and political analyst Arthur Koestler, microbiologist and geneticist Rene Dubos (professor at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research), and community planner Martin Meyerson (president of the State University of New York at Buffalo). It concluded with a discussion chaired by Dr. Deutsch, Frye's part of which is reproduced here from The Ethics of Change. This is one of the talks that was incorporated into The Critical Path (published spring 1971). I begin, as I should, with congratulations and best wishes to the principal-elect of Queen's University. I do not know whether Queen's and Toronto will ever come to be called or thought of as different branches of a University of Ontario. But I do know that the well-being of Toronto is heavily dependent on the well-being of the university in Ontario whose traditions it has shared for the longest time and through the greatest number of vicissitudes. It is now ten years since I was privileged to speak at a similar occasion, the inaugurating of President Bissell of Toronto. During those ten years, the relation of the university to society has changed, probably, more than it had changed in the previous half-

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century. This is true even of Canada, a country where students are not directly subject to the Vietnam draft, and where demonstrations on campuses have not involved violence to a degree that obscures the real issues. In my. own university drastic proposals for auricular and other reforms are now being discussed, and while I am personally in sympathy with many of the proposals themselves, I am apprehensive of the conception of the university towards which they seem to be directed. As the Virgin Mary says in a seventeenth-century "Expostulation," "I trust the god, but fear the child." I can hardly suppose that Queen's is not preoccupied with similar problems, so my present assignment is not rooted in the specific occasion of which I have the honour to be a part. The rhetorical style that I have chosen is the mandarin style, which seems to me appropriate to a ceremonial occasion, being out of fashion. The ethics of change is a phrase which suggests an attempt to think about something that has already gone ahead of thought, like a car driver applying brakes in a skid. In society there is normally a conflict between two kinds of anxiety: a conservative, or let's-be-careful-aboutlosing-what-we've-got, anxiety, and a radical, or let's-clear-out-all-thisstuff-and-have-a-fresh-breeze-blow-through, anxiety. When one anxiety dominates the other, change is thought of as itself an ethical process, good if the radical anxiety is dominant, bad if the conservative one is. In our day we are passing through a period of a dominant radical anxiety, because we feel that we have already created the conditions of a different kind of society from the one we are living in. A literary critic gets his clues to such a situation by looking at the emotional values attached to metaphors. The metaphor of technological obsolescence meets us everywhere: there is a general panic about escaping from the obsolete. Again, liquid and gaseous metaphors ("keeping things stirred up," and the like) have a favourable context and solid ones like "standard" and "set-up" an unfavourable one. A few years ago "structure" was a magical word, but today it suggests mainly the deathwatch beetle, and "unstructured" has replaced it. This metaphorical structure, or unstructure, has been developed in order to incorporate a sense of conflict between youth and age, where youth symbolizes a plastic and age a rigid element. A colleague of mine who watched the Paris student demonstrations tells me that he saw an old lady standing on the street with tears streaming down her face and shouting "Vive la jeunesse!" I understand the old lady's cry very well, but I am assuming that no one in this audience is going to applaud or to condemn the

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young, or the old, merely for being young or old. Such slogans as "never trust anyone over thirty," even when stolen from Bernard Shaw, do not seem to me very cogent, and my heart is not wrung by the efforts of middle-class students, whose every opinion is respectfully considered, to compare themselves to Negro slaves. The conflict of generations is clearly projected from the self-conflicts of both generations. The aging have the fear of seeming to be no longer young in spirit which is one of the normal hazards of aging; the young the fear of the shadows of their own future selves, when they will inevitably be more committed to society. The earliest philosopher of change was Heraclitus, who remarked simply, "Change is a rest" [fragment 843]: that is, it is in change that things find relief from being what they are. In the university, a period of rapid change is a period of the lowering of intellectual sights. It is a period of concentrating on methodology, on administration, on committee reports; a period where the action is felt to be in meetings rather than in classrooms. There is a corresponding emphasis on the assimilating of education to experience. Education is distinguished from "mere" training, or the "mere" acquiring of facts, until it gets almost disconnected from the learning process, as though intellectual curiosity did not normally express itself as a desire for knowledge. Demands for "relevance" and for "self-evaluation" tend to minimize continuity (which implies inner structure) in learning, and to emphasize the discontinuous experiences of teach-in, sit-in, confrontation, and conversation (usually called "unstructured discussion"). I am not saying that such emphases ought never to become important: I am saying that the exhilaration of rapid change, in a university, is not the exhilaration of mental adventure and progress, but of mental release and let-down. The danger of a dominant radical anxiety is in finding in the mechanics of change a substitute for education. The "mere" acquiring of knowledge is also the only means of advance in education, its only liberalizing principle. It is the infallible sign of the anti-intellectual that he looks toward some other activity, which repeats but does not progress, which hardens attitudes and confirms prejudices, as the key to education. "Booklearning" for him ought always to be subordinated to some kind of exciting existential happening, which also helps to prevent brain fever. The present mystique of "confrontation" sessions and the like continues the attack on the learning process, and continues to support the refusal of the lotus-eaters to embark on the discovering voyage.

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In my own student days in the thirties, the Depression was the central social fact, and most radical students were sympathetic to Marxism as then interpreted by Stalinism. The Marxist radical of the thirties accepted the work ethic as completely as any capitalist, but he sought solidarity with the working class, as he defined it. All his efforts were focused on the moment of takeover, the point at which the political and economic structure would pass from bourgeois into working-class hands. The position of the "new left" today is very different. The typical radical of today does not think of himself as primarily a "worker": he reflects rather the disillusionment of a consumer-directed economy, the so-called affluent society. From his point of view, the looter who takes advantage of a race riot to steal a colour television set is a square and outmoded revolutionary. Again, political protest today tends to be sharply localized, and often takes the form of small ethnical solidarity movements, as with the separatism in Quebec, Belgium, Wales, and Scotland. The primary revolutionary categories tend to be psychological rather than economic, closer in many respects to Freud than to Marx. When the contemporary radical denounces intervention in Vietnam or Negro segregation, he does not think of these things as merely by-products of a class struggle, but as issues in which the moral and emotional factors, prejudice and the like, are the real enemies to be fought. Such factors bring the radicalism of today closer to nineteenth-century anarchism than to the Communism of Stalin's era. Like the anarchists, contemporary radicals think in terms of direct action, or confrontation; and their organizing metaphor is not so much takeover as transformation or metamorphosis. Nineteenth-century anarchists showed a curious polarizing in temperament between the extremes of gentleness and of ferocity: there were the anarchists of "mutual aid," and the terrorist anarchists of bombs and assassinations. The essential dynamic of contemporary radicalism is nonviolent, and its revolutionary tactics seem to descend from Gandhi rather than Lenin. When contemporary protest movements commit themselves to violence, they show some connection with the fascism of a generation ago, a similarity which confuses many people of my generation, whose "left-wing" and "right-wing" signposts point in different directions. They feel turned around in a world where not only the Soviet Union but trade unions have become right-wing, and where many left-wing movements utter slogans that sound very close to racism. Perhaps we should drop the metaphors of left and right wing, in a

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situation where we no longer have a conception of two parts of society splitting off from each other and engaging in a final struggle for power. Radicals of today are still influenced by the metaphors of takeover, of which the phrase "student power" is one. But the context has changed: we should think rather of a single society, with a conservative majority and a number of radical groups embedded in it and trying to transform it from within. The aims and values of the conservative majority are not necessarily obscurantist, but are simply different. The epithet "conformist" is a double-edged one, for no social groups show more rigid patterns of conformity than nonconformist groups. There is a strong feeling that it is the democracies of America and Western Europe which are most amenable to radical change today. If this is true, it is so only because the essential dynamic of the conservative majority in the democracies is also nonviolent, forming the main body of a society mature and flexible enough to contain a good deal of organized opposition, including strikes. This implies that the first principle of the contest between radicals and conservatives in the democracies is not the principle of eventual struggle for power, but the principle of coexistence. Clearly, the one thing that would put an end to all hope for genuine social advance in our society would be the growth of conservative violence: the effort, with the aid of a hysterical police force, to trample down all protest into that state of uneasy quiescence under terror which is what George Wallace means by law and order. As the recent Chicago fracas showed,1 there can be no real doubt that such counter-violence would be much more directed at radicals, even of the most peaceful kind, than at criminals. The dangers do not of course come entirely from the conservative side. Contemporary radical groups, including student activists, have in general no objective and documented analysis of what it is that they are against, such as Marx provided for Communists in Das Kapital. They are thus compelled to fall back on such cliche-phrases as "the Establishment" or "power structure," which are used in a paranoid sense as implying a vast and vague conspiracy, much as "world bankers" and "international Jewry" were employed in fascist polemic. The danger here is that violence is often the only means of emotional release from a sense of unreality, in which even wantonly destructive or sadistic acts help to create a sense of identity in their perpetrators. The real radical dynamic of our time, then, is not directed toward a once-for-all revolution which will transfer power from one class to an-

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other and then move on to a classless goal. It is rather a dynamic of permanent revolution (hardly in the old Trotskyist sense, I should think, though related), a dialogue of society engaged in a continuous critique of its order and its assumptions. Because of the central position it gives to the emotional and imaginative elements in radicalism, it can enlist those who are radical in other than political areas, especially the artists. Oldline Marxism had a simple programme for writers and painters which was, in essence, protest before revolution, panegyric afterwards; and the prescriptions of "social realism" have been notoriously incapable of coming to terms with anything in twentieth-century culture which is genuinely revolutionary in form, and not merely in content. In the radicalism of thirty years ago, the great disillusionment was the loss of belief in the moral superiority of the Soviet Union to the bourgeois world. The corresponding illusion of our own time is the belief in the possibility of achieving a moral superiority to society by withdrawing from it and its values, contemplating it from without as something alien, or, in the fashionable metaphor, "sick." When I call it an illusion I am not denying the possibility of human renewal: I am distinguishing between trying to preserve integrity, which is a genuine moral problem, and trying to preserve innocence, which is not one. It is easier to believe that a society which has been "sick" for thousands of years will get well immediately than to believe that we shall come to an immediate agreement on what constitutes health. The ethics of change can only be based on a paradoxical union of participation and detachment. We belong to something before we are anything, and what we belong to is a mixture of good and bad. At present students come to university demanding a greater degree of participation in its affairs, including its decisions. Given the conditions of our time, no reasonable person is likely to deny that this is a normal and healthy demand. But to participate in anything in human society means entering into a common bond of guilt, of guilt and of inevitable compromise. I am not saying that we accept the evils of what we join: I am saying that whatever we join contains evils, and that what we accept is the guilt of belonging to it. The "commitment" and "engagement" we hear so much about are the preconditions of action, but they are not sufficient virtues, if they are virtues at all. Commitment in itself is uncritical and humourless: humourless because it is too busy rationalizing everything in what it belongs to to see the absurd side of it. We need also the opposition of detachment, which starts with a moral judgment on the social institution

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that one is in. I do not mean the token detachment of the opposition in a two-party political system, but a genuine detachment of attitude, one that keeps on saying: this, even if necessary, is still wrong; this, even if logical, is still absurd. In revolutionary times, however, what detachment is likely to do is to set up an alternative institution, which will of course also demand commitment. When this is set up in hostility to its conservative rival, that hostility is built into it, and so the commitment it calls for is of a more intense kind, more eager to rationalize, more impatient of having anomalies or absurdities in itself pointed out, less tolerant of dissent. Thus a revolutionary detachment from society may cancel itself out by a total commitment to another form of society, so that instead of getting more tolerance we eventually get less. We notice that educational experiments set up as part of a student protest often turn out to be more doctrinaire and narrow-minded than what they attempt to supersede, the fetishism of degrees and credits being replaced by the counter-fetishism of "relevance." A New York friend of mine tells me of a poster advertising a studentorganized seminar in contemporary literature, set up as part of the Columbia demonstration, and ending with the statement: "Spokesmen of the so-called new criticism will not be tolerated." Once a society renounces violence as a means of resolving its differences, controversy and discussion provide the only means of social advance. Where we have two separating camps of commitment, advance through discussion is paralyzed, because all arguments become personal. The argument is seen only as a rationalization of one side, and its proponent is merely identified as a radical or a reactionary, a Communist or an Uncle Tom. (I do not see much force in this last epithet, by the way: Uncle Tom, who was flogged to death for sticking by his principles, seems to me quite an impressive example of nonviolent resistance.) The continuing of the paralysis of discussion, in breaking up meetings, shouting down unpopular speakers, and the like, congeals into a mood of anticipatory violence. The end of commitment is the community; and commitment is what used to be called loyalty. Traditionally, loyalty is the acceptance of an external social authority, as embodied in nation or church or party or parents. It contains an uncritical element (e.g., "My country right or wrong"), and its ultimate sanction is power over life, as represented by the authority to draft young men to fight in Vietnam for a cause they may regard as foolish and evil. It seems clear that the sense of the Tightness of this kind of loyalty is disappearing.

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If the end of commitment is the community, the end of detachment is the individual. This is not an antithesis: the mature individual is mature only because he has reached a kind of social adjustment. The notion that individual freedom demands the destruction of all social order recurs in anarchist thought, but with much the same "by and by" feeling that the Christian has for the end of the world or the Communist for the withering away of the state. Such axioms as "anarchy is order," recently chalked up on London walls, do not seem to me any improvement on the "freedom is slavery" slogan of the police state in 1984. We still need loyalty to something with enough authority to form a community, but it must be a free authority, something that fulfils and does not diminish the individual. Such an authority can ultimately only be the kind of authority that education embodies. The authority of the logical argument, the repeatable experiment, the established fact, the compelling work of art, is the only authority that exacts no bows or salutes. It is not sacrosanct, for what is true today may be inadequately true tomorrow, but it is what holds society together for today. A century ago one of the most solidly rooted assumptions in our culture was the sense of continuity in time. History revealed an increasing purpose in its passing; consistency of action throughout life was what gave dignity to man and a real significance to his virtues, or even his vices. This belief in teleology, that time revealed a design and a meaning as it continued, had been built into our religion and philosophy from ancient times. It was still there in the arts of the last century, in the long novels that rolled through suspense and mystery to a foreordained conclusion, in the symphonies that took off from and returned to the same tonality, in the pictures that arrested a climactic point of process, like the self-portraits of Van Gogh or the poised dancers of Degas. This teleological sense is also disappearing. The word "absurd" refers to its disappearance, and to the growth of a feeling that all lives are really discontinuous moments of experience held together with various kinds of ideological paste. This loss of the sense of a future implicit in the present has naturally created a panic or latent hysteria, the future being feared in proportion to its meaninglessness. The panic about being up to date in one's cultural and intellectual vogues, and the panic about being taken over by some concealed and maleficent social design or "Establishment," already mentioned, are aspects of this. The real basis for this sense of the continuity of time was, I think, the sense of the continuity of social institutions. For centuries Western man

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has been enlarged and civilized essentially by his institutions: it was only the continuity of his nation, his church, his class, his party, his ancestry, or his trade that gave his life a dimension of greater significance. The loss of belief in the permanence of institutions, or rather in the assumption that they are any better for being permanent, has brought us to a crisis of a peculiar versatility. It is not a political or an intellectual or a religious crisis: it is all these things at once, a crisis of the spirit unlikely to be resolved by either revolution or reaction. Nothing new has been born, yet at every moment we pass the point of no return. But it is becoming clearer that social institutions are, in a sense, projected from what man knows or imagines or wants to know, and which are his arts and his sciences. The driving power of the continuity of social institutions is the continuity of knowledge and of the learning process, and in a time when social projections no longer command loyalty, we can only return to their source. Meanwhile, the university is rooted in its society, a fact that seems to have come as something of a discovery today, and not only to students. There has been a good deal of discussion designed to show that much of the attempt to define what Newman called the idea of the university, in such phrases as "community of scholars," is a smoke-screen for the university's involvement in a "sick" society. A conference was held this summer under the title: "The University: Rhetoric vs. Reality." It is no disparagement to the usefulness of such a conference to say that rhetoric can never be confronted by reality, but only by a different kind of rhetoric. In any case the university is unlike most social institutions in that it is committed to being aware of its social context, and to examining the assumptions of its society. Some of the phrases used to indicate this may be too idealistic to be convincing; but everything connected with the phrase "academic freedom" implies resistance to being made a mere creature of the community. Thus the university is precisely in the position of radical groups in modern society, belonging to society yet striving to become aware of its conditioning, trying to throw off whatever is illegitimate in that conditioning, and therefore ethically bound to help carry out a long-term transformation of society. Being an institution, it naturally regards "confrontation" as a crisis and a last resort, not a series of rehearsals for an unwritten apocalyptic drama. And, of course, it may lose the confrontation if it cannot resist legislative interference or economic pressure. But such defeats are the result of being in what we have called the bond of guilt, the bond from which there is no escape into

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innocence. Compromise is not a betrayal when a refusal to compromise would be a greater betrayal. So far as the university is an institution, some proportioning of decision-making to the degree of commitment to it seems to me a reasonable principle: teaching staff and administration first, alumni with a lifelong record of work and interest in it second, students third. But the institutional aspect of the university exists only as a means of getting at the inner process of teaching and learning and scholarship, where the free authority of the subject studied is all that matters. A "child-centred" view of elementary education seems to me reasonable because those most concerned are children; a "student-centred" view of university education seems to me to be nonsense because university students are not children. They are citizens intelligent and mature enough to be brought into contact with the source of all continuity and structure in society, the bureau of standards where real time and space are kept. There is another type of social institution which is also committed to the criticism of its social context and to an eventual transformation of society. This is the type represented by the religious bodies. It seems to me that some recognition of the role of religion in society is essential in clarifying today's radical protest, which is religious to a degree that it can hardly comprehend itself. Radicals today, in the universities particularly, are trying to find answers to the existential questions raised by discontinuity and absurdity, trying to solve the paradoxes resulting from the fact that man cannot live continuously on a genuinely human level. Such answers can only be sought in some area of religion, however secularized: they cannot be found in the university, which can deal only with the continuous and the structured. The religious bodies have enough problems of their own, but if they fail to meet the spiritual needs of society, the university will become the only source of free authority, and hence would be almost compelled to slip into the role of a lay church for intellectuals. That this would be a disaster, which could only widen the already dangerous gap between the intellectuals with their fragile opinions and the rest of society with its frightened police, goes without saying. I say it because many of the assumptions under which protest in the universities appears to be operating seem to me to take the form of a misapplied religious reformation, based on a view of the ideal university as a bastard church, resembling the Congregationalists in government, the Catholics in outlook, the Quakers in doctrine, and the Jehovah's Witnesses in tactics. In revolutionary times the emotional emphasis is thrown on the break

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with the past; but the test of revolution comes with the problem of establishing contact with the past, when it can carry on as well as supersede. There are no immaculate conceptions in history, much less in the ethics of change. However new the future religions of Western man, they will still have to establish some contact with his Judaeo-Christian traditions; however new his future universities, they will still have to establish contact with the Western intellectual traditions that have come down from the Greeks. I spoke earlier of magical words, and at present no word is more magical than "dialogue," which raises the spirits of Socrates and Plato particularly. We notice in Plato, however, that the more dialogue there is, the more indecisive the discussion, and the greater the probability that somebody is talking nonsense. In this phase Socrates is the supreme ironist, breaking down and paralyzing all advance in the argument. But when any genuine knowledge is being conveyed, one person, generally Socrates himself, is on the trail of a dialectic, and is allowed to pursue it wherever it seems to lead, taking his followers with him. And, however breath-taking the myths and visions that we see on the way, over it all hangs the greater irony of the eventual martyrdom of Socrates, the fact that society as a whole can only absorb his influence by killing him. The spiritual tradition that runs through the Hebrew prophets and Jesus shows a similar pattern. In some of the protests of "yippies" and other groups today I detect a note of some desperation. Society does not hate them enough: they have not the prophetic authority to strike at our deeper fears, and are themselves involved in the panic they create. I imagine that we shall have to forge deeper loyalties, and confront deeper cleavages, if we are to follow our greatest teachers through an agony which is birth and death at once, to a victory which has triumphed over both. Discussion PROFESSOR DUBOS was impressed by Frye's stress on the structure and continuity of society and its institutions, which he regarded as so central as to represent the very structure of Frye's thought. He suggested that the university's task is to remain true to the continuity of the culture of the past while modifying itself to "imagine and create" the future, in the sense implied by Shelley when he referred in his Defence of Poetry to "the faculty 'to imagine that which we know.'" NF: First, I am very grateful to Mr. Dubos for allowing me a distinction between magical words and thematic words. Even magical words have

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some kind of meaning when properly used, which usually means in a more or less limited sense. I was interested in the fact that both Messrs. Dubos and Koestler stressed the elements of conditioning and continuity. Most of the members of this audience, even when they were embryos in the womb, were still middle-class twentieth-century Canadians. Religion calls that original sin. Political theory calls it, or used to call it, the social contract. But whatever it is called it has an element in it which is to some extent ironic, even tragic. The acceptance of this conditioning is obviously essential because it has been accepted anyway. In our time I think we have become more aware of the ironic aspect of the fact that we are conditioned to begin with, which naturally leads to an emphasis on becoming aware, so far as we can, of our conditioning factors. Mr. Dubos's reference to Shelley's Defence of Poetry I found fascinating. Shelley even goes to the length of saying that we perceive only the element of automatic repetition in the world, and that this conditions us to tyranny and regimentation. Consequently to imagine what we know is also to recreate the world. This is the point, I think, at which the figure of the catalyst comes in which was used by Mr. Koestler. As you remember, T.S. Eliot uses this figure to describe the mind of the poet as a place where something happens. But I feel that in the teaching and learning process at university there is something more important than catalysis going on, because the teacher as well as the student is profoundly involved in what he is doing. What both teacher and student are trying to do, I think, is to escape from the intolerable burden of being teachers and students. The teacher finds it so easy to become opaque, a substitute for his subject instead of a transparent means for communicating, and it is only when that opacity disappears and the room is full of the subject studied that any genuine education is going on. The sense of a place where something is happening is, I think, genuine, but the question of what it is that is unaffected is something else again. It isn't the teacher or the student: they are deeply changed in the compound.... ARTHUR KOESTLER asked Frye to explain his assertion that a student-centred view of university education is nonsense. NF: I think what it means is that in the education of children the personality of the child becomes extremely important, because the child is nearly all personality. The conception of a student-centred education, which is one of the cliches of some of the student activists, strikes me as a miscon-

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ception of what goes on at the university. It seems clear that in the mutual educating of teachers and students, when both are adult, the thing which is at the centre is the subject. That is what I meant when I spoke a moment ago of teachers and students both trying to escape from roles of teachers teaching and students learning, and trying to come together in a common vision of the subject presented to them. There is a kind of impersonality present which I think your figure of the catalyst expresses, and which is something that only adults can reach. With children the teaching and learning process still has to keep carrying on. KOESTLER then questioned Frye's view that the university could not provide answers to existential questions: did he mean that this is a shortcoming of the university, or that it is not its function? NF: I mean that it is not the function of the university. The things that go on at the university—teaching, studying, scholarship, research—are all continuous and structured things, only indirectly connected with the problems of the discontinuous and the absurd. You make a similar point when you refer to Victor Frankl and his conception of logotherapy.21 am not saying that students should go to the churches for answers to existential questions: I am saying only that these questions are religious and not intellectual. Professors may give some leads in answering them, but they can do so only as people, not as professors, and if you require them to deal with such questions as professors, you no longer have a university but what I call a bastard church.... PROFESSOR MEYERSON commented on the dangers faced by the university when it gives up its position as critical observer and centre of knowledge and insight and injects itself into social policy as an active protagonist instead, and he remarked on the brilliance with which Frye has dealt with certain problems in this regard. Students and teachers alike, Frye says, must feel a sense of both responsibility and guilt for the university as an institution, and faced with the conservatism of that institution students have led the way in providing it with the consciousness of the need for reform and with the conscience it so badly needs. When questions were invited from the audience, Frye responded to a question on how the university aimed to break down interdisciplinary barriers, specifically between the arts and the sciences.

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NF: One of the first facts about the humanities is that the arts, unlike the sciences, do not improve or progress. They produce the classic or model, and literary criticism has to keep revolving around that. I think criticism, unlike literature, does progress, but it progresses in depth, studying the same works of literature on deeper levels. The scientist can build on the work of his predecessors in a way that the artist cannot. I don't know whether much can be done about the ultimate integration of such different disciplines: it seems to me that the world of scholarship, in both fields, is irremediably pluralistic. I don't think that we can create a better culture by forcing the humanist to memorize the second law of thermodynamics or the scientist a speech from Macbeth. What unites the literary critic and the scientist is nothing intellectual, but their common role as citizens in a democratic society. Another questioner doubted the validity of Frye's search for transparency or translucency in the teacher, arguing that knowledge must always come through an individual with a specific point of view. NF: I understand that point of view very well, and I would never speak of transparency as an absolute, only as an ideal which one tries to approximate, so that "translucent" is probably a better word. Every teacher worth his salt—certainly in the humanities, which is what I know—feels that his own teaching is valid in proportion as he is speaking with the authority of whatever he is teaching. He comes to understand Eliot's point about the catalyst, the longing to escape from personality and the sense of danger in taking refuge in personality. He does not cease to be a personality, but he is committed, in good will and good faith, to approximate something which includes himself, though it is bigger than himself and contains much that he is not. All he can do is to ask others to come along with him in the same spirit of good will and good faith. MR. KOESTLER then asked whether such things as sit-ins and confrontations, which Frye thought of as outside the educational process, were not in fact an extension of it. NF: I doubt that there is really much difference of opinion between us on this point. I was trying to delimit the university's specific function as a university, in order to avoid what Mr. Meyerson calls exaggeration of the university's role and the attempt to make it a kind of social catch-all for

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almost any enterprise. I do not deny that the type of material I teach— Milton, Shakespeare, Blake—is extremely explosive, and raises issues that in themselves are not matters of teaching or scholarship. But it seems to me that the university is a kind of Moses, who comes to people stuck in Egypt, trying to make bricks without straw, and says to them: "I think I can get you out of this, if you have the intelligence and the persistence to go with me. It's a long dusty walk, one step after another: it will take forty years and you will often lose your way. I can take you to the boundary of a better country. It belongs to you; it's your home; all you have to do is enter and take possession. But I will not go with you, because I have to go back to Egypt for more slaves."

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The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract 9 December 1968

From SM, 27-48. Presented as a lecture at the Quail Roost Seminar at Duke University. First published in Higher Education: Demand and Response (The Quail Roost Seminar), ed. W. Roy Niblett (London: Tavistock Publications, 1969, and San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1970), without the note. The first half, slightly abridged, was published as "Anarchism and the Universities" in New Society, 14 (13 November 1969): 769-71; the second half was published under the title "The University and Personal Life" in University of Toronto Graduate, 2 (Summer 1969): 36-52, and, with slight editorial changes, as "The Educational Contract," New Society, 14 (20 November 1969): 811-14. The whole was reprinted as "The Utopian State of Mind" in New Statesman, 77 (23 and 30 December 1977): 896-900. An abridged version appeared as "Utopia on the Campus," Globe and Mail Magazine, 13 September 1969, 5-8. Two typescripts exist in NFF, 1988, box 2, one with holograph corrections in file uu, and a retyped copy in vv. This lecture was incorporated into The Critical Path. The first half of the twentieth century saw two world wars, each of which was started by a reactionary military autocracy operating mainly in Germany and ended in a major Communist revolution, first in Russia, then in China. The second half of the century is seeing the beginning of a new revolutionary development that seems to have more in common with anarchism than with Communism. The anarchist nature of the "New Left" is often recognized, but usually without much sense of the traditions or context of anarchism. In my own student days, during the Depression of the thirties, anarchism was a negligible force, at least on North American campuses, and the most influential radical movements were close to Marxism as interpreted by Stalin. The pro-Stalinist radical thought of himself as a

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"worker"—that is, he had no quarrel with the work ethic of capitalism as an ethic, only with its economic setting. The metaphors of "left wing" and "right wing" were essential to him, because he thought in terms of an eventual separation and struggle for power between proletarian and bourgeois camps. His outlook was intensely international, and his tactics conformed to an internationally directed and organized strategy. His attitude to social issues was rational, every injustice and cruelty under capitalism being only what one would expect of that system. His attitude to the arts was deeply conservative, based mainly on the content of what was said or painted, or, at most, on allegorical reference. I remember a Canadian Communist magazine that condemned practically all twentiethcentury Canadian painting as bourgeois formalism, and reproduced Victorian anecdotal pictures, depicting foreclosures of mortgages and the like, as examples of the genuine cultural tradition. The Stalinist's personal ethics, when consistent with his political outlook, tended to be rigorous: self-indulgence or muddling one's mind with liquor and drugs was for him only the kind of thing that capitalism encouraged. Hardly any of these characteristics are true of the present New Left. Like the nineteenth-century anarchists, contemporary radicals favour direct action, or "confrontation," and favour also the kind of spontaneous uprising with no context in past or future, which is without precedence and without direction. The word "existential" is often used approvingly to describe a political action which has no particular point. Unlike the Stalinist with his sacred texts of Marx and Lenin and his libraries of commentary on them, many who call themselves anarchists today have never heard of Kropotkin or Bakunin, or would take the slightest interest in them if they had. The nineteenth-century anarchists lost out to the more disciplined Communists in the struggle for control of the working class, partly because they tended to the extremes of either passivity or violence. There was the Arcadian anarchism of Morris's News from Nowhere and the terroristic anarchism of Conrad's Secret Agent. Similarly, radicals of today range from "flower children" to assassins, though their main centre of gravity is of course in an intermediate activism. Their most effective revolutionary tactics are closer to Gandhi than to Lenin, and their great heroes are romantics like Che Guevara, who commands much the same kind of appeal, and for many of the same reasons, that Garibaldi commanded among British liberals a century ago. Even the Mao Tse-tung of radical folklore seems more the guerrilla leader of thirty years ago than the present ruler of China. The contemporary anarchist, like his nineteenth-century forebears,

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tends to localize his protests: he is well aware of the global context of contemporary unrest, but his own movement is likely to be confined to an immediate area of interest. Hence small separatist movements, like those in Quebec or Belgium, are also a part of contemporary radicalism. The conception of "participatory democracy," which demands a thoroughgoing decentralization, is also anarchist in context. In some respects this fact presents a political picture almost the reverse of that of the previous generation. For today's radical the chief objects of loyalty during the thirties, trade unions and the revolutionary directives of Moscow, have become reactionary social forces, whereas some radical movements like the Black Panthers, which appear to have committed themselves both to violence and to racism, seem to descend from fascism, which also had anarchist affinities. Similarly, anarchism does not seek to create a "working class": much of its dynamic comes from a bourgeois disillusionment with an overproductive society, and some types of radical protest, like those of the hippies, are essentially protests against the work ethic itself. Both political movements show many analogies to the religious movements which preceded them. The attitude of the old-line Stalinist to the Soviet Union was very like that of a Roman Catholic to his church, at least before the Second Vatican Council. There was a tremendous international institution which was the definitive interpreter of the Marxist revelation, and one could work effectively for the worldwide triumph of that revelation only from within the institution. Contemporary anarchists, at least those who can read, are more like the Puritans in the way that they seek a primitive gospel in the early work of Marx, before social and institutional Marxism began to corrupt it. Perhaps the similarity, however, is less with Puritanism than with the Anabaptists (who in the sixteenth century were also anarchists tending to the same polarity of pacifism and terrorism) and the more fervid evangelicals. Among religious bodies, those who are most dramatically increasing their membership today are the most uncritical and fundamentalist sects, and I doubt whether this is simply coincidence. There are some curious parallels between the present and the nineteenth-century American scene, between contemporary turn-on sessions and nineteenth-century ecstatic revivalism, between beatnik and hippie communes and some of the nineteenth-century Utopian projects. Stalinist Marxism had practically nothing in the American tradition to attach itself to, but anarchism is one of the central elements in American culture. Jefferson's states-rights and

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local autonomy thinking, Thoreau's civil disobedience, Lincoln's view of the Civil War as a revolution against the inner spirit of slavery, many cultural phenomena as diverse as Huckleberry Finn, the Chaplin films, and the Cantos of Ezra Pound, all show a radical dynamic that has affinities with anarchism. So did the populist movements at the turn of the century, which showed the same revolutionary ambivalence, tending equally to the left or to the right, that I have just noted in the contemporary scene. As for terroristic anarchism, one hardly needs to document that in so violent a country as America. The spirit of the late Joseph McCarthy is still around, but it is much more difficult for it to regard the current type of radical protest as un-American. Anarchism has another advantage over Communism in its relation to the creative arts. The primary revolutionary categories of today tend to be psychological rather than economic, closer in many respects to Freud than to Marx, as we see in many of the writers who have tried to articulate the present radical mood, such as Herbert Marcuse. When the contemporary radical denounces intervention in Vietnam or Negro segregation, he does not think of these things as merely by-products of the contradictions of capitalism: he sees the emotional and imaginative factors in these situations as primary, and as the main elements to be opposed or supported. This primary place assigned to emotion and imagination means among other things that the anarchist is not hampered, as the orthodox Marxist was (and still is) hampered, by the canons of "social realism" which judge mainly by content. A ferment in the arts, including a revival of oral poetry, is an integral part of today's radicalism, as, despite a great many spasmodic efforts, it never became in the radicalism of thirty years ago. The drug cults are another aspect of the same psychologically based activity. They are not intended merely to take one's mind off one's troubles: they are part of an attempt to recharge the batteries of the mind after they have been drained by disillusionment: that is, by the withdrawal of libido from consumer goods, or what advertising is still presenting as the good things of life. The metaphors of left and right wing are still employed, but they have much less relevance to anarchism than to Communism. The Marxist saw a steadily widening split between two parts of society, an eventual struggle for power, and the final victory of the working class. The contemporary radical seems to think rather in terms of a single society, with localized cells and nuclei of radicalism agitating and transforming it from within. Communism was intensely teleological in spirit: every

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Communist-directed strike or demonstration was one step in the great campaign of class struggle and revolutionary triumph. The anarchism of today seems almost as indifferent to the future as to the past: one protest will be followed by another, because even if one issue is resolved society will still be "sick," but there appears to be no clear programme of taking control or assuming permanent responsibility in society. If I am right, then anarchism is committed by the logic of its position to becoming increasingly nonviolent. Violence appears to be an inescapable stage in sobering up an unwilling conservatism and in impressing it with the sense that it is not dealing with children. An ascendant class tends to make an indulgent comic strip out of any group from which unrest seems likely: thus we had the Paddy-and-his-pig Irishman in nineteenth-century England, the Rastus-and-Jemima comic or lovable Negro in white America, and so on. But once the pattern of opposition is established, the effectiveness of violence diminishes. Naturally this does not happen easily, violence being the opiate of the revolutionary: even university students are strongly affected by the "let's do something and not just talk about it" syndrome. But where there is no really serious conception of a climactic struggle for power in which the victor achieves permanent authority, "talk" is the final mode of radical action, and the form that its ultimate confrontation has to take. I spoke of the affinity between some contemporary anarchism and fascism, with its belief in violence as being in a sense its own end. In Nazi Germany this took the form of a melancholy Gotterdammerung nihilism, whose goal appeared to be not so much its professed one of world-rule as annihilation in some heroic last stand, a second Roncesvalles or Thermopylae. This mood is, I think, intelligible to today's anarchist, who has inherited all the heroic gloom of existentialism, as it was utterly unintelligible to the Stalinist radical. I remember when Yeats's Last Poems appeared in 1939, and how brusquely their sardonic bleakness was dismissed as "morbid" by the radicals of that day. But they speak with a peculiar and haunting eloquence now, even to the most self-righteous of student radicals. I spoke a moment ago of the anarchist strain in American culture: another example of it is the work of Edgar Allan Poe, whose significance as a portent of many aspects of contemporary literature it is hard to do full justice to. Poe wrote an essay called "The Poetic Principle" in which he asserted that a long poem was a contradiction in terms, that all existing long poems of genuine quality consisted of moments of intense poetic experience stuck together with connective tissues of narrative or

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argument which were really versified prose. The fact that this doctrine was preposterous so far as it was applied to Homer or Milton did not prevent it from having a tremendous influence on future poetry, including the French symbolistes and Pound and Eliot in England. What happens in literature is very likely to happen in life as a whole a century or so later. In Foe's day, and in fact up to about 1945,one °f tne most solidly rooted assumptions in middle-class Western culture was the sense of continuity in time. That is, life was thought of ideologically, as something that contained a developing purpose and direction. Some gave this feeling a religious reference: for many Christians the essence of Christianity was in the renewed meaning which the Incarnation had given to human history. In Marxist thought the "historical process," which is an irresistible force on the side of those who accept it, played a similar role. The artist, if faced with hostility or misunderstanding, assumed, with Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames, that he would be vindicated by posterity,1 for whom he was really writing. Others, like Spengler in The Decline of the West, saw the teleology in history from the opposite point of view, as an organic process that first matured and then declined. For a great number of bourgeois intellectuals, the doctrine of evolution afforded a scientific proof of teleology in human life, and the doctrine of progress in history, though of course much older than Darwin, became increasingly a mythical analogy of evolution. H.G. Wells in his Outline of History (1920) concludes a chapter on "Early Thought" with a picture of human sacrifice at Stonehenge and an appended comment: "And amidst the throng march the appointed human victims, submissive, helpless, staring towards the distant smoking altar at which they are to die—that the harvests may be good and the tribe increase. . . . To that had life progressed 3,000 or 4,000 years ago from its starting-place in the slime of the tidal beaches."2 The death-wish in human life, so dramatically emergent in the First World War, could hardly be ignored by anyone writing in 1920: but although the final remark is intended ironically, it echoes with the complacency of the "long view." One of the most striking cultural facts of our time is the disappearance of this teleological sense. We tend now to think of our lives as being, like the long poem as described by Foe, a discontinuous sequence of immediate experiences. What holds them together, besides mere survival, can only be some kind of voluntary and enforced ideology. Thus the artist may keep his life continuous by a belief in creativity, the businessman by a belief in productivity, the religious man by a belief in God, the politi-

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cian by a belief in policy. But the more intense the immediate experience, the more obviously its context in past and future time drops away from it. The word "absurd" refers primarily to the disappearance of the sense of continuity in our day. It is not so much that the world around us no longer suggests any meaning or purpose concealed in its design: that in itself, as Robbe-Grillet says, means not that the world is absurd, but merely that it is there.3 The sense of absurdity comes from time, not space; from the feeling that life is not a continuous absorption of experiences into a steadily growing individuality, but a discontinuous series of encounters between moods and situations which keep bringing us back to the same point. In this situation there is one positive feature of great importance: the sharpening of moral sensitivity. I spoke of the complacency inherent in the progressive "long view," and belief in progress can easily become the most morally callous of all beliefs. The thing about Russian Marxism that most sickened its bourgeois supporters was the readiness with which it could (and still can, evidently) embark on a massacre, an invasion of a small independent country, or a deliberately induced famine, for the sake of the greater good that such procedures would bring, from its own point of view, to posterity. In a now neglected book, Ends and Means, Aldous Huxley pointed out how means can never lead to ends, because they condition and eventually replace those ends. George Orwell's 1984, one of the most important books recording the transition in mood from the last to the present generation, shows more vividly how the donkey's carrot of progress can become an indefinite prolonging of misery. It seems to me admirable that contemporary radicals should be concerned with the rights of those who are alive now, and should be protesting against the Vietnam war because it is killing innocent people at this moment, refusing to listen to any long-term rationalizations about the crusade against Communism or the white man's burden. A less attractive side of the same situation is the general panic, even hysteria, that the loss of reference to temporal context has left us with. The most obvious form of this panic is the flight from the past: the anxiety to be up to date, to be rid of unfashionable ideas and techniques, to condemn everything unsatisfactory with the same formula, that it is too cumbersome and obsolete for the unimpeded movement assumed to be necessary today. A society with a revolutionary basis, like American society, is often inclined to be impatient of history and tradition. "History is bunk," said Henry Ford, at one end of the social scale: "I don't

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take no stock in dead people," said Huckleberry Finn, at the other. The future, in such a view, cannot be the outcome of the past: it is a brand new future, which may be implicit in the present but is to be built out of the materials of the present by an act of will, which cannot operate until it has been released from the past. The strongly negative mood in today's radicalism, the tendency to be against rather than for, is consistent with this: whatever is defined is hampering, and only the undefined is free. The resulting crisis of spirit is a far-reaching one. That it has caused a political crisis goes without saying. But there is also a crisis in the arts and in the intellect. The creative artist cannot appeal to posterity, as he no longer assumes that the future will be continuous with the present, and, more important, the impetus to produce the "great" work of art has itself been considerably weakened. For, traditionally, the great work of art became a classic, that is, a work connecting the present with the past. One sometimes wonders if the age of great writers or painters or composers is over, and if what is in front of us culturally is not rather a diffused creative energy, much or most of it taking fairly ephemeral forms, a general rather than a specialized social product. Again, there is a crisis in the intellect, for the assumption that science and scholarship are progressively developing, in a semi-autonomous way, is in many quarters questioned or denied. But above all, the crisis is a religious one. The problems connected with the discontinuous and the absurd are problems affecting the way man lives his life, affecting his conceptions of his nature and destiny, affecting his sense of identity. They are, in short, existential problems, and existentialism has been formulated mainly either in the explicitly religious context of Kierkegaard and Unamuno, or in the context of Heidegger and Sartre, which is no less religious for being atheistic. I feel that contemporary radicalism is deeply, even desperately, religious both in its anxieties and in its assertions: that it cannot, for the most part, accept the answers given its questions by the existing religious bodies, and that a great deal of student unrest is based on a feeling that the university ought to be trying to answer such questions, but cannot do so until it has been shaken loose from the "Establishment." That this is a misunderstanding of what the university is and can do is undoubtedly true. But the questions remain, as urgent as ever, and some people in the universities ought to try to deal with them sympathetically, as questions, before they freeze into immature dogmas. There are two social conceptions so deeply rooted in our experience that they can be presented only as myths. One is the social contract, the

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myth which attempts to explain the nature of the conditioning we accept by getting born. The other is the Utopia, the myth of an ideal social contract. Both these myths have religious affiliations: the contract is connected with the alienation myth of the Fall of Man, and the Utopia with the transcendence myth of the City of God. The overtones of the social contract myth are ironic, sometimes tragic. Before we were born, we were predestined to join a social continuum at a certain historical point: we belonged to the twentieth century and the middle class even as embryos in the womb. We belong to something before we are anything, and the first datum of our lives is the set of social conditions and assumptions that we are already committed to. The conservative temperament is strongly attracted by the positive aspects of this contract. He feels that his own development is a matter of growing organically out of the roots of his social context. What is presented to him at birth, he feels, is a set of loyalties given to him before he is capable of choosing them. To try to reject what one is already committed to can only lead to confusion and chaos, both in one's own life and in society. Further, we discover in the permanence and continuity of social institutions, such as church and state, something that not only civilizes man, but adds a dimension of significance to his otherwise brief and insignificant life. Such, it seems to me, is the conservative view of the social contract, expounded so lucidly by Burke and still being proclaimed, over a century later, by T.S. Eliot. The radical view of it focuses on the uncritical element in our inherited loyalties, as expressed in such maxims as "my country right or wrong." Maturity and development, the radical feels, are a matter of becoming aware of our conditioning, and, in so becoming aware, of making a choice between presented and discovered loyalties. This attitude, developing through Rousseau and Marx, reached a further stage with the existentialism that followed the Second World War. Traditionally, the difference between sanity and hysteria, between reality and hallucination, had always been that sanity and reality lasted longer, and were continuous in a way that their opposites could not be. The rise of Nazi Germany suggested the possibility of a social hysteria indefinitely prolonged by the control of communications. But perhaps what we have been calling sanity and reality is an unconsciously induced hysteria, and the way to deliverance is through and beyond the loyalty of uncritical acceptance. The only real loyalty, then, is the voluntary or self-chosen loyalty. This is the state of mind which dominates the radical of today: an

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intensely Utopian state of mind which feels that it owes loyalty only to a social ideal not yet in existence. The Vietnam issue, particularly, raises the question of what was called, in the title of an indifferent book of twenty years ago, the meaning of treason. In Dante's Inferno, in Shakespeare's tragedies, the traitor, the man who breaks the social contract assigned him at birth, is the lowest of criminals. In our day the word "treason," almost without our realizing it, has joined the word "heresy" as a word that could once intimidate, but is now only a Hallowe'en mask. We notice that the prose romances called Utopias, from Campanella to Edward Bellamy,4 have been rather compulsive and anxiety-ridden stories. In literature, at any rate, they have made far less imaginative impact than the Utopian satires, such as Gulliver's Travels, which ought perhaps to be thought of rather as satires on the social contract. Some of the nineteenth-century Utopias, like Bellamy's Looking Backward, might have looked attractive at the time in contrast to the misery and anarchy of unrestricted laissez-faire. But reading them now, we simply cannot believe the authors' assertions that the citizens of their ideal states are perfectly happy: if they are, we can only feel, as we feel with all victims of brainwashing, that there is something subhuman about them. The reason for this feeling is not hard to see. The conservative who accepts the loyalties presented to him by his society is, to use two stock words of our time, committed and engaged. Commitment and engagement, in themselves, as just said, contain an uncritical element, and tend also to be somewhat humourless, because, confronted with a genuine absurdity in society, their instinct is to rationalize the absurdity instead of recognizing it. The Utopian attitude begins in detachment, but at that point conceives of an alternative institution and transfers its loyalties to that. This alternative institution will of course also demand commitment, and of a more intense kind: it will tolerate much less dissent and criticism, much less sense of the absurd or ironic, than the conservative outlook, unless frightened by crisis, permits. It seems to me that the Marxist revolutionary movement is the definitive form of what I have called the Utopian attitude of mind, the transfer of loyalty from one's native society to another society still to be constructed. When Engels contrasted Utopian with "scientific" socialism5 he was really completing the Utopian argument. In a world like ours a limited Utopia, confined to one definite place, is an empty fantasy: it must be a worldwide transformation of the whole social order or it is

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nothing. But for it to be this it must be conceived, not as an a priori rational construct, but as the telos of history, the end to which history points. The "scientific" element in Marxist socialism, then, is a religious belief in the teleology of history. Marxism envisages a social cleavage in which the possibility of argument, discussion, or what is now called "dialogue" disappears. One does not need to answer an argument: one needs only to identify it as coming from our side or theirs. It is not talk but a planned sequence of actions leading to an ultimate confrontation or showdown that is important. I suggested earlier that the contemporary anarchist radical, though he adopts much of this attitude, is really a post-Marxist revolutionary, forced by the logic of his situation from action into "dialogue." He has no real sense of a proletarian society, and his protest is, primarily and essentially, protest, not a mere prelude to taking power himself. Does this mean, then, that the end of contemporary anarchism is compromise with conservatism? To some extent this may be true: I think democracy is in the initial stages of working out a two-party opposition far less cumbersome and hypocritical, and representing a more genuine division of attitudes, than the one now represented in our parliaments and congresses. But it seems to me that the real end at which anarchism is aiming is very different. (We may note in passing that even anarchism cannot avoid all teleology.) The conservative preference is for commitment and engagement: the Utopian, Marxist, or existential radical begins in detachment, but annuls this detachment in favour of a new commitment. The end of commitment and engagement is the community: the end of detachment, then, is clearly the individual. This is not however an antithesis: nobody ought to be a mere creature of a community, like an insect; nobody can be a pure individual detached from his society. I spoke earlier of the vogue for certain words which seem for a time to have a magical significance. Twenty years ago one such word was "maturity," now out of fashion for obvious reasons. It does seem to me to have some meaning, if not a magical one. The child, and the adolescent in a different way, oscillates between loyalty to the community of his contemporaries and moods of rebelliousness and introversion. As one matures, one's social mask becomes more difficult to remove, and one becomes resigned to a continuous social role. But that very process of adjusting to society is what makes the genuine individual possible. The barriers designed to protect the individual from encroachment from without have to dissolve before

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he can realize that he is not a real individual until his energy flows freely into his social relations. What is true of personal life is true of society. Primitive societies are rigidly ritualized ones; only the mature society permits the genuine individual to emerge. By doing so it does not fall apart: it merely transfers more of its order from external compulsion to internal discipline, from reflex response to the habit of learning. The artist, too, often begins as a member of a school, issuing manifestos and the like, but tends to draw away from such affiliations as he finds his own style. Yet his growing individuality is also a measure of his social acceptance. If we take a second look at our greatest Utopians, Plato and More, we notice that Socrates in the Republic is not concerned about setting up his ideal state anywhere: what he is concerned about is the analogy between his ideal state and the structure of the wise man's mind, with its reason, will, and desire corresponding to the philosopher-king, soldiers, and artisans of the political myth. The ideal state exists, so far as we know, only in such minds, which will obey its laws whatever society they are actually living in. Similarly, More calls his ideal state Utopia, meaning nowhere. Hythloday (the "babbler"), who has been to Nowhere, has returned a revolutionary communist, convinced that nothing can be done with Europe until it has been destroyed and a replica of the Utopia set up in its place. But More himself, to whom the story is being told, suggests using the knowledge of Utopia rather as a means of bringing about an improvement in European society from within. Plato and More realize that while the wise man's mind is rigidly disciplined, and while the mature state is ordered, we cannot take the analogy between the disciplined mind and the disciplined state too literally. For Plato certainly, and for More probably, the wise man's mind is a ruthless dictatorship of reason over appetite, achieved by control of the will. When we translate this into its social equivalents of a philosopher-king ruling workers by storm troopers (not "guardians," as in Jowett, but "guards"),6 we get the most frightful tyranny. But the real Utopia is an individual goal, of which the disciplined society is an allegory. The reason for the allegory is that the Utopian ideal points beyond the individual to a condition in which, as in Kant's kingdom of ends, society and individual are no longer in conflict, but have become different aspects of the same human body. Not only does contemporary radicalism include separatist movements, but it is itself intensely separatist in feeling, and hence the question of

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where one stops separating becomes central. One feels that the more extreme radicals of our time are simply individualists. The more strident the anarchist slogan (e.g., "Let's have a revolution first and find out why later"), the more clearly the individualistic basis of its attitude appears, and the more obviously the Utopian attitude is a projection of it. In the Utopianism of Plato and More the traditional authoritarian structure of society was treated as an allegory of the dictatorship of reason in the wise man's mind. We do not now think of the wise man's mind as a dictatorship of reason: in fact we do not think about the wise man's mind at all. We think rather, in Freudian terms, of a mind in which a principle of normality and balance is fighting for its life against a thundering herd of chaotic impulses, which cannot be simply suppressed but must be frequently indulged and humoured, always allowed to have their say however silly or infantile it may be. In short, we think of the mind as a participating democracy: necessary to live with, yet cumbersome, exasperating, and not an ideal but a process. In such an analogy there is no place for the inner-directed person who resists society until death, like Socrates, or More himself: society is divided and the "individual," despite the etymology of the word, self-divided. In this process the refusal of all loyalty and authority, the attempt of the individual to assert himself against his whole social context, is one such infantile impulse, to be listened to and ignored. The mature individual, who has come to some working arrangement with his society, is looking rather for a loyalty which is coherent and objective enough to create a community, but commands an authority that fulfils and does not diminish the individual. Such a conception of authority is the kind of authority that education embodies: the authority of logic and reason, of demonstrable and repeatable experiment, of established fact, of compelling imagination. Formerly, the sources of loyalty and authority were the social institutions which formed the civilized context of individual life; but these institutions have really been projected from the total body of reason and imagination represented by the arts and sciences. In our age the mortality of social institutions is what impresses us, and when they can no longer command genuine loyalty or authority, we can only return to their source. Further, when we take a third look at the greatest writers on the social contract and the Utopia, Plato, More, Locke, Rousseau, we begin to suspect that they are not really writing about contracts or Utopias at all, but about the theory of education. Perhaps the social contract and the ideal state are also projections, into the past and the

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future respectively, of a source of social authority that sits in the middle of our society, and which I shall call the educational contract. By the educational contract I mean the process by which the arts and sciences, and their methods of logic, experiment, amassing of evidence, and imaginative presentation, actually operate as a source of authority in society. The authority of the social contract is a de facto authority: it exists and it may be rationalized, but it lacks a genuinely ideal dimension, and thereby keeps social ideals in an empty world of wish or hope. Conservatives cluster around de facto authority and radicals around ideals, but as long as they are kept apart, the revolutionary argument, that the Utopian spirit can only gather force on its side and destroy the existing contract, seems unanswerable. The educational contract makes it possible for both sides to submit their social attitudes to a tribunal that not only respects but includes them both. What is needed is a free authority, something coherent enough to create a community, but not an authority in the sense of applying external compulsion. This conception of an educational contract was the main contribution made by the great development of educational theory in nineteenthcentury England. It is the area of free thought and discussion which is at the centre of John Stuart Mill's view of liberty, and which is thought of as a kind of intellectual counterpart of Parliament. It differs from Parliament, for Mill, in that the liberals can never have a majority, which is why democracy has to function as an illogical but deeply humane combination of majority rule and minority right. In Matthew Arnold the educational contract is called culture, and Arnold is explicit about its being the source of genuine authority in society and at the same time operating in a Utopian direction, breaking down the barriers of class conflict and heading in the direction of a classless society. Newman's distinction between useful and liberal knowledge is parallel, when we realize that it is a distinction between two aspects of education, not two kinds of education. All forms of education are at once useful and liberal: they help us to locate ourselves in existing society and they help to develop us as individuals, detached but not withdrawn from that society. Of course Mill's area of discussion, Arnold's culture, and Newman's liberal knowledge are conceptions far wider than the university, but the university is obviously their engine-room, and their power can last only so long as the university keeps operating. The university, then, is the source of free authority in society, not as an institution, but as the place where the appeal to reason, experiment, evidence, and imagination is continuously going on.

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It is on this basis, perhaps, that we can deal with the demand of student activists for relevance in relation to personal as distinct from social life. Using Newman's distinction, there are two aspects to this demand: a utilitarian aspect and a liberal one. The utilitarian one is for subjects of education to conform to what the student thinks to be his present relation to society, so that, for instance, twentieth-century literature would be more relevant than medieval literature. This is, of course, an immature demand, and should be met with massive and uncompromising resistance. In literature, every major writer may be studied in his relation to his own time, or in his relation to the communicative power that makes him relevant to us. To concentrate solely on the latter distorts him by translating him entirely into our own modes of thought. When we study him in relation to his own time we are led into a different kind of culture, with unfamiliar assumptions, beliefs, and values. But contact with these is what expands our own view of human possibilities, and it is what is irrelevant, in the narrow sense, about what we study that is the liberalizing element in it. The same principle enabled the Classical training of humanism, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, to be a far more genuinely liberal education than it is often given credit for being. The study of an essentially alien civilization, even one which was at the historical roots of our own, was probably a much better preparation a century ago for civil service in India than cost accounting or personnel management. The other conception of relevance needs to be more seriously considered. It rests, in the first place, on a division between two types of academic discipline, often identified with the humanities and the sciences, though not quite coterminous with them. The word "scientific" implies among other things a desire to escape from controversy, to rest one's case on evidence, logical and mathematical demonstration, or open experiment, which are, as far as possible, beyond the reach of the kind of argument that attacks the validity of its postulates. The assumption is that while what is true today may be insufficiently true tomorrow, still anything that has ever been true—really true, not just believed—will always be continuous with whatever is going to be true. But there are other subjects which deal, not with the world around man (the sciences), but with the world that man is trying to create. These subjects can never escape from controversy or radical questioning, because existential values are built into them. I should call them the mythological subjects: they include large areas of history, political theory, religion, philosophy, psy-

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chology, anthropology, and sociology, and the key to them is literature, the laboratory of myths. It is these subjects with which student activism today is largely concerned. The sciences are to a degree impersonal, but the mythological subjects have to be more personally taught. There is always something of Mark Hopkins and the log about them,7 whereas the sciences can never dispense with complicated apparatus, and have nothing to do with any logs that do not roll. We have to start again with the decline of the sense of continuity and teleology, already mentioned. Knowledge is, of course, and always must be, continuous and structured. A generation ago, this feature of knowledge was taken for granted, and the continuity of the university was accepted, even by the most radical, as a part of the general continuity of human existence. Much student unrest today springs from what is actually a very ancient conception, though not expressed now, so far as I know, in its traditional terms: the superiority of wisdom to knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge of something: wisdom is a sense of the potential rather than the actual, a practical knowledge ready to meet whatever eventualities may occur, rather than a specific knowledge of this or that subject. Formerly, wisdom was associated with seniority, it being assumed that experience carried with it a residual continuity which gave older people a fuller perspective. Or, as Yeats says, carrying the same principle one logical step further, "Wisdom is the property of the dead."8 The loss of belief in any form of continuity has led to a feeling of the necessity of breaking through the habits of knowledge. What many students today want is some guidance in how to deal with their own sense of the discontinuity in experience. Knowledge for them is propaedeutic: one needs only the minimum of knowledge that will introduce one to the great existential issues. After the three R's, the three A's: anxiety, alienation, absurdity. Instead of entering into a structure of knowledge, one seeks the higher wisdom through "unstructured" means, chiefly informal discussion. In this quest the word "dialogue" has acquired a portentous verbal magic, like the ninety-nine names of God. This movement began with the impatience of students with instructors who regarded their teaching as a second-rate activity and an obstacle to research. As research is largely a matter of specialization, this meant that the instructor who was bored by his teaching was really attaching social status to his ignorance rather than to his knowledge. The feeling that the quest for the esoteric needs to be pulled down periodically into the ordinary area of communication was undoubtedly normal

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and healthy, and throws a very different light on what Sir Charles Snow, in his account of the two cultures, stigmatized as the "Luddite" attitude of the humanities.9 Humanists have to be Luddites to some extent, but what they are breaking are sometimes not machines but the cells of specialization that are walled in from the human community. But as the student protest has gone on, it has tended to take an antiintellectual form, to become, in its most extreme versions, a repudiation of the educational contract itself, a refusal to appeal to reason or experience or history or anything except emotional reflex. In its antiintellectual form it joins on, naturally, to the anti-intellectualism of the past. Fifty years ago we had Stephen Leacock and his recipe for starting a university with informal discussions among students, going out to "hire a few professors" when he got around to it.10 This in turn reflected the old Oxbridge mystique of the common-room, the myth of the Sitting Bull, the rationalization of the fact that for an ascendant class, as such, the point of a university education was in its social contacts rather than in its intellectual training. Its reappearance in our day is part of the general confusion among students about whether they want to be a privileged class or an intellectual proletariat. What seems not to have been noticed is the fact that there is really no such thing as "dialogue." Just as some children try to behave like the heroes and heroines in the stories they read, so "dialogue" is a literary convention taken to be a fact of life. The literary convention comes from Plato, and we notice how clearly aware Plato is of the fact that unstructured discussion is a collection of solipsistic monologues. The etymology of the word symposium points to the fact that the presence of liquor is necessary to make the members of such a group believe in their own wit. Nothing happens in Plato until one person, generally Socrates, assumes control of the argument and the contributions of the others are largely reduced to punctuation. This means, not that dialogue has turned into monologue or democracy into dictatorship, but that Socrates has discovered a dialectic, and has committed himself to following it wherever it may lead. From there on, Socrates and his listeners are united in a common vision of something which is supreme over both. Education can take place only where there is communication, which means the conveying of information from A to B, or a discussion united by the presence of a specific subject. Such discussion is educational in proportion as it is structured. This takes us back to the principle that everything connected with the university, with education, and with

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knowledge, must be structured and continuous. Until this is grasped, there can be no question of "learning to think for oneself." In education one cannot think at random. However imaginative we may be, and however hard we try to remove our censors and inhibitions, thinking is an acquired habit founded on practice, like playing the piano. How well we do it depends on how much of it we have done, and it is never autonomous. We do not start to think about a subject: we enter into a body of thought and try to add to it. It is only out of a long discipline in continuous and structured thinking, whether in the university, in a profession, or in the experience of life, that any genuine wisdom can emerge. The fox in Aesop was wiser than he knew: grapes prematurely snatched from the highest branches really are sour. What is it, then, that the more restless and impatient students of our time are trying to break through their university training to get? I suggested earlier that they are seeking guidance to the existential questions which have largely overwhelmed what confidence they ever had in the discipline of thought. In other words, their quest is a religious one, and they are looking for answers to religious questions that the university, qua university, cannot answer. I do not mean by this that such students should be sent to the churches: the number of people there who can deal with their questions is no greater than it is in the universities, and they start from postulates that relatively few students accept. The scholar can only deal with these questions as a person, not as a scholar, but no one who would turn away a serious student on the ground that these questions were out of his field deserves the title of teacher. The professor in our day is in the same position as the modern doctor who has to try to cure Weltschmerz as well as bellyaches. The doctor may long for the simple old days when hysteria and hypochondria were specific disturbances of the womb or the abdomen, but he is not living in those days, and must struggle as best he can with the intangible. Nothing seems less likely today than a return to the introspection of the Eisenhower decade, yet I cannot help feeling that such a return is just around the corner. Student unrest11 is not a genuinely social movement: it has no roots in a specific social injustice, as Negro unrest has. Like the beatniks, who have gone, the hippies, who are on the skids, and the LSD cults, which are breaking up, student unrest is not so much social as an aggregate of individual bewilderments, frustrations, disillusionments, and egotisms. It takes patience to grant students everything that can be granted in the way of representation on decision-making bodies which

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are restructuring the curriculum, and to look with a friendly eye on the founding of "free" universities, which, as just said, are really religious organizations. The reward of the patience is that students soon come to realize that these things are not what they want, and that, after every possible effort to climb over the walls has failed, there is no avenue of real escape except the open door in front of them.

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An Ideal University Community 3 March 1969

From the Varsity, March 1969,3, with the heading "When one tries to define an ideal university community, a lot of nineteenth-century myth gets into it." The Varsity is the student newspaper at the University of Toronto, and Frye is responding to a letter from features editor Michael Kesterton and news editor Sherry Brydson asking him for a contribution to a projected series tentatively titled "What Is a University?": To start the series, we would like a short piece from you exploring the questions: what definition of "university" would you like to see appear in a dictionary; and if this does not conform to what the U of T is, why are you here? Are you doing anything to change the university to make it conform more perfectly to your ideal?

The letter and Frye's response—accurately reproduced in the Varsity except for the introduction of newspaper-style paragraphs, here ignored—are in NFF, 1988, box 60, file 7.

Thank you for your letter. You ask me for a dictionary definition of the university as I should like to see it, in other words of an ideal university, and what I am personally doing to bring about that ideal. You begin by saying, quite rightly, that people have different assumptions in mind when they speak of the university. Your assumptions appear to be (a) that one must have in one's mind a definable ideal which could be realized in the future (b) that if one is honest and knows why he is here, one must be doing something definite to work for that ideal. Dictionaries don't define things in terms of ideals, and for a good reason. All definable ideals get located in the future, but they emerge

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from the past, a past which mixes up historical and childhood reminiscences. When one tries to define an ideal university community, a lot of nineteenth-century myth gets into it: a small self-contained community where all relationships are personal, and where everybody has a sense of belonging as well as being free to do his own thing. If I tried to work for or towards such an ideal, my tactics would become increasingly and more obviously regressive and reactionary. Everything that really happens goes in the opposite direction, and you follow that direction whenever you support the progressive side of any issue. Being liberal and progressive about contemporary issues is just trying to be sane and balanced about the contemporary world: it won't help to bring about an ideal, in the university or anywhere else, and one shouldn't kid oneself that it will. If you support more student participation, you don't get happier students; you get a new flock of tensions and difficulties. If you support a programme for getting more Negro students, you don't lessen racial conflict: you get Black Panthers demanding courses open only to Negro students. If you try to make curricula more flexible or seminars more personally integrated, you cannot avoid reviving some of the more repulsive features of progressive education and of what used to be called moral rearmament. The only really consistent form of working towards an ideal is the opting-out form, the secession to a new or free university. It's consistent because it's pure and uncompromising reaction. But that, after a brief period of shuddering virginity, plunges into the contemporary world, and all the difficulties of that world begin to seep into it. I joined this university because I discovered that there were some things I was intensely interested in doing, that I believed in doing, and that only a university would allow me to do. What I most regret about my career are my failures in what I can only call pastoral care: failures in making enough contact with students, mainly through not knowing enough about them. Such failures resulted, apart from my own deficiencies, from the growth of the modern university: too many students, not enough time, the difficulty in arranging priorities when scholarship and writing have to have so large a place. During the last twenty years the legitimate demands of my own students have been increased by a steady cataract of books, articles, epic poems, projects, essays, proposals to rewrite my own theories, pouring from everywhere over my desk. The result has been a steadily increasing sense of frazzled inadequacy. I'm not feeling sorry for me; I'm merely showing how even my efforts to

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improve my own scholarship and teaching carry me further and further away from any kind of ideal. The university is in a society that has many things wrong with it, and I am familiar with most aspects of the "I can't study until" syndrome. That is, with the assertions that the university is so completely a creature of a hypocritical oligarchy that its educational process is a brainwashing and regimenting one that kills all creative interest, and that its real values cannot be discerned until society itself has been transformed. One can only check these assertions against one's experience, and my experience tells me that they are nonsense. I like the tolerance of the university community: people can demonstrate and agitate and sit in, but there is no political commissar making sure that everybody does. I like its good will, and the fact that it is a less cutthroat community than any other I know in society. But these are incidental amenities. I get intuitions, in odd moments, of what life could be like if the intelligence and the imagination were totally and consistently functional in it. Of how essential it is to human dignity to recognize that making things and learning things are the most important activities of life. Of how powerful authority is in society when it is a purely internal authority, the authority of the rational argument, the repeatable experiment, the imaginative classic. I know that others, including many of my students and colleagues, have had similar intuitions, and my ideal university would be a place where everybody had them. But such an ideal is not a future ideal to be worked for or towards; it is a present ideal that I keep revolving around. When I joined the university I believed in the values it stood for: after thirty years of working in it I am convinced of them. And there are not many other things I am convinced of in this world.

60 In Memoriam:

Miss Jessie Macpherson 21 March 1969

From Victoria Reports, 19 (May 1969): 12, 20. Two typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 2, file yy. Frye's tribute was delivered at a memorial service in Victoria College Chapel.

For those who can remember Victoria through the whole of Jessie Macpherson's career here, it is almost bewildering to think back on the importance of her place in it. Thirty years ago Victoria was a small college, leaning heavily on its church and alumni connections, a somewhat sheltered community within what was still a provincial town. Today it is a large college in a highly contemporary university, taking a full and equal role in that university's teaching, scholarship, and research. It had to make this change while still maintaining its ethos, its identity, and the continuity of its traditions. There is no one who had a more decisive role to play in guiding that change at Victoria than Jessie Macpherson, and it is hard to even imagine what the college's development would have been without her. She was, of course, a scholar and a teacher who, as that, was an integral part of the college's intellectual life. But her immense influence and prestige as dean of women gave her a central and unique place in it. As dean there was the administrative burden of the residences, of staffing them with dons, of the difficult and often cruelly public task of easing the restrictions on residence life, which had to be made with the greatest caution to avoid the unwelcome assistance of possessive parents and newspaper reporters. There were the countless hours of counselling, advising, and assisting women students, hundreds of whom owe to her sympathy and shrewdness everything from temporary reassurance to the avoidance of major collapse.

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There were the endless social parades at which she patiently appeared, usually as hostess. The greatest demands were constantly being made both on her professional competence and on her integrity, and the courage and buoyancy with which she met those demands were heroic. So much could still be said of many people: Jessie's really distinctive role in this college's life was something else and something more. As soon as she came to Victoria she realized that the main obstacle to the development of a college of its type was the kind of middle-class antiintellectualism that students bring with them to university without realizing it, not that it is confined to students. It is an anti-intellectualism, strengthened by various social and religious attitudes, which is based on an assumption that a person who is sentimental and uncritical is somehow a fuller and wiser human being than a person with high and strict intellectual standards. Jessie fought this attitude with a tenacity that had to be watched to be believed: I have attended dozens of conferences and meetings with her in which one maudlin balloon after another was blown up only to be punctured by her dry and astringent wit. She understood also that cultural Philistinism, of the kind that avoids direct contact with serious art and music and literature, is always a part of this anti-intellectualism. The pictures she bought for the college, the picture exhibitions she arranged, the choirs she coached, the example of good reading she inspired, the work she did for music in Toronto, as a singer in the Mendelssohn Choir and elsewhere—all this is testimony to a cultural crusade that few people in my range of experience have equalled. If Victoria today can fairly claim to be not a complacently comfortable place but a civilized place, it owes more of that achievement to Jessie Macpherson than to any other one person, and the formative and liberating power of her influence was felt not only by students and dons, but by her professorial colleagues as well. The record of her contributions is a record of about three lives, any one of which would have been of estimable value to the college she served so devotedly. But to recognize contribution and service alone is not our purpose here. We all know that services of her quality are only products of a personality. It is a matter of great pride to us to have her achievements to boast of as a part of our own community life and traditions, but what she did was merely the effect of what she was. And what she was, to use terms that she herself might have slightly deprecated, was a person who was universally respected, admired, trusted, and loved.

61

The Day of Intellectual Battle: Reflections on Student Unrest 27 May 1969

Convocation address, University of Western Ontario. From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 2, file zz ii; preliminary typescript in NFF, 1988, box 3, file ca. Reprinted in OE, 83-7. On this occasion Frye received a Doctorate of Letters, and Douglas Weldon received a Doctorate of Laws. May I say first how greatly honoured I feel at being made a graduate of Western, and I know that in saying this I am speaking for Colonel Weldon as well. Western is a university where I have so many close personal ties, and the memory of so many pleasant visits, that the university itself has become an old and familiar friend. I am also honoured by the degree in particular, because in conferring it the university is recognizing that a life devoted to scholarship and teaching represents its own commitment to society. Neither Western nor myself would want to have anything to do with a degree that was simply an established symbol, a reward for being relatively senior and conservative. And may I congratulate, most sincerely, all of you who have reached your first degree today. For four years you have been secluded in the ivory tower of the world, reading papers, making love, attending meetings, expressing opinions, playing or watching games, enjoying all the delights of suburbia. Now you are going out into the great wide university, and whatever your profession, for the rest of your lives you will have to assume the responsibilities of university teachers. Other people, including your children, will get their notions of the university through you; and whatever you do or think, the university will be doing or thinking too, in the place where you are. You have been at Western: now you are going to be in the university, along with St. Thomas and Milton

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and Einstein, and most of you will feel grateful to Western as long as you live because it has given you your passkey to your own real society. Man is first of all a social being: what is true and real for him is what his society declares to be true and real. This is his primitive state, the state of social concern and anxiety, where he clings to his community for all mental support. As society matures, this anxiety relaxes a little, and man becomes aware of another kind of truth and reality, the kind that depends on logic, evidence, verification, and the recognizing of imaginative power in the arts. All education is built on this second kind of truth and reality, and the university is the keystone of education. And because the university is a community as well, it shares to the full man's sense of social concern, though it adds a new dimension to it. But the primitive social anxiety, the fear of the intellect, the desire to accept as true and real only what society accepts as true and real, keeps nagging at the student with some kind of trumped-up moral challenge. Isn't there some primary social obligation that we are dodging by being at college, like fighting a war or a revolution ending poverty, or simply earning a living? Shouldn't we be "out there," doing something, anything, so long as it is busy enough to drown out the intolerable inner quiet of the soul? I have been facing groups of students for thirty years, and have never ceased to be impressed by the amount of sheer courage it takes to keep on studying and ignore the infinite resources of anti-intellectual suggestion. I have watched students resisting the temptations that came through all the disguises of the Second World War, the cold war, the atom bomb, the McCarthyist witch-hunts, and have finally seen the enemy enter the university itself. It is students, today, who repeat the formulas of the ignorant and stupid of a generation ago, that the university is a parasitic growth on society, that academic freedom is old-hat liberal rhetoric, that because complete objectivity is impossible degrees of objectivity do not matter, that the university seeks for a detachment that ducks out of social issues, that scholarship and research are all very well but of course aren't real life. It is not an accident that the more extreme this attitude becomes, the more closely its social effects come to resemble those of the youth movements set up by Hitler and Stalin. For the totalitarian impulse is the primitive impulse, the longing to return to the narcotic peace of society's version of truth and reality, where we no longer have to cope with the conflicts of intellectual freedom and social concern. I have just come from the Berkeley campus, where I have been teaching during the spring quarter. In the previous quarter there had been a

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students' strike called over the issue of a "third world college," mainly for black and Mexican students. The university was willing to start such a college, though less willing to have it become simply a training school for professional revolutionaries, which was what many of its advocates wanted and still want. The university was deeply divided and troubled over this issue, and the majority of staff and students resented the open contempt that so many of the militants showed for the university and its values. The first six weeks of this term were very peaceful, and then, on Thursday, May 15, a state of war began. Like other wars, it was not started but simply blundered into. The issue was a vacant lot owned by the university that was being illegally made into a community park by the "street people," a phrase very difficult to translate into Canadian. The black revolutionary leader, Eldridge Cleaver, had advised his fellow militants to "establish a territorial imperative," in other words, attach a symbolic value to a piece of land. And so we had the "people's park," symbolizing the rights of people against those of property, on land which, we were solemnly told, was also covered with blood because it had been stolen from the Indians. So the "people's park" came to fill the empty space in the militant noddle that a genuine education would have filled with the garden of Eden and the murder of Abel. The quarrel was not a students' affair to begin with, but student sympathies were soon enlisted. The next few days were days of violence and terror, as the police got out of hand. I am not speaking of agitators assaulting or reviling the police and getting what they asked for: I am speaking of ordinary students, including some of mine, who were clubbed and beaten and gassed and prodded with bayonets while trying to get to lectures or enter their own residences. After such events it was impossible to think in terms of a riot being controlled by law and order. It was the police who were rioting, and wherever the social order was, it was not in this hysterical rabble, for all their bayonets and tear gas. And while argument and dispute went on, at every level, I got a strong impression of the whole university, staff and students alike, closing its ranks. The immense cohesive force of the university as a community was making itself felt through all the rumours and half-truths and accusations, through all the cliches of militants and the blustering of officials. Both Governor Reagan and the local SDS issued statements, and there is a curious similarity in their statements. They both say that the people's

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park was a phoney issue, and that the real cause was a conspiracy—the governor says of hard-core student agitators, the SDS says of right-wing interests operating "probably at the national level." Both are undoubtedly right, up to a point. There is a hard core of student agitators: one of them was grumbling in the student paper, a day or two before the lid blew off, that "not a goddam thing was happening at Berkeley," and that something would have to start soon because Chairman Mao himself had said, in one of his great thoughts, that revolution is no child's play. On the other side, Governor Reagan is clearly staking a very ambitious career on the support of voters who want to have these noisy young pups put in their place once and for all. Both are very pleased with the result: the governor is visibly admiring his own image as a firm and sane administrator, and the SDS are delighted that the police have "overreacted" so predictably and helped to "radicalize the moderates." But the more one thinks about these two attitudes, the clearer it becomes that the militant left and the militant right are not going in opposite directions, even when they fight each other, but in the same direction. For both the governor and the SDS, the university is ultimately an obstacle, which will have to be destroyed or transformed into something unrecognizable if their ambitions are to be fulfilled. And this is precisely what I do not think is going to happen. We notice that the progression of sit-ins and demonstrations and confrontations and the rest of it never gets anywhere: one university goes through such a seizure, then collapses in exhaustion, and then another university goes through it. It never gets anywhere because the tactics of trying to revolutionize society by harassing the university are not serious tactics. The university is relatively easy to harass, but student unrest, as it is called, has had no real effect on the social and political life of the country, for all its headlines. I think students are getting a little weary of vague and vaporous revolutionary cliches, and of having their idealism exploited by leaders who do not share it. I think we may be turning a corner in student unrest, that a stage of serious and effective social action is about to begin and that the children's crusade is on the way out. I keep thinking of the analogy of war. Wars ought not to start and accomplish nothing when they stop. Their professed aims are lies and the sacrifices they demand are useless. And yet, out of the midst of a war, there comes, occasionally, a sense of interdependence, of the vast increase in the intensity of awareness when we realize how our own life is bound up with other lives. It is ordinary citizens, whether in the army or

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on the home front, who are most likely to have such a feeling: career soldiers and professional patriots know little of it. We think that if we could only hold on to such a feeling after the war there is nothing that society could not do. But, of course, we are so relieved to have the war over with that we soon go back to our normal attitudes. During the past week I caught a glimpse of the profound concern that teachers feel for their students and that students feel for their teachers and their studies, as they struggled to read and think and write and discuss issues with police helicopters buzzing overhead and tear gas seeping through the windows. I realized, in direct experience, something that I had always known: that the university is the centre of all genuine social order, and that all serious and effective social action has to begin by strengthening and unifying the university community. The university is changing and will change more, but change is simply adaptation to new social conditions: it is not in itself a good thing or a bad thing. A convocation is not a dismissal: it is not an occasion for saying that you have been welcome at your university but that now you may depart in peace. A convocation is rather a calling together, a summoning of a tocsin to those who care about the university, to tell them that society must renew itself if it is to survive, that the university is at the centre of society, that those of us who are professionally concerned with the university are doing what we can, but that for what we have to do every one of you must help.

62 Convocation Address, York University 30 May 1969

Printed separately as Convocation Address by Dr. H. Northrop Frye (Downsview: York University, 1969). Reprinted as "The Community of Freedom" in RW, 111-17. Two typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 3, file cb. York University received its charter in 1959 and opened in 1960 under the presidency of Murray Ross, who retired in 1970. The building referred to in the opening paragraph, York's first home, was the former Wymilwood, a student centre and women's residence on the west side of Queen's Park belonging to Victoria University, where Frye's wife Helen had served as a don in 1936-37 while Frye was a student at Oxford. I know that I speak for my colleagues as well as for myself when I say what an honour it is to have this association with York University. I have seen York growing from a tiny seedling on the Toronto campus into a great university, in one of the most dramatic and historically significant developments in Canadian education. It opened for business, as I remember, in the building at 84 Queen's Park, which when I was a student was a Victoria women's residence. Like other women's residences, it had its dark corners and its passion pits, along with a few whispered rumours about couples who had actually made it. But I never thought it would give birth to an entire university. I remember hearing your president tell of starting off his first Christmas there with a mulled claret party for the students, and it was obvious that York's infancy was destined to be as spectacularly precocious as that of Gargantua in Rabelais, who was also born calling for drink. However, there is always something a little patronizing about the old family friend who knew you as a baby, and has various disconcerting stories about your infantile behaviour—

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one of the rewards of seniority is that the purveyors of such anecdotes have mostly died off. So I shall not labour my reminiscences, but merely express my congratulations to you, Mr. President, as you approach the end of your great task. And may I offer my congratulations also to those of you who have reached your first degree today. Some of you may be suffering from a feeling of anti-climax. It used to be that the alumnus was more important than the undergraduate: he was somebody who could contribute funds, be elected to the Senate, send his children to the same college, or even become a force in university policy. But in recent years there has been no drive for alumni power. I regret this, though not because I am opposed to students participating in the running of the university. On the contrary, I think students are a stabilizing and conservative force in university government, who help to balance the recklessness of the junior faculty and the cynical laissez-faire of the senior professors. But they are around for such a short time, shorter even than the teaching staff who are looking for better jobs elsewhere, or the administrators who are looking for any jobs elsewhere. There are now only two groups of people who have any really long-term and continuous relationship to the university: the alumni and the graduate students in the humanities working on their Ph.D/s. It was for this reason that I recently suggested, elsewhere, that alumni with a lifelong interest in the university should have some say in its operation, perhaps more than the undergraduates.1 This didn't go down too well with my audience, who were mostly undergraduates, and not yet alumni. But I still think there is something in it. Because of all the usual shortages—of space, of money, of staff—the modern university has badly fallen down on one of its most important jobs. This is the job of retraining, refreshing, and re-educating older people: married women with grown-up families and some new leisure, business men with cultural interests, teachers whose knowledge has gone out of date and needs to be updated, perhaps even a few social types who simply need more dates. I am not speaking of extension or evening classes, but of full re-entry into the university. Because the university has had to neglect this job, students in the eighteen to twenty-eight age group have assumed, very naturally, that the university belongs to them. But it doesn't: it belongs to the whole community. We get two kinds of education in life. The primary kind comes from our society, where what is true and real is what society says is true and real. This is an education in concern, in what society accepts. We don't

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really study it: we pick it up from personal contact with parents and teachers and friends, and we hold it mainly by faith. A mature society develops another kind of education, a truth and reality based on the sense of an external world, and depending on logic and evidence and measurement and imagination. This is education properly speaking, and is what the university gives. But it is a secondary kind. If there's any weakening of the sense of social coherence we find it very hard to go on studying: the sense of being in a society that one can believe in has to be patched up first. I suppose this is what is the real trouble today. On this continent, at least, we've taken in, through our pores, a social concern for something called democracy, which is an inclusive ideal. That is, in the society we really believe in there ought not to be any poverty or snobbery or racism, or if there is we ought to be fighting it as hard as we can. But, we feel, this democratic ideal got kidnapped by another kind of society that was really an oligarchy, and this was a society of exploitation and racism and ascendant classes, based on a cannonade of advertising and other forms of systematic lying, and expanding into imperialistic crusades like the Vietnam war. As a result many students in the United States and Canada feel deeply alienated from their own society, to the extent of what is sometimes called an identity crisis. I have just come from the Berkeley campus, where during the past week something like a civil war has been going on. The professed issues are not real issues, but the state of conflict is real, and the profound disturbance that produced the conflict even more so. I often think of the little poem of Robert Frost that begins Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. [Fire and Ice]

Some people look forward to a great revolutionary fire, which of course is possible, but I myself am much more afraid of the ice-death, the slow congealing into apathy, self-contempt, and disillusionment that marks a dying culture. There is no such thing as pure knowledge: whatever we learn we fit into our social context, and try to reconcile with what our society believes in, and with what we believe as a part of that society. We hardly notice how much we are doing this until the sense of social coherence is weakened, and we no longer know what to do with our knowledge. We start looking around for new conceptions of learning, and of course dig

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up all the old fallacies on the way. A hundred years ago, Victorian education for the well-to-do was divided into two levels, a first-class programme for the boys and a second-class one for the girls. The women's education was dominated by two conceptions. One was relevance: it was thought almost morally wrong for a girl to learn anything she was not going to use as a wife and mother. The other was the personal appropriation of knowledge: everything she learned was an accomplishment to be displayed in the marriage market. This was not just a device to keep women in a depressed class, though it was partly that, but to make them symbols of social concern. Women were supposed to set the moral standards and represent the proprieties and generally exhibit what society accepted as true and real. When relevance and doing one's own thing turn up in education today, they are still second-class ideals, but they become popular because so many students are too bothered by the lack of coherence in their society to concentrate on first-class ones. We learn from old stories that for every hero who killed a dragon there were a great many who tried to kill one and got eaten by it instead. There is no future in any kind of social revolt that merely feeds what it is revolting against. Many forms of social action, on the campus and off it, are either purely symbolic or are forms of private enterprise that show a touching belief in advertising and publicity stunts. This is not a social attitude likely to transform bourgeois or capitalist ideals. The same belief in the magic of public relations is shared even by the psychotics who murder public figures in order to get publicity for whatever they think of as a cause. I have looked at some examples of the "underground press," and have been interested to see how it operates as a kind of experimental farm for Madison Avenue. It talks up the drug cults and the clothing business learns how to sell psychedelic dresses; it features pornography and advertising learns from it where to place its emphasis. And I have been rather shocked to see how cynically student unrest has been fostered and encouraged by the news media: revolution is commercially profitable if you know how to stay out of it. If you don't, you're much more likely to be an exploited worker than a free spirit. At Berkeley, one sees clearly how the supporters of Governor Reagan and the supporters of SDS are the same kind of people. The radical talks about the thoughts of Chairman Mao, not because he is really so impressed by those thoughts but because he cannot endure the notion of thought apart from dictatorial power. The John Bircher uses slightly different formulas to mean the same thing.2 In the past week I have seen, and heard about, the most

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incredible acts of police brutality and stupidity against the students. And yet even this is not one society repressing another, but a single society that cannot escape from its own bungling. Whatever we most condemn in our society is still a part of ourselves, and we cannot disclaim responsibility for it. It seems to me that the only way out of this identity crisis, for American and Canadian students alike, is through the recovery of our own revolutionary and inclusive democratic tradition. It is quixotic to idealize whatever Marxist bureaucracies look as though they were still in a state of innocence: they will all soon become what the Soviet Union is now. It is futile to get into the donkey's carrot, or "I can't study until," syndrome, looking forward to some apocalyptic social change in the future that will set everything right. There are no future ideals to be attained: there are only present ones to be realized. What I am trying to say to you, as graduates of York, is this. The university cannot restore a weakened sense of social coherence. It is not a church or a political party: it deals in knowledge, not in faith, and even its relation to social action is indirect. The university is the other pole of society: it represents the freedom which is the only genuine product of social concern. The tactics of trying to revolutionize society by harassing and bedevilling the university are the most foolish and frivolous tactics that could possibly be devised. They accomplish nothing of any real social or political significance, and they reflect nothing except the confusion of people who want to be radical but want also to stay attached to a privileged and middle-class group. On the other hand, strengthening the university can do a great deal indirectly in restoring our social vision, because the university shows us, more clearly than any other aspect of society, why it is important to have a social vision. You have shown, by staying here until graduation, a loyalty to the university and its values, as well as a good deal of courage. Your loyalty to the university is just about the most genuine mental possession you have, and everything effective you can do for your society has to be built on it. You may think it forced and artificial, or perhaps pretentious, for me to talk to you in this way when I hardly know any of you personally. But, you see, I belong, or am trying to belong, to the one real university, the community of freedom where all the genuinely human acts of civilization take place. That is the community which you have just joined, or expressed a willingness to join, this morning. So there is a bond between us now that goes deeper than friendship.

63

Congratulatory Statement to Dartmouth 15 June 1969

In Greetings to Dartmouth: Bicentennial Convocation and Commencement, June 15,1969 (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College, 1969), 19-20. This booklet includes congratulatory statements to Dartmouth College (a liberal arts college in Hanover, New Hampshire) from a number of well-known people on the occasion of'Dartmouth's bicentenary. I should like to offer my sincerest congratulations and best wishes to Dartmouth College on the occasion of its bicentennial celebration. Merely to have survived intact for two centuries, in a world like this, would be an impressive feat in itself. But to come out at the end of the second century with facilities and a reputation among the highest in the country is an achievement of a quite different dimension. There are two things for which I am particularly grateful to Dartmouth College. One, symbolized by its refusal to embark on extensive graduate work when it could easily do so, is its stress on the primary and central place that undergraduate teaching holds in our society, and in safeguarding the liberal ideals of that society. The other is its close and sensitive awareness of the importance of Canada to the United States, as a community in its own right which wishes to be a friend of its neighbour and not a mere satellite of it. Dartmouth has consistently shown the most intelligent and progressive interest in both these areas, and their combination gives it not only a special but a unique role to play in the academic world.

64

Hart House Rededicated 11 November 1969

From the University of Toronto Graduate, 3 (April 1970): 11-14. Two typescripts, one with holograph corrections, are in NFF, 1988, box 3, file cd. Frye was speaking on Remembrance Day at a service in the Great Hall to rededicate Hart House, the campus social and athletic centre for men, during a week of festivities to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The centre had been formally presented to the university by the Massey family on 11 November 1919. Women were not admitted to Hart House as full members until 1972. My own memories of Hart House cover forty of its fifty years. I first entered it with the freshman class of Victoria in 1929, and recognized it at once as a place where I ought to be. For Hart House represented the university as a society; it dramatized the kind of life that the university encourages one to live: a life in which imagination and intelligence have a central and continuous function. There was never any question about student representation at Hart House: the committees from the beginning had consisted almost entirely of students. There was never any question of accepting any of the silly cliches that are found in the university as everywhere: cliches about engineers being Philistines bored with art and music and so forth. It was the place where our education came into a social focus, where we could see the relation of learning and thinking to living. Most historians would probably single out Hart House's first decade as its most spectacular, for reasons that had less to do with Hart House than with the history of the country. In the twenties the pictures bought by the Art Committee belonged to an exhilarating new art movement; in the twenties the theatre was a centre of intense local dramatic activity,

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with plays being written as well as produced and acted by university students and faculty; after the twenties debating, at Toronto as at every other university on the continent, began to decline as the central nonathletic student activity, when something managerial and executive began to take over student life. Hart House had, of course, been opened at a time when women students were still called "co-eds," not quite firstclass university citizens, but in those days of cheap dates and late marriages the status of women students was hardly a major social problem, even to them. In the next forty years, Hart House assumed the much more difficult role of absorption into the routine of university life, meeting changed social conditions and different foci of interests. Ideally, such a building as Hart House ought to be redesigned every ten years. I understand that someone (probably a member of the Art Committee) remarked to one of the architects that it was unfortunate in some ways that Hart House was a hundred per cent functional: that there was no room just for storing junk, for waste space, for no designated purpose. The architect said: "My God, man, you can't think of everything." The words should be over the door of every building of long endurance and versatile use. Hart House was built during the First World War, a fact reflected in the soldiers' memorial at the tower and in the coats of arms in the Great Hall, which are those of the universities in the Allied countries before the entry of the United States. The feeling that the country's energies ought to be concentrated on the war effort was one of an intensity that we can hardly grasp today: there was an obscure sense that this war was historically Canada's entrance on the world stage, and that its whole future depended on the impression its role in the war would make. Hence there was strong opposition to the building of Hart House, and the magnificent passage from Milton's Areopagitica that goes around the Great Hall was put there mainly as an answer to it.1 After that came the Depression, the Second World War, the cold war of Communism and McCarthyism, and the student unrest of the sixties. It seems clear that there is always a crisis, always something of temporary priority that we ought to be attending to instead. But this means that the real temporary hurdle to be got over first, before we have any right to enjoy life, is life itself. The rationalizing of distraction is really an aspect of the death-wish in the human mind, its constant impulse to throw life away under the chariot of some cause that gets a lot of headlines. In my forty years of working on this campus, I have never ceased to be impressed by the amount of

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courage it takes to be a student, the sheer guts required to turn one's back on the current parade, as most of our students manage to do. Only once in my time have students been released from this kind of harassment, and that was when those who had spent an obligatory amount of time in the Second War, and had been lucky enough to survive, came back free to devote themselves to the life that the university stands for. But for the most part students have always had some nightmare of distraction on their chests. All I can suggest is that while nothing is more insistent, demanding, and obviously important than this year's hysterias, nothing is more pathetically ludicrous than the hysterias of last year. Since 1919, a memorial service at the tower, along with an editorial in the Varsity attacking its hypocrisy and crypto-militarism, has been an annual event of campus life. Certainly I could not myself participate in such a service if I thought that its purpose was to strengthen our wills to fight another war, instead of to fight against the coming of another war. That being understood, I think there is a place for the memorial service, apart from the personal reason that many students of mine have their names inscribed on the tower. It reminds us of something inescapable in the human situation. Man is a creature of communities, and communities enrich themselves by what they include: the university enriches itself by breaking down its middle-class fences and reaching out to less privileged social areas; the city enriches itself by the variety of ethnical groups it has taken in. But while communities enrich themselves by what they include, they define themselves by what they exclude. The more intensely a community feels its identity as a community, the more intensely it feels its difference from what is across its boundary. In a strong sense of community there is thus always an element that may become hostile and aggressive. It is significant that our memorial service commemorates two wars, both fought against the same country. In all wars, including all revolutions, the enemy becomes an imaginary abstraction of evil. Some German who never heard of us becomes a "Hun"; some demonstrator who is really protesting against his mother becomes a "Communist"; some policeman with a wife and family to support becomes a "fascist pig." We know that we are lying when we do this kind of thing, but we say it is tactically necessary and go on doing it. But because it is lying, it cannot create or accomplish anything, and so all wars, including all revolutions, take us back to the square one of frustrated aggression in which they began. Cuba is Communist today, South Africa has apartheid today,

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Africa and Asia seethe with unrest today, because the Spanish-American war, the Boer war, and all the imperialistic wars fought two generations ago have to be fought over again. This state of things will continue without change, until we understand that our only real enemies are the legions of demons inside us. And the university, whatever its relation to society may be or however out of date its curriculum or residence rules, still does provide us with some of the weapons we must have for winning the only war, and accomplishing the only revolution, that really exist. I refer to the memorial service because it illustrates the meaning of anniversaries, of moments of recall and of anticipation. We cannot think of fifty years of Hart House apart from its context in the last fifty years of history. In retrospect the horror and misery of the past takes on the unreality of everything evil, even as part of our own experience; it is certain moments of heightened consciousness that stand out as real. Perhaps the great religions are right, after all, when they tell us that death is not the opposite of life, but only the opposite of birth: that there may be something unreal about both death and birth, but that life itself is real, however much of it is passed in sleep and dream. There is a continuous dream in life, which is the slave's life that we live when we are driven by the necessities of money or security or the tactics of conflict. The awareness of the reality of life comes in detached moments of release from this, or in later memories of them. We live by virtue of such moments, and to me, and to thousands of others, many of them are associated with this house. Any place where anything has really happened to us becomes part of our home, and for living people, as is said to be true of ghosts, it is natural to keep haunting the place where something that they cannot forget has occurred. It is in this way that traditions are established, and that institutions acquire social dignity. But to think only of what has been done, and indulge in rhetoric about "these hallowed halls," would be not only glib nostalgia but would be trying to imprison the future in the framework of the past. Even to recall its great wardens and benefactors, at this point, would have something of this. What is still to come must come as discovery, as unprecedented, as something never thought of before. Once done, it will become continuous with the past, but its continuity will look after itself: it must not be imposed from the start. A university becomes great only through its power of renewing its youth, both literally and figuratively. To dedicate is a commitment, but to rededicate is

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something much more than merely renewing a commitment. It is to recognize the hope which belongs only to the future, and for its sake to be ready for whatever may come in the way of revolutionary change. That man is immortal we suspect; that he is enduring we know; but that he can look forward is his most deeply human quality, and to look forward with acceptance and gladness to experiences that can come only to others is perhaps something even more.

65 On Horace 19/0

Reply to a questionnaire on Horace, from Arion, 9, nos. 2 and 3 (Summer and Autumn 1970): 132. Typescript is in NFF, 1988, box 7, file aio. The editors of Arion had sent to a number of literary figures a list of seven questions regarding their attitude to Horace, suggesting that "you may answer any, or all, of the questions, or simply describe in your own terms whatever encounters you have had with Horace." Except in the last paragraph, Frye chose the latter approach.

I am glad you are doing something about Horace, who in spite of the interest in him seems a somewhat neglected poet. When I was seventeen I was compelled to slog my way through the Odes and ever since I have realized that education has a great deal to do with compulsion and doing things that at the time one thinks one doesn't want to do. Horace has always seemed to me to represent the authority of the humanist tradition, the incorporating of all its values into a life style. His chief virtue is the virtue of urbanity, which means primarily the virtue of being able to live in a civilization. This means he has limitations as a poet both on the personal side as compared with Catullus or Propertius, and on the philosophical side as compared with Virgil and Ovid. But the point is that his limitations are his strength. Of your questions, the answer to the sixth one ["We have Marvell, and Pope—why read Horace?"! is that Marvell and Pope not only imitated Horace but transmitted him, so that any course which teaches them and ignores Horace operates like a dentist who extracts a tooth and leaves the root sticking in the jaw.

66 A Revolution Betrayed: Freedom and Necessity in Education 17 October 1970

Convocation address, University of Windsor, on the occasion ofFrye's receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. From a typescript in NFF, 1988, box 3, file eg; also in NFF, 1988, box 47, file i. Reprinted in OE, 88-92. I am deeply grateful for the honour that the Senate of this university has done me, and I am proud and delighted to become one of your honorary graduates. It is also a genuine privilege to address this convocation. At the same time the role of a convocation speaker in these days is hard to define. A university convocation is a ritual, and a ritual is among other things an expression of concern, concern for the community, for one's soul, or for certain emphases and values in society. The church, politics, business, all have rituals that we are well accustomed to, so accustomed that we hardly give much thought to their meaning, or even notice their presence. But radical concern also has its rituals, and the rituals of demonstration, protest, terrorism, confrontation, sit-in, love-in, and folk festival are still new. In another two or three years they will become as conventionalized as an Empire Club lunch, but right now they attract more attention. With the newspapers full of rituals of burning brassieres and bombing libraries, a convocation seems as genteel and uninvolved as an actress with her clothes on. But a university is not, like a church, a political party, or a pressure group, primarily a concerned organization. The people in the university are citizens: they have the same concerns and commitments as anyone else. But the university itself stands for something different: it is not trying directly to create a certain kind of society. It is not conservative, not radical, not reactionary, nor is it a faqade for any of those attitudes. Its

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goal is liberal, in the sense that we speak of a liberal education, but that is not a liberalism in any concerned or political sense, with however small an 1. Even if everybody connected with a university voted unanimously to denounce the FLQ1 or the Vietnam war or racial segregation, that would still not commit the university as such. Still, as citizens, we are all concerned: any notion of being neutral, of standing above the conflict, of seeing all sides and joining none, is only an illusion, and a very dangerous one. So the university cannot be standing for this kind of Olympian detachment either, at least not as an ideal for the people in it. What it does stand for is the challenge of full consciousness. Concern is close to anxiety, and anxiety is close to hysteria. In a world as hysterical as ours, we are all, like bad swimmers, continually getting submerged, gasping and spluttering out the cliches of a partisanship that we do not ourselves wholly understand. The university tries to show us that the intellect and the imagination provide the air which it is more natural for us to breathe. For example, there is such a thing as reason, and philosophy and the sciences show us how it operates. In ordinary life we do not reason, we rationalize. There is nothing that cannot be rationalized: terrorists can rationalize blowing up a plane as political idealism; homicidal maniacs can rationalize murder as an indictment of an evil society; indecisive leaders can rationalize doing nothing as prudence or wisdom. The university does not claim that anybody ever has, ever could, or ever ought to order his life entirely by reason. It merely says that there is a reason beyond rationalization, that if we pursue it we develop philosophy and the sciences, and that if we develop philosophy and the sciences we get something more useful than the rationalizings of thugs and ditherers. Again, there is such a thing as imagination, which operates in literature and the arts. The university does not say that we should learn how to live from poetry or fiction, or how to see from painting. It merely says that there is in the arts an imagination better than the melodrama and poster-painting of our ordinary social imaginations, of our constant efforts to create a knight in shining armour out of Tweedledum and a foul belching dragon out of Tweedledee. This is where the freedom that the university offers comes in, the freedom that the phrase liberal education refers to. Most of us never outgrow the childish notion of freedom as freedom of will, as something opposed to the external constraints that other people, starting with our parents, put on us. Freedom, we think, must still be for us what it was at the age of four, freedom to do as we like, without realizing that what we

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like to do may be as compulsive as anything that the most obsessed parent could think up to prevent it. There is a strong popular sentiment in favour of this kind of freedom: everybody is for it, like motherhood. We have a revolution when one organized group is able to exploit this sentiment as a means toward gaining power for itself. All dedicated revolutionaries are traitors, not because they are trying to upset an established authority, but because they can only succeed by promising a freedom that they have no intention of granting, and could not grant if they wanted to. Every revolution, in short, is a revolution betrayed. The unrest in the United States today is partly the result of a growing feeling that this was true even of the American Revolution, which looked for so long as though it were an exception to the rule. What was exploited in the American Revolution, and again in the Civil War, was a desire for democratic freedom, but what came to power was an oligarchy, and for many Americans the desire for freedom is as frustrated as ever. Meanwhile the university keeps talking about a different kind of freedom. We notice that as soon as we enter the world of intellect and imagination, the whole notion of an opposition between freedom and authority disappears. One is free to reason only when one follows the inner laws of reason; if an artist is painting a picture, what he wants to do and what he must do are the same thing. The authority of the logical argument, the repeatable experiment, the compelling imagination, is the final authority in society, and it is an authority that demands no submission, no subordinating, no lessening of dignity. As this authority is the same thing as freedom, the university is also the only place in society where freedom is defined. We may think of freedom, first of all, as something to be gained or increased by attacking the symbols of external compulsion in society. A good many of these, in every society, deserve to be attacked. But if we destroyed the external compulsions, we should still have the internal compulsions that made us attack them, and they would instantly produce a whole new set of external ones. The university helps us to get out of this rat race of trying to resist one compulsion by obeying another, and never getting any closer to freedom. We cannot struggle to achieve a better society without a vision of what such a society might be, and it is only the arts and sciences, the forms that the human intellect and imagination have achieved, that can provide such a vision. But freedom exists in the vision itself, not in the means of reaching it, because the goal to be attained in the future is, in the intellect and imagination, already there. In this neo-fascist age there

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are many people who hate the very thought of freedom, and it is a sound if vicious instinct in them to attack the university. Naturally they encourage us to think of academic freedom, which is really the freedom to live in the world of the intelligence, as an outmoded concept. But apart from the purely negative freedom of being out of jail, human society is not capable of any freedom except academic freedom and what is derived from it. Nothing short of that is really human life at all. It is usual for a convocation speaker to congratulate the people in front of him on having got their degrees. I am doing this now, but I wanted to explain first why my congratulations are sincere and not merely perfunctory: why, in short, I consider it a genuine achievement for you to have your degrees. When we hear so much nonsense about how a degree is a mere piece of paper, a mere this or a mere that, it is perhaps as well to say that you have a degree not only because you have done the work required of you, but because you have had the moral courage to concentrate on it. The Indian teachers of yoga say that when a novice sits down to meditate, all the demons for miles around come to distract him, because they are terrified of the power of a concentrated intelligence. I often think of Bunyan's Christian, plodding through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and having to listen to all the silly gabble of the voices in that valley, which, says Bunyan, "he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind."2 You may have had your demons too, some telling you to go in for relevance, which means trying to educate yourselves by echo, by listening to the sound of your own prejudices; some telling you that there are no goals in society worthy of your efforts; some telling you to become radicalized, or to transcend your ego-consciousness, or whatever other synonym of goofing off is currently fashionable. There is always something more exciting and picturesque to do than to cultivate the intellect and imagination. But whatever issues demand commitment without critical intelligence today will be stone dead tomorrow, and it is always disconcerting to discover that one has been embracing a corpse. I began by saying that a convocation was a ritual, but it is a ritual of an unusual kind. Most rituals are devoted to adherence, to solidarity, to professions of faith, to consolidating a group or community. We have very few rituals of separation, and the ones that do exist, like political purges, are mostly very sinister ones. You will, of course, be approached by alumni organizations, and I hope you will respond to them: it seems to me a natural and healthy instinct for you to think of the university from which you were graduated as your lifelong intellectual home. But

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still a convocation is a separation, as each one of you leaves the University of Windsor to become the University of Windsor in yourself. It is a kind of benediction indicating that the essential ritual act has already taken place. As at a church service, you have been shown something that is both mysterious and substantial, infinitely beyond us and yet inside us, something we can never reach and yet something that is essentially what we are. It is quite possible to go through university without realizing this, but, even if you have, that does not mean that you have for ever lost the university's vision. It makes a good deal of difference, to you, whether you respond to that vision, but it makes much less difference when or how you do. It is still here; it won't and can't go away: it is independent of time and place, but it is only because it is here that time and place have meaning.

67 The Definitiaon of a University 4 November 1970

From DG, 139-55. Originally published in Alternatives in Education, ed. Bruce Rusk (Toronto: General Publishing, 1971), 71-90, with some small editorial changes, which Frye objected to (see NFF, 1988, box 60, file 6). The DG version, however, introduced a number of typographical errors, here corrected. Partial reprint in Orbit, 2 (June 1971): 14. A typescript with holograph corrections is in NFF, 1988, box 3, file ch, and a retyped version is in file ci and in NFF, 1988, box 47, file i. This was a lecture in a series celebrating both the fifth anniversary of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and the opening of the Institute's new building at 252 Bloor St. West, Toronto. The purpose of the lectures was to explore alternative approaches to education within and outside the educational system.

In a recent interview connected with this essay I was asked why I wanted to present a definition of the university to an audience that might not be profoundly interested in the subject. I suggested that there were two reasons. First, the superstitions and the pseudo-concepts of educational methodology have not made much impact on the university, at least so far, and consequently the university can still serve as a model of educational aims. The second and more important reason, I said, is that, being a voluntary enterprise, at least technically, the university does not have the penal quality which universal compulsory education necessarily has attached to it. The word "penal" slipped out without my intending it, and I wondered afterwards why I had used a word which might possibly be offensive. As I began to think about this, certain visions of my own childhood days arose in my mind. I saw children lined up and marched into a

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grimy brick building at nine in the morning, while a truant officer prowled the streets outside. The boys and the girls were sent in through sexually separated entrances: it was regarded as a matter of the highest importance that a boy should not go through a door marked "girls" even if no act of excretion was involved. They then filed into their classrooms, found their desks, and sat down with their hands folded in front of them in what was referred to as "sitting position." At that point a rabble of screaming and strapping spinsters was turned loose on them, and the educational process began. The deterrent to idleness, in this set-up, was being kept in, or having one's sentence lengthened. As the students grew older, the atmosphere of the classroom came to resemble that of an armed truce. There was a high correlation between a boy's ability to disturb a classroom and his popularity with his classmates, as he himself well knew. The boys, for the most part, resisted the educational process openly, their resistance being either sullen or boisterous, depending on temperament. The girls, on the other hand, were far more docile; they tended to be obedient and to do as they were told. It was many years before I realized that docility was by far the more effective form of resistance. I remember a good deal of unconscious sadism on both sides—teachers as well as students. But there was not, of course, the built-in brutality that goes with teaching younger members of a ruling class, and that belongs to expensive and exclusive public schools. I remember that I had a good deal of sympathy and some liking for my teachers, but I think only one of them was an influence on me. That was my music teacher, with whom I had a purely voluntary and extracurricular connection. He had no truant officer behind him, but he did have the only authority that matters—the authority that springs from a genuine knowledge and love of his subject. The last time I went to see him, he was still dwelling on what had been obviously one of the happiest evenings of his life, an evening during the war when two desperately lonely British airmen, stationed at a camp nearby, had phoned and said, "We hear you're a musician. Is it all right if we come up just to talk about music?" Now you will say that this picture is a very different one from what you remember, to say nothing of what those of you who are teachers would want to produce in your own classrooms. There has been a good deal of change. There should have been in forty years. I will come to the reasons for some of the change later. But there has been a good deal of continuity too.

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I find that I think very little about my school days, but that I think much more about the kind of society which lay behind the school and the kind of assumptions it had built into it, conscious and unconscious. For example: one of the things that bored me to death with public schools was the fact that our textbooks were so grotesquely out of date. In the twenties of this century, our geography book talked of Germany's "newly acquired province of Alsace-Lorraine,"1 and the maps were of the same vintage. The British history was written by someone who was not quite certain of the outcome of the Boer War. The physiology book explained with diagrams how women distorted their viscera by tight lacing, and the physics book talked glibly about ether. This was, I recognize, a purely local flowering of incompetence, and it would not have had its direct counterpart elsewhere. Nevertheless, it comes close to the two permanent defects in education. One is the pathetic illusion that new methods of teaching can make up for an out-of-date conception of the subject, or for a steadily increasing ignorance of the subject. Publishers understand this illusion very well, and they continually push new gimmicks because they realize that a genuinely new conception of a subject would cause immediate panic. This is why every week I get brochures for textbooks on literary criticism based on conceptions of literary theory that would have been antiquated to Samuel Johnson and primeval to Coleridge. The other assumption which allowed such textbooks to exist was, I think, even more important. This was a feeling that children ought to be kept off the streets not only physically but mentally. This assumption is related to that curious conception of the limbo of "adolescence"—the conception that there ought to be a period of life, between puberty and voting age, in which young people should be, to some extent, segregated from what is going on in the world. This conception of the adolescent can hardly have any basis in biology: it is a deliberate creation of industrial society, and one wonders why such a creation was made. One frequent explanation, the one advanced by Robert Hutchins, is that the reason is economic. The attempt is to slow down productivity, or, as Hutchins says, to turn American education into a gigantic playpen in order to keep young people off the labour market.21 think this is quite possibly a part of the explanation, but by no means the whole of it. I want to return to this question: meanwhile, I should like to make it clear that when I use the word "adolescent," I do not refer primarily to young people, but to a social neurosis which has been projected on young people.

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Some of the things that I learned at school were not what I was intended to learn. There was a barrage of propaganda directed against smoking and drinking, which, so far as I could gather, had no effect whatever on the mores of the community, a large proportion of which drank its way all through Prohibition with the greatest enthusiasm. I dare say that similar propaganda against drugs goes on in the schools now, even in communities where half the population is employed in pushing drugs at the other half. What I learned was that propaganda is entirely useless unless it can suggest some kind of participatory role for those at whom it is addressed. It is not because the propaganda was negative that it was ineffective. Negative propaganda can, unfortunately, sometimes be very effective. In Nazi Germany it was possible to convince German children that Jews were of a different human type from themselves, even though their senses and their reason were telling them the opposite. But propaganda based merely on the "don't do that" formula is clearly wasted effort. The schools were also designed to teach what was referred to as good grammar, that is, a standard English which no one spoke or even tried to speak. I remember one remark of a teacher, "Tomorrow we will go on to the lesson on 'shall' and 'will/ because I would like to finish it by Friday." The language of the recess ground was unaffected by the learned language, partly for class reasons: colloquial language was the reassuring speech of those who belonged; "good grammar" represented the unpopular minority cult of intellect and culture. I noted too that two things which were rigidly excluded from all our reading material were the themes of sex and violence. I began to understand why sex and violence are the most genuinely popular elements of popular culture. Why was there so little sense of participation? I think it was partly because of another unconscious assumption on the part of society, that Johnny should go to school because it was natural for him not to want to. That is, what he naturally wanted to do, according to this assumption, was play, and to be sent to school was enrolling him in a civilized operation. Civilization, then, was assumed to be antagonistic to nature. This assumption, that civilization takes the form of an authoritarian domination of nature, is exactly the same assumption which has produced, in other aspects of our society, the tedious grid pattern of our streets, our countrysides, and now even of our buildings. The same assumption is behind our pollution problems, behind the almost unimaginable hideousness of urban sprawl, behind the wanton destruction of

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trees and rivers and animals. There, if I had had eyes to see it, was the central paradox of the contemporary world. It was all around me at school, and it was still all around me after I went to college, enrolled in a course in philosophy, and settled down to grapple with some of its primary texts, including Aristotle's Metaphysics, the first sentence of which reads, "All men by nature desire to know." It is customary when a class is ready to leave school or college to ask a convocation speaker to come and tell them that they have now finished their education and are ready to go out into the world. I have a genuine sympathy with convocation speakers, because I have probably made as many such speeches in my time as anyone else in the country, but that is one theme that I have never used. It is obvious that nobody ever goes into the world at all, and that when one is ready to leave school the social order simply picks him up and drops him into a different file. We leave school and we get a job, and the job is psychologically identical with the school as I have described it. The job is nearly always penal: it is endured so that one can enjoy one's spare time outside it without crippling anxiety, and perhaps with some hope of getting more spare time as one becomes more senior. But from Biblical times there has been a tendency to regard work as partial reparation for what the soul in a poem of Yeats calls "the crime of birth."3 The motive behind compulsory universal education was on the whole a benevolent one. The motive was that in a democracy one had to be trained to participate in a very complex society. At the age of six one may think that one does not want the training, but one will want it later. Education which seems to the child irrelevant is not really irrelevant so much as tentative. A girl in high school may feel that she can't do algebra because it does not correspond to the vision of the kind of life she thinks she wants to lead. But the community mildly compels her to try a little algebra, because this is a democracy, and it is her right to be exposed to quadratic equations however little she wants them. And still what all this benevolence has produced in society is a kind of maximum security prison, maximum because it is impossible to escape to the world outside. There is no world outside. There was once a convict at Alcatraz who got out of the prison library a book of poems, opened it and saw the two lines of a poem by Lovelace: "Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage."4 He looked around him and said, "Well, if that's true, this is one damn good imitation." Yet I think the poet was right as well as the inmate. A prison is any enclosure that gives claustrophobia to those who are inside it. We meet this sense of claustrophobia everywhere in

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society. So the question arises, "How did benevolence produce a prison?" I begin my approach to this by distinguishing and contrasting two different kinds of habit or repetition. There is one kind of habit or repetition which is the basis of the whole learning process. It is the habit of practice, of progress through repeated, sometimes mechanically repeated, effort, which we see in anyone who is learning to play the piano or memorize the multiplication table. It is habit in the medieval sense of habitus, in which a man who could read Latin was said to have the habit of Latin, that is, he had practised Latin and had repeated the practice until he had it in his mind. There was a man in New York who lost his way in Manhattan, stopped an old lady and said, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" The old lady said, "Practise, practise." Practice in this sense is the basis of all mental activity and of all creative activity as well. But there is another kind of habit or repetition which is exactly the opposite. This is the kind of anxiety-habit which is created by the fact that we change roles so frequently during the course of a day, often to the point of feeling that our identity is threatened. So we adopt ritual patterns of behaviour, patterns of compulsive repetition, in order to establish a sense of continuous identity in our minds. This pattern of repetition which is inorganic, which is clung to out of fear, is one which gradually moves us further and further from what we are in contact with. Thus the benevolence which produced the compulsory universal education bill became habitual, and, because it was habitual, it became binding. Conditions change, and when attitudes towards those conditions do not change, there comes a curious Hegelian fatality into human life of eventually producing the opposite of what was originally aimed at. One example would be the career of President Nixon, who was elected on a promise that he would try to unite the country, and who within two years has come to a position in which he can keep going only by trying to divide it. A different kind of example is afforded by the relations of Canada and the United States. When the United States invaded Canada in 1812, it ran into a strong separatist sentiment and some well-organized guerrilla tactics. The Americans failed to conquer Canada as ignominiously as they have failed to conquer North Vietnam. So they opted for peace and an undefended border, with the result that Canada is today almost the only country in the world which is a pure colony, a colony psychologically as well as economically. It has now the same relation to the United States that the United States had to Great Britain before 1776, except for the revolutionary sentiment.5 This phenomenon of things reversing themselves is particularly no-

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ticeable when society fastens on to something as a symbol for its anxiety and tries to maintain it without change. A good example would be the attitude to women in middle-class Victorian society. Women in that society were made the focus of the social anxieties of their time: they were supposed to be the keepers of good manners, of proper speech and proper behaviour. Hence the conditions set up for them subordinated them under the guise of protecting them. They could not vote and, if they were married, could not own property, because they were regarded as "pure"—purity, like impurity, being a conception which always involves social segregation. The result of making women the custodians of Victorian anxieties was, of course, that that society became very largely matriarchal. Women accepted the ethos which had been handed them, and proceeded to impose it on the rest of society. I could give many examples from Victorian novels. One of the most incisive, perhaps, is in George Eliot's Middlemarch, which tells us how Dr. Lydgate, a brilliant scientist and a most original doctor, wanted a typically Victorian wife who would not disturb him intellectually and who would look decorative at his parties. So he married a beautiful, stupid, and insipid woman who promptly took his life over, and in no time at all he had lost all his originality and his eminence as a scientist and became simply a stuffed shirt giving the kind of parties at which she could appear. Around the time that I was going to school, society was beginning to create another focus of anxiety on the young. This was a feeling that young people ought to be left in an age of innocence before they got into the "rat race." Why should they get old before their time? Why should they take on responsibilities that they need not take on? Young people so fresh and attractive ought to be relieved from social responsibilities, and so symbolize the dream of leisure, of getting away from it all, that older people feel they have missed in life. And so there came a social system which both subordinated and protected young people, in the age group from puberty to majority, and did with adolescence substantially what the Victorian middle class had done to women. The result was the same, the growth and eventual domination of society by an adolescent ethos. This ethos now dominates the mass market, forcing women of sixty into miniskirts; it dominates entertainment, and now it tends increasingly to dominate politics, what with kidnapping, stone-throwing, rioting, and similar adolescent forms of facing reality. Again, I repeat that my term "adolescence" refers to a social fixation which is represented by young people, but does not originate with them. The youthful activist who talks

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about his resentment against "authoritarianism" and "establishments" and "power structures" is falling into the anxiety role prescribed for him by his elders. Hence the paradox, which of course is not really a paradox at all, that the more he asserts his equality with those of a generation older, the less of such equality he actually feels, and the more typically "adolescent" his behaviour becomes. The "adolescent" is by definition immature, and the question of maturity, therefore, becomes a major social problem. About twenty years ago there was quite a cult of maturity, and people wrote books with titles like The Mature Mind. (I remember one such book written by a very famous psychologist, whose name you would recognize if I gave it, in which he said that the mature way to stop war was to learn to minimize the combative impulses.6 That is a strong contender for the least informative sentence that I have ever read.) But the word "mature" is out of fashion now. When, for example, a university administrator is faced by a student deputation demanding the instant and total reform of something, he is strongly tempted to use the word "immature" to describe their demands. He does not do so, partly because it would only make things worse, and partly because he realizes that they don't want the reform anyway, but have merely been told to demand it by an organizer with his mind on higher things. Nevertheless, if he did use the term, it seems to me that the students would have a right to say, immature in relation to what? If by maturity you mean either being resigned to or accepting conditions in our society that we regard as foolish and evil, we don't want your maturity; we would rather be immature. Whatever one thinks of that answer, one often has to ask oneself the complementary question in a time of crisis: "Where are the mature people?" I have lived through the People's Park crisis in Berkeley, California, which struck me as a preposterous, silly, and totally unnecessary event. It would have been easy to dismiss it as an immature and irresponsible action. But who was being mature? It wasn't the university teaching staff, which was demoralised. It wasn't the police, who were being given the most incredibly stupid orders. And it certainly was not the government of the state, which showed a considerable degree of low cunning in exploiting the situation, but certainly no wisdom or courage. Similarly, the tactics of the terrorists in the FLQ are, to put it mildly, immature. But whether the mixture of negligence and overreaction that countered them was mature or not is a much more dubious question. We have to conclude, it seems to me, that there are no mature people.

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Maturity is not a thing you find in people; it's a thing that you find only in certain mental processes. These mental processes are what the university is all about: the mental processes of reasoning, as distinct from rationalization, of experiment, of considering evidence, of the precise and disciplined imagination that appears in literature and the arts. These processes are the end and aim of the right kind of habit, the practicehabit on which all civilized life is founded. We think a good deal about freedom in terms of an antithesis between what the individual wants and what society will allow him to have. We tend to think of society, therefore, as inherently repressive, and we consequently have the greatest difficulty in trying to work out the conception of a free society. This antithesis of freedom and compulsion is something that, as soon as we get into the mental processes I just mentioned, completely disappears. If an artist is painting a picture, what he wants to do and what he must do are the same thing. If a thinker says, "After considering this evidence, I am forced to the following conclusion," he does not mean that he is being externally compelled. The authority that compels him does not counteract his freedom: it fulfils his freedom and it is the same thing as his freedom. In later life one speaks of the great changes that one has lived through, usually congratulating oneself on one's power of surviving them. Certainly the changes that anyone of my age has gone through are very considerable. Not too long ago, the King of England was Emperor of India; Nazi Germany ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga; China was a bourgeois friend, Japan a totalitarian enemy, and so on. The moral that one ought to draw from this is that what appears to be real society is not real society at all, but only the transient appearance of society. The permanent form of human society is the form which can only be studied in the arts and the sciences. Those are the genuinely organized structures of human civilization. It is in the arts and the sciences that we understand where the causes are that make society change so rapidly and seem so unpredictable. If that is true, then our definition of education has to be very different from the one that we often give. Of all the superstitions that have bedevilled the human mind, one of the most dismal and fatuous is the notion that education is a preparation for life. It was very largely this notion of education that caused the projecting of anxiety and the fear of change on the "adolescent," and on efforts to maintain him in an imaginary state of innocence. There are two forms of society, we said, the temporary and transient

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appearance of society which comes to us through newspapers and television, and the real structure of society which is revealed by the arts and sciences. Education, therefore, should be defined as the encounter with real life, whereas the world which involves us as citizens and taxpayers and readers of papers and people with jobs is not real life but a dissolving phantasmagoria. Of course, it is possible that this encounter with real life can go to the point of making one maladjusted to the dissolving world. This is, in fact, one of the functions of education. The last thing that education ought to try to do is to adjust anybody to the appearance of a society which will not be there by the time he has become adjusted to it. But it can and should make one to some extent maladjusted. In T.S. Eliot's phrase, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality,"7 but without the little it can bear it cannot bear the rest of life. Because of the traditional view, and for many historical reasons, university students have all been drawn from one age group, and hence they naturally assume that the university belongs to them. Actually the university belongs to the whole community, and I wish very much that this could be reflected in the make-up of the student body in the university. I am not speaking of adult education: I am speaking of a full re-entry into the university by people in their thirties and forties and fifties, teachers who need refresher courses in their profession, business men who need refresher courses outside their profession, married women with grown-up families, and many other people who have had some earlier encounter with the university, but have forgotten the content of what they have learned and recognize that they need a recurrent contact with it as their life goes on. The only real reason for wanting this is the inherent worth of the subjects themselves, but there are economic advantages as well. It would be a little easier to sell education to the taxpayer if he had some sense of personal contact with it and did not feel that he was supporting only a leisure class of young people. This conception, of the university student body as a leisure class, is a survival of an older form of social elitism. A generation ago there were fewer students in universities: it did not follow, however, that those who were there were all highly intelligent. It followed, rather, that those who were there were people of good intelligence who belonged to the middle class. A century ago the goal of university education was defined by Newman as, in the broadest sense, a social goal, as having the function of producing in society what Newman called the "gentleman." But it is clear that "gentleman" is no longer a socially functional conception, and

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the notion of the "best" education as being only of the kind that the university confers is obviously a considerable social nuisance in our day. I have taught relatively few older people in universities. I remember however a class in Shakespeare in which there was one man of about fifty. We were discussing Measure for Measure and the complicated character of its heroine Isabella. He came up to me afterwards and said, "You know, I couldn't say this in front of the class, but they all think Isabella is a grown woman, and she's not. She's a teenager. Look at the way she's crazy to go into a convent. You know, they all go through that stage." I thought that this was a fresh and candid comment on Measure for Measure, and I could understand why he communicated it to me in this confidential way. But it seems to me that if his age group had been more fairly represented in the class, there might perhaps have been a more understanding discussion between the two groups about what "teenagers" thought and why. One reason why I feel the university should be deeply concerned with the education of older people is that so much technical training has such a short life, including the training of teachers and whatever undergraduate training one may have had thirty years back. It is not always understood that the research training in university graduate schools can go out of date just as quickly. As a colleague of mine remarked to me of another colleague's book, "You know, that book would have been pretty radical if he had written it one hundred years ago." The university has to be a mixture of teaching and research functions, and the two functions have constantly to update each other. A teacher who is not a scholar is soon going to be out of touch with his own subject, and a scholar who is not a teacher is soon going to be out of touch with the world. I have spoken of a kind of social elitism still persisting in our society after it has become functionally obsolete. We speak, for example, of "only a few" being capable of doing university work, and forget that, in a world as populous as ours, "only a few" can still mean a great many million. Then again, there is the mystique, as I might call it, of the small staff/student ratio. On the part of students, the belief that education is always better when there are very few students to one instructor, and when there is greatest freedom and variety of choice, is a false analogy with participatory democracy. On the part of the staff, it is a survival of the notion that teaching is an evil necessary to support research, that one's ambition ought to be to teach one's own speciality, and that the fewer students you have, the higher your status ought to be. Both of

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these are leisure-class attitudes. It seems to me that all subjects of research do not necessarily have to be taught, and I should think that there would be many pedagogical advantages in a drastic simplification of the curriculum. Here again, though the pedagogical reasons are the only important ones, there would be economic fringe benefits, as simplifying the curriculum is the only real way to save money in higher education. As for small classes, the tutorial system is of course greatly admired, especially by those who have never been exposed to it. But the tutorial system with all its virtues cannot give a panorama or perspective as a lecture can do. There is a corresponding mystique of the seminar. The seminar certainly has a central place in education, and should be there, and very prominently there, from the age of twelve to the time of the Ph.D. At the same time, students expect and ought to get something better from their tuition fees than merely the sound of their own ignorance coming back from the four walls. The development of fluency is also an ambiguous benefit. I have known graduates of several colleges in the United States that made a special technique of dealing with very few students at a time and teaching them to talk by means of seminars, and the echo of their horrid articulateness still rings in my ears. It seems to me that nobody should be trained to talk unless he is simultaneously trained to listen, because, if he is, then what is called "dialogue" simply becomes a series of solipsistic monologues, and any gathering of people will take on that form of group psychosis which can be studied in almost any conference called in the modern world. As for the analogy from democracy, the essential democratic principle in education is the supremacy of the subject over both the teacher and the student, and the more supreme it is, the more the difference between the teacher and the student is minimized. The implementation of democracy in the classroom comes from the teacher's willingness to share his knowledge and the student's willingness to acquire it, and the authority of the subject corresponds to the authority in democratic society of (if you will pardon what is by now a somewhat coarse expression) law and order. If the teaching and learning conditions of the university approached at all to the conditions which I have outlined, I should like to see them extended further and further down into the school programme. I am aware that young children go through different stages, and we need the research of Piaget and others to tell us what those stages are and to allow for them in our teaching programme. But I have invariably found that, of the teachers that I have talked to, those who most obviously knew what

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they were doing were also those with the least sense of difference between what they were doing and what I was doing. The same thing is true of students. Anybody who wants a substitute mother in grade 2 will still be wanting one in second year university. Throughout my professional career, I have noted that teachers are occupationally disposed to believe in magic, that is, to believe in the virtues of a planned and sequential curriculum. I share that: I believe in such magic as firmly as any other teacher, and I have done a good deal of work on trying to plan sequential programmes in English from kindergarten to graduate school. Teachers, at least in previous years, used to do a great deal of conferring, asking one another whether a course would not be magically improved if instead of the sequence a, b, c, d one had the sequence a, d, b, c, or possibly a, c, d, b. The role of the student in all this was assumed to be roughly what Newman described in his famous hymn, Lead Kindly Light: "I loved to choose and see my path, but now lead Thou me on." Newman, however, was talking to God, who is presumably a more reliable conductor than most teachers. Students have to choose and see their path, even though most of what they see is simply the consequences of choice. The teacher, in his turn, needs to realize that a teacher cannot be taught to teach except by good students. By that I do not mean such things as student evaluation, which is a parody of the genuine process, and is something for which I have no respect whatever. I am not speaking of that, but of a constant participating in the learning operation. The increase of student representation on curricular and administrative bodies in the university is a part of the social life of our time, and no reasonable person is likely to oppose it. And yet, because it falls into the rhythm of society's movement, it tends to fall under the law of reversal which I have already mentioned. That is, as students and junior faculty become increasingly represented in a department, the department becomes so huge and cumbersome that eventually an executive committee is assigned the whole responsibility, and so the university, instead of becoming less bureaucratic and impersonal, steadily becomes more so. It does not follow that we ought to try to reverse the trend to student and junior faculty representation, which would be futile nonsense. But in proportion as department and senate and council meetings become a sounding-board for professional noisemakers, and the running of the university is taken over by an increasingly invisible civil service, the real teachers and the real students will have to get together on a largely

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conspiratorial basis, forming small groups discussing problems of primary interest to themselves. This conspiratorial activity will be what will rebuild the university. 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 co-ordinating of disciplines, so that the student could see a broad area of knowledge from different points of view. 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. I am often asked if a student today is different from his predecessors, and usually the answer expected is yes. The answer happens to be no. There has been a tremendous increase in the rain of sense impressions from the electronic media, and this has produced a considerable alertness and power of perception on the part of students. However, the power to integrate and co-ordinate these impressions is no greater than it was. This is a situation which has been interpreted by my colleague, Professor Marshall McLuhan, but I would regard his interpretation, if I have understood it correctly, as quite different from mine. He distinguishes between the linear and fragmented approach which he associates with the printed book and the total and simultaneous response which he associates with the electronic media. It seems to me, on the other hand, that it is the existence of a written or printed document that makes a total and simultaneous response possible. It stays there: it can be referred to; it can become the focus of a community. It is the electronic media, I think, which have increased the number of linear and fragmented experiences—experiences which disappear as soon as one has had them—and because of that, they have also increased the general sense of panic and dither in modern society. At the same time, there is no doubt that television and the movies have developed new means of perception, and that they indicate the need for new educational techniques which, as far as I know, have not yet been worked out. I did hear a lecture some time ago by an educator which began by showing the audience a television commercial. He then said, "There is one thing in that commercial which all of you missed and which all the young people

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to whom it was shown got at once." I thought to myself, "Now we're getting to something important. Now we shall find out how education is going to adjust itself to this situation." But, unfortunately, all he said after that was, "This indicates a fact of great educational importance. We don't quite know what it is, but we have it under close study." I have spoken of the mental processes of the university as consisting of a group of things: experiment, evidence, reasoning, imagination. It is possible for different aspects of these to get out of proportion. In our day there is a tendency for one's social vision to get drowned in facts. We look at poverty and inflation and unemployment, and we feel that we can only deal with these things after we have got enough facts about them. And so we employ commissions to spend years and millions of dollars on reports, while poverty and inflation and unemployment placidly continue to rise every month. That is a disease of our time. At other times facts get squeezed out by speculative theories. Thus in the fifteenth century, for example, we had an elaborate classification of the nine orders of the angels, but no classification of rocks or geological strata. The proportioning of these things results from the kind of social vision that a community has, and the university in its totality, that is, the arts and sciences taken together, defines this social vision. It is the university's task to define the vision of society. To implement that vision is the business of concerned organizations, like churches, pressure groups, and political parties. It is not the business of the university as such. In this neo-fascist age, there are many who dislike the kind of freedom which the university represents, and would like to kidnap the university by a pressure group of some kind, radical or established, according to their prejudices. But, if this happened, society's one light would go out. I can best conclude by trying to amplify and emphasize this point. Of course I should be cutting the throat of my own argument if I were to say that the university should be protected by and subordinated to society, because that would be putting the university in exactly the same position that I have said women were in in Victorian times and adolescents in this century. If that happened the logical result would be the spread of an ethos of Olympian indifference in which the answer to every problem would be, "Well, we'll have to wait and see until we have considered all the evidence." There is a good deal of this attitude around already, but when universities foster it they are, like the pure Victorian maiden or the bumptious contemporary adolescent, merely helping to dramatize a foolish role that society need never have invented in the first place.

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The university belongs to its society, and the notion of the autonomy of the university is an illusion. It is an illusion which it would be hard to maintain on the campus of the University of Toronto, situated as it is between the Parliament Buildings on one side and an educational Pentagon on the other, like Samson between the pillars of a Philistine temple. But the university has a difficult and delicate job to do: it is responsible to society for what it does, very deeply responsible, yet its function is a critical function, and it can fulfil that function only by asserting an authority that no other institution in society can command. It is not there to reflect society, but to reflect the real form of society, the reality that lies behind the mirage of social trends. It is not withdrawn or neutral on social issues: it defines our real social vision as that of a democracy devoted to ideals of freedom and equality, which disappears when society is taken over by a conspiracy against these things. It may be attacked from the "left," as it is when certain types of radicals demand that every professor should be, in theory, opposed to war and imperialism and laissez-faire, and in practice a Marxist stooge. It may be attacked from the "right," as it was by a Toronto newspaper, which seeing a bandwagon rolling by, printed an article asserting that professors ought to be teaching students rather than subjects (perhaps the silliest of all fallacies in a subject full of them), and reinforced this with a snarling editorial saying that professors had better reform themselves along these lines, but quick, or else "society" would do it for them. These attacks have in common the belief that "academic freedom" is an outmoded concept, dating from a time before "society" realized how easily it could destroy everything it had of any value. The university has to fight all such attacks, and in fighting them it becomes clear that the intellectual virtues of the university are also moral ones, that experiment and reason and imagination cannot be maintained without wisdom, without charity, without prudence, without courage; without infinite sympathy for genuine idealism and infinite patience with stupidity, ignorance, and malice. Actually academic freedom is the only form of freedom, in the long run, of which humanity is capable, and it cannot be obtained unless the university itself is free.

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Education and the Rejection of Reality 18 February 1971

From the University of Toronto Graduate, 3, no. 5 (June 1971): 49-55. Reprinted in OE, 93-100. The talk was given by Frye at the first session of "Reading 71," a seminar at York University with the theme "Reading, the key to equality." He spoke chiefly from notes, and the editors of the Graduate recorded and transcribed his words, editing the transcript slightly to remove oral characteristics such as run-on sentences and repetition. The portions of the text below that are enclosed in square brackets are not found in the Graduate, but are taken from the full transcript in NFF, box 4, file b, similarly edited. [Some time ago, I was browsing through the Senate Committee's report on mass media1 and came across the familiar question of why it is that newspapers report only the bad news. The important things such as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec2 are either not reported at all or misreported and only crisis and disaster seem to make headlines. Now that is a familiar question. It's even a tedious question, but it does raise a very much more fundamental question, which is, what is it that is really happening? What the news media cannot handle is mostly continuity and routine. As the report said, if the plane from Toronto to Vancouver arrives on time with all its passengers unhurt, that is not news. News is what breaks into the continuity and the routine that makes up ordinary existence. So that what is newsworthy is either an event, something that cuts across the normal routine, or else it is an issue which polarizes attitudes either for or against, which of course is why newspapers are so obsessed with the controversial. For example, I may spend a day in reading and making notes on what I read and then somebody phones up in the middle of the day and it turns out to be an extremely irate and

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neurotic mother who accuses me of corrupting her daughter's morals because of what I'm teaching her. If my wife asks me at the end of the day what has happened during the day, it is the phone call that I tend to think of, although of course what really happened was that I made a few yards in the pursuit of my studies. And as the news deals with what cuts across continuity and routine, it follows that there's a kind of mindless and undirected revolutionary tendency in what the news media portray. That is, they portray issues and controversies which polarize opinion for or against. They bring to our attention certain crucial events which are the breakdowns of normal routine. Now in the fact that continuity and routine make up most of our lives, we have to distinguish two kinds of continuity. One kind is obsessive. We are afraid of the threats to our identity which are posed by the variety of things we have to do during a day. We change our personalities almost as often as we change our clothes, in fact more often because we make several different social adjustments in the course of a day so complete that we often hardly seem to be the same person from morning to afternoon. So we get anxious about our identity and we tend to adopt certain ritual habits that keep us doing the same thing. One sees the same tendency in society as a whole. One of the most obvious features of our society is an obsessive over-production. If capitalist society has got to the point where it can produce automobiles very cheaply and efficiently, then it also gets to the point where it can't do anything except go on producing more and more automobiles. The country is saturated with automobiles. They are killing hundreds of people every month. They turn our landscape into a monotonous and frightening cemetery of parking lots and highways; yet the only answer is that what's good for General Motors is good for the country and we have to go on producing more and more and more of them. Similarly if the United States gets involved in the Vietnam war the obsessive continuity makes its appearance there too. It started something and like the sorcerer's apprentice it can't stop. So we have the feeling from our news media of living in a world of current events where the word "current" has its real function as a metaphor of something liquid, something that has no form and no shape.] Most of us are perhaps old enough to remember the world of 1943, in the middle of the war. Japan was a totalitarian enemy and China a bourgeois friend, the King of England was Emperor of India, Nazi Germany ruled the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. When we look back

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on that world we realize that what we are living in, the world of current events and of news, is actually a kind of phantasmagoria. It is an illusion of what is really happening. What really happened between 1943 and 1971 is something that we cannot get from news media. They are not set up to give us that kind of information. Not only is the world we live in a phantasmagoria, it is also a world which seems to be dominated by an almost continuous hysteria. This has its equivalent in education. In education, and particularly in the universities, there is an obsessive over-production of graduates. The economy of waste and of deterioration works here too. We have to keep on producing more and more and more graduates; we educate them less and less and less, just as the more automobiles are produced the cheaper and more trashy is the vehicle turned out. But there is another kind of continuity, and educational theory does not always distinguish the obsessive or neurotic continuity from the kind that actually does preserve our identity throughout the day. It is true that we change roles very frequently during the course of a day, and yet we know that there is a continuity of our own individual life underlying that. We know that we are, for all the variety of appearances we make, the same person. We know that beyond all the conflict and whim and caprice of our lives there is an underlying consistency of purpose. This consistency is the basis of all virtue: it is the basis of all human dignity. The only person who is honest is the person who is consistently honest, and what is true of the moral life is true of the intellectual life as well. The basis of education is repetition in the form of habit and practice, and freedom emerges from and flowers out of discipline. One is only free to play the piano after one has disciplined oneself to practise the piano hour after hour. In the Middle Ages the word habitus or habit was used to describe the process of education. A man who could read Latin was said to have the habit of Latin, and the art of education consists in administering the discipline of habit and holding the goal before the student of what emerges at the end of it. It is this that enables a person to maintain his identity throughout his life and to meet the threat to the identity which is posed by the variety of situations that he is in. The end of knowledge is, of course, wisdom, and if we think of what is meant by the word wisdom, of what a wise man is, we can see that it has something to do with a sense of the potential. The wise person is the person who we feel could meet any number of potential situations in a roughly consistent and yet flexible way. Our lives are founded on a kind

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of invisible continuity and it is this invisible continuity which enters into both education and ordinary social life. At certain times there are cumulative points where we have a kind of breakthrough, a feeling of an emergence into a new and a greater kind of freedom. A scientist may go through five or six hundred experiments which get him nowhere and in the 631st (I think that was a famous number in science), suddenly the experiment comes through. He has done what he has been trying to do and his whole sense of what he is doing crystallizes. The most impressive example of this kind of repetition in literature, I suppose, is the final volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. In that volume Proust describes how the repetitions of certain experiences which held his life together kept his attention focused throughout a long, futile, dilettantish existence drifting from one party to another in the upper crust of Parisian society. Suddenly at one of these parties the pattern of repetition cleared up and expanded, and this futile, dilettantish life suddenly took a new shape and new form, the form of one of the great works of imagination of our time. [I have said that the news media are not set up to tell us what is really happening. What is really happening is both continuous and invisible. Occasionally what is called a breakthrough may occur and become an event which can be reported by the news, butl for the most part real life cannot be discovered except through the continuous and the structured forms of the arts and the sciences. That leads me to make a very different definition of education from the usual one. I should say that life in the world is life in a continuous illusion, and that education is the encounter with life on the level of reality. That is the opposite of the usual notion which we accept in practice if not in theory. That notion is that education is a preparing for real life and that real life is what I have just called a dissolving and hysterical phantasmagoria. It is this notion which has led us to concentrate all education on one end of existence and make it a monopoly of the young. It follows that all discussions of education which use that silly phrase "ivory tower" have got the whole subject the wrong way around. The question of relevance is an example: it is not the relation of education to the world that matters, it is the relation of the world to education that matters. There is no such thing as inherent relevance. No subject is more relevant than another: it is only the student who can establish the relevance of what he studies and the student who does not accept this responsibility does not deserve the name of student. A much more

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serious result of our regarding education as a preparation for real life instead of being real life itself is that we have created in modern society that curious being that we call the adolescent. I say creation because I think the adolescent is a deliberate creation of an adult society, and that we have done with young people what Victorian society did with women: on the pretext of coddling and protecting them, we have subordinated them and kept them out of any real social role or influence, and we have done this because they represent a kind of projection of our own anxiety. Young people very much resent being used as a projection of adult anxieties, but the more they protest against it the more apt they are to fall into the role that society has prescribed for them. The more they talk about the necessity for being treated like grown people, the more adolescent and shrill-voiced their protests are apt to sound. In many of the demands of student protesters in the university, one senses not so much an immaturity as a kind of infantilism, and one feels that to many of their pronouncements and proposals what they unconsciously expect is not the response "How cogent!" but rather the response "How cute!" As I said earlier, there is a law of diminishing returns in the educational process. Clearly there is something in this notion of concentrating all education at one end of life which does not succeed in making people more mature or wiser, nor does it really enable them to think for themselves. If one looks at student newspapers, for example, one does not see any real individuality of opinion: one sees the same outpourings of cliche and slanted news that one sees in any other bad newspaper. This situation is one that carries with it an increasing expense and a heavier burden on the taxpayer and a consequent growth of panic about a process which still appears to be something of a middle-class playground. My own view of an ideal system of education is a Utopian one which could not be achieved without a very extensive restructuring of society. The moral of that is, of course, that the cure for whatever is wrong with education does not lie within education itself. It lies within a much broader conception of society and what society could do. But the value of Utopianism is that it gives one a kind of model to consider and to keep in mind. The basis of my view is my own experience of teaching in the university. When the war was finally over, the returned people came back and there was a tremendous leap forward for all university teachers. Their students were not only older and more mature but they also realized that

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they had been wasting many years and they wanted to return to real life, which was life in the classroom. The challenge which their liveliness and their independence presented to the teacher is something that nobody can ever forget who went through that period of teaching in a university between 1945 and about 1948 or 1949—after which, as a colleague remarked to me one day, "we're back again to teaching children." That made me realize how important it would be if there were some means of alternating schooling and some other kind of experience as early in life as possible. Socialist countries have experimented a good deal with this, though not on a basis that many of us would find acceptable. It seems to me that the bogy of child labour is not so much of a threat as it was, and we notice how serious students pick up for themselves various interests which involve them with the community around them. We have many students at university concerning themselves with Pollution Probe, with Zero Population Growth, and with other things of that kind. That is a rather significant trend and one which I would hope would grow rapidly in the future. I should like to see all educational institutions open for people to return to as frequently as possible in adult life. I wish that the university had students of different age levels, who were not simply in adult education programmes but who were making a full-time return to university life. This would be essential for many groups of people: teachers needing refresher courses, business men who want to get a different kind of experience, housewives with grown-up families, and so on. In a generation or so, the whole picture of every science changes drastically: when a person is fifty, the science he learned at twenty is no longer of the same shape nor does it deal with the same facts. In the humanities, although there are tremendous advances in fields like critical theory and linguistics and so on, the classics of literature remain what they were from the beginning. But while it is very desirable for a student of fourteen to read Shakespeare's Macbeth and look up all the hard words, still Macbeth is not the same play to a person of forty that it is to a person of fourteen. The person of forty has perhaps a clearer notion in his own experience of just how lethal ambition can be. So the development and progress of education lie in the direction of a kind of social planning of which education is a part but which depends on factors outside education as well. If we ask what is wrong with our present society, the left wing would immediately answer "imperialism" and the right wing would immediately answer "permissiveness." It

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seems to me that both of these answers are for the birds. However wrong or evil or foolish the American involvement in Vietnam or the Russian involvement in Czechoslovakia may be, these situations are not imperialism in any Leninist sense. There is something quite different going on. Similarly the word permissiveness might be extended to cover both very good things as well as very bad things. I suspect, when people use these polemical and very largely meaningless words, they have in mind what is really the same thing, different aspects of the same fallacy: that the individual and society are in an antithetical relationship, that society is what diminishes the freedom of the individual. The approach to education which took the forms of the birch rod and the dunce cap also assumed an antithesis between the individual and society. It took the side of society and forced the individual student to conform to a social mould or role, but the fallacy at the bottom of it was exactly the same. We are social beings first and our individuality is a delicate, complicated process of evolution out of society. Anybody can remain a merely social being. He may be simply part of a conforming mob. The individual is not born an individual. He is born a member of a society, and all his individuality has its roots in that society. We still tend to think of society as an aggregate of individuals, and of the individual as somehow prior to his society. That is one reason why one of the central problems of our time is the fragmenting of the social vision, and it is greatly increased by the influence of fragmenting experiences like those of the news media, television, and radio—particularly television. These have enormously increased the amount of fragmented experience, which is forgotten or at best hazily remembered as soon as one has had it. [The 19605 were particularly the time I think when people were preoccupied with this fragmenting of the social vision. There was a strong revolutionary sentiment which nevertheless never got off the ground because all revolutionary sentiment broke up immediately in internal dissension. I'm using the past tense because I think that this particular episode in our history is coming to a close and that the seventies will have a rather different social orientation from the sixties. But so much of our thinking turns on unreal antitheses like the antithesis of youth and the establishment and other things which exist more as necessities of argument than as facts of experience.] If we ask what is the easiest form of education, disregarding the question of what is the best form, the answer is obviously that education

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is easiest when society is at its most static—that is, if society does not change, the educational process is very simple or relatively simple. An obsessive or neurotic sense of continuity is maintained in the desire to keep some things stable. This anxiety of continuity is one of the oldest forms of experience, and has produced one of the oldest forms of our literature. In the Old Testament, for example, we have the Proverbs, which consist of a father handing on to his son maxims of conduct, the transmission of the cultural heritage. Of course the Proverbs in the Bible are based on Egyptian and Mesopotamian models centuries older than that. This same anxiety of continuity, of transmitting a heritage from one generation to another, is still going strong in Shakespeare's Hamlet when Polonius is haranguing Laertes and in the eighteenth century when Lord Chesterfield is writing letters to his son in the vain hope that his son would be something like him. Lord Chesterfield's maxims of conduct, according to Samuel Johnson, combined the morals of a whore with the manners of a dancing master,3 but as Chesterfield's son was an appalling lout anyway, it didn't really matter. This kind of anxiety is what produces the notion in education which becomes recurrently fashionable that the job of teachers is to teach students rather than subjects, disregarding the fact that you can only teach what is teachable and that only the subject is teachable. There is no such thing as a teachable student, and there never will be. It is that kind of anxiety which is the parody, the obsessive or the neurotic form of what seems to me to be the central need of our time, the sense of the wholeness of social vision, the sense of community out of which all individuality grows. To understand how this sense of community operates, one has to distinguish very sharply two things that are often confused. One has to distinguish unity from uniformity. Unity means something which can comprise a great variety of opinions and views. Unity means something which can include dissension, conflicting ideas and opposition. Uniformity means everybody thinking alike or saying that they think alike. It is at this point that the importance of reading comes in. Reading is above all a continuous and not a fragmented experience. The written document is the focus of a community because the written document is there to be returned to. It is the basis of all the repetition, of all the habit and the practice which underlies the genuine educational process. This is why the art of reading, with its stationary book which keeps patiently saying the same things no matter how often one opens it, is still the basis

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of all education and can never be replaced by the fragmented and the temporary media, however large a part of our lives they may occupy. The basis of education therefore is the habit of reading, and it might be said that if young people were taught not simply how to read but taught the habit of reading so that it became continuous, perhaps nothing else would be necessary in our education. One does run into such views occasionally. I studied in Oxford in the 19305, and it was a strong belief in Oxford that English literature was a subject that did not need to be taught. You teach people to read and then you send them into the library. If they want to read English literature they can read it—they know how to read, don't they? This is an extreme view—in fact, I should regard it as a rather fat-headed view in 1971—but it's useful because it is an extreme view. You may remember Mr. Bennet in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. He had five daughters and a library. He made no effort to educate his daughters formally. He knew that the two sensible girls, Jane and Elizabeth, would make a sensible use of the library. The third, Mary, was pedantic: she would be studious and would read a great deal, but would not be able to absorb her social life into her reading. The two silly ones, Kitty and Lydia, would not read at all. So you have two out of five, which is a remarkably high average, and up to that point I suppose Mr. Bennet's view might work. It is more important, however, to recognize that the habit of reading is not a simple matter, because elementary reading is for the most part a passive operation and it becomes essentially the reading of instructions. The elementary reader is trained above everything else to read things like traffic signs. The art of reading has to be continued throughout life in order to keep presenting to the student the fact that reading is an active and creative process and that it is also a constant act of judgment. This sense of reading as an act of judgment lessens the panic that so many of us feel when we are confronted with the immense quantity of reading that there is to get through, the feeling that there are so many square miles of print that one needs to read just to keep up. The nightmare of information retrieval which our libraries present to us is a part of the same thing. I don't know what it is like in the sciences, but I do know what it is like in the humanities. Most of the information to be retrieved from whatever source is not information at all; it is either misinformation or else it is a repetition of what has been said elsewhere, and the trick is to get rid of it and not to absorb as much as possible of it. The act of reading as a continuous act of judgment is the key to

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equality, and the key to freedom. Its purpose is the maintaining of the consistent consciousness which is the basis of human freedom and of human dignity. [The end of the process is perhaps the occasional moments of heightened consciousness which are for those who have experienced them the centres around which all one's life appears to revolve. We learn from the Bible that a single act of vision on the part of Isaiah or Ezekiel or Paul might change the history of the world. We learn from the history of the arts and the sciences that a single crystallization of inspiration may change the whole history of literature or of science and consequently of human life generally. For most of us there are not these dramatic results to be attained but there are still the same kinds of experience waiting for us. It is to elicit these forms of experience that we have dedicated our lives and that we confer on the subject of the importance and the centrality of reading.]

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Published separately as On Teaching Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), excerpted as "Myth and Imagination" in the Strand, October 1973,89, and reprinted in OE, 109-37. Typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 4, files t and u, and NFF, 1988, box 21, files 6 and 7. The original publication was concluded by a schematic chart which is omitted in OE by Frye's decision, and not reproduced here. In a prefatory note, Frye remarks, "In this essay I am trying to set down some of my views about literature as a subject of teaching and learning. The occasion for the essay is the appearance of the first of a set of books under the running title of Literature: Uses of the Imagination. These books, with their successors, have some relation to those views. Hence they are frequently referred to, especially for examples." The books in question, with Frye as supervisory editor and Will T. Jewkes as general editor, were published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972-74. They consist of thirteen anthologies of literary selections from all periods and many languages (in translation), arranged in thematic groups such as "The Perilous Journey" and "A World Remade: Comedy." They are designed to be used sequentially in teaching literature to children,of approximately grades 7 to 12, and are each accompanied by a teacher's manual. In a brief introduction to the first three volumes, Wish and Nightmare, Circle of Stories: One, and Circle of Stories: Two, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Hope Arnott Lee, Frye expressed the beliefs animating the series: The imagination that has produced the poems and stones of the world operates on every age level: it has a childlike aspect, a youthful aspect, and so on up to an aspect of ancient wisdom. In literature, we discover the world that our imaginations have already constructed. When poets and story-tellers talk about the cycles of human life, about the

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beginning of things long ago, or about wish and nightmare, they are using the same set of building blocks that we use ourselves, from infancy to old age. What we discover in the poets we recognize as what we already know, but we can never know that we know it without them. We live in society by means of our imaginations: it is the imagination that tells us how to react to the news, how to vote, how to choose a life style. This imagination is part of a social vision: it tells us how we want to dress ourselves, for example, because our clothes dramatize our social attitudes. Society is full of people who want to "capture" our imaginations, by propaganda, by advertising, by entertainment. When we read poets who want nothing from us except a response to something we already have, we see that the imagination is not to be learned from the outside; it is something to be released from the inside. Our earliest poets in English used to speak of "unlocking the word hoard," and the reader of this book may now turn this page and that key at the same time.

I

The Hidden Likenesses of Literature: A Search for Theory In every subject that can be taught there are certain rudiments to be learned first, and whatever is learned afterward has to have some kind of connection with those rudiments. For example, if we are teaching music, we can begin with the octave, the twelve semitones of the octave that make up the chromatic scale, the relation of the major and minor modes to that scale, and the way in which such musical elements are presented in notation. Knowing these rudiments will not enable us to compose like Beethoven, but it is a start in putting ourselves in command of the same technical apparatus that Beethoven worked with all his life. Such teaching is progressive in a way that "music appreciation" by itself is not. For many reasons teachers have been for a long time confused about how to teach literature (and language, but that is another subject) systematically and progressively, and hence their students often grow up with, at best, only a vague memory of attempts to get them to "appreciate" good literature. The present series of books is designed to help a teacher to present literature in the same kind of coherent and planned sequence that one might use to present music or mathematics. The principles on which these books are based are the subject of what follows.

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In learning some subjects we are forced to depend a good deal on sheer memorization. Political geography is one such subject. There is no reason why Bolivia should be in South America instead of Africa: it just is, and we have to remember the fact. If we try to teach literature without any principles of its construction in our minds, we are going to force a great deal of memorization on our students: names and dates of writers, historical and cultural facts associated with literature, allusions and references and other aspects of content, and so on. One great advantage of teaching literature systematically is that it then turns out to be a structure, like mathematics or science, and the memory work involved becomes a good deal simpler when there is something to hook it on to. The first principle of literary structure is that all literary works are so presented that they move in time, like music, and yet, because they are structures, they can also be studied all in one piece, like paintings. First of all, we must read, or listen to someone read, or listen to a play in a theatre. This is a participating act: we follow the structure as it unfolds in time. It is also a precritical act: we are not studying or judging or commenting at this stage, but suspending all mental operations until the end to get a sense of the total form. Study and criticism begin at the second stage, where we see the structure frozen into a simultaneous pattern. For this second stage we have to have a printed text; but study of the printed text does not replace the original listening experience. In practice we may read or study dramas that we have not seen in the theatre, but even so we should keep some kind of ideal performance of them in our minds. And even if we are just reading for relaxation, not concerned with an educational process and so not going on to the second stage of study and analysis, we can still be aware that our reading experiences are attaching themselves to one another, and forming a larger pattern. The word "convention" expresses one very important kind of similarity that we find in our reading. A detective story is a simple example of a conventional form: we know before we start reading it that there is going to be a corpse, a number of suspects, police called in, an inquest, and the eventual discovery of the murderer just at the end. If we bought a detective story and didn't find this kind of material in it we'd feel cheated. Of course every individual work of literature has to be just enough different from all the others to make reading it a distinct experience. But the similarities within the type are equally important. A radio or television serial will use the same characters, the same incidents, the same turns of speech, and if these familiar features didn't turn up, that

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programme's ratings would go down fast and far. So there are aspects of literary experience that are very like games. Each game of chess or bridge may be different, but the conditions within which the game is played do not change. We notice too that it is in popular forms like the detective story where this rules-of-a-game feeling is strongest. The word "genre," like the word "convention," expresses a similar sense of classification or type in the things we read. If we are told in advance that what we are going to read is a comedy or tragedy or romance or novel, we expect certain features that we should not expect if the indication were different. A work of literature, therefore, not only has a narrative movement and a unified structure: it also has a context within literature, and it will be more like certain works of literature than like others. The first step in teaching literature systematically, then, is to establish a context within literature for each work being studied, first for the teacher, and eventually for the student as well. Detective stories and the like are commercial products of a specific society, designed to meet a specific social demand, so it is perhaps not so surprising to find similarities among them. But when we turn to the popular literature of "primitive" (i.e., technologically less developed) societies, and study their folk tales and myths, we find the same kind of similarities turning up. Sometimes, where the similarities are very striking and the societies that tell these stories are very far apart, we may even find the likenesses uncanny, and feel impelled to invent historical theories about a diffusion of myths from Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or the collective unconscious or what not. But we don't need such theories. If we go into a museum, and look at cultural objects from societies all over the world, such as textiles or pottery or masks, we find that the same principles of design keep recurring. Certain blends and contrasts of colours, certain geometrical patterns, will resemble one another even where there is no question of direct influence. There is enough uniformity in the human mind, in the order of nature that that mind works with, and in the physical conditions of the medium itself, to account for all such similarities. The Function of Archetypes In one of the books in this series there is a story, told among a tribe of Californian Indians, of a man who followed the shade of his wife to the land of the dead and was allowed to return with her on condition that he

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did not touch her before they were back home. Anyone familiar with Greek mythology would say, on reading this story, "That is the same story as the story of Orpheus and Eurydice." We notice that there is no question of the Greek story's having influenced the Californian one, or vice versa. Even if there were, the fact that the same story makes an appeal to two such very different cultures would still be significant. But in what sense is it the "same" story? The incidents are different; the journey to the land of the dead is different; there is no mention of the hero as a musician, as Orpheus was, and the taboo is of touching in this story and of looking back in the Greek one. When we say that it is the "same" story, we are speaking of the shape the story assumes when we look at it all at once as a piece of verbal design, after listening to it being told. As something told and listened to, the story is a narrative or plot (the Greek word for plot, mythos, is the source of our word "myth"); as something to be studied and compared with other stories like it, it is a theme. As a plot, it moves in time, and our reading of it is also a movement in time. As a theme, it exists all at once in space, like a picture. The Californian Indian story and the Orpheus story are the "same" story because they have the same theme. We notice that the Californian Indian story incorporates an episode of clashing rocks. That incident is not in the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but it appears in another Greek story, the voyage of the Argonauts (where Orpheus was also present). This kind of motif, which can appear in any story, is an "archetype," that is, a repeatable unit of imaginative experience that turns up constantly and unpredictably. Just how unpredictable such units can be we can see from this account of the seduction of a girl by a serpent: Cinderella dressed in yella Went upstairs to kiss her fella Made a mistake and kissed a snake And came downstairs with a bellyache.

The verses are nonsense, but amusing nonsense, and no nonsense is amusing if it is entirely pointless. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is in the centre of the Western literary tradition, and so hundreds of poets have referred to it and many composers have written operas about it. Consequently it comes to us with the resonance of these echoes around it, as the Indian story does

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not. But the Indian story, if we listen to it sympathetically, is just as haunting and suggestive, just as touching and as close to our own sense of loneliness and bereavement, as the Greek one. Thus the quality of literature does not depend on the technological development of the culture that produced it. Literature does not improve when social conditions improve, or are assumed to improve. It is true of all forms of human creativity that, while we may in some contexts speak of a development from primitive societies to high civilizations, there is no corresponding development of quality in the arts. Just as the textile or pottery designs of "primitive" peoples may often seem to us as sophisticated as our own, and sometimes much more tasteful, so "primitive" myths and folk tales can be on at least the same imaginative level as our own stories. If we call such stories crude or undeveloped, we are probably misinterpreting them, or thinking of them as early efforts at conceptual thought. They are not forms of conceptual thought at all: they usually come from societies where conceptual thought has no real function. They are forms of imaginative thought, and that can be as subtle and suggestive in the tales of the "eternal dream time" told by Australian aborigines as in our own culture. That is why literature, no less than painting and sculpture, has continually to turn to the primitive, to ballad and popular song and folk tale, to find the sources of its own vitality, and why this literature programme makes so much of these sources. Behind these sources, and even more important for us than they are, are the mainsprings of Western cultural tradition, the Old Testament and Greek mythology. The Primacy of Poetry

One of the things we learn, if we study such a people as the Eskimos, for example, whose conditions of life have kept them technologically restricted and close to the subsistence level, is that the simpler the society, the more clearly poetry emerges as one of the primary needs of that society. In a civilization like ours, poetry, like physical exercise, gets smothered under a mass of other activities. We forget how simple and direct a form of expression poetry is: how it is linked to singing and dancing and marching. Like singing and dancing themselves, however, poetry has come to be regarded as a difficult skill attained by very few people. But the three-year-old who learns to hear and repeat nursery rhymes with the kind of rhythmical swing that belongs to them is learn-

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ing something about the real impact of poetry that many of us have forgotten or never knew. The editors of these books have assumed that the nursery rhymes and fairy tales that children hear in their preschool years, if they are lucky, are the right beginning of a literary education, and they have tried to continue this instead of interrupting it, as school education too often does. The superstition that poetry is difficult and specialized has produced many anthologies and textbooks based on the assumption that the study of poetry should be either circumvented altogether or approached with the greatest caution, and that prose should be the staple of literary education. A culture like ours, submerged under great masses of print that pass for prose, tends to assume that prose must be the natural way to speak and think. But, if prose is more "natural" than poetry, how does it happen that the simplest and most primitive societies have poetry, whereas prose is always a much later and more specialized development? And, more important for us just now, if prose is the natural way to speak, why do young people, introduced to prose in the early grades of school, treat it as a dead language, with no relation whatever to the way that they actually do speak? And why is it that even at the university, by which time the propaganda has done its work and students have finally become convinced that prose is the natural way to write and speak, they still cannot write it, and never speak it consistently? The truth of the matter is, first, that the natural way to speak is not in prose, despite the pleasure of M. Jourdain in Moliere at being told that he had been speaking prose all his life.1 The natural way to speak is in an associative and repetitive babble which is neither prose nor verse. If we want to see what it looks like in print, we should read Gertrude Stein, the one twentieth-century writer who has completely mastered its peculiar idiom. Verse and prose are different ways of regulating and controlling this babble, but prose is a far more difficult and sophisticated way of conventionalizing speech than verse is. It is therefore better and more logical teaching to begin with poetry, and keep it at the centre of all one's training in literature. And, if we once understand the primitive and simple nature of the rhythm of poetry as compared with prose, we may go on to understand something of the primitive and simple nature of its use of language and its methods of thought. The poet, like the child, is dependent on sense experience rather than abstraction, and his primary units of expression are images, not ideas or concepts. Poetry has a

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limited tolerance for abstractions of any kind, including the abstractions of critical commentary. Image: The Unit of Meaning Again, the poet thinks, not in logical sequences, but in the most primitive and archaic of categories, similarity and identity: A is like B; A is B. These are the categories that appear in poetry as simile and metaphor. "Eternity is like unto a Ring," says John Bunyan; "Grandfather of the day is he," says Emily Dickinson of a mountain.2 The programme begins with riddles, describing things in terms of other things: As round as an apple, As deep as a cup, And all the king's horses

Cannot pull it up.3

Such poetry makes a direct appeal to the intellectual excitement of childhood: the child wants to "guess," and thereby he recapitulates the whole history of literature, where the riddle, along with the riddle game and the riddle duel, is among the most ancient of poetic forms. In fact "riddle" was originally what one "read." I suppose no poetry will ever be written more difficult and elusive than that of the nineteenth-century French poet Mallarme, yet Mallarme's prescription for writing poetry, to describe, not the thing, but the effect it produces, is still essentially a prescription for writing riddles. Such mental processes as those that are involved in riddles, proceeding through pun and identification, are very close to the mental processes of young children. A generation ago T.S. Eliot said that poets writing in so unpoetic a time as ours have a moral obligation to be difficult.4 But a proper literary education would preserve a child's own metaphorical processes, not distort them in the interests of a false notion of reality. If it did, the child would grow up to find the most apparently difficult poetry a simple, direct, natural, even inevitable form of expression. Literature is produced by, and appeals to, the imagination. The imagination is a creative and constructive power: it is different from reason, though it is intelligent, and different from feeling, though it is sensitive. If we are responding to someone else's poem, we should respond to it at

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first with intelligence and feeling, as we do to anything else outside ourselves. But sooner or later we come up against the question of how our own powers of creation can be related to what the poet has made. For, however unlikely it is that we could make anything like King Lear or Paradise Lost, our response even to that level of creation still has in it some quality of recognition. Lear on the heath is not like anything we have actually experienced, either in waking life or in dreams. Nevertheless he reminds us that besides actual worlds and fantasy worlds, we do have an imaginative world of our own, a world of possibilities, so to speak, and that Lear is within range of something that we can imagine. We know very little about our own imaginative worlds: even a great genius may not know much about what his genius is producing. Hence we are, at least at first, totally inarticulate about what we can imagine, until something in literature, say a poem, comes along and expresses it. Then we realize that that poem corresponds to something in a world that we have lived in and lived with, but knew nothing about until the poem spoke for us. This imaginative world that remains within us, hidden and mysterious, until literature begins to call it forth, is a world with a shape to it. We have just said that each work of literature has a context within literature: it lights up a specific corner or area of our imaginative experience, and the other works of literature that are most like it are in neighbouring areas. The editors of these books have taken the logical next step, and have tried to sketch out for the student the outlines of his own imaginative world. That sounds at first like a formidable undertaking, but the two main principles involved are very simple. The Two Rhythms of Literature

First, the easiest way to impose artistic shape on material is to give it a recurring pattern. For arts that move in time, like poetry and music, this means the repetition of an established rhythm. The poet uses words, and it is not too difficult to put words into regular rhythm. But words, unlike musical notes, have to mean something besides their own sound: they also describe and refer to the world around us, or, as critics back to Plato have said, they imitate nature. The first thing poetry does, in transforming "nature" into an imaginative world, is to seize on the element of regular repetition in it. This is the element provided by the cyclical rhythm of nature: the four

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seasons of the year moving from spring to winter and back to spring again; the daily cycle of the sun moving from dawn to darkness to a new dawn, the cycle of waters running into the sea and returning in the rain. Next comes the fact referred to above, that the poet thinks in terms of likeness and identity. And what likeness and identity suggest is adding to the cycle of nature the rhythm of life, with human life at its centre, moving from birth to death and back again to new life. But this step gets our own emotions immediately involved with the cycle. And as poetry continues to express not merely the rhythm of what we see around us but what we feel as a part of ourselves, a second principle begins to operate, a principle which tends to separate what we hate or fear from what we want or love. Out of this cycle of death and renewal, and out of the separation of our feelings about the cycle, there gradually emerge four fundamental types of imaginative experience in literature. The editors call this sequence of four types, the first time they appear, the "circle of stories." Later they are referred to by their more usual names: romance, tragedy, irony, and comedy. Romance is the name we give to the type of imaginative literature that takes place in an idealized or stylized world inhabited by brave men and beautiful women, where all villains are easy to recognize as villainous. Such a world is likely to be considerably simplified in its setting also: the discomforts, frustrations, and confusions of ordinary life are largely cleared away. Opposed to romance is the world explored in irony and satire: this is much closer to the world we live in, except that irony puts us in a position of some superiority to the characters in the story, though not so much as to prevent us from being involved with the story. It will generally be found, however, that the shape of an ironic story often takes the form of a parody of romance, as stories of adventurous voyages are parodied in Gulliver's Travels and stories of knights rescuing maidens and the like are parodied in Don Quixote. Then there are the stories we call comedies and tragedies, the stories that turn up or turn down at the end. Tragedy usually focuses on a hero, a central figure of more than ordinary size, who is caught in a situation that propels him inevitably into disaster, whether death or a loss of freedom of action. The direction of the tragic plot is thus from the romantic to the ironic. Comedy moves in the opposite direction, from a condition where (to take a very common type of comedy) a hero and heroine are threatened with separation or a loss of freedom by some obsessed or ridiculous character, but manage to evade all obstacles and

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proceed to a happy conclusion, often marriage. Thus comedy normally moves from the ironic to the romantic worlds. But a tragedy may have its centre of gravity, so to speak, in romance, like Romeo and Juliet, or in irony (ironic comedy is generally called satire), like Vanity Fair, or in romance, like The Tempest. We may feel that this "circle of stories" considerably simplifies the facts of literary experience. Three points in this connection are important. First, the simplification may be valuable for teaching purposes, giving shape and coherence to an inexperienced student's reading. Second, no boundary lines exist, except in diagrams: no classifying or pigeonholing is involved; literary works are simply seen as being in different areas, where they can be both distinguished from and related to one another. Third, and most important, this is not a schematism to be imposed on students. The teacher should have it in mind, but as a principle to give form to his teaching, not as something for the student to memorize and present as a substitute for literary experience. We come then at least to the beginning of an answer to the question of what we should teach. We should teach literature, but in such a way that the primary facts emerge first, and the primary experiences are properly emphasized, so that whatever the student goes on to next will be continuous with what he has already experienced. That implies teaching the structure of literature, and the content by means of the structure, so that the content can be seen to have some reason in the structure for existing. Very often literary materials in schoolbooks are arranged by content, by what they say about love or time or death or what not. When well done, such an approach may overlap with the present one: putting poems on spring together is to some extent arrangement by content too. But the approach of this programme also provides a containing form for the themes: love and death are not taken as real classifying principles, but as aspects of literary genres, such as comedy and tragedy. This avoids the danger of classifying literature by what it says, and so making literary works into documents illustrating various Noble Notions. It thus avoids the moralizing of literature, of treating it as a collection of allegories of something else. Moral and allegorical approaches to imaginative literature have been experimented with from Classical times down through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the Synopticon of a few years ago, which attempted to present all the great ideas of man in reference form.5 But somehow or other this approach has never really worked, except when the moral principles mainly featured were also those that the

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power structure of society was determined to enforce. It has not worked because it does not follow the actual shape of literature, but distorts that shape in the interests of something else. Myth and the Imagination

Every society has a verbal culture, which includes ballads, folk songs, folk tales, work songs, legends, and the like. As it develops, a special group of stories, the stories we call myths, begins to crystallize in the centre of this verbal culture. These stories are taken with particular seriousness by their society, because they express something deep in that society's beliefs or vision of its situation and destiny. Myths, unlike other types of stories, stick together to form a mythology, and this mythology begins to take on the outlines of the imaginative world just described. Creation myths and other myths that account for the origins of things appear at one end of it, and myths of a final dissolving or transforming of the world may appear at the other, though this is normally a later development. Literature as we know it, as a body of writing, always develops out of a mythical framework of this kind. The heaven or paradise or Mount Olympus of the mythology becomes the idealized world of romance and pastoral and idyll, and its hell or Tartarus or Hades becomes the abhorred or grotesque world of irony. The mythological framework of Western culture has been provided mainly by the Bible, with the mythology of Greece and Rome forming a counterpoint against it. During the last century or so we have been learning more and more about the similarity of these mythical patterns to those produced by other societies all over the world, which, of course, in itself gives the study of literature an important function in a world where we have to meet so many other peoples on their terms as well as ours. The present literature programme is full of mythical stories from a wide variety of sources, and their similarity to more familiar ones is clear enough. But, as we said above, the Biblical and Classical versions are the ones that Western poets have known: they are the ones with literary echoes around them, and they have an obvious priority in Western literary education. Of course the fact that the Bible has been traditionally associated with belief, and that Classical mythology has not, at least not since the rise of Christianity, makes for differences in emphasis. There has been a longstanding notion that poets are just playing with words, and novelists just

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telling stories for fun. Hence the writer comes to be thought of as a kind of licensed liar, and the words for literary structure, "fable," "fiction," and "myth," acquire a secondary sense in which they simply mean something untrue. This provides quite a hurdle for the study of literature to get over. When I became a junior instructor in English many years ago, I began a course on the imagery and symbolism of the Bible, which I am still teaching. I thought, as I still think, that without some knowledge of the Bible one simply does not know what is going on in English literature. Also that while the Bible may be many things besides a work of literature, it must be that too, as no book can have had its influence on literature without itself having literary qualities. Naturally some of my students found it hard to understand why poets did not confine themselves to Classical mythology, where they could do what they liked, instead of meddling with really serious issues. To demonstrate that poets took their work very seriously was not difficult, but there was another set of objections when I carried the campaign into the opposite camp, and began calling Biblical stories myths, and Biblical images metaphors. The questions usually took some such form as, "Do you mean to say that it's all just a myth, only a myth, nothing but a myth?" Here one had to explain that, in the first place, a myth is a certain kind of story, and that calling a Biblical story a myth is simply making a statement about its form or mode of presentation, not about the reality or unreality of its content. Secondly, that the Bible employs myth and metaphor because it expects the active and constructive response from its readers that only the imagination gives. The fact that Jesus taught in parables and stories obviously increases the seriousness and immediacy of what he had to say. In the last few years students have started to ask very different questions. They are, after all, living in an age where it is all too easy to see that anything, religious or scientific, becomes dangerous to society as soon as it is uncritically accepted. Whenever we try to place any subject beyond criticism, what we are really placing beyond criticism is our present understanding of that subject. The motivation for religious persecution, for instance, is never "You must believe in God," but "You must believe what I mean by God." The next step is to understand that what is real or true about any human form of understanding, whether religion or philosophy or science or literature, is not its relation to objective fact, but its relation to our own power to use it. So it is reassuring to find that students now seem to realize that active imagination is worth any amount of passive faith.

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Models for Action There is, however, a still more important principle involved here, so far as the teaching of literature is concerned. Every belief or doctrine which can be expressed as a general statement or proposition is also the moral of a possible story. Literature addresses itself to the imagination/and the imagination is not directly related to belief. It is concerned rather with models of possible belief, structures which may be "just stories" in their literary form, but may also take on the outlines of a much wider and more comprehensive social vision. What we believe is not what we think we believe but what our actions show that we believe. Our actions in their turn are chosen by a certain kind of social vision, and if we were sufficiently conscious of our social vision to describe it, we should find it taking on the outlines of a story and a body of imagery. One of the stories in this programme is of a medieval baron who is a werewolf, and is forced to become a wolf for three days each week. His wife, who wants to marry someone else, worms his secret out of him (Samson-Delilah archetype), steals his clothes so that he cannot become human again, marries the other man, and takes over his property. The king goes out hunting, finds the wolf, and the wolf proves so affectionate that he spares his life and takes him back to the court. Eventually the whole story comes out: the baron is restored to his normal shape, and the lady and her second husband are baffled. Just a story, and a very simple and childlike story at that. Yet the structural device employed is an extremely common one in literature, which implies that it belongs to a fairly important group of structures. In Homer's Odyssey, for example, the hero remains absent from home while other suitors of his wife lay waste his goods; he returns secretly and in disguise, and eventually reveals his true shape and destroys the suitors. In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure the Duke of Vienna disappears, leaving a regent in charge, returns secretly, disguised as a friar, and finally reveals his true shape, to the great discomfiture of the regent, who has not been behaving well. There are no greater writers than Shakespeare or Homer, but still, we may feel, these are "just stories," told to amuse. But then we may begin to think about, say, the teachings of Christianity, which form not only a body of doctrines but a story. The story tells how Christ leaves the world after his ascent to heaven, returns in secret to the human heart, often neglected or ignored and his authority usurped, yet to be finally revealed in a second coming at the end of time. The story of Christianity,

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we see, is, from the literary point of view, a comedy: that is what the greatest of Christian poets, Dante, called it. Then there is Marxism, which turns on the theme of a usurping ascendant class getting the benefits of society while an oppressed class remains hidden within it, some day to manifest itself in full force and to return to its rights. In short, hundreds of millions of people today are thinking about the world within the kind of framework represented by that werewolf story. Literature in the Free Society

The social importance of teaching literature, then, does not stop, as so many people think it does, when children have acquired the skills of reading and writing. Nobody denies the importance of these skills: all social participation depends on them. But in themselves they are passive skills: the knowledge of how to read leads in itself merely to reading such things as traffic signs, to learning how to do what one is told. If we go on with the study of literature, it turns out to be, not something to fill in our spare time with, but an organization of human experience. It presents the human situation, not as we ordinarily know it, as a dissolving flux, but in structured forms like romance, tragedy, irony, comedy. To reach this kind of transformed imaginative reality, its rhythms have to be more concentrated, its imagery bolder, and its conventions at once more stylized and more varied, than anything we can use for ordinary experience. Literature in this sense is cultural mythology, the social vision which is not in itself belief or action, but the imaginative reservoir out of which beliefs and actions come. Every subject worth teaching is also a militant subject, fighting against the social perversion of itself. To teach science is implicitly to fight against mental confusion and superstition; to teach geography and history is implicitly to fight against provincialism. And as we continue to study literature, we begin to realize that every society also produces a social mythology, or what is often called an ideology, that it has techniques of ensuring that its citizens learn it thoroughly and early, and that literature has the social function of trying to clarify and provide imaginative standards for this ideology. There are two aspects of social mythology. One is its genuine aspect, as the body of beliefs or feelings that are held deeply, if often very inarticulately, by a society. American social mythology, for instance, has a concern for self-reliance and independence, for tolerance (which is really

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intellectual independence), for the democratic process, for an inclusive community that does not make second-class citizens out of any group. This mythology, like other mythologies, is a construct of historically chosen beliefs and principles, and is incorporated in the Constitution. The fact that it is a mythology, once more, does not mean that it is untrue, but that its truth depends on the way it is used. A great American writer, such as Whitman or Thoreau, will almost always be found to have struck his roots deeply into it. But there is also a strong tendency to project this mythology, to treat it as a body of established social principles, to be imposed on everyone without criticism. This produces a mythology which aims at conditioning all citizens in habits of docility and obedience, or, as it is called, adjustment. This projected adjustment mythology may be studied in all anthologies and textbooks which assumed that the main function of education is to produce docile citizens. For several generations it was widely assumed that the student should learn as much of this adjustment mythology as possible, and as little as possible of anything else. In fact the study of this mythology frequently replaced the study of actual literature. The mythology in the United States presented a nostalgic version of the American past, with certain mythical figures looming out of it, some named, like Franklin and Washington, and some general, like the pioneer, the hunter, and the cowboy. The present was a middle-class world of comfort and security, where the main outlet for adventure was in operating the technological machinery. The rest of the world, including the rest of the United States, hardly existed at all, or existed only among certain exotic peoples who were to be tolerated and sympathized with, but of course at a distance. So far as it addressed itself to literature, it tended to vulgarize the imaginative response to literature, so as to make the student a part of the captive audience of the mass media in their present facile commercialized form. The result was all too often to train the student in stock response, not imagination, and the end of the process to get him in adult life to repeat the liturgy of the adjustment myth, in a series of cliche-notions that show traces of the Christian myth from which it was, at many removes, derived. We have all heard these cliches: things were much simpler in the old days; the world has unaccountably lost its innocence since I was a child; I just live to get out of this rat race for a while and go somewhere where I can get away from it all; there is a bracing atmosphere in progress and competition, and although the world is threatened with

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grave dangers from foreigners, yet if we dedicate ourselves anew to the tasks before us we may preserve the American way of life for generations yet unborn. One recognizes the dim outlines of pastoral myths, fall-from-Paradise myths, exodus-from-Egypt myths, and apocalyptic myths. Genuine American mythology, we said, stresses independence, tolerance, and personal freedom. But no adjustment myth can possibly believe in such things: if it did it would cease to become an adjustment myth. It has to present such beliefs as ways of getting along in a benevolently authoritarian social establishment. Thus the belief in independence and individuality gradually turns into an acceptance of the power of a pervasive but almost invisible corporate state. More important for our present purposes is the principle involved, that if we neglect or misunderstand the teaching of literature, we create a vacuum in education, and adjustment mythology rushes in to fill the empty space. We have no choice about teaching mythology; we have only the choice between teaching genuine and perverted kinds of it. The Imaginative versus the Imaginary One trouble with the stock-response version of literary teaching is that this kind of education is performed far more expertly by advertising, especially television commercials. Advertising, being a socially approved form of drug culture, envelops us in an imaginary world, and promises us magical powers within that world enabling us to transcend the world we actually live in. As we grow older, we learn not to take this very seriously, but we acquire the habit of responding to advertising in childhood, and if we simply outgrow it, many of the elements in that response will remain with us. It seems to me that the study of literature should be accompanied, as early as possible, by the study of the rhetorical devices of advertising, propaganda, official releases, news media, and everything else in a citizen's verbal experience that he is compelled to confront but is not (so far in our society) compelled to believe, or say he believes. The rhetorical devices of advertising are easily analyzed, and such analysis uncovers a primitive level of verbal response that literature as such cannot reach. In totalitarian states advertising turns into propaganda, and the element of competition, which, along with the separation of economic and political establishments, makes advertising something of an ironic game, disappears. The fact that first-rate literature also disappears in totalitarian states is part of the same process.

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Literature, as ordinarily conceived, is so small and specialized a part of one's reading that we forget how much of our total verbal experience is untouched by it. For many a student in grade 8 whose verbal experience is centred on television, The Lady of the Lake may be a pretty meaningless collection of words, something that those unaccountable adults, for whatever reasons of their own, think he should read. The way out of this is not to try to choose the kind of literature that can compete with the appeal of television—no such literature exists. But the teacher should understand that teaching literature means dealing with the total verbal experience of students. The points of contact between literary and subliterary experiences should be kept in mind; obviously the same forms of comedy and romance and irony that appear in literature also turn up in television drama or rock ballads. I am not saying that a teacher should be constantly pointing such resemblances out, only that they are occasionally useful. Far more important, however, is the fact that students are being steadily got at by a rival mythology determined to capture their imaginations for its own purposes, armed with far more skill, authority, and prestige than any teacher has. This is why I think students should be encouraged to become aware of the extent to which they are being conditioned by the mass media, as a central part of their literary training. Some of them have reacted with a general hatred and contempt for everything their society produces, but that, of course, is quite as dependent on conditioned reflex as anything it revolts against. Besides, it does not distinguish between genuine and false forms of social mythology. What is absurd about growing up absurd is adjustment mythology, not society itself. If I am asked how we should teach, therefore, I should begin by saying that the sense of urgent necessity about learning to read and write should never drop out of the teaching of literature, at any stage. We cannot take any part in a society as verbal as ours without knowing how to read and write: but, unless we also learn to read continuously, selectively, and critically, and to write articulately, we can never take any free or independent part in that society. As we gradually become more aware that what we do and believe is the product of a social vision, we can see that this social vision is a product of the imagination. As such, it has been developed by our imaginative experience. Some of this has been formed by literature, but by far the greater part of it has been formed on the subliterary level of mass media and the like. The social importance of literature, in this context, is that it helps us to become aware of the extent

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to which we are acting out a social mythology. Part of this awareness is in realizing that there is a good deal of it that we don't really believe or respect, but are merely following out of habit and laziness. When Flaubert wrote Bouvard and Pecuchet, an account of two clicheridden French bourgeois, he also drew up a "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas" to indicate the limitations of their culture. The dictionary arrangement of course conceals the fact that the accepted ideas form a mythology. Madame Bovary is much clearer on this point: it shows how Emma Bovary's life was dominated by the shoddy construct that her imagination had built, mainly out of subliterary sources. The people who want to censor everything have got one thing right: they do see that what addresses our imaginations does influence our lives, for good or for evil. But, apart from being mistaken in their tactics, they are nearly always on the side of bad social mythology rather than of genuine literature, and consequently it is genuine literature that they usually want most of all to attack. II Theory into Practice: Pursuing Hidden Likenesses

Whenever we read anything, whatever it is, we find our attention going in two directions at once. One direction is centrifugal, where we are associating each word we read with our memory of what it conventionally means. We may hardly realize we are doing this, but if we are reading something in a language we barely know, so that we have to look up a word every so often, we soon become aware of how important this direction is. I call it centrifugal because it moves outside what we are reading into our memories, or, if we don't know the word, into dictionaries. At the same time there is a direction of attention going the other way, centripetally, where we are fitting the words in what we are reading together. When Sandburg writes The fog comes on little cat feet [Fog, 11.1-2]

we remember what a cat is and what feet are, but we also have to know why these words are brought into a poem about a fog. Meaning is derived from context. The context of the dictionary meaning of "cat" is different from the context in Sandburg's poem, but the meaning of "cat"

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in that poem is at the point of intersection, so to speak, of the two contexts. Now, suppose we are reading something specifically for imaginative pleasure, as a poem or story or the like. That means that what we are reading has a special context outside it called, however vaguely, literature. What we are reading is like other "literary" things we have read. I gave an example of this a while ago, when we found elements in a Californian Indian story that reminded us of similar things in Greek stories. Whenever we find something in one piece of literature that reminds us irresistibly of something in another piece of literature, we have found what we have been calling an archetype. If a reader who knows very little English has to look up "cat" and "feet" in Sandburg's poem, he will have two useful words in expanding his mastery of the language in general. Similarly, whenever we pursue the likenesses in what we are reading, we are beginning to expand our mastery and knowledge of literature. That is, perhaps, the most distinctive feature of the present programme: that students should be encouraged to pursue the resemblances in what they read. It may be thought that this practice will require a great deal of erudition. But it should be realized, first of all, that what the teacher of literature is concerned with is the total verbal experience of his students. That includes conversation with families and classmates, movies and television, comic books and advertising. For all important archetypes, a teacher can start wherever his students are, and any question of the "What does this remind you of?" type will soon produce all the examples he can handle for some time. In Wish and Nightmare there is a telling of the Jack-the-giant-killer story. If we try this out on a junior high school class (as teachers have done: this is not simply theory), somebody may be reminded of the David and Goliath story in the Bible or the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus in Homer. But there will also be a flood of analogies from other sources that show how archetypes are not at all confined to what we normally think of as literature. Sergeant York, up against a German platoon. Truman winning an election over Dewey after all the polls and news commentators had decided that it was in the bag for Dewey. Clark Kent turning into Superman. Aspirin defeating Headache in a television commercial. The wise teacher will not reject these as not being literary. They are literary enough to address the imagination, and they are part of the student's total verbal experience. The next question could be: Why is the audience's sympathy usually

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with Jack rather than the giant? Again there will be no lack of answers. People like to see the little guy win. People like to see brains beat muscles. It's more unexpected and exciting to see the little fellow come on top. Nobody likes bullies. Such answers are not just reflections about life: they are answers that take us deep into the structure of comedy and romance. We notice that several of the examples given above illustrate some aspects of the archetypes and not others. Some suggestions may be too far away to be very useful, because in literature there is an immense amount of general and vague resemblance. The teacher's experience and guidance come into play in emphasizing the examples that illustrate rather than digress. In the same book there is a story of "Ashpet," or Cinderella. Some students may suggest that Cinderella and Jack are parallel, that Cinderella is really a female Jack. But with a little more discussion it will become clear that the two stories are quite distinct in both structure and feeling, though, of course, they are related within the general area of comic romance. Discovering analogies is fun, but discovering differences provides direction. Accepting the student's verbal experience as it is is the first step in transforming the teacher-student relationship into a common participation in the subject. Of all the perverted adjustment myths dealt with above, one of the most pervasive is the myth which rationalizes the subordinating of some group of people in society. In Victorian times, for example, women were made the focus of certain anxieties. Their sensibilities, which were assumed to be exceedingly delicate, formed an imaginary criterion for society's constant dread of an unregulated sexual instinct, and for the enforcing of social standards connected with that dread, such as those which were assumed in the censorship of books. We remember Podsnap in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and his appeal to the blushing cheeks of the young person. Podsnap was not alone: even Tennyson could be seriously praised for never having written a line that would distress a sensitive female. This was part of a social code of allegedly sheltering and protecting the delicate sex from the rougher facts of life, in the middle class at any rate. But on the excuse of protecting womanhood, women were deprived of equal participation in society, not allowed to vote, or even to own property after they were married. We may look also at the way that blacks used to be treated in a good deal of popular white literature, as comic-strip characters who were generally good-natured and lovable, but not very strong on intellect. The implication of such

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writing was that, blacks being naturally just happy children, they wouldn't worry too much about being excluded from full participation in society. It looks as though the instinct to patronize and the instinct to exploit are rather closely related. This is not hard to see in, for instance, the African and Asian colonies developed by Western powers during the nineteenth century: it has taken a little longer to understand how disastrous the working of such complacent mythologies in our own society can be. It is most important to realize that we have been applying a very similar mythology to young people for the last three or four generations at least, and that the results have been equally explosive. The motive has been not so much exploitation as the dramatizing of an aspect of the social mythology referred to above. We remember that that mythology contained a pastoral, or primal-Paradise, myth. When people become adults, old enough to vote and hold jobs, they become involved in a social rat race, full of cares and worries and responsibilities. When they look back to their childhood, they reconstruct it as a world which was happier because it had less responsibility. Children, then, should be protected from the adult world as long as possible: why make them old before their time? School is there to keep them off the streets not only physically but mentally: the young should be in a special preserved world, like the Garden of Eden before the fall. Most innocent worlds, including the Garden of Eden, are presexual worlds, hence books for younger people, especially schoolbooks, have to be ruthlessly, even hysterically, censored to remove any trace of a specific reference to the way that human life keeps going. Nobody is fool enough actually to believe that a young person's life is sexless, but books for the young have for a long time been expurgated as though this were true, in order to preserve the myth for the reassurance of adults. Genuine Literature for Real People

"Adolescence," in short, is not really a process that young people must all go through. A great deal of it is really a deliberate creation of adult social anxieties. In order to maintain the adult dream of a happy clean world of fun-loving middle-class children, we have to assume that a person takes twenty-odd years to grow into a genuine human being. During this period, everything he is "not ready for" should be kept from him, which in practice tends to mean that all genuine education should be postponed as long as possible, as explained above. Whatever is so-

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daily undesirable, such as violence, is also to be kept from him, on the theory, if that is the word, that if he never reads about violence it cannot occur to him to become violent. Sex and violence, therefore, come to be associated with adult books, the books one reads outside of school or after one has finished school, which is a major reason why the popular taste in reading, and entertainment generally, whether adolescent or adult, is so prurient and sadistic. I think a little more emphasis on genuine literature in school might make this tendency less automatic. It is, of course, quite as easy for young people as it has been for women and blacks to see through the trick. They realize that what all the coddling and permissiveness really means is exclusion from serious social issues, and from any real participation in society. What is important is not so much to keep them in school as to keep them off the labour market. An overproductive economy would like to turn all children, as it would like to turn all women, into full-time consumers. And no matter how much "citizenship" young people may study, or how much they may learn about democratic processes, the fundamentally antidemocratic attitude of protection which surrounds them from infancy nullifies all this, and throws them on the world expecting more protection. This issue, which has always been serious, has reached a crisis with the coming of television. In an age of electronic media it is no use going on with the pretence that young people in their teens can be kept in a world by themselves. As we have already seen during the past few years, people who have no social function quickly get bored, and boredom leads to smashing things. Although the literature programme is addressed to a specific age level, and uses material appropriate to that level, it does not condescend to its readers. There is no feeling of "this is all you are ready for at present" hanging around it. This programme covers the same area that adult literature covers, including the tragic and the ironic, not a special preserve fenced off within it. There are also stories by and about black and Indian groups indicating that American society and middle-class white American society are not the same thing. What the young student is "not ready for" may be more complex, like the later novels of Henry James or the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but it is not different in kind. Whatever else he reads, at the same time or later, can be seen to be continuous with what is presented to him here. Anyone, at any time of life, may become demoralized by the sense that the world is very different from what he had been told it was. But no teacher wants to feel involved in a process of

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systematically lying to young people. And while no book can be ideal, even for a single reader, I think that the books in this programme are ones that students themselves will respond to eagerly. Some people may object to exposing "our children" to so many serious, even tragic and ironic, themes, and some may believe that children should be taught, in effect, nothing except what they cannot help discovering for themselves, hence such material as these books present is fantastically difficult. The difficulty is for them, not the students, and consists of panic and mental block, not of anything actually in the books. The Authority of the Subject

The title of a book in the programme already available is Wish and Nightmare. The title is significant in itself of the change which has come over social assumptions in the last generation. We understand better now how much "nightmare" comes into life at every age. Nightmares enter the life of the youngest child, to such an extent that it is no good trying to remove them from his experience, for nightmare is not something presented to us from outside: it is something that our own minds construct. The sound of children at play is often regarded, by those bemused with the paradisal myth of childhood, as the sound of the purest and most innocent happiness, but anyone who listens carefully to it, and to the amount of hysteria and aggression in it, can see that the facts of life are otherwise. The way to deal with nightmare, educationally, is not to pretend that it is not or need not be there, or, as in some of the more brutal movies and thrillers, to force it on us on the pretext that "society is involved with it," but to present it in its real context, the context of irony, where it can be seen with detachment, as the vision we must have of the world that we don't want. As for "wish," we have also discovered that that is a far more powerful element in life than we used to think. Wishing used to be thought of as a natural but helpless reaction against "reality," including in that term both the objective world of nature and certain social conditions that men have made themselves. But clearly anything that men have made can be unmade by other men, and in the last few years there has been a dramatic development of the sense that wishing can be a concrete and revolutionary force: that we don't have to live with the mistakes of the past if we don't want to. Again, this feeling need not take the form of a querulous pseudoradical demand for everything to be much better right

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away, or some vague hope that an inspired political leader will somehow put everything right, but should be studied in its proper context, the context of comedy, or the vision of how desire is not always frustrated by reality, but is sometimes strong enough to transform reality, and force things to turn out better than habit and inertia had expected. If we ask whom we should teach, then, the beginning of the answer is that we teach mainly young people, but we teach them as people and not as a special kind of people. Still less do we teach them as half-developed people who must be kept away from what real people, that is, adults, talk about. This sounds obvious to the verge of being offensive, but the implications of the attitude go a little farther. The emphasis on teaching by personal relationships has much that is good in it, along with much that is merely addled, if well-meaning. While many things can bring teacher and students together personally, only one thing can ever equalize them, and that is the authority of the subject being taught. In relation to the subject being taught the teacher is also a student, and so the difference between teacher and students is at a minimum. The role of teacher vis-a-vis the students has its embarrassing aspects for both, and every genuine moment of insight in a classroom carries with it a sense of momentary relief from that embarrassment. When either teacher or students dominate a classroom, there are, of course, likely to be very few such moments. When they do occur, they are moments when the one real authority in the classroom is supreme over both, and everyone is united in the vision of its power. The Reality of Metaphor

The student of literature is continually being brought back to the passage in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream in which Duke Theseus classifies poets with lunatics and lovers as being "of imagination all compact" [5.1.7-8]. These three groups are, in the first place, the only people who can take metaphor seriously. The "lunatic" is normally obsessed by some kind of identification, usually of himself with something or someone else; lovers desire, in Sir Thomas Browne's phrase, "to be truly each other,"6 and poets assert, or seem to be asserting, like Lady Lowzen in Wallace Stevens's poem Oak Leaves Are Hands, that what is is other things. We notice that this progression moves from the negative through the playful to the positive. The same thing is true of another characteris-

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tic of these three groups: that they seem to be unable to distinguish fiction from fact. The lunatic, that is, anyone so disturbed mentally or emotionally that he needs help in managing his own affairs, is the prisoner of his own fictions, which he insists on substituting for the world he is in. The fiction need not be his own creation: anyone who believed advertising literally, for example, would be for all practical purposes a lunatic. Whenever a social mythology is accepted as something beyond criticism, it becomes a fiction or construct taken as fact, and so creates a form of social neurosis. The neurosis may be mild, as it is when criticism and dissent are still tolerated, or acute, as it is when they are suppressed. Here again, the confusion between fiction and fact is negative: one is unable to recognize either, or any distinction between them. We move into a more playful area with the lover: if he asserts that he loves the most wonderful girl in the world, we recognize that some illusions are not only more important than some realities, but may also be truer in the context of personal truth. When the poet presents us with a work of fiction, and insists, again, that if not literal fact it is still truer than fact, he is giving us the positive side of the identifying of the two. He also raises a good many questions that are harder to answer than they look. The traditional, common-sense view is that literature is an imitation of life, or reality, or nature, or whatever we may think of as outside it, and owes what truth it has to its relation to whatever is not literature. The reversed thesis of Oscar Wilde's Decay of Lying, that life imitates literature, and is not real life unless it resembles a literary form, is more recent, but is something much more than just the clever paradox it seems to be. We notice, for example, that we are continually playing roles in society. We are reading by ourselves, let us say: a friend comes in to talk to us, and we instantly throw ourselves into the social role suggested by his presence. Or we decide to maintain a certain public attitude, say in politics, and find that everything we say, or even believe, is being carefully selected by ourselves to fit the role demanded by that attitude. Some psychologists call this roleplaying aspect of ourselves a persona or mask. But, as the soliloquies of Hamlet remind us, we dramatize ourselves to ourselves, and the mask never really comes off. At present there is a great vogue for "unstructured" personal encounters in which it is believed that we can get past the persona to our "real" attitudes. But there are no real attitudes of this kind: there is never anything under a persona except another

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persona. It follows that we spend our entire lives playing roles, and are never in any situation which is not to some degree a structured and dramatic situation. The feeling that there is a "real" self underneath the persona is a tribute to something important, however. It is a part of sanity to be aware that we are playing roles, and a part of our larger freedom to understand what shape those roles have, and why we are adopting them. Looking over some of the books I have been reading recently, I find a book on existential philosophy that said, in effect, "the human situation is tragic," a book on religion (by Kierkegaard) that said, in effect, "God is ironic," and a book on Marxism that said, in effect, "the historical process is a romantic comedy." It is clear that the study of literature has a good deal of usefulness in clarifying such attitudes: none of the authors seemed to realize that his argument was also a literary fiction. Poets are often more versatile. Socrates devoted his life mainly to ironic roles, and Byron to romantic ones, yet Byron wrote satire and Socrates fought with great courage in battle: they were not prisoners of their roles. The fallacy about the "real self" is of a different kind, and important for our conception of education. Most of us are brought up in a halfbaked Rousseauism which makes the individual prior to society. On this theory, the more we explore the hidden or suppressed parts of ourselves, the deeper we are getting into the individual, and the closer we come to the real core of him. But clearly we belong socially before we are individually: if we are born twentieth-century middle-class white Americans, for example, that context is given us long before birth. Below the social comes the generic, what we share with all other human beings. If I know the intimate details of another's sex life, I know only something that is generic about him; if I glimpse his suppressed resentments and aggressions, I see only the aspect of him that can become part of a mob. Individuality is the visible part of the iceberg, the last part of ourselves to be achieved. Our opinions on poetry, music, religion, politics; our relations with one another that deserve the names of friendship or love— these are the things that are individual about us. Individuality, which is the condition of freedom, is never achieved without some genuine form of education. There are of course many forms of that outside the schools, but still there is infinitely more reality, and infinitely more to be discovered about our real selves, in encounter groups with Shakespeare or Milton or Tolstoy than merely with one another.

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Relevance to What? What I have been trying to explain is, to use a vulgarized word in what for me is something close to its proper sense, the "relevance" of teaching literature. Relevance implies a relation to something else, but the question of what relevance is relevant to is often not raised. It seems to me obvious that any subject taught and studied is a part of the whole of human life, and its relevance is to that wholeness. There is no such thing as inherent or built-in relevance; no subject is relevant in itself, because every field of knowledge is equally the centre of all knowledge. Relevance is a quality which teachers and students alike bring to a subject of study, and it consists in a vision of the human possibilities connected with that subject. Some subjects, such as car-driving, are obviously and immediately useful; for those that are not, such as the arts and sciences, the question of usefulness moves from an actual into a potential world. They are useful for living a genuinely human life, but of course one can neither prove that a genuinely human life is better than other kinds, or that a certain programme of study will necessarily enable one to live it. Teaching is not magic, and it would be a very impudent or self-deceived charlatan who would assert that if we only teach literature properly, certain social benefits are bound to follow. Still, a sense of the worthwhileness of what he is doing is what keeps a teacher going, and surely that sense should be made as specific as possible. If he teaches science, he is trying also to teach intellectual honesty, accuracy, the importance of relying on evidence rather than authority, and the courage to face results that may be negative or unwelcome. If he teaches history, he is trying also to teach the dimension of consciousness that only the sense of continuity with the past can give, the absence of which makes society as senile as loss of memory does the individual. If he is teaching literature, he is trying also to teach the ability to be aware of one's imaginative social vision, and so to escape the prison of unconscious social conditioning. Whatever he is teaching, he is teaching some aspect of the freedom of man. I have put so much emphasis on the social function of literature because, in my experience, it is very little understood. In an age when silliness, or, more politely, absurdity, is sometimes thought to be an attribute of genuine vision, it is not surprising to hear some people say that all teaching of literature is an "Establishment's" effort to impose a

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fool's paradise of imaginary values on the rest of society. One may see this to be nonsense and still not be able to formulate a social role for literature beyond the orbit of refined leisure-class amusement. But even if we do recognize its social role, we know that the real answer to any question about why we teach it does not lie in its relevance, or its social by-products. Some subjects, like car-driving again, are a means to an end; the arts and sciences are not. Studying them is a process which is its own end, and exists for its own sake. Its products are incidental, and the usefulness of those products does not represent the value of the process, which is something quite apart from them. In literature there is much to admire, but the end of literary study is not admiration of something remote, but the recognition that it corresponds to something within ourselves. Admiration is thus succeeded by possession, as we make what we read part of our own vision, and understand something of its function in shaping that vision. So far, it is true that education has been for the sake of the student: one wants literature to be something he can appropriate, and its study a process of transferring its power of vision to him. It is often said that there is no disinterested learning process for its own sake; that every such process is conditioned by the society it is in. Hence all scholarship is in a sense political: if it claims to be disinterested, it is really only defending the status quo. This is another way of saying that all our beliefs and actions take shape around a social vision constructed by the imagination. The important thing is to realize that no social vision is ever definitive; there is always more outside it. The circle of stories (or ocean of story, as it is called in India) is there to keep us continually expanding and reshaping that vision. It exists for us; it exists for itself; perhaps we may even feel, for a few moments in our lives, that it really is ourselves on an infinite plane. Definitions Ritual is a special human action maintaining rapport with the natural cycle. Symbol is a unit of poetic meaning. Myth unites ritual Qand symbol, giving action to thought and meaning to action. Mythology is a set of myths that take root in a particular society. TheMythology is a set of myths that take root in a particular society. The most fully developed mythologies form an imaginative encyclopedia providing answers to questions of the deepest concern to society.

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The narrative patterns of literature represent the absorption of ritual action into literature. The symbols of literature recurring in different works of literature are called archetypes. Literature shows various degrees of displacement of myths in the direction of the plausible, the moral, or the "real." Literature is the total body of stories and symbols that provides hypotheses or models of human behaviour and experience. The central story of all literature is the loss and regaining of identity.

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Wright Report (I) 18 March 1972

From the "Letters to the editor" section of the Globe and Mail, 18 March 1972, 6. Frye sent the letter to the Toronto Star, the Globe, and the University of Toronto Bulletin, and it was published in the two latter. Typescript is in NFF, 1988, box 12, file g9. The Wright Commission was the Commission on PostSecondary Education in Ontario, appointed in April 1969 under the direction of Douglas T. Wright (chair of the Ontario government's Committee on University Affairs, 1967-72), to consider the future pattern ofpostsecondary education in the province. In its final report, given on 20 December 1972, the commission stressed the need for alternatives to conventional postsecondary education, such as manpower programmes, an open college, small charter colleges, and continuing education for employees, professionals, and part-time students. The report was widely debated in the Bulletin between 25 February and 13 March, and only pushed from the first pages by the eruption of the Robarts Library protest and occupation of the Senate chambers on 10 March.

In attempting to read the Draft Report of the Wright Commission, I found myself baffled so often by the prose of its Aims and Objectives section that I finally started reading it at the other end. There I discovered, on the last page, that for teaching in universities, one hour of contact with students would require two hours of preparation, hence a teaching schedule of thirteen hours a week would give one a thirty-ninehour week. As this two hours of preparation is evidently intended to include marking and interviews as well, that leaves about one hour of preparation for each hour of lecturing. For the information of the commission, it takes eight to ten hours a week for every hour in the classroom, if that hour is to be of any conceiv-

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able use to students. A good deal of this time would be spent in what the commission calls research, and which it evidently regards as something different from working on one's teaching. I have never found, in more than thirty years of teaching and writing, that I could separate the two activities. Students can read: what is the point of lecturing to them at all unless one has something to give them that they can't get, or easily get, in books? This point has, with a great many others, been dealt with in the University of Toronto Faculty Association brief.1 But it seemed to me to provide a central clue to the thinking, if that is the word, that underlies the draft report. Of course it is possible, in teaching such a subject as English literature, to pick out a good secondary source and memorize enough of it in an hour to get through another hour talking about it. That is sometimes done by overworked junior instructors or uninterested older ones, but if persisted in it becomes dishonest. But, of course, it is emphatically not elitist: it would reduce all university teaching to the level of an eighteenth-century dame school. Consequently, it appears, it would fit very well into the Aims and Objectives of this commission. It is a historic moment when a report on education concludes by taking an occasional abuse or corruption of the teaching practice in universities and proposes to make it the norm of procedure. That is why I think this casual footnote in the report so crucial: if the commission can get the central fact of university procedure so wrong, how can we believe or trust anything else it says?

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Wright Report (II) 30 March 1972

A further letter to the editor in the Globe and Mail, 30 March 1972, 6. Typescript is in NFF, 1988, box 12, file $9. Here Frye responds to correspondent J.E. Orion, who in his letter published 25 March had complained that Frye in his previous letter was quibbling over footnotes and style rather than challenging the substance of the report. He added that Frye's major point "arises out of his admittedly having skipped from page 14 to page 112."

I should perhaps comment on J.E. Orton's letter (March 25) about my views on the Wright Commission Report, because I should not have implied that I had not carefully read the entire report, and if I am misunderstood on this point it is my own fault. Again, when I spoke of being baffled by the prose of its aims and objectives, I was not taking a narrow view of its style, but confused by what seemed to me very material inconsistencies in the argument, especially about the matter of "accessibility." The reason why I focused on the final page, and its footnote to the effect that thirteen hours teaching a week plus two hours preparation for each equals a working week of thirty-nine hours, was that when I first read it I could hardly believe my eyes. It was only a study of the U of T Faculty Association brief, which made a full analysis of the whole report, that convinced me that what seemed to be there really was there, at least in the view of some of my colleagues. At that point I began to feel, very reluctantly, that the report was essentially a hatchet-job on the universities, so far as it was concerned with them. However, when Mr. Orton urges his readers not to accept anyone's authority but to read the report and judge for themselves, he is saying something that I heartily endorse.

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Universities and the Deluge of Cant 27 May 1972

Convocation address to engineering students, University of Waterloo, on the occasion of Frye's receiving an honorary Doctorate of Letters. From the clean typescript in NFF, 1988, box 4, file o (copy in file p). First published, with a few typographical errors, in University of Waterloo Gazette, 12 (14 June 1972): 2. A slightly abridged version appeared in the Globe and Mail, 4 July 1972,7; the Strand, September 1972, 3; and other newspapers. Reprinted as "Substitutes for Thinking" in Technocracy Digest, no. 226 (November 1972): 8-9, from the Vancouver Sun. Reprinted from an earlier typescript in Frye's files in RW, 117-21. First of all, I want to thank the Senate of the University of Waterloo and express my gratitude and appreciation to them for the honour that has been done me. Next, I want to congratulate the graduating students in front of me on having completed their course. It is customary to say these things, but I am saying them also because I want to say them. To complete a university course is not just an intellectual feat, but a moral one as well. Ever since I began teaching I have been impressed by the degree of courage and self-control that it takes to get through university. There is always a powerful anti-intellectual bloc in society, and in every generation it thinks up a new way of rationalizing its hatred of the intelligence. I have taught through the Depression, the Second World War, the cold war, and the 19605. In the Depression we were told that students who stayed in college instead of grabbing whatever jobs there were available were spoiled children. In the War we were told that universities ought to close up and not distract the few students left in them from the war effort. In the years after the atom bomb, we were told that there was no

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point in studying when we were all going to be blown up anyway. In the 19605 we were told that universities were the bastions of an "Establishment," and that they condition students in habits of authoritarianism. I have naturally never had the slightest use for any of this guff, but I have acquired a great deal of respect for the students who, in each generation, ignored it and went on with their studies. What I have just called guff could be called by a good many other words of one syllable, but one of the few that I can use on this platform is the word "cant." This word is out of fashion now, I suppose because the thing it describes is so much in fashion. Cant means the substitutes for thinking that are thrown up by the hypocritical, the malicious, the stupid, and (much the largest group) the self-deceived. At present, a deluge of cant is falling on the universities, because we're in a depression again, and universities are expensive. In boom times, universities had to expand; now there is a great panic about economy and cutting budgets. The trouble with panicky decisions is that a department, for example, can be wrecked within a year in a way that may take twenty years to rebuild. I saw this happen in the Depression, and I am seeing it happen again now. As graduates, it is your duty and your social responsibility to remain connected with and interested in the University of Waterloo, and to do your best to defend it. The boom cycle didn't last, and it is possible that the bust cycle won't last either, but however long it lasts, the university will be desperately in need of intelligent friends. And never underestimate the power of an alumnus. During the last few years there has been a good deal of social unrest, demonstrations and confrontations and riots and sit-ins, largely aimed at the university, though with wider social goals beyond. About this I can say only what those engaged in such activities have been increasingly saying themselves. After several years of demonstrating against the entrenched powers of society, the social will to resist those powers is at an all-time low. The war in Vietnam escalates, because those who do the escalating know that the domestic resistance to their measures, which looked formidable a few years ago, is now practically ineffective. The reason is not far to seek. Demonstrations and the like are the same kind of thing that this convocation is. That is, they are rituals expressing a belief in certain ideals, and they have, or can have, a great deal of meaning for those who participate in them. But rituals don't do anything: you can no more bring about permanent social change by demonstrating than you can bring about the end of the world by attending church.

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The moral of this is that there is no substitute for education. A citizen's primary duty, I should think, is to try to know what should be changed in his society and what conserved. The operative word here is "know." Demonstrations were often accompanied by the belief that somehow or other they were "relevant" to one's social life in a way that education was not. But when it comes to knowing what should be changed and what conserved, nothing is "relevant" except education. Marxism, the most radical movement of our time, adopts the axiom that it is more important to change the world than to study it. But one has to study the world before one knows how to change it or in what direction to change it. Marx himself was quite clear on this point, which is why his most important book is a heavily documented and technical study of the capitalism he was trying to destroy. I think one important motive behind the demonstrations was a desire to make social authority define itself, so that those who wanted to fight it could understand what they were fighting, without the labour of studying or thinking. Demonstrations are rituals, I said: ritual is often close to magic, and magic has a lot to do with calling evil spirits by the right names, and so compelling them to do what they are told. But society hasn't any authority that can take shape in this way. Demonstrations may run up against the police, but police don't represent real authority: they represent, in this context, only the automatic counter-action that's built into every society. The hysterical abuse of the police is caused not by what they are or do but by what they aren't and can't do. Calling them fascist pigs means really that the magic in the ritual has failed: the conjured-up devil still isn't there. There is only one real authority in society, and that is the authority of the arts and sciences, the authority of logical reasoning, uncooked evidence, repeatable experiments, verifiable scholarship, precise and disciplined creative imagination. This authority is in the university, though not in the university as an institution. Some of the cant of our time asserts that destroying universities would make the arts and sciences more accessible to society. That's like arguing that you can liberate a man's immortal soul by murdering him. When we distinguish liberal from professional education, we are using a distinction that made sense in terms of the social conditions of a hundred years ago. It no longer makes much sense. Liberal and professional education are two aspects of the same thing. Engineers, along with architects and town planners, are deeply involved with the physical appearance of society. And the briefest glance at our society shows a

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stupefying hideousness and squalor, with the great octopus sprawl of streets and highways and buildings swallowing all the fertility of the nature around us. When this process is applied to the natural environment, we call it pollution: when it is applied to the human environment, we call it development. But whatever we call it, something is badly wrong with the creative power of the society that has produced it. If you are to be responsible engineers, you need a sensitivity to standards of beauty and proportion. Again, I said that it was important to know what to conserve as well as what to change. When one looks at a European city, one usually sees that the problem of how to live with one's history has been met with some intelligence and understanding. But in, say, Toronto, most of the buildings that represent the history of the city seem to be thought of only as possible obstacles to making a fast buck. If you are to be responsible engineers, you need a sensitivity to history. Part of your education has been technical and professional, but the part that really engages you as a concerned citizen in your society has been a liberal education. Which brings me back to the beginning: university education is not wholly intellectual, not wholly even social, but is moral as well. To fail an examination is merely not meeting a standard that is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, and so that kind of failure has no relation to personal life. Some people, again, drop out of university, or, increasingly nowadays, do not even attend it, because they can't fit it into their conception of society and the role they want to play in it. That is a matter of choice, and choice has to be respected even when it is wrong, as it certainly often is. But not every drop-out is a cop-out, by any means. There remains a failure which really is a failure because it's a moral failure. This is the failure to understand the importance of the standards of reason, experiment, evidence, and imagination that are represented by the arts and sciences. To avoid this, one should follow the advice that Samuel Johnson gave to Boswell: "Clear your mind of cant."1 Don't speak of the university as an "ivory tower": that's a cant phrase used by people whose only feeling about the university is one of vague resentment. Don't use words like "elitist": that's a cant word used by people who think democracy ought to be some kind of mob rule. In a healthy democracy everybody would have his own social function, and so everybody would belong to some kind of elite. Don't use words like "establishment" as though they were concrete nouns, when they are the haziest of abstractions. Cant is a verbal form of drug culture, and taking to it can blunt the moral sense

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much more quickly than pot. I suppose there is no more violence or self-indulgence in the world now than there ever was, in proportion to the population, but there was never a time when violence and selfindulgence were easier to rationalize. And it is cant that does the rationalizing, which makes it even worse than anything it tries to justify. I hope it will not seem an anti-climax, much less an insult, if I end by congratulating you on being so well on the way to becoming respectable people. I don't mean that you are about to fall into a certain middle-class stereotype. Nor do I mean that you will make more money than some other people. I mean only that you are entering on a career which has certain standards and ideals bound up with it. If those standards and ideals are met, your profession commands respect and ought to be respected. You have got over the first, and quite possibly the most difficult, stage of maintaining those standards and ideals. And so it is respect that I now offer you, along with my hopes and best wishes for the future.

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The Critic and the Writer iJune 1972

Address at the meeting of the Learned Societies at McGill University, when Frye took part in a symposium on "The Critic and Teacher" organized jointly by the Humanities Association of Canada and the Association of College and University Teachers of English. The talk was broadcast on CBC's "Ideas" as part of the series "The Writer in Canada" on 27 June 1972. Text taken from a typescript in NFF, 1988, box 4, file c\ made by Robert D. Denham from the CBC tape, and lightly edited to remove oral characteristics. Published in Northrop Frye Newsletter, 4, no. i (Winter 1991-92); 3-7. Some time ago when I was in Oxford, I thought that a place as old as this ought to have some particular kind of genius loci, that there should be something more or less in the key of Oxford which would indicate the quality of work that had been produced there. I soon realized that Oxford people are extremely proud of their record of eccentric bachelors, and that when one examines the great imaginative productions of Oxford, such works as The Anatomy of Melancholy and Alice in Wonderland, one sees exactly this kind of thing, that is, a hyperlogical fantasy which teeters on the brink of normal mental processes. That, of course, throws a flood of light on a number of other Oxford geniuses, such as Pater and Hopkins. And when I read in Newman's Apologia that so-and-so taught him the doctrine of the apostolic succession in the course of a walk around the Christ Church meadows,11 mean no disrespect to the doctrine of apostolic succession when I say that this seems to be in exactly the key of slightly nutty fantasy which has been the characteristic of Oxford from time immemorial, and which was still going on when I was

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there as a student in the kind of work associated with C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Tolkien. So I naturally raised with myself the question of whether there was a similar genius loci in the place where I had grown up. When I came to Victoria College I had three people for teachers, and what I would call to your attention is the utter impossibility of finding three teachers of such characteristics in any other community than that of a Canadian university. There was, in the first place, Pelham Edgar, who at first glance was everything that was upper middle class and Anglophile and vertical mosaic. Only when one got to know him better did one realize that he had got his impressive Christian name from the constituency that had elected his father to Parliament, that he didn't go to England until he was nearly forty, and that he had done a quite conventional Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, on the imagery of Shelley, of the type that would now be done by a computer. Now with this oddly Canadian melange, it's not surprising that his main interests were, first of all, Henry James, with his treatment of the Atlantic Ocean schizophrenia, and, secondly, contemporary Canadian literature. He had begun as a colleague of Stephen Leacock, he brought Pratt to Victoria, and he founded societies devoted to the supporting of authors. Then there was Ned Pratt, who had come to Victoria as a church student headed for the ministry, which again exhibits that curious Canadian affinity between the ministry and an interest in literature. At the same time, Pratt absorbed the contemporary outlook of his generation in Canada that made theology a kind of benevolent commentary on Darwin's Origin of Species. And his interest in the sciences sent him for a time into a brief and ill-advised career in psychology, or at least into what the University of Toronto at that time assumed to be psychology. Thirdly, there was Professor John Robins, who was perhaps the most significantly Canadian of the three. He was of working-class origin. He had left school at the age of twelve to go to work, and it was from there that he began to earn the qualifications for university teaching, getting his Ph.D. at the age of forty-three. He was interested in the ballad and in folk tales and in popular literature. I learned from him the futility of being a social snob in the study of literature, and something of the relevance of primitive and popular literature to literature as a whole. Perhaps without his influence I would not have hit on, for whatever it's worth, the conception of archetypes in literature, which is really an

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application to literature in general of the work done by students of folk tales on themes and motifs. I was told in the summer of 1937 that Roy Daniells was leaving for Winnipeg and that the second-year Honour Course in the sixteenth century, the third-year Honour Course in Milton and the seventeenth century, and the fourth-year Honour Course in nineteenth-century thought had to be taught by me in September. So I got married and taught them. The chancellor gently cautioned me against rushing into marriage so early—after all I was only twenty-five—but if I was set on it, the college would raise my salary for the year from $1200 to $1500. And after another year at Oxford I came back to Victoria in the September of 1939- The colleague who taught the Restoration and the eighteenth century joined up the first day of the war, so I had that too. The Toronto system was a historical system, but it was a historical system which took account of the history of literature itself. It was not a system which ignored the history of literature for a kind of history outside literature, which was perhaps not history either. I'll give you an example of what I mean. Many years later I heard a lecture by a very famous authority on Shakespeare which was entitled "William Shakespeare." The subject of the lecture was that it could now be regarded as practically certain that John Shakespeare, the poet's father, was the possessor of an unauthorized dunghill at Stratford from such a date to such a date. Now I will not bore you with the obvious comments that I and my contemporaries made about that lecture, but I have always kept in my mind the danger of a kind of historicism that, so to speak, gets stuck in a dunghill. And the history of literature itself, the things that happen, the literary conventions, the literary genres, the development of ideas and images down the centuries, with one poet picking up themes from his predecessors, like a torch at a relay race, has always seemed to me one of the liveliest and most intellectually engaging of all disciplines. The students submitted to my ministrations with great patience. It may have been partly the Scottish streak in the Canadian ancestry that gave them a kind of impersonal respect for education as such. It seems to me that if there is a general social respect for education, any educational system will work. If there is not, no educational system will work. The Honour Course system assumed that the student was to be taught English literature. Again, I have always tended to distrust conceptions of teaching which regarded it as a personal encounter between teacher and taught. It seems to me that the authority of the subject being taught is

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supreme over both teacher and student. In the classroom, as in the church, there is only one real presence, and both the teacher and the students are merely shadows of it. At any rate, as John Stuart Mill said of his education, anybody who is not required to do more than he can never does all that he can.2 At the same time I was working on a book on the prophecies of William Blake, a subject to which I had been introduced by Pelham Edgar as an undergraduate. At that time the Eliot-Pound-T.E. Hulme machine was going full blast and nobody could have held my full attention, as a subject for research, except a writer who was the exact opposite of everything that T.S. Eliot said that he was. That is, the only person I could work on would have to be a Nonconformist in religion, a Romantic in literature, and at least a left-wing liberal in politics. Those were of course the kinds of preferences which were inevitable to the kind of WASP upbringing in Canada which I have had. I'm always very proud of the fact that I was brought up as a WASP. It means that I belong to the only group in society that it is entirely safe to ridicule. Most of the critics of Blake up to that point told me that Blake's prophecies were related primarily to a mystical or to an occult tradition, and this constituted a difficulty for me, because Blake's poems interested me a great deal and most of the occultism I had read did not interest me at all. But I eventually saw that I would have to follow Blake's own instructions and read him within the tradition of English literature. As Blake is an intensely Biblical and mythological poet, I began to understand through him something of the importance of mythology in the study of literature, and it began to dawn on me that there is in fact a general grammar or language of poetry which all poets without exception have to learn somehow or other. Up to that time I had thought of Biblical and Classical mythology largely in footnote terms—as ways of explaining allusions. I had not thought of them as structural principles of the subject of literature itself. But I began to understand how little it was true that the poet writes in the way that, according to Swift, the spider spins its web out of her own bowels and in a restricted compass.3 I think that the presence of Ned Pratt in the Victoria department, again, was of considerable influence in making me aware that an extremely distinguished poet could be a very distinguished poet and could still be a full-time member of a university teaching staff. There was in him nothing of the Romantic mystique about the creative, that is, the assumption that the creative person is a separate kind of person distinct

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from other kinds. And so one develops in a department like that the understanding that if a work of scholarship is to outlast the issue of the learned journal in which it appears, it is a profoundly creative enterprise as well, and that the work of any distinguished poet or novelist taken as a whole is, among other things, an impressive critical and scholarly achievement. This is the kind of bind that many people get into, such as the Nobel Prize committee in Sweden, which assumes that the creative people in literature are the people who write poems or stories or plays, although I should think it would be a reasonable assumption that such people as LA. Richards or Lionel Trilling were as important to literature as Kawabata or Lagerkvist. But, of course, this assumption is one which ascribes creativity to those genres rather than to the people working in them. It was, I think, the publication of Art Smith's anthology of Canadian poetry in 1943 that first focused my attention on the extent to which my own environment had conditioned my critical and scholarly attitudes. My review of that book4 was the first article that I wrote that was of more than the most ephemeral importance, and ever since then I have been very deeply aware of the kind of soil that I am rooted in and of the impossibility of my having developed as I did under any formative conditions other than those which I encountered in southern Ontario. But I have always resisted moving around too much, because it seems to me that it takes a great deal of time to understand the backgrounds of one's students and the kind of assumptions that are involved in their questions. I do teach a certain amount in the United States, and American students often ask me if I notice any difference in moving from Canada to the United States. They always expect the answer to be no, but in fact the answer is yes. And I explain that students who have been conditioned from infancy to be members of a vast imperial complex are very different in their assumptions from students in a relatively small and observant country which has a much more peripheral role in the history of the twentieth century. That bothers them because they don't think that they've been conditioned. And what seems to me to make teaching primarily essential in the critic's role is that it helps to define a writer's audience for him. In the years when I first attended such things as the MLA meetings at Christmas-time the papers were extraordinarily dull (they've improved a little since), but I think I began to understand why they were so dull. The readers of them had assumed that there was a scholarly audience in front of them, and this fact had inhibited and

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constipated them so much that they could hardly commit themselves to a definite statement at all. I remember having to push somebody onto the platform in a state of nervous funk, and he said, "But they're a scholarly audience." And I said, 'There's no such thing as a scholarly audience, and the same rhetorical devices that will work with selling soap on television will work with any group of people anywhere at any time." It is the experience of teaching which enables one to crystallize the sense of an audience of extremely astute, intelligent, critical people of fundamentally good will who are ready to listen to what one has to say. And it takes a great deal of time and effort, I think, to persuade students to ask the kind of questions which they themselves regard as silly questions, that is, to ask the obvious, open, direct, simple questions, which are so obvious that it compels you to revaluate your entire approach to the subject in order to answer them.

74 Foreword to The Child as Critic 1975

From The Child as Critic: Teaching Literature in the Elementary School, by Glenna Davis Sloan (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1975, rev. ed. 1984), xii-xv. Two typescripts are in NFF, box 5, files j and k. This book is an attempt to explain what the real place of literature is in primary education. Its place is to provide the verbal element in the training of the imagination. The imagination is not a self-indulgent, ornamental, or escapist faculty: it is the constructive power of the mind. Hence one should teach reading neither efficiently nor passively: reading has to be a continuously active and leisurely growth, as all genuine growth is. Because it is active, the teaching of writing is inseparably a part of the teaching of reading, and the aim of teaching a child to write poetry is not to produce poets, but to produce articulate people, articulateness being the highest form of freedom that society can give to the individual. Mrs. Sloan quotes Kenneth Koch, who should know, as remarking that teaching children to write in this way is not really "teaching," in the limited sense, so much as a matter of allowing them to discover and exploit what they already have.1 The author makes clear from the beginning her opposition to what she calls the "skills and drills" approach, which frustrates and stunts all genuine imaginative growth. Emphasis on skills tries to be efficient: it regards learning to read as a largely mechanical operation, to be taught with the least waste of time by repetition of familiar words, adding new words gradually as facility is gained. The argument for such teaching seems extremely plausible, and has only the flaw that the human mind, which always begins as a child's mind, is simply not built that

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way. Consequently such an approach is not merely immoral and antiintellectual, it is also miserably inefficient, even in its own terms. Emphasis on drills is, again, an emphasis on a "teaching" process in which the teacher is the active agent, the one who knows, and the students are passive, learning through a mechanism of imitation. That doesn't work either. I have had no firsthand experience with education below the university level, and while I believe that no theory of criticism is any good at all unless it can be adapted to kindergarten and grade i, I naturally make mistakes when I try to suggest how such an adaptation could proceed. I think most of my mistakes have really been much the same mistake: the mistake of underestimating what a child can respond to. Mrs. Sloan, with more experience, does not make this mistake. She knows that children can respond to tragedy and irony as well as to comedy and romance, and that children want difficulty: if they are practising jumping over hurdles, they want the highest hurdle they can possibly get over, not a low one that they know they can manage. The author also makes it clear that the notion of there being some danger of distorting "reality" by introducing fantasy and myth to the small child is pure (except that it is very impure) superstition. Such dangers only arise in certain types of bad realism. As C.S. Lewis remarks, no child is going to confuse Alice in Wonderland with reality, but a pseudorealistic story about life in a British public school might lead him to expect that school life really was like this. Mrs. Sloan notes that there is now a fashion for realism in children's stories, probably because there is also a fashion for fantasy in adult stories, and adults tend to expect children to make up for their own deficiencies. When I was about ten I once had to mind the little boy next door, who was about three. He wanted to know what the flowers in the front yard were. I told him they were hydrangeas, and this word, which came out something like "hyainzuz," he repeated all afternoon, chuckling to himself at intervals. Many years later I realized that I had confronted that afternoon one of the primary phenomena of literary education. It is the rare magic word, the mysterious polysyllabic word, that is most likely to become the educational focus, the beckoning light ahead: similarly, it is the magic story, not the imaginatively squalid story, that is most likely to start the quest for awareness going. Ultimately, everyone exposed to literary education has to try to become a Prospero, otherwise he becomes a Caliban. From the stuttering Dick-and-Jane readers to the foul-mouthed

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blither of the Watergate transcripts, we realize how many Calibans there are who are quite right in saying: You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. [The Tempest, 1.2.363-4]

But there are still some Prosperos who have learned how to control the magic of words and make it part of their own experience, and it is to increase their number in society that the present book is devoted.

75 Preface to ADE and ADFL Bulletins September 1976

From ADE and ADFL Bulletins, 5 (September 1976). Typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 5, files bb and cc. Written to introduce a special joint issue of the bulletins of the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages on the topic of "Employment and the Profession" during the year (1976) in which Frye was president of the Modern Language Association or MLA.

The problems dealt with in this special joint ADE/ADFL Bulletin are built into our society, our educational system, and our universities. All are difficult, because humanists are too small a group for "affirmative action" to reach, because many educators and administrators do not understand the humanities, and because academics are better at continuing than at reforming. American society always seems just on the point of rejecting the humanities, this being partly an inheritance from its revolutionary and Utopian traditions. Revolutions break the continuity with the past, and Utopian visions segregate from the rest of the world. Language is inherently the most fragmented form of human activity, and the bewildering variety of idioms and nuances peculiar to every language makes for a great deal of impatience in studying the verbal cultures of what still seem to be in America, despite jet planes, remote parts of the world. A similar impatience about improving the knowledge of one's own language and literature is often rationalized as resistance to "elitism" or what not. The humanities have always to fight for themselves, whatever the economic conditions, but as they are inherently depressed, a boom period in the economy is disastrous for them. When the market expands, many drift into them with no real vocation for or

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commitment to them; and for teaching the humanities one needs the vocation and the commitment of the twelve disciples. Educational theory, so called, has been largely built up on a false analogy with the role of the individual in a democracy: it has become a solipsistic, doing-your-own-thing theory, ignoring what the community as a whole needs and requires. The "freedom" of a student to study only what he thinks he likes, and of an instructor to teach only what he thinks he knows, is simply freedom to fragment, and adds an unnecessary fragmentation to what is already there. The humanist teacher is confronted by the total verbal experience of his students, not merely by the literary experience at the tip of the iceberg. It is easy to learn to read, write, and speak any language at a level which by all civilized standards is a very low one: raising that level demands infinite patience, detailed technical knowledge from the instructor and incessant practice from the student, and a social vision common to both. The universities themselves have barely outgrown the nineteenth century: one does not need to be a Marxist to see that their hierarchical structures are founded on bourgeois idealism. That is, cutting oneself off from the social context of one's job is regarded as the privilege of seniority. Most of the Ph.D. programme does not train people for what they are going to do at the beginning, but for a later and more socially isolated stage, hence it is increasingly producing an overqualified proletariat. The humanities are particularly victimized by this: the division of labour that makes the doctorate practical for science does not work so well for them. A young humanist compelled to write a pseudo-book, and rewrite it as a real book while teaching surveys and marking freshman exercises or essays, often feels that he is getting a crash course in schizophrenia. These are some of the questions to which the writers in this volume address themselves. They may be elegiac, ironic, even angry and contemptuous; but they are serious, sharply pointed, and deeply concerned. They tell us what it is like to be qualified and out of a job, or to have tenure and see what is happening and going to happen to one's students. They offer suggestions, advice, forecasts, and analyses. They give us an invaluable insight into the way our cultural standards are operating, both in their failures and in their successes.

76

Address at the Installation of Gordon Keyes as Principal

of Victoria College 8 December 1976

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 5, file q. Keyes, who succeeded John Robson, had been a member of the Classics department at Victoria since 1947, and was the author of Christian Faith and the Interpretation of History: A Study of St. Augustine's Philosophy of History (1966). Naturally I am very pleased to bring the greetings of the teaching staff to Gordon Keyes on this occasion. The principal of Victoria College is the academic head of the college, and he is the primary, originally the only, representative of the teaching staff on the Board of Regents, so he has a particular relationship to them. Principals of Victoria now have the additional responsibility of having to fight to retain a coherent departmental teaching programme in the college. A college which has no such teaching programme is not a college, but merely a residence or a place for available lecture space, and any weakening of the teaching programme at Victoria would end in annihilating its traditions as a college. This means, in addition, a steady resistance to all pressures to confine college teaching to the more elementary undergraduate levels. I retired from the principalship myself about ten years ago, and I take a very dim view of a good deal of what has happened since in the Faculty of Arts and Science. This in itself is a very common attitude among the more tedious senior citizens, though it is possible that my views are less isolated than such views usually are. In any case I am very pleased that Gordon Keyes comes from a department that has always been outstanding in its teaching and scholarship at Toronto, for reasons directly connected with the federation system. And I am glad that he is a product of the Honour Course, which gave Toronto an undergraduate training

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equal to anything anywhere. He is an example of the fact, too, that the unusual distinction of Victoria departments has been achieved by a policy of judiciously qualified inbreeding. I am also pleased that we have a principal so congenial to the traditions of the college. His department is, I believe, our oldest continuous teaching department. As far as I can make out from college histories, when the college began it taught Classics to its intellectual students, and it also had an "English" course which seems to have been essentially a business training, and clearly was what made the money. Since then, the Department of English has severed its connections with money-making. Then again, Victoria was founded on Nonconformist principles. It had a strong and specific religious affiliation, but it consistently tried to keep its academic work autonomous and independent of it. The axiom credo ut intelligam [I believe in order to understand] may have made sense at one time in our cultural history: it makes very little sense now, and Victoria's attitude was in part a protest against it. Gordon Keyes has studied St. Augustine's interpretation of history, and his book shows that it is possible for a saint and a doctor of the church, a writer of extraordinary literary talents and a powerful philosophical and theological mind, still to be a lousy historian. It is a book thoroughly in the Victorian Nonconformist tradition. We are all greatly looking forward to working with Gordon Keyes: Victoria is still not only a distinguished academic community but a thoroughly congenial one, and I think he will enjoy his term of office with us. As for external relations, not all the dangers in this country come from separatism: the bureaucratic obsession with centralizing may prove in the long run to be even more disastrous. There are many in the university, including our guests here tonight, and some in the provincial administration, who understand how much the liberal arts at Toronto owe to the federated colleges. We all wish for our new principal a term of office in which those who have such understanding will grow in numbers and influence, so that Victoria's teaching staff may be set free to go on doing what they have doing with such high dedication for so many years.

77 Presidential Address at the MLA 27 December 1976

From the revised version printed as "Teaching the Humanities Today" in DG, 91-101. The first paragraph does not appear in DG and is taken from PMLA, 92 (May 1977): 355-91, where the original version was published. The typescript of DG is in NFF, 1988, box 21, file 2, and that of the original speech in NFF, 1988, box 5, file aa. Frye gave this farewell address, marking the end of his 1976 presidency of the MLA, at the ninety-first annual meeting in New York,

The presidency of the MLA is a short-term office, perhaps designed to represent the usual academic attitude to official positions. As president, I have had the honour of writing begging letters to some of you, but the title of PMLA, which I might assume on the analogy of the Royal Academy, is otherwise engaged, and chairing half a dozen meetings does not, even in these instant-administration days, leave much of an odour of charisma behind. I understand that in the recent election campaign President Ford's advisers tried to take advantage of the fact that the American system does not distinguish between the head of state and the head of government. They felt that, if an incumbent president would just stand there, his impressive position would have the best chance of being confirmed by the vote. But the MLA does distinguish the two, and Bill Schaefer will remain the head of government after the head of state has vanished into limbo tomorrow night, like one of the divine kings in The Golden Bough, who hears the grinding of axes in the background as soon as he has failed to satisfy one of his wives. However, the ritual banquet on his body and blood has been commuted to an allegory. He is required only to make the equivalent of a speech from the throne, a speech that is an expression neither of royal will, as in Tudor times, nor

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of government policy, as now, but is rather an effort to express a collective consciousness, to gain some perspective on this confused and crowded assemblage. My first MLA meeting was in 1947, in Detroit, and my experiences of it are still vivid in memory. I am at a group in Elizabethan literature where a young man reads a paper on the influence of Plato on Sidney's Defence of Poesy. At the end a senior scholar remarks that the parallels cited all come from the first book of Cicero's De Oratore. Then I am at a publisher's party with someone singing ballads to a guitar, my other ear exposed to the offer of a job with a department that appeared to spend most of its time hunting raccoons. The scene dissolves to a murky bar— in those days bars were as dark as the shade of Tiresias, doubtless to symbolize the more interesting aspects of sin. Various shapes looming out of the gloom prove to be editors of a journal of Catholic leanings, which in that generation meant that the name of St. Thomas Aquinas kept echoing like the chimes of Big Ben. Then I am passing through the hallways, and meet a glowering friend who says, "I haven't yet seen a single person here that I wanted to see." I overhear a remark: "Well, the trouble is that our board doesn't much like divorced people." I also overhear someone bursting with pride because a student of his had read a paper on a difficult word in Beowulf that had impressed the great Klaeber. One of the acts of the Executive Council in that year was to send an inscribed drinking mug to a baby who had been named Pamela after PMLA. In short, it was the same wonderful, ridiculous, exhilarating, crazy, endearing, exasperating experience that every MLA has been. Surely nothing else in modern civilization can be quite like it. Still, it is becoming more of what it always was: I get letters expressing concern about the variety of offerings, and certainly a study of the programme does suggest an attempt to be all things to all men, even very nearly to all women. I think however that what is going on is not a circus midway but a genuine historical process. I have other memories of the Detroit meeting, of a different kind. I had come down from Toronto, and shared my hotel room, with Professor Barker Fairley, one of the finest Germanists of our time, who was reading a paper on Goethe. It was, I think, his last visit to the United States, as the cold-war hysteria set in shortly after, and, his wife being a left-winger, he was excluded from the country.1 He is ninety years old now, and is still excluded. And I remember how startled I was, as a Canadian unused to the ways of this country thirty years ago, to find in the hotel restaurant white waitresses in white

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uniforms and black bus girls in yellow uniforms: a social distinction based on colour which apparently no one objected to or even noticed. In 1977tne future is uncertain enough, but if there had been no sharpening of social awareness in the last thirty years it would be unimaginably worse. The point of all this anecdotage is that the past is functional in our lives only when we neither forget it nor try to return to it. This is, of course, the principle on which the study of the humanities is also founded. Every work of literature meant something in its own day and now means something rather different to us. There is a constant illogical tension in criticism: we keep shuttling back and forth between historicity and relevance, between the Elizabethan world-picture and Shakespeare our contemporary. But these two aspects of our work are not simply scholarly aspects: they involve two different, if complementary, conceptions of the university, of the society the university is in, and of our own relation to both. When the MLA was founded, it took as its model the Classical-based humanism it was unconsciously displacing. Its creed, summarized in Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, ran something like this. Human experience is set in the frame of memory, and man's present life is fulfilled and completed by his past. The continuity of our cultural traditions gives dignity to our brief and muddled lives, and these traditions include the best that has been thought and said: that is, they include the vision of the greatest that man is capable of. In practice, the best is in the past, partly because it takes time before we can distinguish the best, and when we do distinguish it, we find that it often grows out of historical contexts very remote from us in their assumptions. Their remoteness helps to make them elements of a liberal, which means a liberating, education. The present cannot be an ideal object of knowledge like the past: as Ophelia says, we know what we are, but we know not what we may be [Hamlet, 4.5.43-4]. There is nothing liberating in merely seeing our own prejudices and stereotypes in a mirror, or in kidnapping the culture of the past to make it conform to them. The legacy of the past is not, however, merely a tax-free inheritance added to our ordinary income. The best in the past, when liberated by the present, throws its shadow into the future, for whatever man has been capable of in imagination he can realize in life. In the future there is the possibility of an ideal society in which man's vision of his culture has liberated and equalized his social existence. The university which makes

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this vision possible forms a social counter-environment. We teach to give students an awareness of a greater freedom than society can give (the earliest ML As showed a very genuine concern for teaching). We hold up to all students, whether casual or committed, the ideal of the scholarly life, a life detached yet not withdrawn from the social environment, working constantly, not to create an elite, but to dissolve all elites into the classless society that is the final embodiment of culture. As our elders pursued this conception of scholarship, two things became obvious, and very obviously are reflected in this year's programme. One is that scholarship depends on knowledge, and the advance of knowledge is an advance in becoming unintelligible to more and more people. If I spend my life in an area of scholarship, I come to know something you don't know; or, if you do know it, you're in my in-group and we know something they don't know. All scholars sooner or later come to be like the daughters of the Hesperides in Tennyson: Out of watchings, out of wiles, Comes the bliss of secret smiles. All things are not told to all. [The Hesperides, 11. 77-9]

Hence, as time goes on, we need more groups for fewer members, and the solid compartments in knowledge that seemed to be established by language and historical periods begin to dissolve as synchronic, comparative, and theoretical aspects of literature develop. Then again, in the last few years, the old simple image at the heart of humane studies, of somebody reading a book, has become as complex as a Duchamp painting. The reader is a conventionalized poetic fiction; the act of reading is the art of reading something else; the history of literature records only the pangs of misprized texts. The current programme suggests a Darwinian throwing out of variations at random until something adapts to a new environment. The possibility that the new environment is not there is one that we simply have to risk. By a curious irony, the catholicity of the MLA creates a difficulty for its own periodical. Most learned journals are much narrower in range, and those who consult them know in advance the kind of thing they are looking for. In having to reflect the whole MLA conspectus, PMLA, according to many opinions I have heard, tends to become something of what Marshall McLuhan would call a cool medium of low definition, a collection of prize essays rather than a journal with a specific shape. But

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it would, in my opinion, be a mistake to undervalue the attempt to reflect the scholarship in the modern languages as a total community, however large and miscellaneous. Another feature of the advance of knowledge takes longer to manifest itself. As a greater variety of people come to study the modern languages, it becomes clear that there is much in every past culture that is profoundly alienating. Our cultural traditions, as usually interpreted, are too male-centred for women, too white-centred for blacks, too rentiercentred for radicals, too heterosexual for the gay, too withdrawn for the engaged, too religious for the secular, too secular for the religious. We sometimes assume a large central majority, say a male white middleclass establishment, which is satisfied with the traditional emphases in culture, and anxious to resist changes in them. But there is no such majority, and there never really has been. Everybody's sympathies with the past are highly qualified: everybody has to make very selective efforts to make a personal contact with the chosen part of one's cultural heritage, and more means for expressing one's deeper personal interests have constantly to be provided. As most of the relevant documents, for these interests, are quite recent, we find ourselves swung over to the contemporary context of literary response. The founders of the MLA felt that Greek and Latin had no monopoly on "Classics"; but starting the title of the association with the word "modern" soon broke down the isolation of the classic from the contemporary. Besides, just as the Classics had had to face a competition with the modern languages that forced them into a minority place in the university, so the modern languages have had to face a similar competition with the social sciences. A glance at more recent programmes shows many discussion groups, ranging from language theory to what are politely called gynocentric serial dramas, that reflect an interest very difficult, and quite unnecessary, to distinguish from the interest of a social science. The growing awareness of our sources of revenue, inside and outside the university, has the same effect. Whether the market is students or legislatures, the past does not sell like the present: sometimes it will not sell at all except in some present package like the "national interest." The contemporary perspective reached a crisis about ten years ago, when we began to hear very different views about the university's place in society. The old conception of the university as a counter-environment is, we were told, quite illusory. A social system maintains the university

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for what it gets out of it, and what our system gets out of the humanities is an ideology that translates the facts of oligarchy into pseudodemocratic platitudes. The rationale of teaching is not to give students detachment, but to condition them to being kept off the labour market and out of the area of social decision. As for the scholarly attitude of mind, the belief that a certain kind of training will magically produce a certain kind of mentality simply ascribes to education what really belongs to social status. The older humanist philosophy did distinguish knowledge and wisdom, but it assumed that knowledge was the only possible road to wisdom. Knowledge for it was knowledge of the actual: wisdom was rather a sense of the potential, the ability to adapt to a variety of situations which is developed out of knowledge. But, as I said, knowledge is secret and elitist by its very nature: what it really leads to is a mysterious expertise; and this, so far from broadening the social perspective, tends to narrow it. Such a narrowing, many people began to say, is at best pedantry, at worst an indifference to the real issues of our time, issues involving not only the well-being but even the continued existence of the human race, that verges on the psychotic. There has always been a different conception of wisdom, the conception preserved in the popular proverbs and fables which from ancient times have been among the few really democratic literary genres. This wisdom consists in the possession, by the community as a whole, of the essential axioms for sanity and survival. By ignoring or undervaluing this common wisdom in favour of expertise, education becomes a pernicious form of mass hypnosis. We have heard something of this attitude expressed in earlier presidential addresses to the MLA. I do not question the truth in it, certainly not the good faith of those who expounded it. But the movement it spoke for stopped short of an effective attack on the universities, and for a very good reason. Even among those most deeply dissatisfied with a capitalist-controlled democracy, relatively few regarded any other society, such as the Soviet Union, as providing a model for the transformation of those nearer home. And as the movement had no external model, so it had no clearly defined enemy: the real model and enemy were in ourselves. In this situation the old view of the university as a counter-environment, a place where criticism and dissent could be protected by various devices like tenure appointments, had to survive, if only faute de mieux. The sociology departments of the seventies are now well stocked with student activists of the sixties. And, as the university continued to hold its

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own, a new generation of students grew up in reaction to the preceding one, as new generations are so apt to do. I don't know what Pamela thought of her name when she got older, but there was once a critical magazine in Canada called The Rebel, and a couple connected with it named their daughter Rebel. When Rebel reached the age of seventeen she changed her name to Joy. It would be easy to take a complacent attitude to the relative quiet of today and say that the pendulum has swung back. It has, but we should look at the whole metaphor: when a pendulum swings back it is always later in time. Besides, if a radical reaction includes a good deal of hysteria, a conservative one is bound to include a good deal of inertia. The educational bureaucracy, after being prodded out of its massive incompetence for a few years after Sputnik, has now relapsed to what it considers normal, and the modern languages have suffered accordingly. The educational budget, like the defence budget on a small scale, is crushingly heavy and mostly wasted, and this naturally means a squeeze on the universities. The MLA is a place that people go to partly to give and get jobs: there are enough jokes about the slave market, and enough demonology about the department chairman who sits in his hotel room over a bottle and breaks down the morale of one applicant after another. But there is something in the MLA's continued concern for employment which is both realistic and humane. It is still doing what it can, but it is crippled by a budget squeeze too, which is why I wrote those begging letters I referred to earlier. And there is not much it can do if the situation is aggravated by a decline in the solidarity of the profession itself. By solidarity in the profession I naturally do not mean advancing people regardless of their merits, nor am I convinced that unions are the answer, or the permanent answer. For one thing, there is a difficulty in finding the boundary line between labour and management. Like other older academics, I spend a lot of time writing letters of recommendation for jobs, promotions, and tenure appointments, and I get a strong impression that not only the administration but the senior teaching staff in many universities will snatch at almost any excuse to deny these things. By solidarity I mean the sense that no scholar is an island: everyone's scholarly fortunes are inseparable from those of one's colleagues and of the profession as a whole. Students emerging from graduate school with a genuine vocation and commitment are a part of my own scholarly life, and their frustrations and humiliations frustrate and humiliate me also. This clearly points either to stomach ulcers or to some attempt at

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organized professional action. I have no programme of my own for such action—it too would have to be a complex and co-operative enterprise— but I would not despair of the possibility. In 1976, the MLA heard an eloquent plea for solidarity from Professor Germaine Bree, in which she soberly reminded us that there is no substitute for the first essential thing, a belief in our own subject and in its importance for society. She quoted Ronald Berman of the National Endowment for the Humanities as saying that what was needed was not so much money as a body of intellectual conviction, and she added: "This does not seem to be in plentiful supply among us. Not, I think, out of a basic indifference, but because we have no established curriculum in relation to which we can define our place and usefulness as an academic discipline."21 should like to comment briefly on this text in conclusion.3 Certainly, students come to us knowing far less than they should: it is quite possible to design a school curriculum that would waste less of their time and of ours, and there can be no giving up the fight for better standards. But the situation will not change overnight, and even if it did, it is also possible to get trapped by metaphors of progress and steady advance. We may feel that if students reached university properly baked in their various age-layers, we could add an impressive architectural icing. But there is always a great deal of unlearning and beginning again at every stage of education. We find in our own experience that the feeling of progressive advance is very rare, and that scholarship is mostly a matter of continuous fumbling for a light switch in a dark room. It is hardly reasonable to expect more from students. In any case no teacher thinks of himself as stuffing information into young people who haven't got any. Students have acquired a large body of verbal experience, of which perhaps one per cent has been derived from anything recognizable as literature. We have the whole of this experience to deal with, not merely the one per cent, and we have to be guided by broader principles than information. One of these is the principle of freedom which is inherent in the whole conception of a liberal education. Literacy, the primary act of learning to read, sets one free to take part in a modern industrial society. But every society is set up in such a way that what one primarily learns to read are things like advertisements and traffic signs, that is, directions or exhortations to conform. The real freedom lies behind, the freedom that comes only from articulateness, the ability to produce as well as respond to verbal structures. Trying to liberate students by increasing their power to articulate is a

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militant activity, carried on in the teeth of inertia, confusion, and ignorance. Each of us has to relearn in the classroom the lesson that Milton learned from the Civil War: that freedom is something people say they want but don't really want. Genuine freedom and discipline are the same thing: one cannot be set free to play the piano or speak German without a long period of directed attention and practice. But for most people freedom means only what Arnold called doing as one likes, that is, getting pushed around by one's inner compulsions. In adolescence particularly there are strong pressures toward introversion on the one hand, and rigid conformity to group action on the other. Both of these, as we saw in the hippie movement of a few years ago, tend to make a fetish of inarticulateness. With the awareness of freedom comes the awareness that language is much more than simply an area of knowledge. Everything we know is formed out of words and numbers, and literature and mathematics are the only subjects of knowledge which are also a means of knowing. A student in Toronto recently attached a note to his political science essay reading, "Please do not take marks off for grammar or style, because I am not and have never claimed to be an English scholar." The confusion resulting from thinking of the languages purely as bodies of knowledge like other bodies of knowledge could hardly go further. Such a student has still to learn that what we express badly we do not know: we have only the illusion of knowing it. Teachers are ranked by society in an unofficial hierarchy according to the age of their students, and the university teacher is thought of as further up in the hierarchy than the grade 2 teacher, even though it is clear that the more elementary the level of teaching, the more important it is that it be done properly. It is perhaps a similar perversion of values that ranks the languages rather low in the university itself: they are low in budget and administrative esteem, low in the sense of being where the action is. I think that the instrumental quality of language teaching has much to do with this: the fact that a student must learn words before any other kind of learning is of any use to him, must be articulate before he can be a real person, must know more than his native language to live with any awareness in a world like ours. It may be right to think of ourselves as service departments, like the maintenance staff, but we should also sometimes think of how much depends on us, and of how important it is to keep on fighting for the only kind of social change that makes any real or lasting sense. As for our scholarship and research,

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what sustained me, as it still does, when I first went into the study of literature, was the feeling that I had the best subject matter in the world, and a job to do with it that literature could not do by itself. It distresses me that literary scholars still tease themselves with the notion of criticism as failed creation, and continue to explain to one another, in a kind of ecstasy of masochism, how vain, futile, and parasitic the critical enterprise really is. For some time now I have been interested in the relation of the Bible to European literature. It is the sort of topic that, whenever one gets at all close to it, sends one back again with a sense of the total irrelevance of everything one knows, or thinks one knows. Yet the suggestion in it of infinite mysteries connected with logos or articulate speech is as fascinating to the literary critic in me as a flame to a moth, even if in the end it proves equally destructive. There are two conceptions in particular involved in the study of the Bible that I am still nowhere near really understanding: they are wisdom, already referred to, and prophecy. Both words clearly have different levels of meaning in their Biblical contexts. The primitive meaning of wisdom seems to be following the tried and tested way; its chief form of expression is the proverb, the counsel of prudence that keeps our balance in life from one day to the next; its opposite is the fool with his new idea that always turns out to be an old fallacy. Such wisdom goes with conservatism, the authority of seniors, the acceptance of a fixed framework of education, and the anxiety of continuity, of getting through life without being confronted by a dialectical choice. Prophecy seems to start from the opposite direction: the primitive prophets were mediums or oracles who could go into a trance and speak with a different voice, interpreted as the voice of the local god. And just as wisdom is conservative, continuous, and linked to the past, so prophecy is discontinuous, radical, and linked to the future. The prophet does not accept established society, but repudiates it, along with all its wisdom, in the name of a deity who has higher standards, and the focus of his prophecy is a final transcending of the social order. But as the two conceptions develop they get less unlike. The prophet becomes less of an ecstatic and more of an adviser or counsellor, and the wise man comes to be thought of as having a potential of utterance called forth by certain occasions. Both are drawn toward the present, and away from the past and future. And as wisdom and prophecy approach each other, it becomes clear that there is a point where they meet and become the same thing, the point where there is no longer any wise man or any

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prophet, but simply the word itself, a power of speech articulating itself independently of the speaker's ego. Perhaps this is the point described by Heidegger in his later essays, where he calls language the master and not the servant of man, and tells us that it is really language that speaks, man speaking only through a response to language.4 Scholars are temperamentally disposed to be conservative and protected by institutions: creative people often have ecstatic or other involuntary powers, and are apt to be freewheeling in their social attitudes and unreasonably radical or reactionary in their political views. Scholars and creative writers seem to have many psychological links with the wise men and prophets respectively of earlier times. In the study of language and literature the scholarly aspect of the human mind is struggling with the creative aspect. Each is also involved in its own struggle. The scholar is concerned with the continuous accumulation of knowledge, yet all the time there is an underlying drive toward a more discontinuous kind of wisdom, an insight for which all knowledge is only a symbol and literature itself only a means. The writer is concerned with becoming a distinctive creative voice in literature, yet in him there is again a drive toward some kind of "zero degree of writing," as it has been called,5 where the literary and all its conventions disappear and only the pure prophetic vision is left. Our real reasons for doing something are usually different from our formulated ones: perhaps the real motivation in literary scholarship is a sense that literature is not a territory to be conquered by critics who divide it up according to the chance of preference, but a common cause that unites all of us with all of it. Such a motivation could exist only if there were, ultimately, some sense behind it of an identity of criticism and creation, of scholarship and teaching, of the search for knowledge and the production of vision, an identity produced by the authority of the word speaking for itself. The awareness of this identity may be unconscious, but then some critics have suggested that the unconscious itself is linguistically structured. If the awareness ever rose directly into our consciousness, as a full vision of the role of words in human life, I suspect that it would become something very close to what in times past has been symbolized by the gift of tongues.

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Reminiscences 1977

From the University of Toronto Graduate, 4, no. 3 (1977); 16. The issue, celebrating the sesquicentennial of the university, contains reminiscences solicited from a number of distinguished graduates, including Mavor Moore (University College 412) and Bill Crothers (Pharmacy 6Tj). Published under the general heading "Oh, the Dear Good Days ..." In my nearly half a century of association with Victoria College and the university, I think two memories stand out, both connected with the war, and both connected also with two very great men in the English department at Victoria who were my teachers, Ned Pratt and John Robins. Some time in 1941 or 1942,1 was present in Earle Birney's apartment on Hazelton Avenue, along with Claude Bissell, Ernest Sirluck, A.J.M. Smith, and Ned Pratt. It was on that occasion that I first heard The Truant. This is the poem of Pratt's which I have always regarded as the finest poem that Pratt wrote, and, consequently, one of the top poems in Canadian literature. It is a statement of the indestructibility of the human spirit, when threatened by the kind of menace which seems to come from the order of nature but really comes from something psychotic in man himself, as embodied in Nazi Germany. I heard it at a time when I felt that the poets and intellectuals of that age were deserting the cause of humanity in droves, speaking either for some irresponsible form of leadership or for some kind of religiosity that seemed to me a sell-out. Hearing Ned read that poem restored my confidence in the poetic imagination. Shortly after Pearl Harbor and the fall of Singapore and Hong Kong,

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Victoria College decided to go ahead with its annual series of public lectures, and one of them that year was a lecture on Alfred the Great, given by John Robins, whose scholarly field was Old English. The lecture very quietly told us of Alfred's overwhelming defeats at the hands of the Danes when they were invading England, of the way in which he had been driven into a narrow corner of his kingdom, and then started, step by step, fighting back to regain his country. At the same time he never once faltered in the priority that he gave to scholarship and learning, having the great works of his time translated into English and making sure that in his country, at least, it would not be the "Dark Ages." All pure allegory, of course, but these two events, coming so close together, gave me a sense of how real scholars in a real university react to a major crisis. It is the feeling immortalized in the quotation from Milton's Areopagitica which is on the Great Hall of Hart House.1 I mention these things because there is a whole generation now that does not remember the war, much less how close we were to total defeat by two of the most evil societies that the human race has ever known. Since then, I have not lived through a real crisis, only the more or less phoney ones of the late sixties. But I have never lost the sense that the university is very near the centre of the idea of human community, and that our society stands or falls with it.

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The Teacher's Source of Authority 30 March 1978

From DG, 125-35. Originally an address given at the conference of the American Educational Research Association in Toronto, before Division B (Curriculum and Objectives). Joel Weiss, editor of Curriculum Inquiry, taped and transcribed the talk and submitted his transcript to Frye (see NFF, 1988, box 60, file 4) before publishing it in Curriculum Inquiry, 9 (Spring 1979): 3-11. However, he did not accept a number of Frye's corrections, and made many editorial changes, whereas DC follows the corrected transcript. NFF, 1988, box 6, file u has the original transcript with Frye's pencilled alterations; file w has a retyped transcript with both Frye's and the editor's further changes; and file v has Frye's cleanly typed version. I want to consider the question of authority in education more particularly in connection with my own subject, which is the humanities. In the sciences, which deal primarily with man's relation to nature, the question of authority is more or less taken care of by such things as repeatable experiment and the possibility of prediction. If an astronomer can predict an eclipse to within a second, the question of authority is inevitably bound up with his method, and there is no use arguing about the validity of observations which lead to a prediction as impressive as that. But the humanities belong to the world which man himself creates; consequently, some kind of fundamental questioning of postulates is built into them from the beginning. Many of our ideas on education derive from Plato and from the figure of Socrates which is so important in Plato. What Plato writes is normally in the form of dialogue, and the dialogue takes the form very frequently of what he calls the symposium, a group of people meeting together at a

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banquet and putting forward partial and individual views of a certain central theme (such as that of love in the dialogue called the Symposium), with the hope that this theme will manifest itself with all the vividness and impressiveness of a Platonic form or idea in the middle of society. In his last and most complicated work, the Laws, Plato begins unexpectedly with the symposium as something which has a crucial importance in the actual regulating of society. He says that the symposium is an important element in education and is to that extent one of the ways of achieving the vision of authority which underlies the Laws. It seems extraordinary that the symposium should be used in this way in a work as serious and as comprehensive as the Laws, because elsewhere, Plato is quite clear about the limitations of the symposium in actual practice. He knows very well that most gatherings and discussion groups of this kind are really a collection of solipsistic monologues, or else a continuous embarrassed silence. The etymology of the word "symposium," which means "drinking together," is perhaps of some significance, because in actual symposia, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, one has to be drunk in order to believe in what is going on. Nevertheless, the symposium vision in Plato still survives in the mystique of the seminar and the belief that somehow or other a discussion which begins in an unstructured way will eventually achieve structure. Fifty years ago, for example, we have Stephen Leacock saying that if he had an ideal university to found, he would get a room full of students and then go out to hire a few professors when he got around to it.1 Here again is the belief that the discussion group is the core of education, despite all the evidence proving that what it usually is is a pooling of ignorance. Before Socrates, we have the Presocratic philosophers, such figures as Heraclitus and Pythagoras, who were not so much philosophers, in the modern sense of the word, as gurus or spiritual leaders. They uttered dark sayings like "You can't dip your foot twice in the same river" and "Don't eat beans" and their only authority, so we are told by legend at any rate, was "Ipse dixit," "The master says so and that's it." What there is in an educational setting of that kind is a cult of the non-explicit, and the basis of it is the assumption that we learn only from those who do not teach. That is, such advisers, or gurus, do not teach in the sense of systematically answering questions. When you answer a question, you consolidate the mental level on which the question is asked: the efforts of such spiritual advisers are rather to keep prodding the student into

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making more and more adequate questions or, at any rate, less and less inadequate questions. We find this kind of guru education still going on in our day, with the fashion for yoga and Zen Buddhism. In such surroundings, the teacher is a negative focus. Zen Buddhism has a typical form of dialogue in which the student asks a deeply serious question and gets a brush-off answer. We notice that it is when the teacher becomes a negative focus of this kind that he acquires a personal authority. The teacher who refuses to answer a question has to have a tremendous authority given him by his students if he is to get away with it. This situation survives in society, that is, a teacher is given this kind of personal authority only when what he is dealing with happens to be generally accepted in the society, or else extremely fashionable. Our modern conceptions of education begin rather with Socrates, who renounced the idea of the possession of unusual knowledge. He kept saying that he didn't know anything but that he was looking for something. Knowledge was replaced by search, and search took the form of following a verbal trail, the trail that we know as dialectic. Socrates came into society at the moment of transition from the spoken to the written word. The written word has a linear quality in it which the spoken word, which depends much more on repetition, does not have. We notice that in most Platonic dialogues, nothing really happens until somebody, usually Socrates, takes control of the discussion, and the other contributions are reduced to punctuation. That means, essentially, that whatever authority Socrates has, in a Socratic discussion, results from the breakdown of an ideal symposium of a type that almost never manifests itself in actual experience. The same thing is true, I think, of the ordinary classroom situation, where the teacher's personal authority is acquired by default. The ideal of discussion is something which, for the most part, students are not mature enough fully to participate in. Nevertheless, the teacher-student relationship in itself is a mutually embarrassing relationship which both are trying to escape from. So we have, in the university, a young lecturer haltingly reading his lecture notes, and the gradual growth of a sense of human presence as the discussion becomes more fluent. Perhaps once or twice in a teacher's life something of what Plato meant by the symposium actually does appear and both teacher and students recognize the common authority of the subject itself and they are all united in the vision of its power. The ghost of the symposium, similarly, revives in the community of scholars, in maintaining conferences, learned journals, and the like. But there is still a

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lack of immediacy which accounts for the presence of what I think of as the habeas corpus element, the necessity of producing the body and, hence of keeping people travelling over immense distances in order to maintain the physical community of scholars. It is obvious, of course, that the primary source of authority in the humanities, as everywhere else, is neither the teacher nor the student but the subject being taught. Every teacher who has a vocation for teaching is aware of the insidious temptation of becoming an opaque rather than a transparent medium, and becoming a personal authority, so that the authority of the subject is conveyed only through him. There is also an intense will on the part of students to make a teacher into that kind of opaque source of authority, hence we have the superstition of the inspired teacher, as though it were possible for a teacher to get inspired by anything except his own subject. But while the subject taught is obviously the primary source of the teacher's authority, that is only the first step, and what I should like to discuss with you is the question of where the subject itself gets its authority. In the first place, we realize that whatever is genuinely educational is continuous. There is always a type of student, for whom one has a great deal of sympathy, who would like to see every lecture, every exposure to education that he has, take the form of some kind of exciting existential experience. This again is part of the mirage of the symposium which has haunted education from the earliest times. But it is clear that education is based on what the medieval educators called habitus, in the sense in which a man who can read Latin has the habit of Latin. The basis of education is the apprentice or initiatory education, the training in skill; and the only possible basis for that is a steady repetition of certain themes arranged in a linear sequence. There is, of course, such a thing as inorganic habit, which merely repeats a convention. One finds in primitive literature, for example, a convention repeated simply because that is the way in which it has always been done. The word superstition, in religion, means, essentially, something which persists out of inorganic habit, which continues to be done without any reason understood for doing it. In all societies there is a strong anxiety of continuity, with its sense that following precedent is the source of security. This is the primitive idea of wisdom. We can see traces of it in the wisdom literature of the Bible, where wisdom means essentially the doing of the tried and tested thing, the thing which has proved in experience to maintain one's stability from one day to the next. That sense of continuity goes along, of

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course, with a deeply conservative view of society, a sense of the authority of seniors, of prescribed curricula, of avoiding anything like a revolutionary break in society, which confronts one with a dialectic choice. There are two levels of habit. There is the mere habit, or mechanical repetition, and there is the practice habit which is the technique of all education and is the kind of repetition that underlies the learning of every skill, such as driving a car or playing a piano. Motor skills, like piano-playing and car-driving, are not different in that sense from intellectual skills, because thinking is also a matter of habit and practice. How well anyone will think at any given moment will depend, like his ability to play the piano, on how much of it he has already done. The development of both motor skills and intellectual skills, through repetition, goes both down and up. It goes down into the subconscious, the instinctive, the involuntary, where things that were originally a matter of conscious effort and choice become habitual and instinctive. It goes up to plateaus of understanding or increasing insight into what one is doing. The Bible tells us that this combination of effort and relaxation is even built into the work of God himself, in a ratio of six to one. There seems to be in education, therefore, an active rhythm of production and a more passive rhythm of consumption. This has always been recognized in the history of education, but unfortunately it has been associated with the class structure of society and made into a political allegory, so that we have traditionally in society a working class, which provides the production in society, and a leisure class, for whom the productions of society are intended and who manifest, by their leisure, the fruits and the blessings of civilization, including education. Aristotle, for example, points out that the words "school" and "scholarship" are derived in Greek from the word schole, which means "leisure,"2 and the kind of liberal education that Plato and Aristotle are concerned with is only possible in a social class which has been freed from servile work. Similarly with the Bible, where the Apocrypha tells us that "the wisdom of the scribe cometh by opportunity of leisure, and he that hath little business shall become wise" [Ecclesiasticus 38:24]. The verse in the Psalms, "Be still (and know that I am God)" [46:10], is, in the Septuagint, Scholasate, which means "have leisure" or "take your time," as though that were the foundation of a religious consciousness as well. This tradition still survives in the nineteenth century, where the conception of the gentleman in Newman and Arnold obviously has a class reference, and it survives in our own day in the physical withdrawal

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from society which young people make at university. For Matthew Arnold, the conception of culture was associated with leisure and therefore with the leisure class, although Arnold saw it as operating dialectically, tending to neutralize class conflict and eventually leading us towards a classless society. But this kind of middle-class vision of education as centred in a leisurely or gentlemanly class was meeting with a good deal of resistance even then. We have, then, for example, William Morris, a socialist, a Marxist sympathizer, setting out in News from Nowhere an ideal of education which was really founded, like so much of the later philosophy of the Dewey school, on motor activity as an educational model. In Morris's ideal world of the future, everybody is engaged in cultivating the minor arts of carving and drawing. They also do a certain amount of heavier work but the sense of reflection, of contemplation, of the whole speculative side of education, is quite deliberately minimized in Morris's vision. Here we have an example of something that runs all through the history of thought, the fact that in this area of thinking the important thing is to get hold of the right metaphors, diagrams, and analogies. This educational analogy is clearly that of the human body, where the hands are the active principle and the brain, with its eyes and ears, represents something in the seat of judgment with a superior authority to the effort of working society. But not everybody has felt that this association of the leisurely aspect of education with the brain was the right metaphor. In Shakespeare's Coriolanus, for example, the main theme is the class struggle of the patricians and plebeians in ancient Rome. A spokesman for the patricians tries to rationalize the rule of patricians by the fable of the belly and the members [1.1.96-149], which comes from Aesop. The members of the body, we're told, rebelled against the belly but eventually they realized that they couldn't get along without the belly; a productive society cannot do without a consumer class. The importance of this metaphor, for me, is in the suggestion that the real place for this kind of leisure is not on top, in the seat of judgment, but below. What the fable attempts to prove is that the belly is not really parasitic but digestive: if so, its place is below the work of society, consolidating its efforts from time to time. What we are coming to, I think, is the fact that in our own society, these conceptions of different classes, a working class and a leisure class, are becoming simply metaphors for what are actually two aspects of every concerned and adult citizen. We have already got to the point where the phrase "leisure class"

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makes no sense. Perhaps our grandchildren will be living in a world in which the phrase "working class" makes even less sense. Liberal education, then, is not a middle-class privilege, but the art of setting both the individual and society free. The movement towards freedom, in this sense, is the opposite of what Matthew Arnold meant by doing as one likes, because doing as one likes means getting pushed around by one's inner compulsions. In Milton's Areopagitica the remark is made in passing that reason is but choosing, and this remark so impressed Milton's God that he does Milton the honour of quoting him in the speech which he makes in the third book of Paradise Lost. But to say only that reason is but choice seems a trifle oversimplified even for God. One wonders what the choice is, and it is clear that in the context of Milton's whole thought, choice means the choice for freedom. This is not the same thing as free choice, because free choice indicates that freedom is built into the situation from the beginning, and for Milton it is not. Adam in the Garden of Eden is confronted with the necessity of either preserving his freedom or throwing it away, and his real act would have been to preserve it. What he had to preserve was the Garden of Eden itself which surrounded him on all sides. The implication is that what really occupies the place of the brain, the seat of judgment, the ultimate source of authority, is a kind of informing vision above action. For example, a social worker trying to work in Toronto obviously has all his or her activity motivated by an inner vision of a healthier, cleaner, less neurotic, and less prejudiced Toronto than the one which he or she is actually working in. Without that vision, the whole point of the work being done would be lost; hence it is in the informing vision of action that the real source of authority in education is to be found. It is to be found in the suspension of judgment that precedes the actual judgment, the choice. It is in that assembling of the materials for choice which made John Stuart Mill base his whole theory of liberty on the conception of freedom of thought, and it is that informing vision which marks the moments of genuine inspiration in the arts, those moments when the creative artist feels that somehow he is in full possession of his vision and that nothing can go wrong. Here we have the two elements of the decision-maker and the adviser. Again, in the history of education, these have been represented by social metaphors. In the Renaissance, for example, the theory of education was largely based on the education of the king, because he was the most important person to get educated. Beyond the king was the courtier,

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the subject of Castiglione's book, which is not only one of the most beautiful books in the world, but perhaps one of the two or three genuinely great treatises on education. The courtier's function is, of course, to become an adviser. Once again, the king and the courtier in our society are metaphors for two elements within each concerned citizen, and they refer to the different kinds of authority which are traditionally described as de facto authority and dejure authority. The de facto authority is where the necessity for making decisions comes in, but beyond that there is the dejure authority which is pre-eminently the authority in education. The characteristic of de facto authority is that it always involves some kind of subordination. We often think of freedom as what the individual wants to do minus what society will stop him from doing, and even when there is no king or ruling class, there is still the sense of subordinating oneself to a de facto authority. Dejure authority is a kind of authority which, like the authority of the repeatable experiment or the great work of the creative imagination, does not diminish but enhances the dignity of everyone who assents to it. In the study of literature, for example, we begin with a response to an individual poem, then we normally go on to the total body of that poet's work, and then on to the total body of literary experience of which the poet's work forms part. Here again there is something corresponding to the ghost of the symposium which so seldom appears. The ideal literary response is a definitive experience, a response which incorporates the whole energy and power of the work of art itself. But in ordinary experience, we almost never attain such a response. We are always reading Paradise Lost with a hangover or seeing a performance of King Lear with an incompetent Cordelia; there is always something wrong with the moment of response. Hence criticism grows up as a kind of analogy of that wonderful definitive response that our actual responses all circle around, but seldom if ever, or perhaps once in a lifetime, can attain. It is only when we get to the point of having some sense of the total subject in our minds that we begin to recognize the source of an authority beyond that of the poet or the creative artist whose work we are studying.3 If we are listening to music, let us say, on the level of Bach or Mozart, the response keeps shifting from the personal to the impersonal. On the one hand we feel that this is Bach, that it couldn't possibly be anybody else. On the other hand, there are moments when Bach disappears, and what we feel is: this is the voice of music itself; this is what music was created to say. At that level, we are not hearing the music so

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much as recognizing it. The same thing happens in the literary arts. If, in watching a play of Shakespeare on the stage, we ask what the source of authority of this dramatic structure is, we answer loudly and confidently, "Shakespeare," and we get a visual impression of the poet Shakespeare writing in his garret in Elizabethan London. The two contemporary representations of him both make him look like an idiot, so we tend to substitute the later faked portraits with their noble brow and their serene expression as the symbol of the authority that we're in touch with. But at a certain point that vanishes too and we begin to realize that this is what words have been created or invented to say. At that point, we begin to establish a kind of contact with the work of art in which authority becomes intelligible. It was a major breakthrough in literary criticism when Freud recognized in Sophocles' play of Oedipus Rex the working out of a situation which everybody goes through at some time or other in their lives. In other words, what the drama presents to us is the mirror of experiences which we have in some sense or other lived through ourselves. Bernard Shaw remarks of Claudius in Hamlet that the reason why Claudius is so fascinated by the mousetrap play is not because it's a great play, but because it's about him.4 Some time ago, I was in Osaka in Japan watching a performance of the Bunraku or puppet theatre. Each puppet is manoeuvred by three attendants and the speaking parts are all taken by a speaker off-stage. After four or five hours of this, something suddenly occurred to me which I will give you in precisely the same absurd way in which it occurred to me. It seemed to me that these puppets were quite certain that they themselves were producing all the movements and noises that the audience was hearing, even though the audience could see that they were not. And that suddenly connected in my mind with my experience, for example, of the great romances at the end of Shakespeare's period: The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline, where the characters seem to me to have been deliberately scaled down to puppet size. Again, they seem quite certain that they are autonomous sources of what they are doing, even though it is obvious that some divinity off-stage, like Jupiter in Cymbeline, or someone else on-stage, like Prospero in The Tempest, was producing it all for them. And that in turn begins to dramatize, so to speak, the situation of drama itself. Here again, we have, as we have in the theory of education, the actors and the watchers, the players and the audience. The watcher knows more, and that fact is the source of all irony in drama. The

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audience always knows more about what is happening than the players on the stage do, and because the audience can walk out of the theatre at the end, they're also in a situation of greater freedom. What they are looking at in the play on the stage is a recognition of patterns that they themselves contain. Our own experience tells us that we spend our lives acting out roles and assuming one persona after another. There are pathetic illusions about encounter groups, which are supposed to get underneath a persona to the real person, but there is never anything under a persona except another persona; there is no core to that onion. The process of playing roles is infinite, and, as Hamlet's soliloquies demonstrate, we keep on dramatizing ourselves to ourselves. So drama, which I'm taking as a central form of literary education, is not only a training in the ancient axiom of knowing oneself, but also a training in something which the existentialists tell us is impossible: of being a spectator of one's own life, of developing that kind of creative schizophrenia in which one can both act and watch oneself acting at the same time. So it seems that there are, in addition to the steady effort, the forming of habit, in the learning process, elements which (again using diagrams and metaphors) are both below it and above it. The one below it is what the cultivated man gets, a possession of rarefied pleasure usually dependent on a certain kind of class structure. It is something which he can use and which can give pleasure and even serenity to his life, but it has no power to transform him. On the upper level is that descending informing vision which is what Heidegger is pointing to when he says that man does not use language but responds to language.5 Man obviously does use language, but he does so only on the level of personal cultivation, the leisure which Menenius in Coriolanus tells us is centred in the belly and not the brain. We are all born under a social contract; we belong to something before we are anything, and that is the source of all the de facto authority which exists in a context of subordination. But the society of this social contract is only the transient appearance of society, a society in which a single psychotic with a rifle can change the presidency of the United States, and in which empires rise and fall as rapidly as women's hem lines. It is clear that such a society has only an interim and emergency authority. Behind the transient appearance of society are the permanent realities of the arts and sciences which education leads us to. It is obvious, therefore, that the social contract has to be supplemented by an educational contract. This latter is the recognition of the reality behind the transient appearances

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presented in our morning newspapers and television, and it is the contract with an authority which does not diminish, but emancipates. Every great writer, we notice, has two forms of communication; he meant something to his own time, and he means something to us across great barriers of time and space and language. He communicates to us for reasons often quite different from those which appealed to his own day. Our twentieth-century understanding of Shakespeare is quite different from the Elizabethan understanding of Shakespeare, and if there is one thing certain about the body of Shakespearean criticism in the twentieth century, it is that Shakespeare himself would have found it unintelligible. But the fact that these double appeals, to one's own time and to our time, have to keep polarizing each other in a continued tension, leads us to a glimpse into what the permanence of the society represented by the arts and sciences really is. It is a glimpse beyond the tyranny of an irreversible time and the temporary expediencies which are the normal form of life in the ordinary world, into a world which has an authority because it lies beyond our ordinary mental capacities of time and space, and hence leads us to understand how we can be what Proust calls "giants immersed in time."6

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Address on Receiving the Royal Bank Award 18 September 1978

From the mimeographed booklet (Montreal: Royal Bank, 1978). Reprinted in the CEA Critic (organ of the College English Association), 42, no. 2 (January 1980): 2-9, as part of a two-volume tribute to Frye, and as "The Teacher of Humanities in Twentieth-Century Canada" in Grad Post, 2 November 1978: 5-7. Printed in abridged form as "The Rear-View Mirror: Notes toward a Future" in DG, 181-90, and as "Thoughts of a Canadian" in Report on Confederation, 2 (November 1978): 30-1. The booklet and typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 6, files q-t, and NFF, 1993, box 3, file 8. A few corrections to the booklet in Frye's hand were incorporated into DG and have been adopted here. The award is given annually, in the name of all teachers of the humanities, to one who makes an outstanding contribution to the common good.

I am deeply grateful to the Selection Committee for the honour they have done me, and to my hosts of the Royal Bank for their hospitality to as many of my friends as they could afford to invite. But I have also been asked to make an address, and I find that extremely difficult: perhaps the most difficult assignment of the kind I have ever had. For every address I have so far made, there has always been an occasion, some reason for the speech which prescribes the general subject and approach. But those who are here are here because they are friends of mine, and I have nothing to say that could possibly express my respect for such an audience, or my gratitude to them for their presence. The best I can do is to assume that this award is to something bigger than I am, to whatever it is that I stand for. If a soldier gets a medal for valour pinned on him, it doesn't mean that he is braver than other soldiers: it means that he is a representative of the

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army's morale which the army has been able to identify. In a sense the army is pinning a medal on itself. This is not quite what is happening here tonight, but those who have already had this award, many of whom are also friends of mine, are clearly representatives of something: Morley Callaghan of creative writing, Dr. Gordon Thomas of medical service in remote areas, Arthur Erickson of architecture, and so on. I could hardly accept such an award with a clear conscience if I didn't think I had the same kind of representative function. What the award to me recognizes, or so I hope and believe, is the importance of the teacher, more particularly the teacher of the humanities, in the life of twentieth-century Canada. It is in the name of those teachers that I am speaking; it is they who provide me with whatever occasion and subject I may have. I have been called, very generously, a scholar, and ideally there is no difference between a scholar and a teacher. But in practice there is a good deal of difference, at least in emphasis. I think all my books have been teaching books rather than scholarly books: I keep reformulating the same central questions, trying to put them into a form to which some reader or student will respond, "Yes, now I get it." A more typical scholar than I, I should think, can be much more of a guru: he can train other scholars; he is at his best in the graduate school, and when his students become scholars in their turn, they have his brand mark, so to speak, printed on them. I teach mainly undergraduates, and I find the undergraduate classroom important for my writing. And yet the teacherstudent relation, as such, seems to me a curiously embarrassing one: I want my students released from it as soon as possible to go and do their own thing. Their own thing may very well be teaching, of course; but what interests me even more is the great variety of things that students in an undergraduate classroom go on to do. Because this is what indicates most clearly the variety of ways that the university affects the society it belongs to. I have used the figure of a soldier getting a medal, and clearly one of the essential things that a soldier has to do to get his medal is survive. None of my predecessors was in his first youth when he got the award: most of them have been about where I am, close to or past retirement. I recently read an article, written by someone much younger than myself, which said sternly that the twentieth century is moving so fast that anyone born when I was, in 1912, is at best a survivor from an earlier age, a dinosaur who may not realize how cold it's getting. But it has been often pointed out that Canada itself is peculiarly a land of survival: a

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huge loosely assembled collection of territories, divided by language, geography, and politics, can only stay together by constantly meeting a series of crises, each of them carrying the threat of not surviving if the crisis is not met. So perhaps Canada has something in common with my generation. And during the sixty-odd years that Canada and I have survived together, it seems to me that Canada has become steadily more typical of the world it is in. Survival in itself is nothing to be complacent about: people survive a war only because other people do not; and if we worry less about nuclear destruction than we did, it is because the worry is intolerable, not because the threat is any less of a threat. But the survival of society as a whole is usually considered a good thing: we may be surviving in a fool's paradise, but perhaps no other paradise is appropriate for human beings. If I can believe what that article said, along with so many others that say much the same thing, the world I was born into in 1912 was both a stable world and a simple one, a world of ordered values, whereas now these values are being questioned or denied, and are either disappearing or turning into something else. People of my generation, in short, were brought up to be against sin and in favour of motherhood, and can't cope with a world where motherhood is out and sin is in. Being a literary critic, when I am faced with statements like this I look first at the literary conventions behind them, and then at the metaphors they use. The convention is what critics call a pastoral myth, and it descends from ancient stories of lost gardens of Eden and vanished golden ages. Pastoral myths are mostly illusions projected from the experience of growing older. A child's world seems simple and innocent to the adult, so he assumes that the world as a whole was simpler when he was a child, and by extension even simpler before that. But however natural this assumption may be it is clearly nonsense: there have never been any simple ages. As for the metaphors, what they really say is: the world used to be solid; now it's liquid. The basis for these metaphors is chiefly money: if we can put a dollar into a bank with a reasonable hope of still having a dollar when we take it out again, then our world looks solid, and all our social, political, and religious values look solid too. Rapid inflation makes the world liquidate very quickly, and we have to live from one moment to the next by a combination of faith and self-hypnotism, like the people in the Far East who walk over hot coals, to the great bewilderment of tourists, most of whom are capable of self-hypnotism but not of faith.

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What I am speaking about is what is often called future shock, the sense of uneasiness caused by a technology moving faster than the human ability to control it. This is also a standard myth, the story of the sorcerer's apprentice, the machine that could be started but not stopped. Uneasiness about the future is there, certainly, and the basis for it is real enough; but I have no expertise in this area. What I hope I do know something about starts with the fact that there is no such thing as future shock, because nobody knows one instant of the future, except by analogy with the past. Metaphors are tricky things to handle. We think we know that the earth revolves around the sun, but we still say "sunrise" and "sunset" because we don't really believe it. The sun revolves around the world that concerns us, and doubtless always will. Similarly, if we're driving a car, we look ahead of us to see where we're going, but what applies to moving in space doesn't apply to moving in time. We move in time with our backs to what's ahead and our faces to the past, and all we know is in a rear-view mirror. But we don't like to think this way: we say to a young person: "you have a great future ahead of you," and forget that what we mean is: "you will probably have a good deal more past to contemplate." The humanities are often reproached with their concern over the past, but there is no difference between the humanities and any other form of knowledge on this point. The humanities change just as radically as the sciences do, and on the same principles. There is nothing new under the sun except our knowledge of what is under the sun, but that new knowledge is a constant recreation of old knowledge. The question, "Where are we going?" assumes that we already know the answer to the question, "Where are we now, and how did we get here?" We certainly don't know the answer to that one, and in fact all our really urgent, mysterious, and frightening questions have to do with the burden of the past and the meaning of tradition. Here we are in Canada, confronted with so many problems that demand immediate solution. Nobody denies their importance, but what continues to fascinate us is the reinterpreting of our history. What seems really important to us is that all Canadians don't agree about the British North America Act of a century ago, or about the Quebec Act a century before that.1 Oh well, we say, that's just Canada, always fussing about its identity, like a neurotic who can't deal with the world until he's got his private past unsnarled. But it isn't just Canada: there's the weight of a past of slavery on emerging nations in Africa, the weight of the British Empire on contemporary Britain, of the

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Old Testament on Israel, of Marxist doctrine on the Soviet Union. Up to the Vietnam war, more or less, many people in the United States believed that the American way of life had only to progress and look ahead: their view of life for themselves was based on the car-driving metaphor. But now most Americans also, I think, regard their past as something in front of them to be studied, not behind them to run away from. I understand the fear that our civilization will fail to adapt in time to the changes which its technology has already started. But the word "adapt" may be misleading, because there is no environment to adapt to except the one we have created. Man is the one animal that has stopped playing the Darwinian game of adaptation, and has tried to transform the environment instead. Much of his transformation so far has been pollution, waste, overcrowding, and destruction, and there is a limit beyond which he can't go on doing this. At least I hope there's a limit: there are movies like Star Wars which suggest that we can learn to visita distant galaxies and smash them up too; but I'd prefer not to think of that as our future. The American poet Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called Description without Place, in which he says that man does not live directly in the world; he lives inside his own constructs of that world. Nothing like nationality has any existence in nature, and yet, Stevens says, when we are in Spain everything looks Spanish. A parallel of latitude divides Canada from the United States; a meridian of longitude, Manitoba from Saskatchewan. Such things don't exist in the world of birds and trees, of course; but on the other hand, the world of birds and trees doesn't exist for us, except as part of the constructed human world which starts with things like Canada and its provinces. I have spent most of my professional life studying one aspect of the way man constructs the world he lives in; the aspect I call a mythology, the building of worlds out of words. Nobody can create, think, or even act outside the mythology of his time, but a mythology is not some kind of prison; it is simply the whole body of verbal material we work with. Like science, it is being recreated all the time, partly by critics and scholars and partly by literature itself, because every new writer recreates something already in literature. So anyone teaching literature gets involved with mythology, and this very quickly carries him past the boundaries of literature into the social function of words. In forty years of teaching, I have never seen any differences among my students, as students, that could be ascribed to sex or ethnical origin. But

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of course I see any amount of social conditioning, in every classroom I go into. Gradually it dawns on a teacher of English that he is in contact with the student's total verbal experience, and that probably less than one per cent of that experience has been derived from anything that he would call literature. The rest is made up of social conditioning, from television and other news media, casual conversations, advertising, the chattering of the student's own subconscious, and so on. All teachers know that their students need to become aware of and question their assumptions; but perhaps the teacher of English sees most clearly how militant a job teaching is, and what kind of enemy it has to fight. What faces him is not simply a mass of unexamined assumptions but a complete and mostly phoney mythology, made up of cliche and prejudice and stock response, a kind of parody of the one he is trying to teach. We think of reading as essential to living in a modern society, which of course it is. But in itself it only attaches us to that society; it doesn't set us free from it. In the subway, where I do a certain amount of my writing, I can see around me four signs telling me not to do things, three sets of instructions about what to do in an emergency, and two threats of fine or imprisonment if there turns out not to be any emergency. There is also a long document in fine print I have never read, besides all the advertising. It's clear that the primary motive for teaching one to read is to produce an obedient and adjusted citizen, who can respond to a traffic sign with the right reflex. This conformity is probably the only basis for living in a complicated society: we belong to something before we are anything, and the individual grows out of the group, not the other way round. There is nothing much wrong with the fact that most students are conformists, including of course the rebellious students, who are bigoted conformists. But social adjustment is a beginning, not an end, and on this basis of conformity the teacher has to work for their liberal education, trying to transfer their loyalties from ready-made responses to the real world of human constructive power. As the university comes very late in a student's life, the teacher may have to work only with a few, but that few makes all the difference in the level of the civilization it belongs to. How is it that people get trapped in phoney mythologies? Thomas Pynchon says in his novel Gravity's Rainbow that man is a paranoid animal, always claiming that the world he's made is the real world, and that it's the order of God or of nature, or both, as well. This means, in reverse, that there can't be any reality that doesn't have an essential relation to us. The notion that God made the world primarily for the sake

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of man was built into our religious consciousness for centuries. What other point could there possibly be in making the world? people asked, without realizing how sick the question was. It was a slow and painful adjustment to seeing the world as a place that got along for millions of years without man, and still could, in fact still may. Or else we claim that what we impose on our world is what nature put there. When we had a society with "nobles" on top and "commoners" below, people tended to assume that those on top had "noble blood," and were better by birth or nature than the others. Such constructs are at first partial: in early times one nation would assume that it had supreme rights over the rest of the world; another nation would make the same assumption, so they would go to war, and the winner was the one who was right. But as human life has slowly expanded over the whole globe, it has become steadily clearer that all enemies, proletariats, slaves, scapegoats, and second-class people are products of illusion, things to be outgrown, and the longer we cling to such illusions, the more obviously evil and disastrous our attachment to them becomes. St. Paul reminded the Athenians that there is only one human race [Acts 17:26]: I say reminded, because he clearly assumed that it was a fact they would know. We know it too, but are very unwilling to act on it: however, there are signs that we are making a beginning. Some of us have begun to wonder whether the world of animals and plants, perhaps also of coal and oil deposits, really exists only for our benefit. Every classroom shows a division between those who take in what education is about and those who stay with cliche and stock response. This creates a distinction that I would call the distinction between concern and anxiety. Concern is the response of the adult citizen to genuine social problems. Anxiety is based on the desire to exclude or subordinate, to preserve the values or benefits of society for the group of right people who know the right answers. The anxieties closest to teaching the humanities, I suppose, are those of prudery and propriety, or what I think of as garrison anxieties, the desire to keep everyone in parade uniform so that it will be easy to distinguish the officers. One of the more attractive features of my own life in Toronto has been in seeing many anxieties of this type gradually relaxed, or even abandoned. In my younger days there was a great deal of anxious deference paid to women, of a kind that was clearly connected with keeping them out of many fields of social activity. There were anxieties about the

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freedom of expression claimed by painters and sculptors, and art galleries resounded with comparisons to what one's five-year-old kid could do. There were frantic anxieties about sexual scenes or four-letter words in books: the copy of Ulysses that I am still using was smuggled in to me from Buffalo by a friend. When I was a student, a young woman in a Latin class who had memorized the crib went on placidly translating a passage of Horace which the anxious editor had removed from the text to safeguard her purity, and I have never forgotten the vision of futility that that opened up for me. Religious bodies cultivated special kinds of anxiety, and felt that it increased their virtue to do so. Jokes that assumed racial or sexual or class prejudice abounded, and the assumptions in them were more or less taken for granted. And a policewoman set up as a sexual decoy could hardly be festooned with more warnings and special instructions than those surrounding the purchase of liquor. Nevertheless, Toronto went on expanding from an uptight ScotchIrish town to a cosmopolitan city, with art galleries and theatres and bookshops presenting a kind of imaginative experience that fifty years ago would have filled the newspapers with screams of panic and despair. I know that all this is only a normal part of a big city's growth; I am merely saying that it has been rather exhilarating to live through. I know too that no dragon ever dies: many people feel that their security is bound up with their anxieties, and Canadian novelists even yet are struggling with the same kind of hysteria that faced Morley Callaghan half a century ago.2 It may be thought too that many of these things are rather trivial. I happen not to think so. It's the job of a teacher of the humanities to keep fighting for the liberalizing of the imagination, to encourage students to confront experience, to explore the shadows and the darkness, to distinguish evil from the portrayal of evil, and to meet the unexpected with tolerance. If I am right, this is a fight on the front line of social good will, an aspect of what in religion is called charity. The democratic ideal is one of equality, where everyone has the same rights before the law, but not, except indirectly, one of freedom. It tries to provide the conditions of freedom, but freedom itself is an experience, not a condition, and only the individual can experience it. So for freedom there has to be some tension between society and the individual. As the democracies have continued to maintain this tension, another movement has begun to take shape, which I think may be the most significant social movement of our time. This is the rise of the small community that coheres around a cultural tradition. For culture, in contrast to political and economic movements, tends to decentralize: it is usually based on a

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distinctive language, which is one of the most fragmented forms of human expression, and its products, like fine wines, are restricted to a small area in growth, if not in appeal. In the world around us there are, first, the colonies of the old empires which have come to independence, and are now looking for their own cultural traditions. Then there are the small ethnic groups that have refused to be entirely assimilated to larger ones, like the Welsh in Britain or the Bretons in France. Some of these groups have a long history of oppression and repression, and partly because of this they may include violent or terroristic elements. These are naturally the ones we get to hear most about, but they are not the really significant ones, because violence always brings about the opposite of what it aims at. The extent to which political separation may be necessary for a culture will vary with circumstances, and often it may be simply the result of clinging to obsolete patterns of thinking. The centralizing political and economic movements have built up huge cities; these cities are now almost unmanageable, and I think a decentralizing cultural movement is likely to become more dominant. But I think as it goes on it will also become less political. In every part of Canada there are strong separatist feelings, some political, as in Quebec, some economic, as in the west, some geographical, as in the Maritimes. But the genuine movement underlying all this is a feeling of cultural distinctiveness, and this, I think, will keep breaking down into smaller units as more of the country becomes articulate. In the last fifteen years or so, I have noticed how an increasing number of writers and painters in Canada have come to regard the place where they are living not as an accident, but as an environment that nourishes them, and which they in turn bring into articulateness. We speak of American literature, but what we have are mainly Mississippi writers, New England writers, Parisian expatriate writers, southern California writers. Similarly, I think Canadian literature will become more and more a literature of regions. It seems to be a cultural law that the more specific the setting of literature is, the more universal its communicating power. One reason why this movement interests me is that it could give the university a social function which would be its traditional function renewed. The reason why I have stayed in the university is very largely the fact that I have never got over the impact of my four undergraduate years. As an undergraduate, I was in a small community of students concerned mainly with the liberal arts. This was a community in which life could be experienced with a far greater intensity than anywhere else,

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because it was a life in which the intellect and the imagination had a functional role to play. It is no good arguing with me, or with anyone else who has had a similar experience, about the practical value of spending four years in a university. The experience is its own value, and is a totally irreplaceable one. Modern universities have been geared to political and economic expansion: they have developed into multiversities, with research institutes and professional training centres. As a result systems of financing have grown up that are based on size, and have practically compelled the universities to compete for students and to suggest that degrees were essential for a better job or social position. We still need research institutes and professional training schools: the question is whether they should be set up in such a way as to smother one of the real centres of university life. I would hope to see the small university community come into focus again as the spark plug of a small cultural area that was beginning to feel its own articulateness. I began by saying that the rear-view mirror is our only crystal ball: there is no guide to the future except the analogy of the past. But one's view of the past is coloured by prejudice and narrowed by ignorance, and so the future, when it comes to join the past, is always unexpected. Many people base their lives on what they think of as the future: the writer hopes he will be read in the future if he is neglected at present; the radical dreams of a revolutionary future and the conservative of a safeguarded one. I have my hopes of the future too, but future generations are never the children of light: they are no better than those they followed, though they see different things. One is wiser to leave the future to itself: whatever else it may do, it will not fulfil our hopes in the way we anticipate. But as our personal future narrows, we become more aware of another dimension of time entirely, and may even catch glimpses of the powers and forces of a far greater creative design. Perhaps when we think we are working for the future we are really being contained in the present, though an infinite present, eternity in an hour, as Blake calls it.3 Perhaps too that present is also a presence, not an impersonal cause in which to lose ourselves, but a person in whom to find ourselves again. Thou art that, as the Hindus say. If the selection committee feels that I have done anything to improve the lot of mankind, I am of course very pleased. There is another kind of pleasure, however, in feeling that even in its accidents, whether of suffering or of triumph, a human life may not be a "lot" at all, but a life that because it dies is a real life, a freedom that because it is known and determined is once and always free.

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Installation Address as Chancellor 11 October 1978

Address given in Convocation Hall on being installed as chancellor of Victoria University.1 From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 6, file I; a carbon copy is in file m, and an earlier version with corrections in file k.

A law in the Holiness Code of Leviticus prescribes that a trumpet should be blown on the Day of Atonement after the passing of forty-nine years, or seven sabbaths of years, and that the following year, the fiftieth, should be a jubilee year of rejoicing. Today was the Day of Atonement; this year is Emmanuel College's fifty-year jubilee, and the chancellor you have just installed has been associated with Victoria for forty-nine years, or seven sabbaths of years. So this might well be an occasion for nostalgic recall, with the emphasis on superficial change. When I came to college, dancing had quite recently become a central feature of student life, and we still had the occasional promenade, not that there was ever much difference as far as my feet were concerned. Sexual mores were as rigid as authority could make them, which was not very rigid; young couples were not as a rule publicly adhesive, and women in residence endured a system of late leaves so complicated as to make one wonder whether its real intention was protective or penal. Most male freshmen were put in a separate building on Charles Street, now a parking lot, with, I regret to say, no plaque in the pavement to record the fact that Professor Joblin and I were assigned to it, as our first installation here. Student affairs were managed by the Debating Society; such a phrase as "the Vic pub" would have seemed a contradiction in terms, and there were, with one exception, no tall buildings on the skyline to remind us that a central location in a big city can become, for a university, something of a trap.

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But I doubt if nostalgia is the right tone. Alumni reunions are commonly nostalgic, but what keeps alumni reuniting is the feeling that the college they come back to is still the same place. When I was principal of Victoria I had to arrange a dinner each June for a number of graduates of the current senior year, to which alumni of fifty and sixty years back were invited. That event in particular made me realize how much more important continuity is than change in the academic world. It is a central feature of university life that it is flexible enough to absorb the generation gap, just as the wide halls and high ceilings of the much ridiculed main building turned out to be surprisingly functional as the student body tripled in size. History, then, is perhaps more appropriate than reminiscence, especially on Charter Day.2 At the time that Victoria was founded, Egerton Ryerson seems to have grasped two permanent facts about education in the Canadian context. One is that where there is limited wealth in private hands, all universities have to be publicly supported; the other is that the principle of the separation of church and state does not imply excluding a religious foundation from such support. Here the Canadian attitude, in contrast to the American one, has always been more conservative, as we used to say, or more liberal, as we are coming to think now. The issue of academic freedom only arises when academic credit or appointment is made to depend on a profession of belief, and there has never been any question of that at any time in Victoria's history. The religious ethos of Victoria, for Ryerson, was not a leaven looking for a secular lump; it simply represented a distinctive ethical mix, the product of a unique tradition. As there was a group of such mixes in Ontario, all were equally deserving of state support. Ryerson's attitude was not antisecular, like Bishop Strachan's, and by definition it could not be anti-Anglican or anti-Catholic: it was simply antimonolithic. When I was a student, each college had its own variety of religious instruction, although in University College it had to be called Oriental Languages or Ancient Near Eastern Literature, in order to preserve the decencies of secularism. But there was no general recognition, until about a dozen years ago, that religion in itself was a valid academic discipline, in spite of the unique resources the Toronto campus had for teaching it. There were still fears about "indoctrination," much as though we were to refuse to have a Department of Political Science because it might influence the way some students would vote. Even people with specific religious commitments often tended to think of the world as

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having a monopoly of intellectual honesty. Once over this important hurdle, the issue of equal academic status for religious education shifted its centre of gravity (for us) from Victoria to Emmanuel College, and we are very pleased, if not surprised, to learn from President Ham's inaugural address that the University of Toronto has no difficulty about the principles involved. It is, of course, the existence of Emmanuel College that makes the religious tradition of Victoria substantial. It is difficult to know what to say about the religious ethos of the arts college. My own feeling is that it is not too hazy to invoke a more concrete presence. I never go into the chapel without feeling that the four great witnesses pictured there, Martin Luther taking his stand on reasonable authority, John Milton dedicating his poem to the reality of God in a world of sin and death, Isaac Newton remarking that science never reaches an end but always a new beginning, John Wesley staking his life on the paradox of the Incarnation, still speak for our staff and students, not in any restrictive way, but as pointing to horizons worth exploring and expanding. Nobody wants religious dogmatism, but nobody wants either a dogmatism that would seal off the religious perspective from human life altogether. This perspective is essential to my own work, and I have stayed at Victoria partly because I felt that I had a more positive freedom here than simple toleration in secular surroundings would give me, even though no official Victoria policy can or wants to go beyond toleration. By the time Victoria was ready to leave Cobourg, Ryerson's issue had moved from the religious to the academic. The principle of federation was that the sciences, on the whole, are best taught when they are centralized, and the humanities when they are decentralized. This is not simply a matter of laboratories. The natural sciences, at least, deal with nature, the primary world of man, and the humanities are concerned with culture, the world that man has built out of nature and wants to live in. The scientist can appeal to an authority beyond controversy, the authority of repeatable experiments, accurate measurements, prediction, and verified observations. The humanities can never escape from controversy, because they are in the world of ethical choice. For verified experiment and observation, students need to face in the same direction; for ethical choice, they need to face one another. Once stated, this contrast looks very simplistic. Certainly there is a dimension of science which is cultural, and is concerned with the way society wants to use and absorb the discoveries of science. The same

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double perspective is even clearer with the social sciences, to say nothing of the professional faculties, including theology, which was once called the queen of sciences. The cultural aspect of science, however, requires a different kind of teaching, perhaps a different kind of teacher. It needs, I think, the environment of a college community rooted in the humanities, its teaching based on the various modern forms of what Plato called the symposium, the small congenial group pursuing a dialectic until the shadow of argument vanishes into the substance of vision. This study of the social use of science is not yet fully a part of the university curriculum, but it will be by the end of the century, and in federation Toronto already has a means of containing it. The conception of "college subjects" with separate departments is dead now, mainly, I think, because it was mishandled from the beginning. If Victoria had taken its share of Philosophy and Modern History at the time of the Act of 1906, and if the newer language departments had automatically been added to the colleges, we might have come much more quickly to centralized departments with interlocking college staffs. Even so, the rise of the social sciences was enough to unbalance an arrangement that looked reasonably fair-minded when it was drawn up. Eliminating college departments, however, carries with it the danger of falling into the opposite extreme of reducing the colleges to elementary classes and the lower years. I need not labour the point that this would lead directly to a junior or second-line staff in the colleges. Clearly, Victoria must retain some power of appointment, in whatever degree of co-operation with the departments, if it is to remain a college, that is, a teaching unit, and not become merely a group of residences with some supplementary lecture space. At present, for obvious reasons, Victoria's staff is largely confined to the traditional college subjects, but it wants to increase its variety of cross-appointments in other subjects, according to the premises and promises of the Memorandum of Agreement. This would eventually give Victoria, with the other colleges, a Senior Common Room more like that of an Oxford or Cambridge college, which can change its academic pattern over the years. Such diversifying has to be done gradually. An ill-advised attempt to reshape one of the arts colleges too fast and too soon should teach us greater caution for the future.3 Many other universities have seen the immense advantages, for students and staff alike, in a college-based faculty of arts and science, and have tried to develop systems of colleges for themselves. But colleges function with more

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sense of direction when they have grown out of historical and cultural roots, and are not simply called into being by administrative fiat. Here again, in its federation system Toronto has more solid college assets than any other North American university I know. Once established in Toronto, Victoria had a hard time becoming a real community until its two residences had been built. In my student days a large proportion of students came from small towns in Western Ontario; consequently a lively social and athletic life revolved around the residences. This round of activities was so absorbing that Victoria students who took no course work at all at Victoria felt as much at home there as anyone who did. The eighteen married couples in my own year, 1933, suggest that this social activity was not without long-term results. But the college became increasingly metropolitan, and the students who spend a good part of the day commuting and have less time for living in the college community became more numerous. In short, the residential aspect of Victoria, forty years ago, was strong enough to make up, in some degree, for the curricular imbalance. It is not so strong now, and Victoria students say that they need to take some part of their work at the college if they are to feel that they belong there. It will be a strain on the college's ingenuity and resources to provide appropriate programmes for so many more students, but the strain should be a buoyant and not an oppressive one. Victoria's distinctive tradition, then, has three aspects, religious, humanistic, and residential, and removing any of these would destroy, for both staff and students, the double identity of a distinguished college and a great university which they possess now. If all the colleges were weakened beyond effectiveness, the arts and science faculty would still be big and impressive, but no longer great. Such a disaster could occur, not through spiritual wickedness in high places, but simply through the heavy inert pressure of restricted budgets that in time will wear down any university into an academic processing factory. I am a literary critic with a great respect for genre and convention, and the speech I have so far given belongs to one of the oldest forms of human oratory. You can find two examples of it in the Book of Joshua. It consists of a historical retrospect followed by an exhortation to persevere in the tried and tested way. If I turn slightly more personal in conclusion, it is because I have been here long enough to speak from personal experience. At the age of seventeen I fell by accident, if that is the word, into a college where I was taught by three first-rate humanists, Pelham

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Edgar, Ned Pratt, and John Robins, one of them of course also the best Canadian poet in English. It was an equally great privilege to find myself in turn teaching generations of students who have included many of the finest writers and scholars in Canada. So many, in fact, that as long as I have been here, I have continuously had the feeling of living in Canadian cultural history. I speak of Victoria, because I have worked in Victoria; but my debt to Emmanuel is very considerable too. In my last year at Emmanuel, after I had decided on university teaching as my life's work, I consulted an older classmate about whether I should accept ordination, quoting a remark of a teacher of mine that ordination might become an embarrassment in a secular career. He said: "But isn't that your best reason?"4 Forty years later, when I was staring at a so-called Maoist pamphlet called Northrop Frye: The High Priest of Clerical Obscurantism? its cover illustrated by a row of black monks, with hoods suggesting the Ku Klux Klan, I realized that his remark was straight on target. To be made the chief executive of Victoria, like President French, if a heavy responsibility, would be at least a fairly specific one. But to be made the symbol of it is an honour I hardly know how to do justice to. To the love and affection that I sense here tonight, I can make little response beyond the silence of the deepest gratitude. What I can say has to be said primarily to the students. First, a great tradition is not a dead weight from the past, like a chain tied to a ghost, but a continuous source of energy. Second, the promise that truth leads to freedom, which Victoria has appropriated to itself, is not an empty aphorism, but the guarantee of a direction and a purpose in life that can be repeated in the experience of every Victoria student, of whom I am one among many thousands.

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The Chancellor's Message 1979

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 47, file 2. Printed in the Victoria University Handbook (a student guide), 1979, 4, with a number of errors; reprinted in 1990 when the handbook was revived.

A book on popular psychology of some years ago was called What Do You Say After You Say Hello?1 and your editor has put me in the rather difficult position of trying to answer the question. You are now a member of two independent universities, Toronto and Victoria. Victoria College is an arts college in both universities. If you survive until graduation, your degree will be a Toronto degree, but your academic home will be Victoria. No other university, to my knowledge, has a set-up like this one: it grew up in response to special historical conditions in Ontario, a mixture of accident and design. The general idea is to give you a membership in a major university, with a teaching staff and learning facilities as good as you can find anywhere, along with a smaller community where you can find more identity for yourself as a person. That smaller community of Victoria has a traditional religious connection which can be of advantage to you if you can or want to make use of it, otherwise it will not touch you. Its present staff teaches mainly in the humanities, because until recently there were six "college subjects" in the humanities which Victoria students took only at Victoria. Now all subjects are organized into university departments, and there will be, or should be, an increasing variety of tutorial and lecturing opportunities at Victoria for students in other areas. There are also, of course, residences and social and athletic facilities peculiar to Victoria.

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It is often said that Toronto is a big impersonal place where a student gets lost in great masses of other students moving from and back into a large industrial city. This is true up to a point, though exaggerated: for arts and science students the colleges are one way that Toronto tries to fight against this impersonality. Even at that, Victoria is larger than it ideally should be. Consequently, a certain amount of initiative has to be put on you: you may have to make fairly positive efforts to get to know your classmates and instructors. You will find that your instructors are a good deal more interested in you as a person than they appear to be in a lecture room, but in the nature of things they can't take much initiative. If you do feel lonely or lost or panicky about your courses, nobody wants you to feel that way, and if you look for help you will get it. However important your studies, remembering their content for the rest of your life is not primarily what the university aims at. Four years at a liberal arts college are not a withdrawal from the world: you are in the same world you will be in after graduation. But you are in a specialized community in which the intellect and imagination have an obvious and visible function. Life is lived here in a way which makes such words as culture and civilization mean something. So it's easier to see what human life could be like if intelligence and awareness were constantly being used. That doesn't mean that the people at university, including yourself, are any better than other people: it means that the society you're in is better organized in a specific way for specific reasons. That is the memory of your years here that we hope you will preserve. College years are often said to be the best years of one's life, but in themselves they are no better or worse than any other years. It is only the change in one's perspective on the rest of life that makes them the best years: if that change takes place, you will never wonder why you came to college. Welcome, best wishes, and (as it is sometimes called) good luck.

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Criticism as Education 26 October 1979

The first Leland B. Jacobs Lecture (New York: School of Library Service, Columbia University, 1980), Reprinted in OE, 138-52. Two typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 47, file 2, one with holograph corrections and one a retyped copy (which introduced two errors into subsequent printings). The Leland B. Jacobs Lecture Series was inaugurated at the Library School at Columbia to honour Dr. Jacobs, the distinguished student of children's literature, and in support of his belief that teachers and librarians working with children must have a knowledge of adult critical theories, and would benefit from dialogue with outstanding literary scholars. Frye was also the first recipient of the Leland B. Jacobs Award, presented to those whose achievements have had a significant influence on the study and teaching of children's literature.

It is a great pleasure to be here and to inaugurate this series of lectures in honour of a distinguished educator. I was in some doubt in my mind as to just what path to take: true, I rather rashly joined a committee on children's literature, but I have not yet been able to attend a meeting of it, so I feel that I have not been properly instructed in the subject. On the other hand, I did not begin to believe in my own critical theories until I began to see ways of applying them to elementary education. In a book published over twenty years ago, I wrote that literature is not a coherent subject at all unless its elementary principles could be explained to any intelligent nineteen-year-old [AC, 14]. Since then, Buckminster Fuller has remarked that unless a first principle can be grasped by a six-year-old, it is not really a first principle,1 and perhaps his statement is more nearly right than mine. My estimate of the age at which a person can grasp the elementary principles of literature has been steadily going down over

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the last twenty years. So I am genuinely honoured to be able to pay tribute to an educator who has always insisted on the central importance of children's literature. The teaching of literature has certain problems peculiar to our particular state of society. There were many good reasons for separating church and state in American life, but of course one inevitable consequence was the creating of a kind of religious vacuum. In that vacuum education became a kind of denatured religion. That aspect of education increased in the proportion to which the church and home continued to abdicate more and more responsibility to the schools. So I have often been asked, quite seriously and by adults, that if the study of literature is supposed to make you a better person, why doesn't it? My original answer to this question was, "who supposes this?" But I found that it was understood to be my colleagues. They had, or were assumed to have, some hazy notion that scientists studied the mere mechanics of things, whereas they were the ones who had values and the elements that really made for fuller human life. So, very early in my contemplation of these problems, I came up against what I still think of as the magic potion fallacy. I had to make it clear to myself, as well as to anyone who would listen, that nothing good inheres in any subject of education as such. If somebody wants to be a better person, there is plenty of literature that will certainly help; but if there is no "want," the engine has no gas. This fact, in turn, connected with my lurking distrust of value judgments as the distinguishing aspect of a literary education. It was clear to me that value judgments were really disguised moral judgments: consequently they were socially conditioned. Being socially conditioned, they had a limitation in them that did not extend to the central thing that literature is about. Bringing value judgments, either explicitly or implicitly, into the classroom strikes me as a dangerous procedure, and invokes a tricky analogy with the school cafeteria, in making a distinction between that awful tasting stuff that's so good for you and that junk food that you like. It seemed to me that students' likes and dislikes should be approached rather differently. If a student prefers the movie he saw on television to the play of Shakespeare he has to study, the emphasis should fall on the structural analogies between the two works, on the assumption that while the difference in value will eventually become clear to him, the perception of it cannot be hurried or forced. There is such a thing as value in literature, certainly, but a work of literature establishes its own value. What we really mean by such terms as

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"classic" and "masterpiece" are fundamentally works of literature that insist on their value, and refuse to go away. I can understand why Matthew Arnold, a century ago, took so seriously the conception of literature as a denatured religion.2 He felt that culture would come to occupy the place in our lives that religion formerly did. When I was a graduate student, T.S. Eliot was the dominating force in criticism: he dismissed Arnold's confusion of culture and religion as nonsense, which I think it is, but he went on playing the old value game. It seemed to me that something more pragmatic and more connected with the learning process needed to be invoked. It has often been said, when I have attacked the undue reliance on value judgments, that after all I write a great deal more about Shakespeare than I do about, say, Thomas Churchyard or Barnabe Googe. Doesn't that imply a value judgment? Of course it does: that is where value judgments ought to be, in the area of tentative working assumptions, where they can be subjected to revision. The revision is nearly always a revision upwards. If I accept society's traditional value judgment on Shakespeare and begin the study of Shakespeare, I find only that that value judgment is confirmed in practice. That helps encourage me to continue, but the study itself is not founded on the value judgment. On the other hand, it often happens that a poet who has been ridiculed or neglected for centuries, such as Skelton in the early sixteenth century, may turn out, to a fresh eye, to be an extremely interesting and original poet. And just as value judgments are not the beginning of the literary process, so they cannot be the end of it. The end of the study of literature is not an act of genuflection in front of a masterpiece, but the incorporation into the student's mind of the articulateness which literature represents. That is a devious and subtle process, I know, but none the less I feel quite sure about the validity of the general process involved. The final aim of studying works of literature is, in some way, the absorbing of their verbal power into oneself. There are also a number of confusions in the theory of education which are hangovers from a class-structured society. Compulsory education assumed a leisure class on top and a working class underneath, and it sought to extend the benefits of what the leisure class had in the way of education to everyone else, to the whole of society. That was benevolent enough, but it eventually raised a second question, and a rather more difficult one to answer. If the study of literature is supposed to give you a better job or a better social status, why doesn't it? Again, the answer is that the change from a closed class system to an

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open class system is not a simple or a one-way process. Some months ago, I found myself in Italy, in something of a dream state, in Urbino, the home town of Castiglione, and lecturing on Castiglione's Courtier, which I have always regarded as one of the supremely great textbooks on education as well as one of the most beautiful books in the world. It is a book written at roughly the same time and in much the same environment as Machiavelli's Prince. In Renaissance society the most important social facts were the prince and the courtier, so it was natural that two seminal works of the period should have these titles. Renaissance education took as a theoretical model the ideal education of the king, because the king was the most important person in society to get educated. This had produced a genre among educational treatises which had come down from Greek times with Xenophon's Cyropaedia, the account of the training of Cyrus the Great, and it was still a very active form in the sixteenth century. This cyropedia form splits in two with Machiavelli's treatment of the prince and Castiglione's of the courtier. There is a curious tension between the two books which is still central in our educational confusions today. Machiavelli's prince is a person for whom moral principles are something of an inhibition, in short, hangups. He has to remember that the people over whom he rules are animals as well as men, and have the animal qualities that he himself needs to rule them, the ferocity of the lion and the cunning of the fox. As the prince is constantly on view, his reputation, or what we should call his image, is much more important than the reality behind that image. It is good for the prince to be reputed virtuous, much more important than for him to be virtuous. It is essential for the prince to be reputed liberal, though he is probably more sensible if he saves his money. Castiglione, on the other hand, stresses an educational programme for the courtier plunging into all the arts: painting, sculpture, music, and literature, but on an amateur level, in order to give glamour to the prince's court and to be an adviser to the prince. These two aims run into certain paradoxes. If the courtier is to be the adviser of the prince, he should be an older man with experience; but if he is to cut a dash as a musician or poet or cavalry officer, he has to be a young man. And if he teaches the prince moral principles, is he not reducing him simply to the rank of a justice of the peace? One can only answer these problems today by remembering that in our society every man contains his own prince and his own courtier. The education of the prince in Machiavelli is the

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pattern for the education of the will, the tradition of which culminates, perhaps, in Nietzsche. The importance of Dewey in the history of educational theory is mainly in the emphasis he laid on the education of the will, on the active or performing force in man, as distinct from the more contemplative virtues which have been more traditional in teaching. Similarly, the education of the courtier represents the education in leisure-class virtues, but the phrase "leisure class" makes very little sense now. One rather suspects that the phrase "working class" would not make much sense either, if it were not a holdover from an earlier phase of society. Work and leisure are different aspects of the same person (according to the Bible they are even different aspects of the activity of God, in a ratio of six to one). Traditionally, there has been a lurking analogy between the hierarchy in society and that in the human body, in which the brain, the directing force and the power behind vision, corresponded to the leisure class which was "on top" in society. But even this had been questioned for a long time. In Shakespeare's Coriolanus there is what amounts to a civil war in Rome between the patricians and the plebeians. One of the patricians attempts to rationalize their ascendancy in society by telling the fable of the belly and the members [1.1.96-149]. The members of the body rebel against the belly which, they say, does nothing but sit there and absorb food; but they soon find that they cannot get along with the belly. The moral of the fable is that the leisure class is not really parasitic; it is a digestive force in society. But if it is digestive, then, unless my anatomy is very mistaken, it is not the brain of society. Neither in work nor in leisure, nor in any precedents in the classes with which they were formerly associated, can we find the controlling vision which is, as I think, the real driving force in education and the one to which literature is centrally connected. The ideals of our society are, I think, still the same revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Liberty and equality have become mass movements in our day, but the third one, fraternity, the sense of personal relationships, is one that has been largely ignored. Yet it seems to me that it is an ideal very deeply involved in all forms of humanistic education, where all knowledge is ultimately personal knowledge. Although one may plunge into impersonal scholarship for a while, one has finally to come out on the other side with some kind of personal absorption of what one has learned. Over against the individual whose knowledge has become personalized is society itself. It is, I think, an essential educational principle that

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the morale of society is more important than its morality. It is, of course, much better if you can have both, but, if society believes in its values, it can function with some efficiency even if some of those values are wrong. Consequently, the cliches of forty years ago, about "starting education where the child is" and "the whole child goes to school," need reshaping in view of the individual's actual relation to society. You can't start education where the child is; the child isn't anywhere. The whole child doesn't go to school because he is not a whole child or he wouldn't be in school. The first step in education, in other words, is acquiring, or rather recreating, the sense of one's social context. We all belong to something long before we are anything. We were predestined to be midtwentieth-century middle-class North Americans before we escaped from the womb. The elementary forms of education have much to do with rediscovering this fact, a fact which by itself leads to adjustment, to docility, and to obedience. Learning to read on the elementary level is fundamentally an act of responding passively to a verbal stimulus. That is, the essential or primary reason for learning to read is to learn how to respond to traffic signals and the like. It is because the demands of society are prior to the needs of the individual that literacy is a social requirement. If we can read and write, the first use we make of this skill is to discover what society expects us to do. There has been a good deal of repetition of the phrase "back to basics" in Toronto during the last few months. I distrust all slogans that begin with the phrase "back to" because I suspect that they derive from some kind of pastoral myth, like the little red schoolhouse, where "back to" meant something fairly specific. Again, these "basics" are the things that society primarily demands from its citizens. That is why the study of literature can be shunted off to one side in favour of things like "language arts" or "language skills." The difficulty with such phrases is that there are many language skills, which are in quite different compartments, each with conventions so different from one another that they are not transferable. A poet or novelist cannot immediately start to write advertising copy or good journalism without some training in the specific conventions of advertising or journalism. The educational process begins with continuity, or with what in the Middle Ages was called habitus. At that time a person who could read Latin was said to be a person who had the "habit" of Latin. There can be no education without the kind of creative continuity that goes with incessant practice. But this right and essential continuity gets mixed up

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with another kind which is far less legitimate. This is the continuity of instinctive conservatism, or what I call the anxiety of continuity in society, the desire to keep going with the same things as far as possible without change. It is, I think, largely because of the anxiety of continuity that education acquired, for so many centuries, that curiously penal quality which sometimes made it a positive hell on earth for young people. Education that depends on punishment and terror goes with the authority of seniors, the tried and tested way, the primitive notion of wisdom in which the wise man is the man who does what society has found to be the right thing, and in which the fool is the man with the new idea which always turns out to be an old fallacy. One of the most popular stories in the later Biblical period is the story of Ahiqar (the spelling varies), an elderly man who was betrayed by his wicked young nephew but was subsequently brought back into favour by his king. He then took his revenge on his nephew by reciting to him several hundred proverbs, largely connected with the undesirability of ingratitude to one's elders. The nephew began to say he thought he had got the point, but Ahikar kept on placidly reciting more proverbs until, so the text says, the nephew blew up and burst. This was an immensely popular tale echoed in the fables of Aesop, in the Bible and the Apocrypha, in the Koran. With a story like that you can't miss, from the point of view of conservative wisdom, because the senior man is the hero and we have a sense of the customary thing being upheld and re-established. The anxiety of continuity is really an anxiety of hoping never to meet a situation in which there is a dialectical conflict. In modern society it is entirely impossible to do that, so we have to educate in a way that provides for the possibility of such conflict. Dialectical conflict implies, among other things, a group of individuals who have grown out of the social body, not to the point of breaking with it, but to the point of seeing it in proportion. We belong to something first; we are something afterwards, and the individual grows out of the group and not the other way round. But it is the group of individuals linked in the fraternity of social vision that constitutes the real brain of society. Society by itself can hardly distinguish the visionary who is above its standards from the criminal or lunatic who is below them. The social vision I am speaking of, the real directing force in society, is one which is aware of its own social conditioning but is not wholly imprisoned by it. I have always been deeply impressed by a poem by Wallace Stevens called Description without Place. He points out that man does not live

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directly and nakedly in nature as the animals do. Man lives inside a kind of insulating envelope of his own construction which we call culture or civilization. It is the verbal aspect of this culture which concerns us here. This verbal aspect is what I think of as a mythology, a body of words which contains literature, or the products of verbal imagination, and provides the context for each work of literature within it. But there are many layers of this verbal mythology. Being a transparent envelope between us and nature, it may, in its earlier stages, make statements about nature, and so be a primitive form of science. So far as it does so, however, it is eventually displaced by real science, which is designed to study nature directly, as geology, astronomy, and biology displaced the mythology of creation. But this does not affect its importance as a structure of human concern, made up of human hopes and anxieties and fears. This is what is encapsulated in our literature, and is what constitutes the distinctively human part of the world we live in. In early stages of language we get a strong sense of the word as a power in itself, as something that may have a magic force uniting consciousness and nature. Warriors will begin battle with boasts because they may be words of power for them. For the same reason the gods of Greek mythology are extremely nervous about people who start boasting: they are afraid that they may get hold of the words of power which will threaten their authority. In the language of Homer, such words as time or motion or courage or thought or anything that sounds in the least abstract is strictly connected with parts of the body or with physical images. The word kairos, which came to mean a specific moment in time, originally meant the notch of an arrow. Such language is totally concrete: there are no true abstractions, and in this stage of language there is little sense of the separation of subject and object. This kind of language is succeeded by other approaches to language, such as the metaphysical constructs from Plato and Aristotle down to Kant and Hegel, and by the descriptive and defining language of our day. Yet the metaphorical structures thrown up by primitive societies are just as subtle and powerful as the constructs that succeeded them. I think it is particularly LeviStrauss in our own time who has insisted upon the importance of this, and its importance for children's literature, which to some extent recapitulates the primitive experience, can hardly be overestimated. It is the function of literature, as I see it, to recreate the primitive conception of the word of power, the metaphor that unites the subject and the object. Such metaphor flies in the face of the contemporary use of

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language which implies a rigid separation of subject and object and calls for a descriptive accuracy in the use of words. There is nothing wrong with this use of language either, but other kinds must not be ignored. That means, among other things, that within our present attitude to language some words have lost their meaning. The words God or soul or spirit mean nothing in a world where words have to be specifically objective if they are to mean anything. Nietzsche's phrase "God is dead,"3 which has received so much acclaim even in theological circles, is really a specialized linguistic observation extended to other areas. It means essentially that God is dead as the subject of a predicate. That is, if we ask, "is there a God?" the answer, if it is in terms of the language we customarily use, can only be no, because any question beginning with the words "is there" is, so to speak, an ungodly question. I spoke of various layers of our mythological envelope. The innermost layer is a phoney mythology, made up of prejudice and gossip and the shallow and superficial reactions that inform so much casual conversation. This is the aspect of verbal mythology which is conveyed through advertising and propaganda. The distinction between reality and illusion is one of the most important activities that we use words for, and, as advertising and propaganda are designed deliberately to create an illusion, it follows that they form, in a sense, a kind of anti-language. Their effect on the modern world has been analyzed by, for example, Roland Barthes in Mythologies and by Marshall McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride. Beyond this layer of phoney mythology, prejudice, and cliche comes the serious mythology, or genuine social vision; the vision that makes us believe in things like democracy and liberty to the point of being ready to fight and die for them. On this level I think we might relax our fever over the word "indoctrination," because I keep coming back to my principle that only a society that believes in its own values can really educate. I notice a tendency among people of my own generation to nag younger people on the grounds that they are much too indifferent and apathetic. They say: when I was young I was very radical, taking nothing for granted and questioning all established values—I think. Why can't you be the way I was? But what was radical and questionable thirty and forty years ago has changed its social role by this time, and this whole approach seems to me to be an arrogant misuse of seniority. It is little good questioning values if what you need at the moment are a few answers, however tentative and inadequate they may be. We are surrounded by various forms of verbal illusion, and the genuine magic that inheres in

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the metaphors of poetry and the words of power is sometimes replaced by the degenerate magic of vogue or cliche words. I was recently attached to a government commission in Ottawa, and the chairman, who was a distinguished humanist, was reading a directive from higher up in the civil service. Being a humanist, he was unable to understand gobbledygook, and said helplessly, "what are we supposed to do with this?" I said, "if s very simple; we just establish our parameters and keep our interface clean." This is an example of the use of vogue words thought at one time to have some special clarity about them. But the clarity has gone dead, just as a cliche is often a fossilized epigram where the wit has gone dead. All ways of using words fall under the general educational law that they are powers to be acquired and developed by continuous practice. That is true of thinking, for example. One cannot think at random: how well one will think at any given moment will, like playing the piano, depend entirely upon how much of it one has already done. The resistance to continuity on the part of a good many muddled educational theorists has created another social vacuum, which is partly filled by things like meditation cults, where there is no argument about the necessity for regular practice and continuity. People will undergo a degree of discipline in studying yoga, Zen, or transcendental meditation which undoubtedly surprises themselves. The only trouble with this from the educational point of view is that so much of it stops with tuning the instrument, rather than going on to take part in the social vision that I spoke of as the community of fraternity. In the sciences there is a curious factor which we may call a factor of alienation. It was a wonderful achievement when mythological space, which put a fixed earth at the centre of the universe, was replaced by the scientific space brought in by Copernicus and, more effectively, Galileo. It was a wonderful achievement when the mythological time that started with a creation in 4000 B.C. was replaced by the scientific time brought in by Lyell and Darwin. Yet there is in science also the realization that man is essentially unrelated to the world of nature, except through his own mythological envelope. We live in a world that got along without us for billions of years, and could still get along without us, in fact still may. When this fact penetrates the public consciousness, a kind of alienation develops. If we go into paperback bookshops, we see rows of books on out-of-body experiences, reincarnation, telekinesis, survival of death, space ships arriving in the past, and the like, invariably described in the

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blurbs as utterly shattering to orthodox notions of science. Whatever the validity of any of these subjects in themselves, I think their attraction for the public has something to do with the sense of an intellectual holiday, of the mind breaking free of the laws of nature into a more uninhibited form of speculation. This is not hard to understand in a world so rigidly split as ours is into subject and object. The word "subject" means two things, an observer, and a person subordinated to a ruler or to society, as when we say that one is a British or American subject. It seems to me that we cannot separate these two meanings. The modern mind "subjects" itself to the world: it crawls under it, like Atlas. Perhaps that is why we use that very curious word "understanding" to describe our attitude to nature. In all this what is not objective soon becomes clear. The world of the observer observing the observed is too simple; the observer himself becomes a factor in the observation. The social sciences in fact are founded on the principle of observing the observer. So what is left that is subjective? It seems to me that man is subjective to the extent to which he participates in the community of the essential languages of mankind, starting with the verbal language of literature, but including mathematics and the languages of the other arts. Just as his relation to nature is under law and the conception of necessity, so his role in the participating community of observers is his heritage of freedom. In the educational process we can reach no more elementary level than the level of coming to terms with the panic of time. A child of four is just as aware of the ticking of the clock as a man of eighty. The sense of relaxing the mind and the body, of making time for receptivity, seems to me to have a most important role to play in education from earliest childhood. That is why the most elementary forms of literary education, learning and chanting nursery rhymes, listening to stories, singing together, and the like, are so important as a way of relaxing this sense of panic. Joining a community, whether it is a singing community or a listening community, leads to realizing that literature is first of all something anchored in the body, something connected with dancing and singing, something which one's whole being must respond to. A literature cut off at the neck is not a literature at all. Reading whatever is worth reading cannot be hurried, because what we have to do is to take possession of it, absorb its power, and that will take time. We must not worry about the time, but let it soak in. If rushed or directed by too active a will, the process collapses.

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I have been asked a good many times if it is true that if a man knows the 1611 Bible and Shakespeare, he is an educated man whatever else he may or may not know. I usually distrust the kind of assumptions that are behind such questions; nevertheless, it is perhaps worth remembering that these two great pinnacles of English literature are both primarily involved with speech. The reason why the 1611 Bible held the market against all comers for so many centuries was not the scholarly quality of the translation, but the fact that its translators had an infallible ear for the spoken word. What is said on the title page of the King James Bible, "appointed to be read in churches," is the key to its supremacy. It is based on the spoken word, and the spoken word comes out of the human body. And what is true of the 1611 Bible is even more obviously true of Shakespeare's plays, which were intended to be acted and spoken on the stage. Literary education proceeds by intertwining a speaking style and a writing style. No written style will be any good unless it is based on a good speaking style, which in turn means that a good speaking style must develop too. The usual schizophrenia in which we get "oral composition" on a level of sub-language not far removed from the orang-utan, and a written language of composition so dead that it sounds like something transcribed from Linear B, is not very close to that interplay of good speech and good writing which is the civilized use of words. In the study of literature there is a historical factor, and in that factor there is a paradox. The plays of Shakespeare, let us say, meant something to his own time and his own audience; they also mean something, and something rather different, to us. We have to recognize both these facts and make some kind of bridge between them. If we ignore the fact that they are seventeenth-century productions addressed to a very different society from ours with very different assumptions, then we are simply kidnapping them into our own world of values. If we ignore their relevance to us and study them simply as seventeenth-century productions, they remain icons, or more accurately idols, set up to be admired but not to be incorporated into our own experience. The connecting of the two, the historical context and the contemporary context, is a process of what I can only think of as a process of continuing recreation. There are many paradoxes raised in critical theory today, some of them very intricate. Where is the text, and what is a text? What is the reader doing when he reads, or the writer when he writes? How many masks intervene between the writer and the reader? One can easily get

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lost in these labyrinths, and I think one needs the conception of recreation to make sense of such problems. Everything that we read we recreate into our own orbits; that is, to some degree every reading is a translation. Even if we are reading a personal letter from a friend we are still translating it into our own forms of experience. Criticism, as I see it, is really the shaping of a central tradition of recreation. I say a central tradition because there are peripheral readers, critics who are crackpots or whose recreations we cannot accept. In the study of Shakespeare, Johnson, Coleridge, and Bradley are as useful as ever, but Ignatius Donnelly, who decided that the Folio contained a scandalous court history which could be extracted by cryptograms, remains a crank.4 I remember coming across a remark in the great Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, who says, "nine things out of ten that I say are metaphors; seven things out of ten are illustrations of valued writers." He goes on to say, "a person who is not fitted to precede is not in the way of human life."5 It seems to me impossible to improve on that statement: each of us is engaged in the process of preceding posterity, however great the mess that we transmit to it. That is what I mean by recreation: in it there will inevitably be misunderstandings or perversions, but many of these may turn out to be creative too. This sense of recreation seems to me to be an improvement over that anxiety of continuity that I mentioned a while ago and identified with primitive wisdom. In our society, I said, education must include the possibility of breaks in continuity, of dialectic confrontations, even though a good deal of what has been said about "future shock" is expendable. That is why in, for example, the Bible, there is respect paid not only to wisdom, with its sense of the traditional thing to be done over again, but also for prophecy. Wisdom culminates in such figures as Jesus or Socrates, who confront their societies with a transcendent vision which triumphs over those societies even as they reject it. Perhaps the oldest of educational ideals is that of the dramatic transformation of the mind, the sudden entry into a new plane of reality. We start with primitive shamans who seek moments of enlightenment and abnormal or supernormal powers. We have early philosophy developing with gurus and instructors who announce cryptic formulas but refuse to elaborate on them. A teacher who can get away without answering questions can be a great moral force, difficult as it may be for him to exist in modern society. The idea is that pondering the formula may bring insight. The same hope for the moment of transforming vision

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comes through such things as the dialogues of Plato, where a group of people gather, usually around Socrates, to see whether, if they follow a dialectic long and intensively enough, they may come to some vision of one of the Platonic forms, whether courage, justice, or love. There are similar things in religion, such as the Quaker meeting, which quietly waits for the Spirit to transform it with a wisdom and knowledge not its own. The only thing that can be said about this conception of transforming inspiration is that it never descends on those who are totally unprepared for it. But, of course, neither can a system of education be based on it. I fully sympathize with students of the late sixties who wanted something exciting and existential to happen in every lecture they attended. But the first characteristic of this kind of enlightenment of spirit is that it is totally unpredictable, and may never happen at all. Literary education seems to assume a kind of definitive response which in practice never occurs. A definitive response to a performance of King Lear would blow our minds, effect an unimaginable transformation in our whole sense of reality. But we are always dissatisfied with something in the performance, or some part of our emotional mechanism is not adjusted, or we may be simply too immature to understand what is happening. So we have to have Shakespearean criticism; we have to have repeated readings and performances of the plays; we have to look up the hard words and understand something of the editorial work that produced the text we read. After a while we may become aware that we are not simply making up for a failure in response, but gradually acquiring certain powers of our own, which keep moving us closer, even if we never actually get to, that final metamorphosis of experience. But, like Tantalus, we may always see what we may not reach, and what we see is that there is no real difference between criticism and creation, nor between education and vision; there is only our failure to abolish the difference.

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The Beginning of the Word 30 October 1980

Given as the keynote address to the Ontario Council of Teachers of English, at their conference in Toronto, "Can Teach/Let's Teach." From the Council's publication, Indirections, 6, no. i (Winter 1981): 4-14. Reprinted in OE, 9-21, where it stands first in a section of its own. The typescript is in NFF, 1988, box 47, file 4.

If I speak of myself to begin with, it is to make clear, so far as I can, the personal origin of my attitudes to the study and teaching of literature. They are attitudes that some of you may consider only the prejudices of my generation, as they may well be. I started teaching at Victoria when it was a small college, and recruits to the teaching staff were selected on what would now be the heretical basis of personal knowledge. My own chairman, Pelham Edgar, had previously appointed to the English staff a demonstrator in psychology in his late thirties who had published virtually nothing, on the ground that he would not only make a good professor of English, but quite probably a poet as well. It sounds like an utterly idiotic thing to do, except that the unknown psychologist was E.J. Pratt. I never had the anxiety of lacking tenure: as long as my superiors knew me I was unlikely to lose my job, so I could pick the very difficult subject of Blake's prophecies for my first book, and take the time to do it within the scope I wanted. At Victoria, and at Toronto generally, there was still a strong enough Anglophile feeling for the Ph.D.'not yet to be compulsory. So, being very impatient to start both teaching and collecting a salary, I avoided it, and have never been systematically trained as a scholar. I should have been better off with such a training, and this statement is far from being a boast. But it explains why my main interest was teaching from the beginning, and a teacher I have remained.

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For most of my career at Toronto the university possessed the Honour Course in English, which many of you will remember, and a new teacher was simply assigned a course to teach if nobody more senior wanted it. That was how I acquired what knowledge I have of many fields, such as nineteenth-century prose, that I should otherwise have left uncultivated, probably for a long time. Texts were prescribed and examinations were anonymous, because students from four colleges, all taught by different people but all proceeding to the same degree, were involved. What this meant in practice was that everywhere a teacher of English turned in Toronto in those days, he was confronted by the impersonal authority of the subject he taught. He could not teach courses he had invented himself, except, within very strict limits, in the graduate school; and the student could not avoid his courses if that student had chosen Honour English—perhaps a more dubious advantage. Once you chose Honour English, that was your last choice: from then on you got English, in various courses covering the whole field from Anglo-Saxon to what had so far emerged of the twentieth century. I have been accused, if that is the word, of defending the Honour Course whenever I get a chance, and this is one more chance. I remain obstinately of the opinion that the Honour Course, with all its rigidity and built-in administrative absurdities, gave the best undergraduate training available on the North American continent, and the best teacher training for the instructor as well. At the same time it required a much greater maturity from students than many students were able to bring to it, even with the extra year in high school. It takes a good deal of maturity to see that every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge, and that it doesn't matter so much what you learn when you learn it in a structure that can expand into other structures. The containing overall structure at Toronto was mainly historical, and options in philosophy and history that covered the same historical period as the English provided an exhilarating clarity of vision into culture. I do not think I am reconstructing when I say that there was a high morale then among both students and teachers of English, and what held us together was encapsulated in a remark I heard Professor Woodhouse make at one of the spasmodic efforts to organize societies of teachers of English that preceded the one I am addressing now. "After all," he said, "we do have the best subject matter in the world." I am not mourning the loss of something that has gone and can never come back in anything remotely like the same form. I am saying only

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that I was lucky to have what I have had, and whatever deficiencies I may feel as a scholar or teacher of English cannot be blamed on anything outside myself. I am also trying to explain how I acquired my sense of cultural priorities, such as it is. Clearly, no one who believes that he teaches the best subject matter in the world is going to worry very much about the goals of teaching. I can seldom understand the statements about goals that departments of education set for the end of public school, for the end of high school, for the end of anything that seems to have a discernible end. They all sound like much the same set of goals, and the entire operation reminds me of the New Yorker cartoon of a man lying in bed and reading a book called How to Get Up and Get Dressed. There can really be no goal where taking the journey itself is the best thing to be done. Although Toronto has always put a strong emphasis on undergraduate teaching, I soon got to learn about the common university attitude to teaching. The common attitude is that the university's primary function is to produce scholarship, and the scholar is the man on the frontiers of knowledge who keeps pushing them back. The teacher imparts the knowledge that has already been established to less advanced students; hence the more seniority a teacher has, the more likely he is to confine himself to supervising a few graduates and withdraw from undergraduate teaching. This is, I say, a common attitude, and should be, because much of it is true. It is the university's primary function to produce scholarship, and a great many scholars do want to be relieved of undergraduate teaching as they grow older, and rightly. What is wrong about the attitude, I think, is its conception of the teaching process, which seems to me a quite different one from the retailing of information. I have never felt that I was necessarily an uncreative writer merely because I have confined myself to works of criticism, and I have often attacked the fallacy which says that writers who produce poems and stories are creative, and critics and scholars noncreative. The fallacy, once more, consists in ascribing creativity to the genres used instead of to the people working in them. Some poems and stories and works of criticism are creative; other poems and stories and works of criticism are simply variant verbal patterns. No system of valuation, beyond the tentative hunches of practical experience, will tell us in advance which ones are "alive" and which are not. As with the question of which seeds of a plant will grow, the only practicable answer is "wait and see." I am often assumed to know the answers to such questions as which contem-

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porary Canadian writers are the best, or will be judged "truly great" in the future. There is no answer I know except to ask the question again in two hundred years, and even then the answer would reflect all the limitations of posterity, which has no infallibility in such matters. It seems to be difficult for some to understand that a contemporary writer cannot be "great," whatever his merits or his future reputation, because greatness includes the dimension of having been dead for a long time. My view of my own work revolves around my growing realization that in my writing I am also a teacher, rather than a typical scholar. My books seem to me now to be addressed essentially to teachers, concerned with new perspectives rather than new data. Such books would be of little use unless more typical works of scholarship were still the main staple of university production, but fortunately they are. I may be said to have blundered into this form of criticism by accident, and it took me a long time to understand what I was really doing, although I might have learned something from the remarks of others. A very old and dear friend, now deceased, remarked over thirty years ago, when my book on Blake had been out for some months, "When I think of that book of yours masquerading as a work of scholarship, I nearly split myself laughing." Perhaps it is high time to look at some of the theoretical implications of my own practice. Let me begin with an illustrative parable. The older one gets, the more clearly one's childhood comes back into the memory, and I recently recalled a story I had forgotten for over half a century about my mother's experience as a teacher in the late i88os. One of her pupils was a girl named Susan, who had been nicknamed "Confusion" by the previous teacher and ridiculed as a dunce. My mother discovered that she was blocked by the theorem in Euclid that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, a theorem that for many centuries has been a famous pans asinorum or crucial obstacle. My mother spent most of a day going over this theorem with her: she was a desperately honest girl who would never say she understood something if she didn't, and my mother said that the expression on her face when she finally said, "I see it, Miss Howard," was worth not only the day but her whole career as a teacher. Those were very different times, and such a situation could hardly occur now, but even so I can see some contemporary morals in the story. First, the initial change would have to be psychological: she would have to realize, on a deep level of consciousness, that this time she was being required to react as a student and not as a dunce. It has been proved any

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number of times that the main problem with a learner's so-called stupidity lies in his belief that he is or is considered stupid. Second, what she said was "I see," not "I understand"—perhaps an accident, but still every breakthrough in education is a breakthrough in vision. Third, it made no practical difference to her life whether she understood the theorem or not—in the 18803 not much was open to a young woman except marriage, and no matrimonial advantages were bound up with isosceles triangles. But it had everything to do with her sense of identity. As long as Susan remembered that she had once known why the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle were equal, some part of her identity would remain inviolate. All of which indicates how inadequate it is to think of the teacher as primarily someone giving out information to someone else who doesn't have it. The teacher's function is to help create the structure of the subject in the student's mind. That is why it is the teacher who asks most of the questions and not the student. The student already knows a great deal more than he realizes he knows. But this greater knowledge is concealed from him, partly by the fact that it is unstructured, lying around in bits and pieces, and partly by certain repressions operating in his mind. All around him is a world of advertising, propaganda, brainwashing, casual conversation with all its prejudices, news with all its slants, everything conspiring to say to him: "It's all you can do just to take things in; if you try to put things together you'll probably go nuts even if you succeed; let it go. If you go on you'll become different from other people, and you're not smart enough to get away with that." This is not a natural state of mind, which is why so many students are at their keenest when still children, before the full force of social conditioning makes itself felt. I have long been aware that students are more sensitive to poetry, on an average, in grade 4 than they are in second-year university. I thought at first that this problem was peculiar to the humanities, but those concerned with the teaching of science and mathematics don't think so. How does this situation arise? I think it lies deep in the nature of mass education and the social motives for maintaining it. In a civilization as complex as ours it is crippling and dangerous to be without the rudiments of reading and writing and arithmetic. If we are stopped on the street and asked directions by someone who cannot read, we become as consciously aware of his handicap as if he were blind. At the same time, the main motive in keeping a system of mass education going is, and must be, a regulating one. The primary motive in teaching reading and

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writing and arithmetic is to produce the disciplined, that is, the docile and obedient, citizen. Of course we must learn to read: how else are we to respond to traffic signs? Of course we must learn to count: how else can we make out our income tax forms? There is nothing sinister about this: it is a simple law of social cohesion. But it means that society aims at a level of literacy that is primarily passive, a training in the ability to make conforming acts. There is no real motive for a society to aim at anything more than this in education, and no obvious tangible benefit for it if it does. It produces the adjusted citizen, and in relation to originality it is anti-intellectual. It is only the born and dedicated teacher who can realize that this motive of adjustment to society, however benevolent, is an enemy to be fought. The students he can win over to his way of thinking are his allies, but in the nature of things they will seldom be a majority. The situation is further confused by its historical context. In the educational process there is always a tendency to hand down a cultural tradition with as little change as possible, which derives from a very primitive conception of wisdom as the voice of antiquity. The myth of ancestral wisdom goes with the authority of seniors, the anxiety of continuity, the sense of the need for preserving the tried and tested way, the supreme virtues of prudence and precedent. As a matter of fact this does characterize a good deal of what is most valuable in education, especially in the humanities. It is only when it becomes inorganic, not recreated for each generation and each student in that generation, and above all when it becomes exclusive, ignoring its connections with the contemporary world, that we get an impression of a fossilized cultural heritage being passed on merely for the sake of passing it on. Such a lifeless continuity can survive only when the traditional heritage, like the Classics in the public schools and universities of England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, becomes a symbol of upper-class prestige. This can be a very powerful social support, and as long as the symbolism is accepted, such education may survive the dullest reading over of crumbling lecture notes, or even, for younger students, physical brutality. This symbolic and class-structured approach to education, however, hardly survives anywhere now, and in America at least it collapsed long ago. For well over a century American education has been increasingly geared to society's demand for regulated conformity within a more open class context. It is not called conformity, of course: it is called independence of judgment, learning to think for oneself, fostering the original and

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the creative, sending the whole student to school, and so forth; but conformity is what it is. Some years ago I was asked to investigate a series of readers that represented literature as taught in grades 7 to 10 in a large number of American schools. They showed no interest in literature, but a great deal of interest in the stereotypes of middle-class Americanism. They presented some of these with legendary names attached, like Washington and Lincoln and Franklin, others as types, like the pioneer and the inventor; but their greatest object of reverence was Helen Keller, to whom all the volumes recurred, because she represented so triumphant an adjustment to the normal. They were called the "Adventures" series, and the frontispiece of the first one was a picture of a little girl staring into a mirror. That is, what they pretended to suggest was mental adventure; what they actually suggested was narcissism. There are other reasons why America has had a particularly pervasive kind of anti-intellectualism built into its educational system, at least on the younger levels. The United States is a revolutionary country, starting with a written Constitution and proceeding deductively from it. Any society which has gone through a consolidating experience like a revolution feels itself drawn together and mutually involved in its own coherence. De Tocqueville carefully studied the sense of engagement, the sense of actively participating in the immediate social data, as the characteristic feature of American life. Dickens ridiculed the same kind of thing in Martin Chuzzlewit, where the British hero visiting America is nauseated by someone's table manners, and another American remarks on the hatred of outsiders for American "institutions" [chap. 34]. In a postrevolutionary society everything one does has immediate political relevance, but the conforming act is the typical symbol of this relevance. The last thing a postrevolutionary society is likely to produce is revolutionaries. Canada has had very different historical and cultural traditions from those of the United States, but of course it has been thoroughly (and in education increasingly) permeated by American social attitudes. For most young people, male or female, the code of the gang, the attitudes held by one's contemporaries, is the strongest and most attractive form of conformity. Nineteenth-century American fiction is full of stories about schools where the new teacher could survive only if he could lick the biggest boy in the class, who because he was that was the representative of the local gang spirit. The same condition of entrenched violence is still present, in a much more sinister form, in the jungle schools of some of the big cities. Elsewhere conditions may be more

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overtly peaceful, but there are still many tensions around the generation gap. There is a wide difference between being aware of the world and being "with it": the teacher ought to be more aware of the world, as older and more experienced, but when it comes to being "with it" he usually finds his students a jump or two ahead. The deliberate debasing of the literary curriculum that goes on in so many schools is often less an attempt to attract the students than to educate the teacher. If the teacher replaces a Shakespeare play with a contemporary thriller of passing interest, it is not because his students find Shakespeare stale and outmoded, but because he does; not because they need to know about the world of the thriller but because he feels left out of it. But these efforts to bridge over the generation gap soon fall into the separating abyss. I feel a profound sympathy with the clergyman who looks over his congregation, sees nobody under sixty in it, and imports a number of gimmicks to make his church more relevant to young people. But, as he is practically sure to alienate his sixty-year-olds without gaining any additional following among the young, one should look for the fallacies involved as well. The main fallacy is that the church, if it is worth maintaining at all, is an educational institution like the school, and can never be sustained on the basis of relevance. Relevance is a disease for which education is a possible, though by no means a certain, cure. It is a disease of nervous degeneration, like St. Virus's dance, and it ends by destroying the sense of individual identity. We begin by trying to relate social phenomena to ourselves, but end by partitioning ourselves among the phenomena. The so-called "student unrest" of the late 19605 was caught in this double bind of conformity and generation resistance. Students felt obscurely that they were being pushed into conforming modes of action and resented it, but they were too conditioned themselves by the same process to know where or who their enemies were. They spoke darkly of "Establishments," and caricatured the university as an agent of reaction and repression, encouraging learning by rote and forcing students to "regurgitate" their lecture notes. I read at least enough student editorials using this word to produce the effect it referred to. There was actually not much of this kind of teaching in the major universities where the unrest centred; but it was essential for them to pretend that there was, as they could not conceive of undesirable conformity except as a fossil from the past. Nor had they any vision of a better order except an intensified conformity, enforced in many places, especially in Europe, by terrorism.

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I noted earlier that a postrevolutionary society tends to conformity, and in the 19605 the SDS hoped to mastermind a total revolution modelled on the "gang of four" regime in China that would introduce a total conformity. Fortunately the next generation of students took a saner view of democratic society. I have called this talk "The Beginning of the Word," and I suggest that the literary teacher's role is to stand out in the current drifting towards conformity and work his way upstream, like the fisherman in Yeats's Tower, towards the headwaters of his cultural tradition. I shall not recapitulate arguments I have made elsewhere about putting poetry in the centre of literary education, but merely repeat that poetry is at the centre, because it is the most primitive and powerful way of stylizing utterance; that prose surrounds it; and that the specialized forms of jargon known as communication skills are on the periphery, where a proper literary education would never get around to reaching them. Trying to reverse the procedure by starting with the kind of gabble fostered by textbooks in "effective writing" and working one's way in a vaguely literary direction does nothing for anybody. I do not trust any way of teaching writing except composition from models, feeling one's way into the idiom of cultivated prose. Again, I need not repeat my contention that the Jourdain fallacy, as I have called it, that prose is the language of ordinary speech, is totally wrong.1 How wrong it is nobody fully realizes except a teacher of literature. Students may believe that prose is the language of ordinary speech, at least to the extent of distrusting and disliking poetry, but they seem not to be disturbed by the paradox that the language of ordinary speech is something that most of them cannot speak themselves, much less write. Yet the ability to speak in a relaxed, colloquial, associative rhythm, recognizably close to prose, that is, a lucid but articulate speaking style, is the foundation of all good writing: in fact it is the foundation of any cultivated life. The biggest problem a teacher has to meet in this area is the sense of shame or embarrassment about speaking articulately that so many young people have. It makes their speech stand out from the uniform bleating of the herd, and hence threatens exposure, like a nightmare about appearing naked in public. In times of social unrest, as we saw in the hippie movement of the last generation, there arise cults that make a fetish of inarticulateness. Prose is a difficult and complex form of expression, and I do not see how it is possible to master it without entering into the technicalities now associated with linguistics.

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I am aware of the objections brought against the old-fashioned Latinate grammar I learned myself at school, and against them can set only my own experience. My training in grammar, such as it was, was of immense practical benefit to me, and I feel that I could have accomplished very little as a writer without it. It may have analyzed the language in the wrong way, but at least it conveyed the fact that there was a structure in language, of a most exciting kind. It was also a curious and oblique introduction to philosophy. There is no reason why such rudiments of philosophy as the distinction of concrete and abstract, the conceptions of universals, of predication, of the relation of subject and object, cannot be absorbed early in public school. I learned them from Latinate grammar, and am still learning from them. So I read with no sympathy an allegedly "controversial" newspaper article of some years ago called "Grammar Is Snobbish Nonsense." The title sums up many of the anti-intellectual fallacies I have been dealing with, and the word "snobbish" expresses the feeling that education is to be distrusted because it might create "elitism," which, whatever it is, is bound to be something simply awful. It can hardly be said too often that "elitist" is a bogey word without content, with the same resemblance to reality that a child's Hallowe'en mask has to the child. Like "heretical" or "atheistic" in a previous age, and like "Communist" in many quarters still, it expresses certain social anxieties but defines nothing, and raises only pseudo-issues. The social goals of the teacher of literature are not reactionary, but he should not feel upset if they are often called that by people who do not think beyond reflex. Man cannot attain his true dignity until he exists in time, in a historical dimension as well as in his spatial surroundings, until some of the gates of the past have been opened, and he can see something of the relativeness of his own standards and values. The centre of literature in time, the historical beginning of the word, is, as it always has been, the great classical tradition, which in English normally runs from Chaucer down to the great symbolic age that ended around 1950. This is what young people, to whom it is new, have a primary right to learn about, and it is our duty to see that they are not cheated. Canadian literature is an offshoot of the central classical tradition: that does not mean that it should be neglected, only that the teacher should have the same sense of proportion about its place in literary tradition as a whole that all the Canadian writers he is likely to choose for study have already acquired. In a sense one may say that the social ideal of the teacher of literature is a prerevolutionary society, which his teaching

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helps to recreate. By that I mean a society in which new ideas, new structures of intelligence and imagination, can still have a revolutionary impact. The foundations of such a society are in the classroom, where old ideas and old structures are striking new minds. In this kind of society the educated person discovers a social function for himself that transcends the immediate function of his job or career. There is, then, a positive and a negative pole, to be respectively sought and avoided. The two poles have been clearly identified ever since the writings of Plato. What has caught everyone's imagination primarily in Plato is the figure of Socrates, especially the Socrates of the Apology, facing his mob of accusers and telling them that if they are going to condemn him to death they had better get on with it, as he has no intention of stopping what he is doing. But Plato was a revolutionary thinker, and in one of his last works, the Laws, he gives us a blueprint of his postrevolutionary society. There everything turns on the rigid control of the teachers, who are to have no freedom to choose what they teach, but must teach under the strictest instruction and supervision. In such a society no Socrates could exist. We should understand the full dimension of Plato's betrayal of the spirit of Socrates here: he is really assuming that those who condemned Socrates were right in principle, and wrong only, if wrong at all, in their application of it. Similarly, Christianity was founded on the teachings of a prophet who was put to death as a blasphemer and social menace; hence any Christian ready to put someone else to death as a blasphemer and social menace is assuming that Pilate and Caiaphas were right in principle, and should merely have selected a different victim. The teacher's function, I suggest, is to turn his back on all such postrevolutionary terrorism and face the unpredictable world of Socrates and Jesus, where anything can still happen, in the mind or in society. Socrates remains the archetypal teacher, and the modern teacher finds that Socrates' irony is equally essential to him. He has to answer all questions with a deep reserve and elusiveness, suggesting the tentativeness of all answers, because progress in understanding is a progress through a sequence of questions, and a definitive answer blocks this progress. This is particularly true when the student himself gives the answer, which demands a very active use of irony in counteracting it. Irony has also a peculiar importance in the teaching of literature because the emotional response to literature is quite as important as the intellectual one, and is much harder to awaken to maturity and flexibility.

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It is very easy for a teacher to turn himself into an opaque substitute for literary experience, presenting himself and his personal influence as the substitute. This is a subtle and insidious temptation he must fight against every moment in the classroom. His ultimate goal is the abolition of himself, or the turning of himself into a transparent medium for his subject, so that the authority of his subject may be supreme over both teacher and students. In four or five of the great Socratic dialogues everyone is united at the end in a vision of one of the Platonic forms, love or justice or eternal life, a union that draws them into a single body and then releases them. Even with Socrates this kind of vision did not appear very often, though often enough for education to be haunted ever since by the ghost of the symposium and its fleeting glimpses of the forms of the good. Whitehead speaks of education as the habitual vision of greatness,2 but I question if such a vision can ever be habitual, and the greatness in any case is not that of a person but of the spirits from the deep that the great writers may summon. At his trial Socrates compared himself to a midwife, using what for that male-oriented society was a deliberately vulgar metaphor. Perhaps the teacher of literature today might be called a kind of drug pusher. He hovers furtively on the outskirts of social organization, dodging possessive parents, evading drill-sergeant educators and snoopy politicians, passing over the squares, disguising himself from anyone who might get at the source of his income. If society really understood what he was doing, there would be many who would make things as uncomfortable as they could for him, though luckily malice and stupidity usually go together. When no one is looking, he distributes products that are guaranteed to expand the mind, and are quite capable of blowing it as well. But if Canada ever becomes as famous in cultural history as the Athens of Socrates, it will be largely because, in spite of indifference or Philistinism or even contempt, he has persisted in the immortal task granted only to teachers, the task of corrupting its youth.

85 Installation of Alvin A. Lee 14 November 1980

An address given on the occasion of Dr. Alvin A. Lee's installation as president ofMcMaster University. From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 47, file 4.

It is a privilege to bring greetings from the Learned Societies of Canada, and even more of a personal pleasure to extend them to a very old friend and former student, whose career I have followed with the greatest interest and admiration. Dr. Lee began a distinguished academic record as a first-class student in at least two major disciplines, English and religion, and continued as a teacher and scholar, with his main field of interest in Old English. Forty years ago a teacher of mine remarked that Old English was no field for an enterprising scholar any more, because all the essential work had been done. When anyone says such a thing, it is usually a sign that an entirely new phase of it is about to begin. Dr. Lee's brilliant and lucid study of the typology of Old English poetry, The Guest-Hall of Eden, the fruit of his religious as well as his literary training, is one of the most influential works of that new phase, and a wholly new perspective on the field of Old English studies is actually, and even more potentially, present in it. I stress this because other scholars seldom give their entire confidence to an administrator who has not been one of themselves. They often feel about a non-academic president much as an Air Force officer would feel about a superior who had never taken a plane off the ground. One wonders if this is really a valid attitude. To summarize briefly the arguments of several thousand books and articles, the idea of a university, in our world, is of a place producing a scholarship so specialized and pluralistic that no one can grasp more than a fragment of it. I myself have

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the presumption to bring greetings from the Learned Societies of Canada, representing dozens of organizations of which only a few produce papers that I could follow with any comprehension. Considering this, perhaps the desire to have a president who is also a fine scholar is only a superstitious tokenism. I think differently, and concur with the general attitude. Scholarly goals are as uniform as the ways of reaching those goals are diverse, and to develop a sympathy with the aims of scholarship without being a scholar is like learning to swim by correspondence: it can be done, perhaps, but it is more practicable to get soaked first. It is a futile irony to exhort a new president to uphold the ideals of scholarship, even if it were necessary in this case. Ideals mean materials, and materials mean money. I should only be exhorting him to spend all that money which he is so unlikely to get. The only advantage I can see in this situation is the strengthening of loyalty that results from having a common cause. As long as universities are faced with declining budgets, students, teaching staff, and administration will be increasingly forced into a solidarity that will make the phalanxes of Alexander the Great's army look like open slat-blinds. In these days messages of good will to incoming presidents are also messages of support, when they come from academic bodies, and so far as my constituency extends, I bring those messages to President Lee as well.

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The View from Here 12 April 1983

Address to the Victoria University Alumni in the Victoria University Chapel at a special "Frye evening" on which Frye was given belated congratulations on his seventieth birthday (the previous July). The festschrift Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye was on display. From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 48, file i. An earlier typescript with a few holograph corrections is in NFF, 1991, box 39, file 5. First published in MM, 63-78.

I I suppose a certain amount of reminiscence is appropriate to this occasion, but I shall try not to overdo it. If one has remained for a long time in the same place, one gets some curious kinds of bifocal vision. It is disconcerting, or was at first, to find that the student in front of you is the grandchild of one of your classmates. There is also a confusing foldover in time, because at my age the classmate of the past is more vivid in the memory than the student of the present. I have kept going by putting together the two great axioms of the Book of Ecclesiastes: "there is no new thing under the sun" [1:9], and "there is a time for all things" [cf. 3:1]. The first axiom refers to knowledge and to history: many things go in cycles, and that fact tends to even out one's moods. Good times do not last, but bad times do not last either. The second refers to experience: each stage of the cycle, when it comes round, is a fresh and unique phase of life. Over the last half-century, however, I can see social changes that suggest bigger cycles than those of a single life. In my own undergraduate days, a great many students came from small towns, mainly in

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Western Ontario: there was of course no Waterloo then, no Guelph apart from OAC, and no McMaster in Hamilton.1 Coming to a bigger city was an essential part of one's cultural education, even granting that Toronto was something of a hick town then compared to what is available in it now. It says a good deal about the essential nastiness of my disposition that what I seem to remember most clearly is Bertrand Russell responding to a question with "read my books," Paderewski playing the Chopin "Butterfly" Etude with the most exquisitely bad taste,2 and a number of movies, silent and audible, sufficiently corny to be regarded now as primitive classics. The lectures, at least in English literature, were rambling and digressive, because there were no courses in contemporary or Canadian literature, and any reference to what was going on around us had to be, so to speak, bootlegged into a lecture on something else. I first heard about the Group of Seven3 in a lecture by John Robins on the ballad, and about contemporary Canadian poets and novelists in Pelham Edgar's course in Shakespeare. Fortunately, Pelham rather disliked Shakespeare, so I learned a good deal about Canadian literature while reading Shakespeare on my own. At that time, Toronto was a very homogeneous town; the names of Victoria students read like a Belfast phone book, and the public food was as bad as it is in most right-thinking Anglo-Saxon communities. Shortly after the Second World War, a social worker told me that one out of every seven people in Toronto had been there less than a year. Canadians are often scolded for their diffidence and lack of sense of identity, but the positive side of that is, I think, shown by the ability of Toronto to absorb this tremendous and cosmopolitan influx with what seems to me a minimum of tension. The fact that the public food improved dramatically may have had a soothing effect. Canada had, I think, one of its few advantages in starting out with two European cultures and languages. Nobody could ever say what a hundred per cent Canadian was, except that he would obviously have to be bilingual, which in 1929, when I first came to Toronto, would have eliminated practically the entire city. Here there certainly has been tension, but even in the worst days of separatist terrorism a dozen years ago I never saw in Canada anything like the mart aux flamands graffiti that I have seen in Belgium. And while there are many disadvantages in being trapped in the middle of a big city, Toronto seems to have escaped the worst of the problems that have beset Chicago and Columbia.

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One soon learns that many social issues that we at first consider moral are really nothing more than convention, and can evaporate like the morning dew almost unnoticed. What has always been to me a very moving spectacle, the meeting at reunions of graduates of fifty years back with the present undergraduate body, shows how easily a continuing institution can get over generation gaps. In my undergraduate days there was still Prohibition, and very strong feelings about it, especially at Victoria. This reflected the rural-based society of nineteenth-century Canada, where it did tend to be true that people either took to drink or stayed off it, and where temperance organizations were politically liberal, even radical, centres of activity. But as manners became more urbanized this issue simply disappeared. That was merely a change in social pattern: whether we call it an improvement or not depends on our selection of evidence. Some things I note with at least tentative satisfaction. I am concerned with language, and among other things with the dialects within the same language that indicate where the social barriers are. There are slight differences between the vocabularies, inflections, and linguistic assumptions of men and of women: a century ago those differences were very marked. They pointed to a social situation in which women were given a certain protected status in order to keep them out of the decision-making processes of society. The speech of what are called adolescents differs from the speech both of children and of adults. In times of great social tension, like the late sixties, some young people would express their dissidence by refusing to speak the ordinary language, or by reverting, like certain other social groups, to the starvation-budget vocabulary that consists in the repetition of two or three obscenities. Even in more placid times, the English teacher is often handicapped by a shyness, almost a feeling of shame, on the part of young people about speaking articulately at all. I think this reflects that very ill advised development of the early part of this century, the deliberate creation of the "adolescent" or "teenager" as a means of keeping young people off the labour market and consigning them to an intermediate limbo where they were neither children nor grown up. Their situation was similar to that of women: some protection and privilege at the price of exclusion from a good deal of adult life. In the 19205 the cult of adolescence extended into the university, where the typical undergraduate was supposed to be a case of arrested development in a coonskin coat. My sister was teaching then in a working-class

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area near Chicago, and she reported that she had no luck at all in persuading parents of even the brightest children to send them to college. They had acquired their notions of college from the movies; the movies had told them that college was a middle-class playground, and they would not have their children declassed in so humiliating a way. Sixty years ago is not as remote as it may seem. A few weeks ago a neighbour's son, a boy of eleven, came in to see me with a questionnaire his teacher had given him. His first question was, "What sort of image comes into your mind when you think of a teenager?" I said none whatever: I thought it was not only silly but morally wrong to form stereotypes of large and miscellaneous groups of people. He said that if that was my attitude there was no point in going on with the questionnaire. But I knew well enough what his teacher meant, and I hope that more flexible methods of involving high school and university students in the operating of their institutions will minimize both the social and the linguistic differences. What I am circling around here is the fact that the more homogeneous the language, the fewer social barriers there are. A century ago the language of domestic servants in Punch or of black people in comic strips was supposed to be automatically funny, like pidgin English, which I understand was developed partly to make non-English speakers of English sound foolish. I should be very pleased to think, if it were true, that teachers of language may have had something to do with a growing thinning of class barriers, and that speech is being used less and less as a form of aggression, whether of class or sex or age. In this process I think it important to understand the extent to which language can neutralize or fossilize, that is, help along this minimizing of aggressiveness by a kind of inertia. Every language picks up metaphors from the social phenomena around it, and retains those metaphors long after the phenomena have disappeared. We don't have cockfights any more, but we still say "crestfallen" and "showing the white feather"; we don't shoot with flintlock muskets any more, but we still speak of "hanging fire" or "a flash in the pan." Retaining these metaphors in the language gives us no nostalgia whatever for the return of cockfights or flintlock muskets. In the same way traces of ancient feuds and intolerances may survive in language without reviving dead emotions. If I speak of a member of the Society of Friends as a Quaker, I am using a term that was originally hostile or derisive, but it has become so sanctioned by usage now that it no longer

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conveys any sense of hostility to any listener. Similarly a doctor may speak of an abnormal arrangement of chromosomes as "mongolism" without reference to the idiotic racism that originally suggested the word. In the seventeenth century there were Puritans who refused to pronounce the word Christmas because the last syllable was "mass," and there are people today who refuse to pronounce the word chairman for much the same reason. However, people kept on saying "Christmas," and Christmas did not turn Roman Catholic in consequence: it merely turned pagan. It seems to me superstitious to assume that words can never fossilize, but must always keep reminding us of their origin. It is not difficult to show that social changes are reflected in changes of language. What interests me more is the reverse possibility: that the teaching of language, and the structures of literature in which language is contained, may foster and encourage certain social changes. This is what I should like to discuss briefly now. Not long ago I was asked to speak to a group of alumni in a neighbouring city, and a reporter on a paper in that city phoned my secretary and asked if this was to be a "hot" item. My secretary explained that Professor Frye was what Marshall McLuhan would call a cool medium of low definition, and that he could well skip the occasion, which he did with obvious relief. The incident was trivial and typical, and I wanted nothing less than a reporter on my trail looking for hot items, but it started me thinking about the curiously topsy-turvy world of "news" as reported today. What would the historians of the future, say of the year 2283, assuming the human race lasts that long, make of the history of Canada in the 19805? In that remote future it is most unlikely that there would be any historians left who would still regard newspapers as historical documents. If there were any such, they would have to report that in the 19805 there were clearly no functioning universities in the Toronto area, otherwise the papers would refer to their activities, but that there must have been some conception of the university, because every month or so these same papers would run an item asserting that there was no particular advantage in attending one. There might also be, in that future, some anthropologists with a historical bent, and they might have some interest in studying the assimilating of children's and adult activities during this period. They would point out, for example, that in the phrase "adult entertainment," the word "adult" had already come to mean infantile, and they might trace out the similarities of pattern between, say, the

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leadership conventions of political parties and children's games, like pinning the tail on the donkey. But the real historians of that period would know very well that nothing of any historical importance whatever was taking place in Canada during the 19805 except what was happening in the universities, and in certain specific fields outside that were directly reflected in and by the universities. These fields would vary widely: there would be environmental control, related to the biological area of the university spectrum; computer technology, related to engineering and physics; literature and the performing arts, related to the humanities, and so on. If Canadian universities continue to be underfunded and supported so badly that they can no longer function effectively, Canada will disappear overnight from modern history and become again what it was at first, a blank area of natural resources to be exploited by more advanced countries. This is not empty rhetoric: it is a verifiable fact, just as the destructiveness of the hydrogen bomb is a verifiable fact. In neither case should I care to become known as the person who verified it. What is connected with the universities is what is really happening: the political and economic charades also going on are what are called pseudo-events, created for and blown up by the news media. The human lives behind these charades, of the people losing their jobs or finding that they can no longer live on their pensions, certainly do not consist of pseudo-events. But they are not hot news items either. The humanities in particular have for some time been fighting a rearguard action, constantly faced with supercilious questions that take the general tone: assuming that your area of interest is an expendable luxury, what are the serious things in society you can attach it to in order to defend its continued support? There are only two answers, so far as I know. One is the utterly futile Vicious Circle argument: we have to go on teaching this stuff to younger people so that they will grow older and teach it again to the next generation. The other is the National Interest argument. If we are going to trade with Latin America it might be useful to know Spanish; if Ronald Reagan's hardware fails to perform on schedule it might be handy to have some elementary Russian grammars around. But one should not try to argue by accepting the terms of people who have got it all wrong. The basis of my own approach, as a teacher of the humanities, has always been that we participate in society by means of our imagination or the quality of our social vision, and that training the imagination and

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clarifying the social vision are the only ways of developing citizens capable of taking part in a society as complicated as ours. Society supports compulsory education up to the point of producing passive, docile, obedient citizens. We must learn to read in order to read traffic signals and government handouts; we must learn to count to make out our income tax; we must learn to write to sign the income tax form. Obviously learning to read and write on this level is as essential for living in the modern world as food and shelter, and we periodically hear public complaints that the schools are not enabling children to grow up in a real world. So we get such slogans as a "back to basics" movement. The "basics," however, are not bodies of knowledge: they are skills, and the cultivating of a skill takes lifelong practice and repetition. All genuine education starts with the passive knowledge of elementary reading and writing and then tries to transform this passivity into an activity, reading with discrimination and writing with articulateness. Without this background of practice and repetition, one may be able to read and write and still be functionally illiterate. It is, admittedly, discouraging for a student to find that he has reached university and is still totally unable to say what he thinks. It is even more discouraging to realize that the real trouble is that he cannot think, thinking being a by-product of the skill developed in the practice of language. When he is in that condition there may be some relevance in a literature course that shows him the amount of reading, pondering, experiencing, and revising that has gone into the making of a serious writer, whose books are like the tip of an iceberg, the little that has emerged from a sunken mountain of torn-up drafts. A skill may be difficult to acquire without having social authority: articulate speech and writing does have authority, though critics have hardly begun to examine its nature. Every society, if it is to hold together at all, has to develop a body of concerns, assumptions in various areas, political, economic, religious, cultural, that are generally agreed on, or sufficiently agreed on for members of that society to communicate with one another. As society gets more complicated, various bodies of knowledge appear within it: these bodies of knowledge develop their own authority, and that authority may conflict with the concerns of society. We can see this most easily in the sciences. Galileo upheld a heliocentric solar system when the anxieties of a panic-stricken church were screaming to keep the geocentric one. That meant a conflict of loyalties in Galileo's mind, one to his science and the other to society as a whole. As I understand it, there was not as yet, in Galileo's time, an overwhelming

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body of evidence on the heliocentric side. Galileo was simply taking what some writers on religion, such as Pascal and Kierkegaard, call a leap of faith. Not every leap of faith is a religious one. It is not hard to see that the sciences have their own authority, to which a scientist is committed even when their authority conflicts with that of social concern at the time. It is harder to see that literature and the arts also have their own authority, that a writer may have to persist in his loyalty to the demands of what he writes even when threatened with censorship or personal persecution. Marxism, in fact, whenever it comes to power, simply denies, as a point of dogma, that literature has any authority of its own at all. Literature in a socialist country, it says, should reflect and follow the demands of socialist concern, otherwise it will turn into the neurotic, introverted, decadent, etc., kind of literature produced in the bourgeois countries. The United States has no actual dogmas on the subject, but there have been startling outbreaks of hysteria, from Anthony Comstock in the i89os4 to Joseph McCarthy in the 19505, and it is clear that such hysteria is constantly there, waiting for someone sufficiently evil to get it organized. The whole question of the authority of culture is complex: there are no easy answers, and certainly social concern does have its own case. Nuclear bombs, the energy crisis, the pollution of the environment and the choking off of the supply of air, all indicate that scientists have a profound social responsibility for everything they do, and that ignoring it is treachery to their science as well as to society. In literature, too, I think that there is such a thing as a moral majority, though I certainly don't believe that the people who call themselves that represent it, which a serious writer has to respect. Once when I was very young I found myself on a train with nothing to read, and in desperation bought a thriller from a news agent. It told me, in effect, that practically all the Chinese in North American cities were engaged in drug-running and in kidnapping or seducing young white women. It would be against the law to distribute such stuff in Ontario today, and I thoroughly approve of the law.5 Nevertheless, almost all movements of censorship are mistaken, because they spring from an instinctive hostility to anything that seems to threaten one's habitual reflexes. Hence censorship almost always fastens on the most serious writers as its chief object of attack, whereas the serious writer ought to be considered the ally of social concern, not its enemy. I can remember a time when even university professors (none of

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them at Victoria, I should add) would tell their students that D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were degenerates wallowing in muck. The real concerns of society are not anxieties, which merely resent the authority that comes from the fresh and expanded vision of the serious writer. The failure to grasp this results in some very grotesque situations: people in Canada snatching Canadian books out of high school libraries that are read and studied with the greatest enthusiasm in a dozen countries in Europe. What emerges from this is, I think, that there are two levels of social concern. There is a primary level which is instinctively exclusive, suspicious of outsiders, and very wary of any new developments from within. Left to itself, this primary level becomes a lynching mob, where every clearly defined individual, simply by being that, becomes a marked-out victim. Above this is a higher level of concern, reached occasionally by the professions and some of the trades, but much more clearly represented in the arts and sciences. The achievements of a society's culture always have a quality of authority about them, however foul the anxieties of the society out of which they emerged. We return again and again, with the same shuddering delight, to the opening of Macbeth: "Thunder and lightning: enter three witches," even though we know that these witches were contemporary with the most hideous and pointless tormenting of harmless old women. Perhaps the witches were put into Macbeth to amuse King James, who was an ardent and gullible supporter of witch-hunting, but the authority of the play is unaffected by that. However, this upper level of authority has no power: it is spiritual authority only, and is an ark precariously perched on Ararat when there is still no evidence that the flood is receding. This is not to say that the study of the arts and sciences will make us better people: it can, and it should, but it would be nonsense to claim that it invariably does. Nothing works by magic. Reading the Gospels, and contemplating the quiet dignity and unwearying kindliness of its central figure, one would say that it would be impossible that any religion founded on such an influence could develop mob hysteria, ferocious persecution, torturing of suspected dissidents, or public burnings of "heretics," but unfortunately the record of history indicates otherwise. Still, there is potentially the greatest experience to be ordinarily had in life in attending a university for several years. The university is a community in which the intellect and the imagination have a continuously functional place, and so gives us a sense of what human life could be like

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if these qualities were always functional in it. The phrase "alma mater" does, or could, mean something: in taking one's first degree there is a genuine rite de passage, an acceptance of a new motherhood in which the maternal spirit is one of companionship rather than protectiveness or externalized authority. I think Canada is a good training ground for the detachment, without withdrawal, that the university gives, because it is a secondary and necessarily observant country. Ordinarily we associate authority with leadership, but Canada is the sort of environment in which we can see most clearly that leadership is a conception that modern society is trying to outgrow. A bad metaphor blocks us here. Convocation addresses frequently refer to graduates as young people facing forward into the future, but of course nobody faces the future: we face the past and back into the future, and what knowledge of the future we may have, or think we have, we glean from a study of the past which is really a form of divination. Statistical tables replace the guts of chickens, and statements by public figures take the place of riddling oracles, but the process remains much the same. The leader is needed in competitive situations, where he faces, not the future, but the opposite leader. War is competition pursued to its limit, hence military leaders are needed in wartime; competitive business similarly, and Marxist countries are more preoccupied with leadership than we are because they feel an urgent need of competing with capitalism. Under ideal social conditions, we should not have leaders but representatives of public opinion, who do not pretend to face the future but retreat gradually into it, one hopes with a sufficiently sensitive backside. Intellectuals often do not make good politicians because they construct their social vision by themselves, without waiting for the input of Tom, Dick, and Harry. The intellectual tends to be aware only of the higher level of culture, just as the demagogue is aware only of the lower one. Real political guidance, of course, is constantly aware of both. In the course of my teaching I have gone through two cycles of student radicalism. One was in my graduate-student days, when, in the wake of the Depression, a number of left-wing groups crystallized on the campus, of which the Stalinist Communists had the most effective control of most youth organizations. The second cycle was in the late sixties, which was much more anarchist in tone, and drew its main inspiration from the cultural-revolution or gang-of-four Maoism in China. Crude and simplistic as student radicalism has usually been, such movements have

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their importance in illustrating the fact that universities form something of a counter-environment in society, that they dramatize a state of free criticism of that society from the inside. It is the same principle that has developed the system of tenure appointments for the staff. Tenure may look now as though it were merely a form of job security, but those who remember the frantic efforts to get rid of Professor Underhill in the 1930s6 will understand that it has often been much more than that. Underhill had said only what everyone takes for granted now, that Canada had effectively ceased to be a British country and had moved into the American orbit, but the generators of local hysteria at that time were immediately activated. II

Not long ago I read a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, who is at Princeton, though the book was published by the University of Toronto Press. This book tells us that man was not really conscious in ancient times, in, say, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, in Sumeria, in the oldest strata of the Iliad. That is, he had no sense of a continuous self existing in time, where experience moves along a central egocentric base, so that our verbal expression instinctively takes a narrative form that imitates the continuity of the self. Ancient man, we are told, had a divided or two-chambered brain, one hemisphere controlling immediate and practical actions, the other getting along with hallucinations and autonomous voices, assumed to be of or proceeding from a god or other symbol of authority. By the time we reach the Greek oracles and the Old Testament prophets, these voices and visions are heard and seen with increasing difficulty, and are increasingly associated with mental disturbance as a unified consciousness takes over. Today the ancient two-chambered experience survives in schizophrenia and the like. It is an interesting book, but it presents consciousness as a recent form of evolution, and suggests the reflection: seeing what a ghastly mess our egocentric consciousness has got us into, perhaps the sooner we get back to split brains and hallucinations the better. And in fact something very similar in feeling to this forms one of the major cultural trends of our time. It is widely felt that our present form of consciousness, with its ego centre, has become increasingly psychotic, incapable of dealing with the world, and that we must develop a more intensified form of conscious-

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ness, recapturing many of Mr. Jaynes's "bicameral" features, if we are to survive the present century. It is interesting to compare the history of the word "imagination." In Shakespeare's day imagination was mainly a pathological term, seeing what is not there, the sense that survives in our word "imaginary." With the Romantics, beginning in England with Blake, "imagination" reversed its meaning and became the thing that made man a creative being, in fact the power that unified his consciousness. The Romantics tended to ascribe the power of creating to an inspiration or genius that dwelt in mysterious and inaccessible areas of the mind, where it fitfully emerged from time to time, much as though the brains of creative people were two-chambered. This conception of the Romantics was, perhaps, the direct ancestor of the consciousness movement of today, or what I think of as the Zen industry, which by meditation, paradox, even physical violence, attempts to dissociate the linear ego and liberate us from helplessly dragging along after it. It was a similar intuition that started off the work of Marshall McLuhan, who also contrasted a linear, causality-bound, tunnel-vision type of perception with a simultaneous type capable of taking in many aspects of a situation at once. He associated the linear perception with the reading of print and the simultaneous one with the more many-sided appeal of the electronic media. I think these were the wrong referents, because it is only the preliminary process of reading that is really linear: once read, the book becomes a focus of a community, and may come to mean, simultaneously, any number of things to any number of people. The electronic media, on the other hand, vanish so quickly in time that we can make no sensible use of them without falling back on the continuous ego. I think McLuhan also realized very quickly that these were the wrong referents, but by that time he had been ground up in a massmedia blender and was unable to set the record straight. What is involved here is a prodigious change, extending over the last three or four centuries, in our views of what is or should be "normal" and of what deviates from it. Some time ago I was reading a rather dull academic book when Samuel Johnson's phrase about Addison floated into my head: "He thinks justly, but he thinks faintly."7 This started me thinking, no doubt faintly, about what is really meant by the phrase "he thinks justly." Would any contemporary critic use such a phrase as a commendation? To think justly implies, it seems to me, thinking from out of a centre of established assumptions, agreed upon by practically the whole educated upper-middle class of a society with clear lines of

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authority running through it. Johnson himself, Gibbon, Hume, even Macaulay in a latter age, however widely they may have differed among themselves, all think justly in this sense, and they all write, in consequence, with an assurance that they are addressing consistently rational readers. They speak for a world in which society establishes the criteria for what is rational, and where a deviating individual is a crank. I spoke earlier of young people who feel almost a sense of shame in speaking articulately. I think part of the trouble is that we still tend to think of this kind of continuously rational prose as normal prose, whereas the student knows that for him it is a dead language. If we had asked anyone in the universities in Shakespeare's day, or Milton's, or even Johnson's, what writer we should study to give us a clear sense of civilized and humane values, he would almost certainly have urged us to devote our days and nights to the study of Cicero. For many readers of our day, interested in the more prominent twentiethcentury writers, Cicero is the pits: they would see nothing in him but platitude and cliche and sonorous nonsense, at best a certain amount of pop philosophy. This seems strange: critical readers today live in a linguistic age, and one would think that the stylistic mastery of Cicero alone would hold their interest. But Cicero was admired for so long because nobody spoke with greater assurance out of that centre of authority in which one "thinks justly." He is a secondary writer today for the same reason. The people who have interested us most, from Rousseau onward, have been mainly people who thought unjustly, who went off exploring on their own, broke with customary assumptions, exaggerated some questions and blandly ignored others. Behind this is a revolution in our assumptions about society, the individual, the normal mind, and the intellectual deviate. For Johnson, the consensus of society established the criteria of sanity. Society as a whole could not be mad; only the individual could, and Johnson was ready to accuse even himself of disorders of mind near to madness. After the French Revolution the notion that society as a whole could go mad became more conceivable. When Johnson published his essay on Addison, William Blake was in his late twenties, and Blake was a typical example of the deviating individual who could be dismissed as an eccentric too close to madness to be taken seriously. Well, Blake's biographer tells us that the Blakes once had a visitor, and that, as they could not afford a servant, Blake went over to a nearby pub and brought back a supply of beer. On the way he met a successful artist, a Royal

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Academician, who had met him at a dinner a few nights earlier, and was about to shake hands. But, seeing that Blake was carrying the beer himself instead of getting a servant to do it, he replaced his hand in his pocket and cut Blake dead.8 Eminently sane from his point of view: he was simply doing what his social conditioning told him to do. But I imagine that today the question, "Which of those two men was the real neurotic?" would get a very different answer. After the almost unimaginable horrors we have seen in this century, we have reached a manic-depressive psychosis in which we swing wildly from a despairing conviction that the human race is near its own extermination to euphoria about a coming age of Aquarius when everything will be for some reason wonderful. (I can hardly imagine a gloomier donkey's carrot to pursue than the precession of the equinoxes,9 apart altogether from the fact that Virgil predicted a new Golden Age for the period of Pisces, and could hardly have been more wrong.) When Russian and American spokesmen both tell us that nobody would start an atomic war because there would be no sense in such a thing and nobody could gain anything at all from it, we are not reassured. We simply do not believe that human society is as sane as that any more. Only the individual can be sane, though at great cost and effort, and even then he would be helpless. So it is not surprising that so many should feel today that nothing but the developing of a higher consciousness can lift us out of our present history. It was a sense of this that made me say, a great many years ago, that the aim of education was to make people maladjusted, to destroy their notions that what society did made sense, and that they had only to conform to it to make sense of their own lives. I was also, I think, fortunate in coming to Blake so early in my scholarly career. I learned from him that society is not, beyond very narrow limits, qualified to say whether a man is sane or not. Society cannot distinguish between the individual above its standards and the individual below them. Blake also indicated a simpler way out of the impasse than any of our gurus and spiritual exhorters have provided. Blake was a poet and a painter. That meant that, like his split-brained ancestors, he could hear and see things that most of us cannot hear or see, and yet what he heard and saw it is profoundly profitable to us to look at and listen to. In short, works of art constituted for him what they have always been since Palaeolithic times, a focus of meditation, a means of concentrating consciousness. The poem or painting is in some respects a "hallucination": it is sum-

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moned up out of the artist's mind and imposed on us, and is allied to delirium tremens or pretending that one is Napoleon. Blake would say that such creative hallucinations are spiritual visions, and that what they present is more detailed, more vivid, and more accurate than anything that normal eyesight affords. In other respects a work of art is like a dream, but it does not introduce us to the ordinary dream world, where we retreat from reality into our withdrawn selves. It takes us into the world of social vision that informs our waking life, where we see that most of what we call "reality" is the rubbish of leftover human constructs. It speaks with authority, but not the familiar authority of parental or social conditioning: there will always be, I expect, some mystery about the real source of its authority. Continued study of literature and the arts brings us into an entirely new world, where creation and revelation have different meanings, where the experience of time and of space is different. As its outlines take shape, our standards of reality and illusion get reversed. It is the illusions of literature that begin to seem real, and ordinary life, pervaded as it is with all the phoney and lying myths that surround us, begins to look like the real hallucination, a parody of the genuine imaginative world. The glimpses I have had of the imaginative world have kept me fascinated for nearly half a century, and no one life can begin to exhaust the fascination. What that may say about the actual dimensions of life would take me too far beyond "the view from here."

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The Authority of Learning 19 January 1984

Address to the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto. Published in The Empire Club of Canada Addresses, 1983-84 (Toronto: Empire Club Foundation, 1984). Six typescripts exist in NFF, 1988, box 48, file 6. One clean typescript, marked "long version," is perhaps the version actually delivered, subsequently shortened for publication. Reprinted in OE, 183-91. The Empire Club was founded in Toronto in 1903 to advance the interests of Canada and the British Empire, later the Commonwealth. The club holds weekly luncheon meetings with speakers at the Royal York Hotel between October and April, and publishes the addresses annually.

This year, 1984, seems to be the only year that has had a book written about it before it appeared, and discussions of Orwell's 19^4 have become one of the most hackneyed themes in current journalism even before we are out of the January of that year. Nevertheless, I insist on beginning with one more reference to it, and for two reasons. In the first place, most of the discussions of the book I have read have failed to grasp its central thesis. Second, that thesis coincides with my own conviction as a student and teacher of English, which I have been trying to pound into the student and public consciousness for nearly half a century. I remember well the impact that Orwell's book made when it appeared in 1949. The Communists turned on their scream machine, and in those days a lot of people in the democracies listened to it. For there was still a very large group of leftist sympathizers who, in regard to the Stalin regime in Russia, were in exactly the situation that the book itself calls "doublethink." The deliberately engineered famines in the Ukraine, the purges and massacres, the concentration camps in Siberia (a) didn't

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exist, (b) maybe did exist, but nobody but a mean old fascist would mention them. So the book was decried a good deal as reactionary propaganda. I reviewed it over the CBC in 1949, and I remember the comment of my producer, who himself was clearly in the state of doublethink I mentioned: "Why didn't you just talk about the prose style?" What I then said about the book was what I would say now: it is a twentieth-century Inferno, a vision of hell where there is no hope and no end. The liberal bromide that tyrannies will disappear when certain ends, however selfish, have been achieved, is carefully taken away from the reader. "I understand the how but not the why," the hero says, and is told that there isn't any why. The tortures and spying are not means to an end; they are the ends; the object of power is power; the reason for torture is torture. In the ensuing years, Orwell's prophecy began to look very accurate indeed. True, Stalin died, as the Big Brother of 1984 cannot die; but much of his structure of tyranny survived him. China set up a very similar structure during the so-called gang-of-four regime, and the fact that it has a more reasonable, or at any rate more pragmatic, regime now is the luck of a power struggle, not any uprising from the people: this is another mirage that Orwell's book sets aside. In the United States, the spying and frame-up trials of the McCarthy era went on and on and on. Everything Orwell said would happen has happened, but in bits and pieces, not, so far, in the consolidated global form that makes the book a real Inferno. Why not? The central thesis of the book is that there is only one way to create a hell on earth that we and our children can never escape from, and that is to smash language. As long as we have the words to formulate ideas with, those ideas will still be potential, and potentially dangerous. What Orwell's state brings in is a pseudological simplification of language called Newspeak, in which, for example, instead of saying that something is very bad you say that it is "double plus ungood." This kind of talk is rationalized as making language more logical; what it actually does is to make it mechanical, like a squirrel's chatter. Orwell devotes an appendix to his book in which he impresses on his reader the fact that the debasing of language is the only means to a permanent tyranny. We can no longer change a world like 1984 when the words that express the possibility of change have been removed from speech. The appendix ends by quoting the opening paragraph of the preamble

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to the American Constitution, and then seeing how it could be translated into Newspeak. A Newspeak translator, Orwell tells us, could only stare at the paragraph and write down the word "crimethink." Even that indicates that his society is still in a state of transition. "Ultimately it was hoped," Orwell says, "to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all." If we know we are in hell we are no longer wholly there: it is our consciousness that tells us where we are, and consciousness is a function of language, not the other way round. Orwell's central case, then, is that the inner citadel of human freedom is language, and that language is not simply content or subject matter, such as we have in mind when we say that a speaker "has something to say." The way in which something is said is the reality of that something, and anyone who says, "just give the ideas; never mind the words," is taking a step in the direction of the subconscious quacking and barking of Newspeak. We know that this is Orwell's view from his other writings, notably a wonderfully incisive and pungent essay on "Politics and the English Language." So while 19^4 is a satire, the position from which it satirizes is the traditional humanist position. Again, 1984 belongs to a specific literary genre, the mock- or parody-Utopia. The genre includes, among many others, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which in its last book describes a society in which the horses have taken over because they can talk, while the counterparts of human beings, whom Swift calls Yahoos, cannot talk, and have consequently turned into the most noxious and vicious of animals. So everything that comes after food and shelter and makes life worth living, Orwell says, is bound up with language. The rest of us simply take the humanities for granted, assuming that they are pleasant but secondary ornaments of civilization. In some ways it is better that this should be thought: it could be an advantage to have the real importance of language overlooked. Yet it is clear that the twentieth century is an age in which we cannot afford to take anything for granted. We have been accustomed to take air and water for granted, but we have managed to pollute both. Another thing we take for granted is compulsory education, which seems to be a benevolent and well-meaning thing for a society to provide. So it is, up to a point. But society supports compulsory education because it must have docile and obedient citizens. We learn to read primarily to read what society says we must read: traffic signs, advertising, labels on merchandise. We learn to count to make change and figure out our income tax. The thought of a citizenry unable

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to do these things fills us with such panic that we periodically hear complaints that the schools are not enabling children to grow up in a real world, and thus we get such slogans as a "back to basics" movement. The "basics," however, are not bodies of knowledge: they are skills, and the cultivating of a skill takes lifelong practice and repetition. The simple ability to read, write, and count is essentially a passive acquirement, a means of social adjustment. All genuine teaching starts with this passive literacy and then tries to transform it into an activity, reading with discrimination and writing with articulateness. Without this background, one may be able to read and write and still be functionally illiterate. It is discouraging for a student to find that he has reached university and is still totally unable to say what he thinks. But by this time an odd kind of schizophrenia has begun to afflict public opinion. However "basic" it may be to read and write, as we go on doing it public opinion begins to push these abilities toward the periphery of society. The humanists find themselves fighting a rearguard action, faced with supercilious questions that take the general tone: assuming that your area of interest is expendable, what are the serious things in society you can attach to it to defend its continued support? One would assume that the simplest answer would be: people need political and social leaders who can define policies, articulate problems, and express the aims and ideals of their society for those who cannot express them for themselves, though they may feel them very deeply. But the evidence is overwhelming that voters in a democracy want, and expect, bumble and burble from their leaders, and seem to be disturbed, if not upset, by the impact of articulate speech. Without exhaustive examination, I should guess that if we read Hansard we might have to go all the way back to Arthur Meighen to find a political leader who habitually used the language with skill and precision, and the correlation of his ability to speak with his success at the polls seems to me significant, like the similar correlation for Adlai Stevenson in the United States later.1 There is a story, which I understand to be true, of a late colleague of mine, a professor of English who was private secretary to Prime Minister Mackenzie King during the war.2 In working on King's speeches, he inserted various quotations from Canadian poets, English and French, touched up cliches with a few metaphors, rounded out stock formulas with more concrete and lively language. These were regularly and routinely struck out. Eventually, the prime minister said, "Professor, the public memory for a picturesque phrase is very retentive." All this is a kind of negative indication of the real significance of what

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the humanities bring to society. The basis of my approach as a teacher has always been that we participate in society by means of our imagination or the quality of our social vision. Our visions of what our society is, what it could be, and what it should be, are all structures of metaphor, because the metaphor is the unit of all imagination. Logical thinking in this field seldom does more than rationalize these metaphorical visions. Occasionally, we realize that a metaphor is no longer useful, and doesn't fit any more. One such metaphor is that of political and economic structures, including that of government, as machines. We speak of people "running" a business or a department so habitually that we forget we are using a metaphor showing that we think of such things as mechanisms. So anything that symbolizes to us the efficient running of a machine in public life creates a feeling of reassurance in us. When we hear a political candidate talking in a continuous series of uniform burps suggesting a breakfast coffee percolator, our conscious minds may be bored, but our metaphorical imagination feels that, so far, all's well with the world. There would be no harm in this except that I think we are beginning to feel an uneasy sense that social structures are not really machines at all. It is obvious that social change would be reflected in changes of language but what interests me much more is the reverse possibility: that the teaching of language, and the structures of literature in which language is contained, may foster and encourage certain social changes. Not long ago I was asked to speak to a group of alumni in a neighbouring city, and a reporter on a paper in that city phoned my secretary and asked if this was to be a "hot" item. My secretary explained that Professor Frye was what his late colleague Marshall McLuhan would have called a cool medium of low definition, and that he could well skip the occasion, which he did with obvious relief. The incident was trivial, but it started me thinking about the curiously topsy-turvy world of "news" as reported today. What would the historians of the future, say of the year 2284, assuming the human race lasts that long, make of the history of Canada in the 19805? In that remote future, such historians would be puzzled by the exclusion of most news about universities in them. For they would also know that nothing of any historical importance whatever was taking place in Canada during the 19805 except what was happening in the universities, and in certain specific fields outside that were directly reflected in and by the universities. These fields would vary widely: there would be environmental control, related to the biological area of

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the university spectrum; computer technology, related to engineering and physics; literature and the performing arts, related to the humanities; and so on. If Canadian universities are underfunded so badly that they can no longer function effectively, Canada would disappear overnight from modern history and become again what it was at first, a blank area of natural resources to be exploited by more advanced countries. This is not empty rhetoric: it is a verifiable fact, though I should not care to become known as the person who verified it. What is connected with the universities is what is really happening: the political and economic charades also going on are what are called pseudo-events, created for and blown up by the news media to give us the illusion of living in history. The human lives behind these charades, of people losing their jobs or finding that they can no longer live on their pensions, certainly do not consist of pseudo-events. But they are not hot news items either. I am leading up to, or circling around, the question: what kind of social authority does language, and the study of literature which is at the centre of language, really have in the social order? Every society, if it is to hold together at all, has to develop a body of concerns, assumptions in various areas, political, economic, religious, cultural, that are generally agreed on, or sufficiently agreed on for members of that society to communicate with one another. As society gets more complicated, various bodies of knowledge appear within it: these bodies of knowledge develop their own authority, and that authority may conflict with the concerns of society. We can see this most easily in the sciences. Galileo upheld the idea of a heliocentric solar system when the anxieties of a panic-stricken church were screaming to keep the geocentric one. That meant a conflict of loyalties in Galileo's mind, one to his science and the other to society as a whole. It is not hard to see this authority within science. It is much harder to see that literature and the arts also have their own authority, that a writer may have to persist in his loyalty to the demands of what he writes even when threatened with censorship or personal persecution. Marxism, for example, when it comes to power in society, simply denies, as a point of dogma, that literature has any authority of its own at all. Literature in a socialist country, it says, should reflect and follow the demands of socialist concern, otherwise it will turn into the neurotic, introverted, decadent, etc., kind of literature produced in bourgeois countries. Christianity said much the same kind of thing in the past, and the Islamic religion repeats it in the present. The United States has no actual dogmas on the

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subject, but there have been startling outbreaks of hysteria, from Anthony Comstock in the i88os to his descendants in our day. There are no easy answers to this problem. For one thing, social concern certainly does have its own case. Nuclear bombs, the energy crisis, the pollution of the environment, and the choking off of the supply of air, all indicate that scientists have a social responsibility for what they do. In literature, too, I think there is such a thing as a moral majority to be respected, even though I don't believe that the people who call themselves that represent it. Once when I was very young I found myself on a train with nothing to read, and in desperation bought a thriller from a news agent. It told me, in effect, that practically all the Chinese in North American cities were engaged in drug-running and in kidnapping young white women. It would be against the law to distribute such stuff in Ontario today, and I thoroughly approve of the law. None the less, censorship is practically always wrong, because it invariably fastens on the most serious writers as its chief object of attack, whereas the serious writer is the ally of social concern, not its enemy. I can remember a time when even university professors (not at my college, I should add) would tell their students that D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were degenerates wallowing in muck. This is not concern for society, but only anxiety directed at token or phoney symbols of concern, four-letter words and the like, and its basis is a resentment of the authority that comes from the fresh and expanded vision of the serious writer. The failure to grasp this results in some very grotesque situations: people in Canada snatching Canadian books out of high school libraries that are read and studied with the greatest enthusiasm in a dozen countries elsewhere. In society there is a level of anxiety, which is instinctively exclusive, suspicious of outsiders, and distrustful of any new developments from within. By itself, this level becomes a lynching mob, where any clearly defined individual, simply by being that, becomes a marked-out victim. Above this is the level of genuine concern, most clearly represented by the arts and sciences. I say most clearly, because they still attract us after many centuries, no matter how foul the anxieties of the society out of which they emerged may have been. We return again and again with the same shuddering delight, to the opening of Macbeth: "Thunder and lightning. Enter three witches," even though we know that these witches were contemporary with the most hideous and pointless tormenting of harmless old women. Perhaps the witches were put into Macbeth to

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amuse King James, who was an ardent and gullible supporter of witchhunting, but the authority of the play is unaffected by that. I think Canada is in a unique position from which to study the role of language and the humanities in culture. Its political and economic structures may be in something of a shambles, but its culture, and I speak here more particularly of its literary culture, is flourishing and exhilarating. As we study this situation, we begin to see that two different social rhythms are involved. Political and economic movements tend to expand and centralize; cultural ones tend to decentralize, to bring to articulateness smaller and smaller communities. One has to keep the contrast steadily in mind: if we hitch a political development to a cultural one, as in separatism, we get a kind of neo-fascism; if we hitch a cultural development to a political one, we get a pompous, bureaucratic pseudoculture. Some time ago an American official, an appointment of the Reagan administration, remarked to me that he didn't approve of intellectuals in government. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself agreeing with him, if somewhat tentatively. The social role of creative people, and of most of the group known vaguely as "intellectuals," is at this time probably to create possible models of human behaviour and action. Orwell created the terrible model of 1984 and remarked, "All a writer can do today is to warn."31 think writers can do many things besides warn, however important warning may be. Every social change brings opportunities as well as dangers, and there are still a lot of people of good will around eager to respond to a more positive challenge than simply "avoid that." But models are one thing, and social machinery is another, and the nervous itch of many intellectuals to help turn the wheels of history, and show that they are of some practical use after all, has produced mainly illusions. This perversion of culture has been studied in a now-famous book, Julien Benda's Le trahison des clercs, the treason of the intellectuals. Such people are frequently very vocal in the first stage of a revolutionary situation, and its first victims in the second stage. It has often happened in the sciences that a new discovery, even a new invention, seems to be of no immediate practical use. But fifty years later, it may turn out to be exactly what that science is then looking for. Similarly, it has been noted many times that what poets have seen in any given period becomes what the whole world is doing fifty or a hundred years later. Among those who have seriously studied our possible futures, we find, apart from those who prophesy tyranny or total destruc-

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tion, a large number who see our present expanding of political and economic technologies as having reached its peak, and they tell us of a possible world which has become decentralized into smaller units, of the kind defined by a maturing literature. In short, the metaphor of society as a vast interlocking machine may succeed to a metaphor of society as a group of social organisms. At present, it seems that our culture, especially our verbal culture, is all that Canada has to contribute to the world that the world appreciates for its own sake. I have often been puzzled by the intensity of the interest shown in Canadian writing in European and Asian countries whose social conditions are very unlike ours. But perhaps before long we shall see the reason for that interest. If the world really does outgrow its vast jungle cities, its strangling international cartels, and the deadlocked hostility of its superpowers, it may break up into smaller units in which the individual can find once more an identity and a function. In such a world Canada might gain a quite new significance. In many ways, Switzerland is the model for a peaceful and co-operating Europe, and Canada, ringed around with the world's great powers, is a kind of global Switzerland. Politically, it is constantly falling apart and being patched together by ad hoc compromises; economically, it has been trampled over by exploiters from three continents. But somewhere in its literature, its universities, its scholarship staggering and limping under budget cuts, there may be buried the model vision of a new world, where nightmare visions of tyranny and destruction have vanished as even the worst dreams do.

88 Language as the Home of Human Life 14 June 1985

From Salute to Scholarship, ed. Michael Owen (Athabasca University, 1986), 20-33; reprinted in OE, 192-205. Typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 49, file 2, and NFF, 1991, box 38, file 5. This was originally an address given at a colloquium that was part of the official opening of Athabasca University, in Athabasca, Alberta. The university was particularly dedicated to "distance learning" among the widely scattered communities of northern Alberta.

I

I assume that in this programme my role is to try to speak for the part of the academic spectrum usually called the humanities, which has the study of languages and literatures at its centre. The title of my paper adapts a phrase from the philosopher Heidegger, who remarks that language is the dwelling-house of being.1 We may notice two things about this phrase. First, "dwelling-house" is a metaphor, and implies that even philosophers can't get along without the metaphorical picturewriting that's the backbone of poetry. Second, "being" for Heidegger is the profoundest subject that man can think about, because, Heidegger says, the first question of philosophy, and the hardest to answer because it's also the simplest, is: why is there something rather than nothing?2 As this is a question we can't answer but can only talk about, we're really starting with the fact that man, unlike anything else in nature, is a talking being. He is often called a tool-using being, but language is by far his most useful tool. Many things are natural to man that are not natural outside human life, such as wearing clothes, and that means among other things that there are no noble savages, that is, human beings who

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can live directly in nature as animals can. All human societies without exception are enclosed in an envelope of culture, of certain social, religious, legal, and other practices, and most of this cultural envelope consists of words. Completely natural societies, if they could exist, would probably communicate by telepathy or some kind of body language or gesture. In societies as complex as ours anyone who cannot read or write is far more handicapped than the blind or the paraplegic. Consequently society supports elementary education, on the ground that reading and writing are necessities on much the same level as food and shelter. But the real reason for making elementary education compulsory is that society needs docile and obedient citizens. We must learn to read in order to read traffic signs and advertising; we must learn to write and cipher to make out our income tax. Society does not show much concern for education beyond the point where the student has acquired certain essential units of knowledge, like the alphabet or the multiplication table, and has developed out of them an essentially passive education. All genuine teaching begins at that point, and tries to transform this passive education into an activity, of a kind appropriate to citizens of a free society. The transforming process takes place through the encouraging of a factor in the student's mind that is, in the broadest sense, critical. The cultural envelope I spoke of is something that I, for many reasons of my own, call a mythology. A mythology has two aspects. One aspect contains all our really deep and committed convictions and loyalties: our beliefs in freedom, human dignity, the values represented by our religious or social visions: that is, all our mental models of what our society should be. But such mythologies are also exploited by advertising and propaganda interests of all kinds, and that is why we are compelled not just to read, but to read actively, that is, critically, trying to separate what speaks to our real beliefs from the sales pitch that asks us to support the ascendancy or prosperity of some particular class or group. If a political leader says, "this is antidemocratic," when he means, "this will affect the interests of my party," we have to learn to distinguish the two aspects of what he says, even if we ourselves belong to his party and accept his general position. So teaching the humanities is a militant activity: it has constantly to fight for the freedom that the critical faculty represents against passivity and uncritical acceptance. Most of us realize, whether we consciously realize it or not, that the words confronting us in advertising, propaganda, and most news and

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casual conversation have to be taken in an ironic context. That is, they do not say precisely what they mean, and we have to recognize the difference between real meaning and presented meaning. We have just got through the year 1984, during which we heard a good deal about George Orwell's book of that title, and we remember that Orwell's main point was that the only way to establish tyranny permanently in society is to destroy the integrity of language. So his state promotes such slogans as "Freedom is Slavery." We may find this a bit crude even as satire, but nevertheless the satire reflects the century that has discovered the effectiveness of the big lie, and of the controlling of information in a way that cuts off access to the real meaning of what is said to us. We are constantly making judgments about the irony of advertising and propaganda, and many of them have to do with fairly harmless situations. A restaurant promises "an evening of leisurely dining," and we have to estimate how much of that really means "we're doing our best, but we're understaffed and the service is slow." Or a college tells prospective freshmen that their teaching staff directly engages students in the existential problems that will confront them in society, and we have to decide how much of that means "our staff doesn't amount to much as scholars, but some of them are quite decent people to talk to." Or we may even find ourselves reading the opposite meaning into what is said: if we pass a theatre advertising "adult entertainment," we know that "adult" in such contexts generally means "infantile." So my special interest, which is literary criticism, is not really specialized at all in its elementary stages. The examples I've just given are critical judgments, and if we didn't make them every day of our lives we couldn't manage our own affairs. But of course there are more important social aspects of language than that. It is very common for both social establishments and the conspiracy groups that oppose them to develop secret or in-group languages, where words have special meanings not shared by outsiders. For centuries criminal groups have used special languages, and the drug cults of a generation ago also had their own jargon. By jargon I mean a language specialized for dubious social reasons, not the use of technical terms in a technical subject. At the other end of society, we may recall the use of Latin as a mode of maintaining the ascendancy of both church and state for so many centuries, in Great Britain down to the end of the nineteenth. During that time, even the dumbest member of the upper classes, if male, would be sent to

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a public school to get some Horace and Cicero whacked into him. I say male, because Latin was also used as a sexual status symbol. In Scott's Guy Mannering the heroine has a tutor who teaches her modern languages, and then innocently proposes to go on to Latin and Greek. At this point she balks, because she is a proper young lady conceived by a very sexist writer, and she, like Scott, feels that the Classical languages are not ladylike [chap. 29]. In Tom Jones there is a very funny scene of a dinner party where the local parson keeps quoting tags of Latin, then oozes over the heroine and says, "That is a Latin quotation, young lady, and it means," etc. [bk. 4, chap. 10]. If you have been following this critically, you will realize that I am not reflecting on the teaching of the Latin language, which is an admirable practice, but on the misuse of it for irrelevant social purposes. In imperialist days pidgin English grew up in the Orient, and it has often been suggested that one motive, perhaps wholly unconscious and perhaps not, in developing pidgin English was to make non-English speakers sound foolish and ignorant. Again, social prejudice, as we find it in racism and elsewhere, is often embedded in a use of language peculiar to itself. We speak of people as black and white, for example, and this can get involved with other metaphorical uses of the words black and white that have nothing to do with the social groups called by those names except in prejudiced minds. Thus Huckleberry Finn, brought up on the cliches of white supremacy and not old enough yet to see through them, can say approvingly of Jim, "I knowed he was white inside."3 And yet the distance, in ordinary human decency and dignity, separating the "black" Jim from most of the technically "white" characters in the story has been quite as obvious to him all along as it is to us. Not long ago a neighbour's child, a boy of eleven, came in to see me with a questionnaire. The first question on it was, "What kind of a picture comes into your mind when you think of the word teenager?" I said none whatever: in my opinion it was not only silly but morally wrong to make up stereotypes about so large and miscellaneous a group of people. He said that if that was my attitude there was no point in going on with the questionnaire. I think I understood what his teacher was after, but the tactics in my view were mistaken. George Orwell remarked, in commenting on the deliberate destruction of language in his horrible 1984 society, that the ultimate aim was to make speaking a purely mechanical gabble, like a squirrel's chatter, involving no conscious thought at all. We can see such tendencies very

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clearly at work in all mob language, whether used by criminal gangs or by bureaucracies. One subdivision of bureaucratic jargon is academese, with which I have some reluctant familiarity. The other day I picked up a volume of essays concerned with critical theory, and read the following opening sentence of an essay on literature and phenomenology: "To question at our present intellectual juncture the relationship of phenomenology to literature implies beyond a re-elaboration of an extension of familiar concepts the re-examination of a relationship which is essentially problematical." I did not read the second sentence, because it took me so long to decode the first one. What I think it means is: this is a tough subject, and maybe it's tough because it doesn't really exist. At least, that's what "essentially problematical" sounds like to me. But he couldn't say that openly and still go on for another twenty pages, so he retreated behind this barricade of polysyllables. What is important here is that it is actually easier to write this way than to write in lucid prose, although the difficulty in deciphering it may convey an illusion of something profound. This is still a fairly harmless issue, and only a few misguided people like myself are likely to suffer from brain sprain over it. Other aspects of the social use of language are more crucial. During the discussions I referred to over Orwell's 1984 last year, some journalists asserted smugly that the issues Orwell raised had been bypassed and were out of date. They forgot to notice how important it was that the press is still sufficiently free to observe the difference between what such a thing as the nuclear arms race means in plain English and what it is said to mean in press releases. It is quite simply true that the survival of the human race depends on the way that it responds to language over the next few years. Language comes to us with a long history behind it, and has to keep adapting itself to changing conditions. Its power of adaptation is very considerable: there are, for example, few if any abstract words in the language that were not at one time concrete and metaphorical, but they are abstract now, for better or worse, and their use is not affected by their origin. We don't have cockfights any more, but we still say "crestfallen" and "showing the white feather"; we don't shoot with flintlock muskets any more, but we still speak of "hanging fire" or "a flash in the pan." We should notice that using these phrases does not give us the slightest nostalgia for bringing back cockfights or flintlocks, even if we know their derivation. If I speak of a member of the Society of Friends as a Quaker, 1 am using a term that was originally hostile, but has become so sane-

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tioned by usage that it no longer conveys any sense of hostility. In fact, thanks to the advertising of the Quaker Oats Company, so far as any popular stereotype is concerned, it is one of stolidity rather than neurosis. In the seventeenth century there were Puritans who refused to pronounce the word "Christmas" because the last syllable was "mass," and there are people today who refuse to pronounce the word "chairman" for very similar reasons. However, people kept on saying "Christmas," and Christmas did not turn Roman Catholic in consequence: it merely turned pagan. I see no reason why such words as "chairman," "spokesman," "mankind" and the like could not fossilize in the same way. We sometimes forget how much the language has already changed in this respect. When I was growing up, in the early years of this century, men and women spoke appreciably different languages: different in vocabulary, in rhythm, in intonation. The flattening out of these differences is a sign, I think, that society has gone a long way in normalizing the relation of the sexes. It should be clear by now that there is nothing "natural" about language, except that for a conscious being, the natural and the artificial are the same thing. There is no freedom in human life that does not come from long and disciplined practice, and free speech is no exception. If we associate freedom with doing as we like, or in a most illiterate phrase, "doing what comes naturally," our freedom is simply a matter of obeying compulsions developed in childhood that keep pushing us around because we don't know that they're there. Playing games may be a natural activity, but playing them well means a lot of work. Every so often public opinion comes to realize that elementary education is not doing a good many of the things it ought to be doing in a free society, and so a demand arises with some slogan attached like "back to the basics." But the "basics" are not bodies of knowledge: they are skills. The important thing is not merely the ability to read and write but the habit of reading and writing critically, and that takes years of practice. If you listen to the speech of people in public office, you'll be impressed by how easy it is to become fluent by simply repeating formulas that are supplied for you, where the speech is semi-automatic. But articulateness means developing your own rhythm of speech and speaking in your own voice, and that takes independence and not a little courage. So the skill involved is not purely technical: it's partly moral as well. It must be admitted that there is a certain aggressiveness in framing fully articulate sentences. Like the songs of birds, they set up a territorial

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claim, and create a space and a silence around them. You look at the speaker, perhaps with attention, perhaps only with resentment, but you look at him anyway, in a way that separates him from others. Anyone who has much to do with young people soon becomes aware of their obstinate silences: it often happens that the more obviously troubled they are the more silent they become. They are apt to feel that silence is their only defence: to speak, they feel, would let in the enemy, and they can't yet distinguish the enemies outside them from those inside them. But behind the insecurity, which is normal enough, there is also a kind of shame about speaking out. If, like the hippies of a generation ago, you confine yourself to formulas of the "like wow, man" type, you know that you can be invisible in a crowd. As soon as you are actually speaking language you become naked and exposed. That is what I mean by the courage of articulateness. II

All human societies have some sort of verbal culture, and in ancient or primitive societies the bulk of this culture takes the form of stories. Usually two kinds of stories develop: perhaps we could call them, oversimplifying things a bit, folk tales and myths. The most striking quality of folk tales is that they are nomadic: they wander over the world through all the barriers of language. Some of them are quite long and elaborate stories, and some are mere anecdotes, but they all have a wellmarked story line and a specific theme that tells you what sort of story it is. In fact their motifs are so clearly outlined that they can be counted and indexed by scholars. They also keep interchanging their themes, so that a new story may emerge from older materials. All this is of course completely anonymous: a folk tale may start in India and wind up in Ireland or Japan, and scholars may, up to a point, be able to trace the path of its migrations. But nobody knows who started it off in India, and nobody gets any royalties. It's a long time before anyone starts thinking of a story as a story-teller's property. But there are other stories that seem to have a different and much more serious social function, and these are what I call myths. These are the stories that tell a specific society what that society most needs to know about its recognized gods, its legendary history, and the origin of its class structure and customs and rituals. Myths may have the same structure as folk tales, but their place in society is different. They don't

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wander over the world: they do travel within limits, but they also send down their roots into a specific culture and transmit a heritage of shared allusion to posterity. In the course of time they become a mythology in the sense in which I used that word at the beginning. That is, they form the core of the beliefs and values a society holds. This is what the stories of the Old Testament did for Hebrew culture and the Homeric poems for the Greeks. There is, of course, a vulgar sense of the word "myth" in which it simply means something not true. But this is derived from the notion that it is possible to convey definitive truth in words, and everything is wrong with that assumption. However changed the conditions, one can still trace the same contrast even in complex civilizations like ours. Most of our verbal culture, in books and magazines and newspapers, in movies and radio and television and comic books, is geared to the expanding rhythms of marketing. It flows out from the big distributing centres, New York or London or Hollywood, into smaller and more remote communities. To keep things simple I shall speak mainly of books, and, for the most part, of books of fiction. This is the rhythm of what is usually called mass culture, or popular culture. Such phrases don't imply any value judgment, because mass culture exists on every level of merit, from the best to the worst. But economically it is the direct descendant of the migrating folk tales I mentioned, and like them it is highly conventionalized. The great bulk of it falls into certain obvious categories: there are detective stories, science fiction, romances, westerns, fantasies, and so on: any good bookstore will provide the labels. In many of these categories there is much firstrate writing, and no book can remain on a best-seller list for long unless it is written with a good deal of professional expertise. But we nearly always know the kind of thing it is: if we pick up a book on the detective rack, we know the type of story that is going to be inside, and similarly with romances and historical tales. Knowing that we are going to read something highly conventionalized doesn't seem to put us off: on the contrary, we'd feel cheated if we didn't find the conventions observed. Books where the conventions are very clear remind us a good deal of games: each game of chess or tennis will be different, but there is a controlling set of rules that remains the same for every type of game. In the book trade this means that there will always be a constant pressure to turn out the predictable and highly professional product, whatever its category.

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I should explain that all art is conventionalized, and convention works in two opposite directions. For a genuinely original writer convention sets one free to say what one wants to say. For a beginning writer, or a writer with some expertise but nothing much to say with it, convention provides a ready-made framework. But originality does not break with convention: it rediscovers it at a deeper level. Whether a given book is a good book or not will depend first of all on whether we like or accept its convention. Perhaps a very tentative standard of values might be established on the question: how much has to be sacrificed to keep the convention intact? To take an extreme example, hard-core pornography is writing that takes no interest in story, characterization, or social comment, but passes over all this in favour of an incessant prodding of reflexes. Those who respond to the reflex form the public for this convention: those who do not merely find such books a bore. Canada has been, for most of its history, a provincial market for the big distributing centres. The pinnacle of success for a Canadian writer fifty years ago was a New York or London publisher, and this usually meant pulling his settings out of Canada. Stephen Leacock, for example, had to locate a good many of his stories in the United States even when they were as Canadian as Oka cheese. Gradually, however, there grew a demand for more unusual and out-of-the-way settings for novels, and in Canada this led to a certain amount of what we might call tourist literature, some of which might even be written by Canadians. We have Jack London and James Oliver Curwood writing about the Northwest, Robert W. Service celebrating the Yukon gold rush, and a mixed lot of historical novels about Quebec. In Quebec also we have work as different as the verse of W.H. Drummond and Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdelaine. What I call tourist literature corresponds to what in the history of painting is called the picturesque. Literature of this sort, like picturesque painting, looks at its setting with a kind of conservative idealism: it doesn't want to get close enough for actual realism, only close enough to distinguish its chosen setting from others. Eventually we begin to be aware of a growing movement in the opposite direction from this, not the writing of a tourist looking in but of a native looking out, studying the immediate surroundings, ready to face the difficulties and the hostility involved in treating them realistically, and trying to communicate something through the imagination that we can't learn in any other way. This kind of writing may be, once again, on any level of merit, but good or bad it seems to follow the

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rhythm of myth rather than folk tale: it strikes its roots into a specific community and tells us about that community. It's not a mythology in the sense of transmitting a distinctive set of social beliefs and values, but most of it does have a special kind of seriousness, even of urgency: it tells us the kind of thing we need to know if we're to understand the country it comes from. This is how Canadian literature has grown up: not a literature that calls itself or tries to be Canadian, or tries to express some imaginary essence of the country from one sea to the other, but one that lives in restricted regions, in southern Quebec, in southern Ontario, on the prairies, on the Pacific coast. The best and most professional of its writers will sooner or later merge with the mass product of literature on its top level: this is what, for example, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, and several others have done. Other books may remain for longer within a Canadian or even a regional orbit: that's nothing against them, just a characteristic of the kind of work they are. What is most important is the total enterprise. You don't find a twentythousand-foot mountain on a flat plain: you find it in a mountain range, where it's surrounded with a lot of others like it. Shakespeare was Shakespeare partly because he was one of about a hundred contemporaries, including nearly twenty dramatists, who have made a permanent impression on English literature. Nearly all of them lived and worked in a city far smaller than Edmonton. We begin to understand what the poet William Carlos Williams means when he says, "the classic is the local fully realized, words marked by a place."4 It would of course be just as true of science that it's the whole enterprise that matters, not the individuals working within it. And yet every year Nobel prizes are awarded in the sciences, and these prizes carry a great deal of prestige. It's not too difficult for a sufficiently well informed committee to discover where the front lines of research are in the sciences. The Nobel prizes in literature, though they get the same publicity, don't have anything like the same prestige. In the nature of things they can't have: it's not the diversity of languages that's the trouble, so much as the diversity of cultural situations behind the languages. There are too many variables, and the value- system changes every time you look at it. The first Nobel prize for literature was awarded in 1901, a year when Tolstoy and Ibsen were still alive. It went to a French poet of the Parnassian school named Sully-Prudhomme, and today even professors of French might have to do a double take to remember who he was. On the other

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hand he belonged to French literature, and the world's sensibility owes an immense debt to French literature. Similarly, in Canada it's not the "greatness" of this or that writer that's important, but the sense of a total body of imagination emerging from the country with its own distinctive impact and integrity. This quality in a literature gets immediate recognition: that's why institutes of Canadian studies are now being set up in universities all over the world. So what begins as a kind of counterculture, a handful of poets and novelists writing in a much overlooked provincial area, ends as an export product. Canada hasn't reached this stage as completely as, say, Ireland, where there have been dozens of world-famous writers who never thought of writing for the Dublin market even when they wrote about Dublin. And, of course, I very much hope it never does: it would be a miserable anticlimax to have a Canadian literature that Canadians weren't much interested in. That's where centres of education, like Athabasca University, get into the act.

Ill I've been speaking of books, but the same economic situation holds true for the other verbal arts. The movies at the beginning of the century, radio in the twenties, television in the fifties, all seemed to have to go through a kind of archaic phase of rather crude beginnings. The gradual maturing of movies and radio has been assisted by the growth of television, which has pushed them out of the central place of entertainment and forced them to appeal to a more limited market. In Canada the growth of nationally subsidized media has also helped the maturing process, just as what used to be the Canada Council has played a major role in the growth of Canadian literature. As we all know, there was a golden age of radio and to some extent of documentary movies during the forties of this century in Canada. Golden ages seldom last: sooner or later the pressures of the mass market will bring about at least a partial return to the predictable professional output, or what I think of as the Agatha Christie syndrome. This has happened in all the media, but more particularly in the book business. More particularly, because in the United States the book business is no longer primarily in the hands of those who are really concerned with books, but in those of large corporations who have bought a publishing house or two as a hobby or even an investment. A publishing house I am connected with myself in New York is

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now attached to a zoo in Florida: what effect this will have on its interest in books I have yet to discover. In all societies there is a built-in tendency to anti-intellectualism. Sometimes this is maintained by a state-enforced dogma, as it is in the vulgar Marxism of the Soviet Union or the still more vulgar version of the Moslem religion enforced in Iran. Sometimes, as in North America, it is simply part of the human resistance to maturity, and to the responsibilities that maturity brings, the instinct to stay safe and protected by the crowd, to shrink from anything that would expand and realize one's potential. It is this element in society that makes all education, wherever carried on, what I just called a militant enterprise, a constant warfare. The really dangerous battlefront is not the one against ignorance, because ignorance is to some degree curable. It is the battlefront against prejudice and malice, the attitude of people who cannot stand the thought of a fully realized humanity, of human life without the hysteria and panic that controls every moment of their own lives. Words like "elitism" become for such people bogey words used to describe those who try to take their education seriously. At the heart of such social nihilism, this drive to mob rule and lynch law that every society has in some measure, is the resistance to authority. By authority I do not mean what is traditionally meant by it, the external power of church or state or big business or political party over the individual. That type of authority is one that a serious concern with democracy would reduce to a minimum. If we think of the people who have been presidents of the United States for the last quarter-century, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that it doesn't matter so much who is president of the United States, and that the real authority in society is something different and somewhere else. By authority I mean, for example, the kind of authority the sciences have when they appeal to evidence, logic, repeatable experiment, and accurate measurement. This is the kind of authority that, when we accept it, increases instead of limiting our own dignity and freedom. Further, a scientist's views on his science may collide with the anxieties of society, as Galileo's did. That means that he owes a loyalty to his science as well as to society, and whenever possible he should stick to the authority of his science in any collision with society. But a scientist may have social and political views not directly connected with his science, as Einstein did. Einstein held such views, not as a scientist, but as a man who had got where he was by exerting a considerable independence of judgment. And to exert inde-

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pendence of judgment, in any area of life, is a political act. It is very seldom really dangerous to society, but the hysterical will always think it is, and the political expression of hysteria, the police state, puts as many of its "dissidents" as it can in jail. That is why we have to have tenure clauses in university contracts. Most people can be got to understand the authority of science, but the authority of poets and novelists is something we seldom think about. But they are more the targets of hysteria than almost any other group, and that is an impressive negative tribute to the importance of their work, little as they want it. Scientists have come to understand that academic freedom for other scientists goes far beyond the bounds of their science, and have started agitations for the release of scientists all over the world who are victims of tyranny and terrorism. Recently organizations of writers, such as PEN, have started parallel agitations for the release of persecuted writers.5 Such activity would not mean much, apart from ordinary humane feelings, without an underlying assumption that writers embody one of the genuine forms of social authority. It is a very difficult authority to characterize, because it is a form of prophetic authority. It has no techniques of verification like science, and it is often present in writers who may be obviously and perversely wrong about any number of things. This gives the university a delicate but very crucial role to play. However important Canadian literature may be or become in a university, it is not any university's primary duty to foster a national literature. Its primary duty is to build up a public receptive to it, a public that will not be panicked by plain speaking, not put off by crankiness, not bewildered by unexpected ways of thinking and feeling. Again, the importance of doing this goes far beyond the boundaries of literature. A society's tolerance for its own culture is the most accurate indicator we have of the level of its civilization. It is also the next step on from the critical approach to language I mentioned at the beginning. When a university begins operations, or enters on a new phase of operations, as this one is doing, the situation I've been outlining faces it at once. The educational market functions like all other aspects of the market: it's centred in populous and wealthy areas like those of Harvard or Chicago or Berkeley, and it ripples out from there until it reaches the youngest, most remote, and most vulnerable seats of learning. The easy way to look at this situation is the cop-out way, to think of a new university as one where students go because they can't afford to go somewhere more central, and where the staff remains only because the

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employment situation is too bad to let them move somewhere more central. Such an attitude would kill any university, and would have killed Harvard or Chicago or Berkeley if it had got there early enough. There are no peripheries in scholarship and learning: every university is fighting on the same front line, whatever its morale. A line of defence against Soviet missiles will be out of date long before it is built, but education's line of defence is never out of date, and it runs as directly through this community as it does through every community in Canada. The conception of culture as an expendable luxury, to be taken up only after we've done all the really important things like polluting the environment, is particularly strong in Canada, because two centuries ago Canada accepted the ethic of mercantilism that the Americans revolted against, and devoted itself to providing raw materials for centres outside the country. If Canadian education is persistently underfunded, Canada will disappear from history and go back to being again what it was at first, a blank area of natural resources to be exploited by countries that are more advanced and better organized than we are because they've spent more on their education. The routines of teaching, lab work, essay-marking, and the like are quiet and undramatic. Breathing air and drinking water are quiet too: it is only when we run short of them that things get dramatic. The expansion of university work in Canada increases the supply of cultural air and water, and so represents an act of faith. Faith gives us, according to the New Testament, the substance of hope and the proof of the unseen [Hebrews 11:1], In that sense every act of teaching and learning is also an act of faith, with every step visible but the final goal unlimited. Those of us who have devoted our lives to the same process do not know, any more than you know, where the path to greater knowledge and enlightenment will take you. What we can say, with a confidence born of long experience, is that to such things there is no wrong path.

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On Living inside Real Life Spring 1986

From Vic Report, 14 (Spring 1986): 2. This is a guest editorial in the college alumni magazine, introducing an issue which includes reminiscences by Christina McCall (576), A.B.B. Moore, Douglas Fisher (479), and David Gardner (5x0). The typescript is in NFF, 1991, box 40, file 2.

There are disadvantages in staying at the same place all one's life, even though I've tried to minimize them by occasional visits elsewhere. But there are advantages too, including a clearer sense of the continuity that a university can give, especially one like Victoria, which has its ethos on such a broad liberal base. That ethos remained placid, even in its early sectarian days, when Pratt included a most un-Methodist catalogue of whiskies in a poem [The Witches' Brew]; it kept the hysteria of the late sixties within a solid boundary of common sense; it survived two world wars and any number of witch-hunts, political and religious. Graduates of fifty or sixty years back can still mingle at alumni reunions with graduates of one or two years' standing, recognizably in the same world, tolerating and even mutually absorbing some of the differences in conventions and attitude. Continuity means movement; graduates keep reuniting and reminiscing about their undergraduate days here, not simply out of nostalgia, but to revisit that period of their lives when they most clearly saw the shape and direction of human life, because they could also see how human intelligence and imagination are the transforming powers of that life. Once you have belonged for a few years to a community that knows why it respects both religious conviction and academic freedom, you can never be in later life what is called a "one-dimensional man" or woman.

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I speak of both religious and academic connections. A college with a religious affiliation often speaks of it negatively: it's there, but it doesn't interfere with the aims of scholarship. I think of it more positively: it's there, and won't bother you if you don't want it, but if you do want it you'll find things in it that expand the conscious horizon, and show the relation of knowledge to human life in new and unexpected ways. As for academic freedom, I've often doubted whether there is really any other kind of freedom. "Doing as one likes" merely means being under the tyranny of impulse. Freedom means passing through intense and repeated discipline in order to become free to play the violin or tennis, free to know the detail of one's business or profession, free to think in a sequence instead of just soaking in the rain of prejudice and cliche. In reading the four reminiscences in this issue, all of them by people well known to me both inside and outside the Victoria context, this is the kind of framework in which I see them. The authors understand that the university is not outside "real life" but inside it: it is the place where one can see reality created, instead of being broken up into the dissolving mirages of business or politics or professional life. They are evidence that Victoria has a heritage, and that the heritage is not a buried treasure or a transmitted secret, but an experience renewed by everyone who comes in contact with it.

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Farewell to Goldwin French 10 June 1987

From a typescript with holograph corrections in NFF, 1993, box 5, file 9. Goldwin French had succeeded J.E. Hodgetts as president of Victoria University on i January 1973. It is with great regret that we are, in effect, saying goodbye to Goldwin French as president. But one has to remember his remarkable ability to make friends of everyone he works with, and no real friend would want him to carry on indefinitely. I suppose the first and most striking impression one has of Goldwin French is the amount of work he gets through and the absence of fuss about getting through it. Attending Board or Senate meetings with him, one soon finds that there is no aspect among several hundred in Victorian life that he is not fully informed about. Whether the question is about residence life, old or new buildings, properties, appointments, or dealings with Simcoe Hall, the president always knows the answer, and always gives it in a lucid and up-to-date form. He is at the opposite pole, always, from the Neville Chamberlain who, when asked about Germany's invasion of Poland, responded: "I have not had time to confirm the press reports." Behind these answers there is an immense amount of time spent in endless meetings, endless discussions with or without lunch, endless readings of reports. And, perhaps, endless periods that seemed to be getting nowhere, but where he is in fact sitting and waiting until the dumbest academic bureaucrat has finally got it through his head that there is a place called Victoria University, a university in its own right with its own aims, ethos, and ambitions. In his Convocation address in May Goldwin spoke of the complexity

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of a world that is pluralistic in religion, chaotic in political and economic function, full of technology but confused about what to do with it. It was very characteristic of him that he did not add what an extra burden of work this puts on administrators who have a working schedule of a size and complexity that no one could have dreamed of a century ago. Of course, if he were speaking, he would emphasize that he could not have given such competent leadership to Victoria without the support of hundreds of others, administrators, teaching staff, alumni giving great quantities of time and energy voluntarily. But the quality of leadership has everything to do with the quality of followership, if that is a word. In that same speech he says that all Western history demonstrates how utterly dependent all institutions are on the effectiveness of their leadership. It would never occur to him to apply that statement to himself, but everyone else here would. The United States right now is gravely distressed at the amount of crookedness and chicanery among the Reagan squad in Washington. Perhaps they should consider that when one is working for a leader who is a kind of gap in nature, one's stands and principles begin to disintegrate very quickly. Fortunately, the same principle works in reverse, and the sense of high morale in the Victoria community today, in spite of financial constraints, owes more to Goldwin than to any other single person. Professor Sissons's history of Victoria describes the administration of one of Goldwin's predecessors as "a straight furrow."1 Professor Sissons was a man to whom farming metaphors came readily. Goldwin has inherited and has had to continue a situation more like that of a sailboat on a choppy sea, tacking and veering with every change of wind, not leaving at all a straight trail behind him, but steadily getting ahead whatever the difficulties. What Victoria would be now if she had had a less flexible president over the last few years is something we fortunately don't have to think about. When the next history of the university comes to be written, the term of Goldwin French in office will stand out, perhaps as a decisive turning point in that history, one that finally put it out of the danger of having its identity dissolved in federation. Whatever he chooses to do after retirement, the collective gratitude of everyone who cares about Victoria will always be with him, along with the affection and respect that he doubtless prizes even more.

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Foreword to English Studies at Toronto 1988

Foreword to Robin S. Harris, English Studies at Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), ix-xii. A typescript with holograph corrections is in NFF, 1991, box 40, file 2.

The history of English language and literature is a dramatic success story. After the Norman Conquest English became as submerged as the Celtic languages are now; at the Council of Constance in the fifteenth century it was classed as a minor dialect of German. Even on the threshold of the Elizabethan age Sir Philip Sidney complained that it was part of the curse of the tower of Babel that one should be sent to school to learn his mother tongue;1 and in the age of Shakespeare and Milton no cultivated Continental would know anything about writers from the British Isles unless they wrote in Latin. In Britain itself literary education was based on Latin until the nineteenth century, and in status-conscious public schools even until the twentieth. My Oxford tutor in English, Edmund Blunden, told me that at his first diffident entry into the Senior Common Room of his college, an older member asked him what his subject was, and on learning it said, "Didn't know they had to teach'm that." The enrooting of English study in Latin still went on in my time, and some of its benefits were very considerable. My own elementary school (New Brunswick in the early twenties) afforded only a few paradigms of Latin and some moralizing junk that passed for literature, but it also had Latinate English grammar, with the categories and organizing conceptions of English derived from Latin. How I could ever have got anywhere as a writer without that training I don't know. The linguists say that this kind of grammar is all wrong, but I was lucky enough to live

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before the linguists. In language training, as in plant breeding, a certain amount of cross-fertilization seems to be advisable. The same type of cross-fertilization, on a large scale, had been in the ascendant in the eighteenth century, when the tide turned for English and it started to become a major world language. The principles of practical criticism, in English, were established then by Samuel Johnson, whose roots were still in Latinity. Johnson died in 1784, and two years later that extraordinary genius Sir William Jones was telling the Asiatic Society of Bengal that there was reason to believe that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Teutonic, Slavic, and very possibly Old Persian, all belonged to a vast interlocking group of related languages. The enthusiasm for philology, largely disseminated from Germany, gave more academic interest to the study of modern languages, and during the nineteenth century, as recorded in this book, universities in English-speaking countries gradually admitted English to the curriculum, often on a philological basis. Ryerson's comment quoted in Professor Harris's preface2 sounds like the most obvious common sense now, but was quite a liberal departure at the time, and reflected the influence of the eighteenth-century dissenting academies in Britain, where Nonconformist students went who would not sign the Thirty-Nine Articles, and which were more pragmatic and less bound to the Classics-mathematics monopoly in the older universities. Most of Professor Harris's survey, naturally, belongs to the period when English has become one of the world's major first languages, is easily the world's leader among second languages, and has, in all English-speaking universities, replaced the Classics as the central discipline of the humanities. When I entered Toronto as an undergraduate there was still a strong emphasis on philology, though less strong than at Harvard or Oxford. Professor Woodhouse belonged to a generation, including Douglas Bush of Harvard, a Victoria graduate in Classics, which rather resented the prestige of philology and was devoted to what was then called the "history of ideas" approach. This emphasized the relevance of philosophical, political, and even (for Spenser and Milton) theological issues to literary study. The effect of this approach was to move the emphasis in literary criticism back to its central tradition in Johnson, Coleridge, and Arnold, allowing, as indicated, for a heavier Classical content in those venerable figures. Much of the best scholarly work at Toronto in that period, such as the editorial work of Priestley on Godwin and Kathleen Coburn on Coleridge, along with the Miltonic studies of Arthur Barker and Woodhouse himself, fell within this histori-

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cal orbit. Another strong influence was that of E.K. Brown, who worked towards liberalizing the curriculum with courses in modern and American literature. Courses in Canadian literature began seeping in during the fifties. The first such course was introduced, outside the English Honour Course, as a "Religious Knowledge option"—but Professor Harris would have to write another book to explain what that phrase meant.3 Pre-Chaucerian English was retained, as of course it should have been, for graduate degrees and specialist certificates, though I remember a growing restiveness even about that. (I also remember a remark from the author of this book at a department meeting: "Why should I object to learning Anglo-Saxon? I've learned it myself three times.") But much of Toronto's scholarship in this area was absorbed into the two medieval institutes on the campus. These were two of several such institutes set up in Toronto, partly as a result of Toronto's dragging its feet on a graduate programme in Comparative Literature for so long. We began hearing about the "New Criticism," with its conservative, Catholic, and southern leanings, in the forties, but it had little impact at Toronto. The chief exception was Marshall McLuhan, who had had some personal contact with it before he came to Toronto, but as everyone knows, he developed very different interests of his own. Brown, however, became interested in explication de texte techniques after he went to Chicago, and I remember a discussion between him and Woodhouse during an evening at President Cody's. Brown remarked that he had spent eighteen periods on a reading of a Keats ode. "What did you say in the other seventeen?" asked Woodhouse—I have seldom heard a neater collision of two critical attitudes. But at that time the day when an appointment in critical theory would seem a top priority to the English department still seemed a very long way off. At every step in the liberalizing of a curriculum, some academics will say: "Why should we set up courses and examinations in that? Shouldn't students be reading that sort of thing on their own? We've got a library, haven't we?" In one generation people like Edmund Blunden's colleague would have applied this to the whole of English literature; in the next it would be applied to contemporary literature; in the next to the study of films, television, and pop culture. In my experience such objectors do not read "that sort of thing" on their own, but apart from that, there are two very important facts left out of their assumptions. One is the immense psychological difference between cultivating a leisure-time activity and studying the same material within the context of a university course. It is a little like, though considerably subtler than, the differ-

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ence between looking at a row of soup cans in a supermarket and looking at them in Andy Warhol. The other is the schizophrenia set up in a teacher's mind. Two of my teachers at Victoria were Pelham Edgar and John Robins, both interested in the modern novel and in Canadian literature. But all references to such subjects in lectures devoted to Shakespeare or The Rape of the Lock had to be bootlegged, so to speak, and lectures got very digressive as a result. It was very important for our education as students to be told about the short stories of Hemingway or the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott—it was difficult for us to read these authors "on our own" when we did not yet know that they existed. Edgar, Pratt, and Robins at Victoria, and Woodhouse and Brown at least at University College, did very important work for Canadian studies many decades before they got into the curriculum. What I am saying implies what was certainly true: the Honour Course in English was practically all "core curriculum," covering the entire area from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. I think the advantages of this greatly outweighed the disadvantages, but of course there had to be expansion and consequently more options. When I was an undergraduate there were no courses in twentieth-century literature, largely because there was not much twentieth century, but that obviously was not a stable situation, nor at that time was there much likelihood of, say, a Nobel Prize in literature going to a writer in Nigeria. In the sixties the two things that put Toronto's English department among the best on the continent (at least), the distinction of Honour and General Courses and the federated college system, were dissolved in favour of an elective curriculum and uniform university departments. Many of the rationalizations for this were justifiable: the old system was, as just indicated, becoming intolerably inflexible and cumbersome. Some were merely hysterical: it was said that the students wanted an elective system, though it was immediately clear that they wanted nothing of the kind. The effective rationalization was, as always, that it would save money. Just for whom the money was being saved was another question: certainly not for the chairman of English, stuck for years unable to make a permanent appointment without the help of Mr. Mellon.4 That Toronto still has a first-rate English department is a miracle achieved by devotion to scholarship, affection for students, and professional pride. How so high a morale has been developed is a major part of the story Professor Harris has to tell, and he deserves our most genuine gratitude for telling it.

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Preface to On Education September 1988

From Frye's On Education (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1988), 1-8. The book is a collection of seventeen essays by Frye, most of which appear in the present volume of the Collected Works (and are so identified here by number), though a few have been assigned to other volumes. The typescript is in NFF, 1991, box 40, file 2.

This book is a collection of essays and addresses on the general topic of education, written or delivered over a period of about thirty years. I have written similar essays that have been reprinted elsewhere, but I think this collection expresses as clearly as anything else I have written my own convictions on the subject, as transmitted to Canadian audiences (practically all of the essays have a Canadian setting). There is bound to be some repetition in a book of essays that were originally oral addresses: a listening audience, who hears only what is said to it, does not mind if another audience hears something of the same thing, but the situation is different with a book. I hope my editors and I have minimized the repetition, but at the same time I cannot forget the remark of a clergyman on the board of a magazine I once edited: "Don't imagine that you've said anything if you've only said it once." The background for this remark was doubtless his parishioners' resistance to salvation, but the principle holds for a secular (if equally evangelical) context. This preface in fact adds to the repetition by stating, like the overture to an opera, the themes echoed later. Three of these themes in particular are important. First, there is my own confession of faith as a humanist, and my confidence in the value of what is called liberal education, a confidence that the social and political

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events contemporary with my seventy-five years of life have left totally unshaken. Here I am speaking as a teacher whose main focus of interest has always been the classroom. Second, there is the record of watching, and sometimes participating in, the Canadian and American educational scenes. As this has covered several decades, there are doubtless contradictory statements in the book, but these should be taken in context: a statement of fact in one decade may well be a statement of fantasy in the next one. Some of the statements in "The Changing Pace in Canadian Education" [no. 31] were true of the fifties and sixties, emphatically not true of the seventies and eighties, but may become true again in the nineties. Third, there is the interrelation of the subjects of education, the interrelation implied by the very word "university." The study of science or the performing arts is obviously as humane as the study of literature, and concentrating exclusively on one field makes a scholar sterile even in that field. The audience for "The Bridge of Language" was mainly one of scientists: the audience for "Academy without Walls" mainly one of people interested in the practical arts, including poetry and painting.1 Many of the essays are occasional in a fairly restricted sense: for example, one or two convocation addresses are included. A convocation is something I take very seriously, because I try to think of it from the graduating student's point of view, as a major milestone of one's life. Such addresses illustrate the fact that every humanist is likely to become something of a professional rhetorician, employed on public occasions, whether to illuminate the occasion, as he hopes, or at any rate, in difficult situations—and I have had some difficult ones, not recorded here—to save its face. In the humanist tradition one of the central figures—for long the central figure—is Cicero, many of whose writings are speeches in law courts or the Senate on very immediate and local issues. A twentieth-century humanist, once past a certain point of seniority, is unlikely to write anything on his own initiative, except when doing what he would call "his own work." Certainly nothing in this book has been written on mine: every essay in the book was a response to an invitation for a specific occasion. Apart from phrases of the "I am deeply grateful to X University" type, the retaining of which would make the book look silly, even though the statement is true, I do not feel that all marks of the occasion should be removed. Nothing written or spoken is timeless or without an immediate social context, and the impulse to "rise above" an occasion is usually a mistaken one. So in a sense the whole book is really occasional, and perhaps I should say how I look at the sequence of these

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occasions, beginning with the most general and proceeding to the more specific. My studying and teaching career has spanned the Depression, the Second World War, the cold war of the fifties, the student unrest of the sixties, and what might be called the expectant stagnation of the seventies and eighties. In my student days it was widely assumed that capitalism would, with or without a revolution, evolve into socialism, socialism being assumed to be both more efficient and morally superior. This led to a good deal of adulation for Stalin's Russia, which all the massacres and famines of that regime failed to disturb. In a world full of the dragons of fascism and the squealing maidens of democracy there simply had to be a rescuing knight somewhere. This evolution did not occur: the two systems settled down into an adversary situation, where both sides improved slightly by stealing techniques from the other. The stealing had to be unconscious, otherwise it would be denounced as open Communism on the American side and as bourgeois revisionism on the Soviet one. This situation, though one has hopes of its breaking down, is still essentially with us. What does a humanist learn from all this? Well, obviously he learns that an adversary situation impoverishes both sides. Also that inconsistency is more of a human virtue than a human failing. In our time we have seen first China and then the Soviet Union discover, to their considerable benefit, that doctrinaire Marxism would not work, simply because no doctrinaire anything will work. I have remained a bourgeois liberal all my life because the serious ideals of democracy—personal liberty, free speech, equality of citizenship and tolerance of variety of opinion— are antidoctrinaire ideals. The Americans made some effort to be doctrinaire democrats in the McCarthy period, but the fact that that was taking them rapidly in the opposite direction from democracy was luckily recognized in time, even if in far too long a time. It seems to me that what is called academic freedom is the key to all freedom. Once the scientist is allowed to pursue science without reference to political priorities; once the records of the past are thrown open to the historian; once the poet or novelist can write without the restrictions of ideology, I think the worst horrors of the police state will become relaxed and eventually impotent. The doctrinaire is a characteristic of a mass movement, and mass movements are not genuinely social movements, in the sense of people establishing real human contact with one another. Solidarity (in the general sense: I am not speaking of Poland) seldom breeds love or

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friendship: it may breed loyalty of a kind, but such loyalty all too quickly turns into suspicion of disloyalty. Everything a humanist most values comes out of some loophole or anomaly in the social order. When one looks at a particularly psychopathic period of history, such as the sixteenth century, when people burned heretics for taking their religion seriously, burned witches for being women, and burned the cottages and crops of peasants for being on the site of a holy war, one wonders how great poets and artists survived in such a world. They survived, I think, because the psychopathic tendencies were not consistent enough or well enough organized to destroy them. The fact that such tendencies always do want to destroy the best and most valuable elements in their culture is confirmed by every period of history, including of course ours. The greater efficiency of censorship and suppression in our time results from a highly developed technology. Humanists are often ridiculed or denounced for resisting technology, but what they are really resisting are certain social evils that come in its wake. These evils may be, from a historical point of view, short-term by-products, but a short term in history can be a long term in a human life. One of the most obvious immediate results of twentieth-century technology is introversion. Our own time, when, quite suddenly as such things go, the churches, theatres, and libraries are largely replaced by television sets, the marketplace by the processing supermarket, the floor of the stock exchange by computers in offices, is an intensely introverted time, when most human speech that is a genuine expression of thought tends to freeze up. I note in this book (p. 18) that children, and even more adolescents, exhibit a shyness, even shame, about speaking ordinary language, a tendency that often persists through life. It matters very little what one knows if one cannot express and communicate what one knows. That is why I think of the study of literature and related disciplines as fighting on the front line of civilization. Free speech can only mean highly disciplined speech: it is normally (there are exceptions, but they remain exceptions) a skill resulting from relentless practice and a relentless search for the exact words that express one's meaning. As is obvious, such practice is a moral as well as a cultural training. Its chief technological instruments are, and I think always will be, books. The book is also often regarded as introverted ("always sitting in a corner reading a book," as many parents say when worried by the fact that their children show symptoms of developing minds), and of course it can be that. But the book is actually a companion in dialogue: it

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helps to structure and make sense of the flood of automatic gabble that keeps rolling through the mind. This interior monologue, as it is called, never relates to other people, however often it is poured over them. Further, a book stays where it is, and does not vanish into ether or the garbage bin like the mass media. So the book becomes the focus of a community, as more and more people read it and are affected by it. It moves in the opposite direction from the introversion of what has been well called "the lonely crowd," where no one can communicate with his neighbour because he is too close to him mentally to have anything to say. Some of the addresses in this book are of particular interest to me because of what they seem to me to symbolize in retrospect. After the "Sputnik" was launched in the Soviet Union, the normal anti-intellectual tranquillity of America was disturbed, and there was a considerable todo over improving methods of teaching. In Canada, I became one of the founding members of the Ontario Curriculum Institute, an organization designed to consider elementary and high school education, and my preface to the book called Design for Learning was one result. The Institute was obliterated when the provincial government set up OISE: I suppose this was inevitable, but I regretted the passing of a genuinely grass-roots movement that had revealed to me the existence of so many dedicated teachers enthusiastic about making what they were doing still better. In the United States, I was made a consultant by a publisher interested in issuing a series of readers for grades 7 to 12 that would be an improvement on a series they had found very profitable, yet a series that taught no literature but only the mythology of what was then (and doubtless still is) called the American way of life. On Teaching Literature [no. 69] was a teachers' guide to a new series produced under my general editorship, and often refers to the volumes in it. Unfortunately, the Sputnik affair had not put the fear of God into America, only a fear of Russian technology, and by the time American astronauts had reached the moon, a good deal of the anti-intellectualism was back in charge. This anti-intellectual current swelled to a flood within the university itself, with the rise of what is usually called student unrest in the late sixties, to which the reader will find many references in what follows. In fact he or she may feel that there are too many references, and that what they add up to is an impression of a bourgeois liberal running scared. I don't think that is true: student unrest was not an obsessive anxiety of

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mine, but it broke out at a time when I was heavily committed with speeches, partly because society itself was getting obsessive about the subject, and wanted discussions of it from those who had had some experience of it. I had little sympathy with the unrest: it seemed to me to have, unlike feminism or the black movement, no genuine social roots. Those who sympathized with it because they were remembering their own left-wing enthusiasms in the thirties were prisoners of their own metaphors: this movement was anarchist and neo-fascist in its tactics. It enlisted a very small minority of students, most even of them, I suspect, egged on by television cameras, who created "mass demonstrations" with a totalitarian skill. But if I had no use for the protest, I had if possible even less for the kind of opposition organized against it, as the Western convocation address [no. 61] shows. The lack of any real social base accounted for the fact that student unrest did not so much go out of fashion as simply drop dead. What was much more significant about it was its close relation to the various separatist movements contemporary with it, including the Canadian ones. The two together indicated the importance of the problem of relating cultural to political forces, another theme referred to in this book. I regard this as one of the central social problems of our time, quite important enough at least to be approached with all possible sanity, rather than with violence and paradox. The decentralizing movements of culture, the centralizing movements of politics and economics, the need for distinguishing the two and yet recognizing their constant interinvolvement, is a situation at the heart of present-day society, and Canada is, I think, further along than most countries of its population in getting some sense of direction about it. The age of hysteria, in Canada, peaked with the murder of Laporte,2 the news of which came the day after the Windsor Convocation address [no. 66]. By that time it was clear to everyone that such terrorism was both futile and obsolete. My own activities, however minor, had brought me into touch with more genuinely long-term issues. In the spring of 19571 went to Ottawa from Harvard, where I was teaching that term, to deliver the inaugural speech, "The Study of English in Canada" [no. 18], at the founding of what is now called ACUTE, the organization of professors of English. In thirty years this has become a large and flourishing group, with its own periodical. There was, if the reader is interested, a certain personal wistfulness in the references to "supporting a common cause," because the publication of my book Anatomy of Criti-

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cism about two weeks previously had started me on what seemed at the time a lonely and rather frightening path. A few years later I spoke at a conference of the arts meeting in the O'Keefe Centre ("Academy without Walls"). One almost has to read the speech in the context of the issue of Canadian Art that reprinted it to recall the extraordinary excitement aroused by this conference, an excitement that seemed inexplicable at the time, even to its organizers. In retrospect, I see it as a realization, however unconscious, that Canadian culture had finally begun to awake from its sleeping-beauty isolation. Fifty years ago it would have been true to say that Canadian literature was totally unknown outside Canada and that there was every probability that it would remain so. Today there are about a dozen Canadian writers who are world figures, and at least another dozen who should be. Institutes of Canadian studies have been set up in what once seemed very unlikely parts of the non-Canadian world, and Canadian poetry and fiction have been translated or otherwise made available in most of the major languages. This maturing of Canadian literature (mainly English Canadian, despite so many wonderfully impressive French figures) is the greatest event of my life, so far as my own direct experience is concerned. The paper on the Ontario bicentenary,3 apart from being by accident confined to Ontario, perhaps does not really convey the intensity of this feeling. I have been very fortunate: it does not fall to everyone's lot to see everything one believes in so triumphantly reinforced by a social and cultural movement on such a scale. Over a long period, say two centuries or more, no society is respected for anything whatever except the evidences of cultural vitality that it has produced in that time. The vagaries of the book business and related enterprises, and their constant preoccupation with what I think of as the Agatha Christie syndrome, the bungling of bureaucracies, and the pressure on schools to squeeze out all serious reading from their curricula, may yet destroy the continuance of what has been achieved; but Canadian writers have been struggling with such things for years, including the years of the greatest productive energy. I have called the last two decades a period of expectant stagnation, because it is clear to most of us that our world is in the midst of a gigantic revolution, mainly technological in form, and that such problems as chronic unemployment and inflation have to wait on the unfolding of whatever that revolution may contain. I do not mean a revolution of the traditional type: such things seem very antiquated now, along with wars

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and strikes and government emergency regulations. Later on in the book I recall that in my younger days George VI was Emperor of India, and that Hitler ruled an empire stretching from Norway to Greece. The conflict of empires, their growth and decay, produces only phantasmagoria and illusion. This has been said for many centuries, but we have come to a point in history when we cannot afford illusion any more, and must either be destroyed by it or turn to reality. I do not know of anything except the arts and the sciences that can tell us anything about reality. At seventy-five the sense of perspective becomes more important than the sense of discovery. And yet the perspective includes a recapturing of discovery: the sun has been told often enough that it shines on nothing new, but it knows better, and keeps rising as placidly as ever. Any temptation I might have to say, "this is my last word on the subject," is checked by the realization that it is probably also my first word. For I find myself constantly returning to the assumptions and intuitions of my earliest critical approaches, but the return is not simple repetition, rather continuity into a different life. I suspect that every critical or creative effort in words is a beginning, a reconstructed creation myth. Its model, for those in my field, is Wordsworth's last work, published after his death at eighty, and bearing the title of Prelude.

93

Preface to From Cobourg to Toronto 1989

The Preface to From Cobourg to Toronto: Victoria University in Retrospect (The Sesquicentennial Lectures), ed. Goldwin S. French and Gordon L. McLennan (Toronto: Chartres Books, 1989), 7-9- This was a collection of talks given to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the founding of Victoria, including those referred to by Frye: Chaviva Hosek on women at Victoria, Alvin A. Lee on Canadian literary culture, Robin Harris on federation with the University of Toronto, and John Webster Grant on theological education. An annotated typescript is in NFF, 1991, box 40, file 2. These essays speak very clearly for themselves, and need only the minimum of comment. They were delivered in Victoria University in the fall of 1986 in connection with Victoria's sesquicentennial celebrations, and are therefore retrospective and historical. Victoria's date of origin is that of the granting of the original charter to Upper Canada Academy in 1836, although the infant was not christened Victoria until 1841. The lectures follow in general the model of the centennial lectures of 1936, which are still very fresh and readable, though it is interesting to see what issues have moved into the front line since then. Victoria began with no wealthy patrons and bears no founder's name. What money it started with came mainly from the grass roots of Canadian Methodism, as did its earlier leaders. Money was also collected from British Nonconformists by Ryerson, though one gets an impression that some of his benefactors thought they were converting Indians instead of educating colonials. The emotional debaucheries of the mothers of Ryerson and Burwash were socially acceptable then, but left behind them their inevitable heritage of mother-fixations, migraine headaches,

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and a distrust of women that delayed coeducation in the college for years. Nelles, with his more relaxed American background,1 may have been less inhibited, though he had personal problems too. Unlike the Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic foundations, the Methodists had no real European models to go by, and what influences there were were mainly American. The transition to partnership in a big university, from such beginnings, seems in retrospect almost incredible. When a college drawing its students mainly from small towns in Ontario became part of a cosmopolitan university, with the changes of ethos that city-centred life is bound to bring, there were naturally a good many growing pains. Dancing was officially sanctioned at Victoria in 1926, in the middle of what some people think of as the Roaring Twenties. To the accounts of Hosek and Lee I can add recollections of difficulties in promoting even first-rate scholars if they happened to be women, and of the struggle to defend undergraduate poetry and fiction (in Ada Victoriana) against alumni and students who had no notion of what contemporary literature was turning into, much less how much Victoria graduates would be contributing to it. Again, the lives of Miss Addison and, in her earlier years, of Jessie Macpherson, were not made any easier by the badgerings of overprotective parents. But these are trifles now, appropriate only for reminiscence, and Victoria's record in such matters was better than many other places, including other parts of Toronto. The important thing was that Victoria had developed in Cobourg, and contributed to federation with the University of Toronto, a sane and courageous attitude to academic freedom. It had fought down the anxieties that tried to keep Methodism separated from the contemporary world of Darwin and "higher criticism," and held to the view that science and religion could not conflict because they were not operating in the same area. Victoria's early leaders knew well enough that education affected soul, spirit, and body as well as intellect, but they knew too that there could be no education with a blinkered mind that refused to deal honestly with the world in front of it. I think the ethos then established accounts in large measure for Victoria's ability to adapt to altered social conditions, for its impressive creative and scholarly achievements, and for the consistency of its educational policy. The attitudes to education implied in the presidential reports of Arthur Moore and Goldwin French show a remarkable continuity with those of Ryerson and Nelles. It was extraordinary that the "university" period (see Dr. Harris's

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paper) lasted as long as it did, and that the "multiversity" took so long to become established. One reason was, I think, that the colleges were doing a quite unexpectedly good job, academically and socially, long after the curricular arrangements made at the time of federation had got hopelessly out of balance. The original idea of federation was roughly to decentralize the humanities in the federated colleges and centralize the sciences in the university. But through lack of money and perhaps some unwillingness to try to raise it, Victoria sacrificed some crucial areas in the humanities themselves—philosophy, history, modern languages other than English, French, and German, and of course the whole of the social sciences. It would be unreasonable to blame Nelles and Burwash for failing to see that they were painting themselves into a corner, and that the academic basis for federation was bound to fall apart before long. It is less easy to excuse some of the leaders in the late sixties and early seventies for destroying the Honour Courses and trying to reduce the federated universities to residential centres. Victoria's leaders have put up a gallant fight against the second, but were unable to prevent the first, and as a result there has been much difficulty in providing proper channels for the scholarly energies of the teaching staff in Victoria and the other federated colleges. The founders of Victoria proposed a "purely literary" (i.e., liberal arts) institution, with no system of divinity to be taught in it. In 1836 it was hardly possible to think of any system of divinity as much more than a sales pitch for a specific church, certainly not as a liberal discipline. That this could be so clearly seen then was a considerable feat of self-critical detachment. But the attitude to religion changed like everything else, and one of the most positive features of the "multiversity" phase of Toronto's development has been the creation of a proper department of religion, to replace the often rather ineffectual efforts to teach "religious knowledge" courses in Victoria, Trinity, and St. Michael's, along with similar courses under various euphemisms ("Near Eastern Studies" and "Oriental Languages" were two of them) at University College.2 My late wife summed up the influence of a New Testament course on her intellectual development by saying, "All I remember is Q." However, the liberalizing of the study of religion spread to theology as well (see Dr. Grant's paper), as the University of Toronto came to recognize in the late seventies. Daniel Wilson's conviction that federation resulted simply from a Methodist itch to get their hands on state funds

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has proved considerably oversimplified.3 Ryerson and Nelles did not see why the separation of church and state in educational institutions should be a rigid dogma, because a proper religious ethos in an academic community enlarges instead of narrowing the intellectual life. The historical process of the last century and a half has proved them right.

94 Unpublished Introduction to Beyond Communication July 1989

This piece was written to introduce Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism, ed. Deanne Bogdan and Stanley B. Straw (Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1990), but not included in the book; the text is taken from Frye's computer disk in possession of Jane Widdicombe, final version typed 11 July 1989. A draft with corrections exists in NFF, 1991, box 40, file 2. The three essays by Bogdan referred to by Frye are on pp. 109-95.

This remarkable collection of essays is concerned with uniting two areas of humanistic education. One is the theory of criticism, which has proliferated into a number of schools and sects during the last two or three decades. The other is the theory of reading, and of the relation of the reader's personal involvement in what he reads to the information he acquires. The two themes together reflect the growing shift from the writer to the reader as the "hero" or chief character in the humanist drama. We start with what is called the "transmission" theory of teaching, where we have a compound of texts and a context of information (mainly historical and biographical) surrounding the text, to be poured into the empty heads of students. This is not really a theory but an observation about the practice of more or less inept teachers. There are two elements in transmission. One is genuine information; the other is the ideological container in which this information normally comes. Distinguishing the two is essential, and after the distinction has been made we can see that the acquiring of objective knowledge, relentless drill in memorizing essential data, especially in the elementary stages, and a respect for fact as such, are always and forever a good half of every teaching and

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educational process. What is true of purely factual information applies also to more speculative areas, such as the "great thoughts" alluded to in this book. The text has to be detached from its author, because a text is not, as Carlyle thought, the personal rhetoric of the writer. But once detached, we can see that there are "great thoughts" that transcend the ideologies that pass them on. The sententious tradition, the respect for saying, in poetry or elsewhere, "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed," in Pope's phrase,1 was much broader in its perspective than a mere handing on of ready-made cliches. The other half of education, described as "reader response," is concerned with the principle, which goes back to Plato's Meno, that teaching consists partly in expanding the context of what a student already knows, the point of attack being what has been called the shock of recognition, or connecting what he knows with what he also knows but doesn't know he knows, and moving from there to genuinely new discoveries. I take it that what is here called "student involvement" relates mainly to a teacher's responsibility to make the subject interesting: carried to its "logical conclusion" (in quotes because all conclusions are illogical) as an end in itself, it would be simply a matter of telling the student that he has all the educational structuring he needs now. In the fall of 1935 I confronted my first undergraduate class, armed with the text of More's Utopia, in the Elizabethan translation.2 To say that I had butterflies in my stomach would be poetic licence: what was inside me felt more like a horde of brooding vultures. Fortunately for me, Utopia in 1935 was a highly controversial text, what with the narrator's conclusion that he saw nothing in sixteenth-century European countries except a conspiracy of rich men promoting their own interests and asserting that those interests were the commonwealth. As the students began arguing,about this according to their own socialist, liberal, or conservative biases, I started piecing together the rudiments of my own teachers' education course. First was the question of relevance. What is relevant to the student is not what is related to what or where he is at the moment, but to what he may become or where he may arrive as the result of being a student. All organisms except human beings adapt to their environment: humanity alone has elected to go on to transform it as well. Most people of course stop with adapting, and our educational bureaucracies are full of incompetents telling them that that is in fact the end of education, and encouraging them not to try to go beyond the role of docile and obedient

Unpublished Introduction to Beyond Communication

613

citizens. Except that, in America particularly, docility and obedience to what is called the American way of life have to be called intellectual independence and thinking for oneself. But genuine students are seeking a better country. The genuine student, confronted with such a text as More's Utopia, is not put off by the fact that it is centuries removed from him in time. He knows that it is part of his own cultural birthright, and he is anxious to claim his share of it. Second was the realization that, just as one can teach only what is teachable, so one can teach only people who are teachable. Many educational theories seem to assume a sullen, uninterested (or disinterested, as they would say), resistant student body who can only be prodded into reading a book by being told that it reflects themselves like the mirror of Narcissus, and who are inarticulate because the peer pressure of illiterate classmates gives them a sense of shame about trying to speak their language correctly. Through the accidents of high intelligence, cultivated home background, class status, and the like, there are always some students of good will and active interest available, and the whole educational process depends on them. Such students normally come as exceptional individuals, but the ultimate source of positive attitudes to education is social morale. The pervasive anti-intellectualism of the society we live in is the real enemy of education, but its causes and manifestations are too varied to go into here. Society is full of educators, politicians, journalists, and others who barely know and certainly do not care that they are fostering it. A third axiom was that in acting largely as a chairman of a discussion group I was getting "student involvement," but was not abdicating any responsibility (I do not say "authority," because the authority in a classroom exists only in the subject taught). The opinions advanced may have been callow—mine certainly were—but the educational process behind it was only getting started. Such an endlessly suggestive work as Utopia is a focus of a community of readers, a community extending over many centuries, cultures, and languages. There is no "right way" to understand it, but neither should there be any helpless relativism that puts all responses on the same level, or asserts that there can be individual responses but nothing more. Everyone has to live his or her own life, but that means also living within a society, and the society of literature is part of society as a whole, which functions through tentative and ad hoc agreements, or disagreements neutralized by concessions. All responses to anything verbal are part of what should be an indefi-

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nitely continuous growth in understanding. Stock response, as we have realized since Richards's Practical Criticism, may be immature, prejudiced, and unreliable, but it is still response, and a potential maturing process is always concealed within it. The initial response to a "great thought" or whatever may be a simple "jeez, that's great!" or the opposite, but it can go on until the student is producing his own great thoughts, that is, crystallizing his response into articulate and considered rejoinders. The process is possible because the procedure and the subject both make sense. Which brings us to the other concern of the book, the relation of the teaching of reading to developments in recent critical theory. Here again, in obedience to some mysterious impulse to keep inventing antitheses where there aren't any, we have theorists distributed along a spectrum ranging from formalism to determinism, from concentration on a central verbal structure to concentration on its external social referents. A formalistic approach to individual works of literature is usually connected with some form of holism, or the assumption that the verbal structure in front of us is a perfect unity, with every detail accounted for by its relation to that unity. This is really the assumption of an inspired text, except that it is what is called a "heuristic" assumption, adopted for the sake of seeing what comes out of it. Hence although every holistic assumption ever made is either quite wrong or only partially right, that doesn't matter: we have done the best we can for the text by making it. In addition to this kind of structural approach, there is a larger whole, or order of words, the context of the entire body of, say, literature within which every work of literature is contained. This literary whole in turn constantly expands and adjusts itself to take in or relate to other verbal contexts. Here we do not assume a specific whole of parts, but a totality of context which is the source of verbal meaning. On the other hand we have feminist, Marxist, or deconstructive critics who are primarily interested in those subjects, and approach literature with the aim of annexing it to their main interest. Here every work of literature becomes a document for feminism or Marxism, to be examined within that point of view. (Deconstruction seems to me different in its aims, for reasons too complicated to elaborate.) Such determinisms, it is clear, are imperialistic ideologies out to conquer one more field. Their proponents say that if they didn't conquer it some other ideology would, because every critical approach is equally ideological. I think this is a half-truth. An ideology is a myth kidnapped by a power structure or a pressure group, and it is essential to distinguish the

Unpublished Introduction to Beyond Communication

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ideological from the mythological elements in every work of literature. I wish the present book had paid more attention to the study of myths and folk tales and the way in which they reflect the primary concerns of mankind, the concerns of food and sex and property and freedom. Because it is these concerns that the poets have inherited, and just as there is information that is separable from the ideologies that normally transmit it, so there are concerns that belong to all humanity, and are still there whatever their ideological contexts. The argument of Ms. Bogdan's three essays, if I have understood it correctly, is that there should be a dialectic between the conception of a total order of words, mentioned above, and the sub-dialectics of feminism and the like, which by themselves can form only a reductive approach. Once feminist criticism has understood how much a given work owes to a patriarchal ideology, it can go on to understand what such a work looks like when separated from that ideology, and thereby become a positive element within the critical enterprise. The notion that it never can be so separated is an illusion derived partly from a failure to apply Coleridge's principle that we must often distinguish where we cannot divide,3 and partly from a reluctance to give up the pretence to universality of a critic's preferred interest. One gets rather weary of the bourgeois masochism that keeps insisting that we should be receptive to all ideologies except our own, and that we should always be uniformly and indiscriminately suspicious of that. Bourgeois ideology, like every other kind, contains a core of serious commitments to values of peace and freedom: this core is the myth transcending the ideology that surrounds it. Despite the wording of the American Constitution, we do not hold views about such serious matters: they hold us, and are the soil we grow out of. The students crushed under tanks in Tiananmen Square were loyal to their own Communist ideology, but wanted to expand it to include the values of democracy and freedom of expression as well. They showed that on the deeper levels of primary concern all societies want the same things and share the same convictions. The brutalities of power would have nothing to do with such notions, and the sour smell of the cold war and its successors hangs over all efforts to expand our own loyalties from this side. For Bunyan's Christian, imprisoned in Doubting Castle, there was a key called "Promise" that would get him out of there. For those of us who are locked into the prison-house of ideological language there are keys too, if we have the courage and will to blow the dust out of the lock. One hopes that discussions like this book will support the efforts to do so.

95

Woman Heads University 23 December 1989

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, 23 December 1989, dj. This was a letter to the editor in response to the Globe's article of 15 December, "Ontario Gets First Woman as University President/' regarding McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. It was signed "Northrop Frye, Chancellor, Victoria University, University of Toronto."

The Globe and Mail carried a story of the appointment of Geraldine Kenney-Wallace as president of McMaster University. Congratulations are in order to president-elect Kenney-Wallace and McMaster University for an excellent appointment. Unfortunately, the news item added that she was the first woman president of a university in Ontario. Dr. Eva Kushner has been president of Victoria University in the University of Toronto for two years. I am, as the saying goes, shocked and appalled by the Globe and Mail's grotesque ignorance of the federated structure of the University of Toronto. I only wish I could also say that I am surprised.

Appendix

Educational Pieces Omitted from The Collected Works

These are minor items which have not been republished. The Acta Victoriana columns include jokes and gossip compiled by Frye as a columnist for Acta in his third year, and brief comments on the contents of individual numbers that he made as editor-in-chief during his final year as an undergraduate. The articles in Victoria Reports are summaries of college activities which Frye wrote during the 19505 and 19605 in his capacity as principal of Victoria College. "Mercury Column/' Acta Victoriana, 56, no. i (October-November 1931): 38-9; no. 2 (December 1931): 38-40; no. 3 (January 1932): 38,40-2; no. 4 (January-February 1932): 39-42; no. 5 (March 1932): 39-43; no. 6 (April 1932): 39-40,43. "Debating Society/' Acta Victoriana, 56, no. i (October-November 1931): 31''Acta Victoriana," Acta Victoriana, 56, no. 7 (May 1932): 21. "Editorial in Undress," Acta Victoriana, 57, no. 2 (December 1932): 7. "Installation Luncheon" [for Lester Pearson as chancellor of Victoria], Victoria Reports, 2 (March 1952): 5-6. "Abeunt a Lot More Studia," Victoria Reports, 9 (November 1959): 6-8. "Operations Proceeding: II," Victoria Reports, 10 (December 1960): 7-9. "Fearful Gauntlet," Victoria Reports, 12 (April 1962): 7-9. "Weather Clear, Track Fast," Victoria Reports, 12 (November 1962): 6-9. "Victorian Era," Victoria Reports, 13 (May 1963): 26-7. "New Faces, Old Ways," Victoria Reports, 13 (December 1963): 5-7.

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Notes

Introduction 1 NF came second in the novice class in the National Typing Contest, 1929 (Ayre, 51-2). Completion of senior matriculation was the admission requirement for an Honour Course in the University of Toronto. 2 NF's student record, Victoria University Archives. The University of Toronto admitted students to the four-year Pass Course (later three-year) or to a four-year Honour Course. To graduate in an Honour Course the student had to complete a specified number of subjects with a minimum secondclass standing. 3 Ayre, 122-3; Victoria University, Minutes of the Board of Regents, 20 June 1939. 4 He was promoted to the rank of professor in 1948. In 1967 he became the first university professor in the University of Toronto. See Ernest Sirluck, First Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 260. 5 Northrop Frye Newsletter, 7, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 29. 6 NFC, 185. 7 Unpublished diary of 1942, NFF, 1991, box 22, notebook 4, par. 40. 8 NFC, 50. 9 Eratus S. Howard (1833-1923) was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Canada (1863-84) and the Methodist Church, Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda (1884-1923). He attended Victoria College for a time, a common practice of ministerial candidates. The Methodist Episcopal Church was more evangelical than the Methodist Church of Canada and considered itself to be a genuinely Canadian denomination. The two churches were united in 1884. On Canadian Methodism see Neil Semple, The Lord's Dominion (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996). 10 Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), 255. This statement was made in 1930 by the Rev. S.D. Chown, last general superintendent of the Methodist Church.

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Notes to pages xxiv-xxvii

11 NFC, 49. 12 Ayre, 44. The Methodist Church in Canada was not associated with the fundamentalist movement in the United States and its Canadian offshoots. 13 NFC, 52-3; Ayre, 45. 14 Quoted in Ayre, 123. In the nineteenth century such a comment would have been a bar to ordination. 15 Victoria College was and still is one of the federated colleges in the University of Toronto. As such it offered instruction in seven humanities subjects. The degree programmes were designed by the university and degrees in Arts and Science were conferred by it. In 1932-33, the total enrolment of the University of Toronto was 8,274. 16 NF's class OT3) became well known for its cohesion and its members' loyalty to Victoria. 17 Edward W. Wallace, chancellor and president of Victoria University, 193041, and Walter Brown, principal of Victoria College, 1932-44, were both prominent former Methodists. Wallace was a retired missionary; Brown was a layman. NF's close friends, Arthur Cragg and James D. Martin, became ministers in the United Church. 18 The shifting attitude of United Church ministers and academics toward the Depression is discussed in Michael Gauvreau and Nancy Christie, A Full-Orbed Christianity (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), chap. 7. 19 The first of several references to Knight is in NFHK, 1:67. In 1932, NF noted that Knight had become secretary of the Trotskyite wing of the Canadian Communist party. Knight's student record indicates that he wandered in and out of the university and did not graduate. 20 For example, in their second, third, and fourth years, students were required to take three philosophy courses, one English course, and an elective course. The philosophy courses were either historical or focused on specific texts such as Plato's Republic. 21 George Sidney Brett (1879-1944), appointed dean of the School of Graduate Studies in 1932. Brett was the son of a Methodist minister and a graduate of the Methodist Kingswood School in England. He graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford, with a first in Literae Humaniores. In some notes for an address in NFF, 1991, box 38, file i, NF described Brett's dazzling display of scholarship and teaching. 22 Michael Gauvreau, "Philosophy, Psychology and History: George Sidney Brett and the Quest for a Social Science at the University of Toronto, 19101940," Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers (1988), 235. 23 See no. 27, in which NF recalls Brett's "clinical analysis of modern philosophy." 24 Although graduates of the Honour Courses were at least potential scholars

Notes to pages xxvii-xxxiii

621

in their respective disc ines, the system was not flexible. Students could not transfer from one course to another and those who did not secure the required standing were transferred to the Pass Course. In addition, final examination marks counted more heavily than the results of term work. Frye's attack on examinations was motivated by the fact that skilful performers could evade the consequences of neglecting their work during the academic year. 25 The college's formative years have been described in Kenneth Cousland, The Founding of Emmanuel College ([Erin, Ont.:] Porcupine's Quill, 1978). 26 See Gauvreau, Evangelical Century, 278-82. The impact of "higher criticism" had been absorbed in Victoria before 1914. 27 SE, xxii. 28 NFC, 61. 29 Ibid., 62. 30 Ibid., 52, 54. 31 NF's candid impressions of Oxford are recorded in NFHK, vol. 2, passim. 32 The expression "psychotic ape" occurs in NFC, 53, and NF writes that "the language of love is the only language that we can be sure is spoken and understood by God" in DV, 21. 33 The background of his appointment is described in Sirluck, First Generation. 34 This movement is described from a Canadian perspective in Claude Bissell, Halfway Up Parnassus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), chap. 8. 35 The SDS published "The Port Huron Statement" in 1962. Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (London: Routledge, 1994), 167. 36 The term "multiversity" was coined by President Clark Kerr of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the first casualties of the student movement. On Toronto, see Bissell, Parnassus, chap. 5, and Robin Harris, From Cobourg to Toronto: Victoria University in Retrospect (Toronto: Chartres Books, 1989), 32. In 1964-65 the university had 16,217 students, of whom 2,521 were graduate students. 37 Bissell, Parnassus, 184-5. 38 Harris, From Cobourg to Toronto, 43-52. In the 19705 the University of Toronto and the other Ontario universities were funded inadequately, a constraint that in Toronto made it difficult to rectify the imbalance between the numbers of teaching staff in the college subjects and the social sciences. The federated colleges were in a precarious financial position—Victoria, for example, had a substantial operating deficit. Fortunately, at this juncture the Ontario government decided to extend full grants to the church-related institutions, which were or became fully integrated academically with the universities with which they were affiliated. The Memorandum of Understanding was designed to enable the university to secure effective control over the appointment of faculty in all subjects

622

Notes to pages xxxv-xl

and to encourage innovative teaching. The federated colleges, now eligible for full grants, were enabled to move toward financial stability. 39 In the Jungian typology, Frye would probably be classed as an intuitive thinking type; Jung's description of the introverted thinker in Psychological Types fits him admirably. However, in his diaries he sometimes refers to himself as one of Jung's "feeling" types—at the opposite pole from thinkers. At any rate, sensation, Jung's fourth function, was relatively low and undeveloped. 40 AC, 243; cf. AC, 79. This threefold division is said to correspond to the division of the human faculties into will, feeling, and reason, with their respective ideals of law, beauty, and truth. Frye also adopts the Renaissance notion of a poem as a "speaking picture," combining the individual actions studied by history and the general statements of philosophy. 41 Cf. no. 79, in which NF speaks of language and music as having an authority beyond that of the individual artist: the greatest artists have mastered their art so completely that they are following its laws rather than their own will. This is an aspect of the paradox of freedom and necessity discussed later regarding choice in studies. 42 A certain uneasiness with this distinction is apparent in the fact that in the address on "The Instruments of Mental Production" of February 1966, NF declared it to be nonsense (274); yet in some form it is basic to his thought. 43 Undated notes in NFF, 1991, box 38, file i. 44 "The Responsibilities of the Critic," MM, 140. 45 See J. Edward Chamberlin, "Mathematics and Modernism," in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 230-9. 46 459; see also the interview "A Literate Person Is First and Foremost an Articulate Person," Interchange, 7, no. 4 (1976-77): 35. 47 A number of Burwash's addresses are among the Nathanael Burwash Papers in the Victoria University Archives, Fonds 2042. Several of NF's commissionings and benedictions at baccalaureate services are reproduced in the volume 'Northrop Frye on Religion, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady, CW, 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 48 NF's sense of the inadequacy of the Ontario school system is expressed most openly in the two anonymous editorials he wrote for the Canadian Forum in 1952, nos. 16 and 17, in which he protested against Ontario's being "the junkpile for discarded American experiments." 49 Letter to Michael Dolzani, 8 June 1987, NFF, 1991, box 4, file i. 50 See, e.g., Winnipeg Free Press, 16 June 1962; Educational Courier, January and February 1963, 57-65. 51 W.G. Fleming, Supporting Institutions and Services, vol. 5 of Ontario's Educative Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 178.

Notes to pages xl-xlvi

623

52 R.M. Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 1876-1976 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 45. 53 Design for Learning: Reports Submitted to the Joint Committee of the Toronto Board of Education and the University of Toronto, ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 27, 35. 54 The readers had probably been acquired when Harcourt, Brace and Co. amalgamated with the World Book Co., a publisher strong in elementary school textbooks, in 1960. By the time the new series mentioned below was published, the firm had become Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 55 Information courtesy of Alvin A. Lee. 56 Geoffrey Hartman says of NF's theory of displacement that "it works; it is teachable"; "Ghostlier Demarcations," in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 126. The same sentiment has been endorsed, e.g. by James Reaney, conversation with J. O'Grady, September 1999. 57 Among other anthologies based on NF's concepts are Wavelengths, three anthologies for grades 7,8, and 9 in Ontario, ed. Johan Aitken, Peter Millar, John Stevens, and Kenneth Weber (Toronto: Dent, 1971); the college anthology An Anatomy of Literature, ed. Robert Foulke and Paul Smith (New York: Harcourt, 1972), and the Spanish Las Estaciones de la Imaginacion, ed. Julian Rodrigues, rev. ed. (Madrid: n.p., 1998). 58 See, e.g., letter of 14 February 1939, NFHK, 2:855. See also no. 27 in the present volume. 59 Francis Sparshott maintains of NF's auditors that "to a student, they were mesmerized and buffaloed," unable to ask the searching questions that NF would have welcomed. "Frye in Place," Canadian Literature, 83 (Winter 1979): 148. 60 Margaret Atwood, "The Great Communicator," Globe and Mail, 24 January 1991. 61 Margaret Burgess, "The Resistance to Religion: Anxieties Surrounding the Spiritual Dimensions of Frye's Thought; or, Investigations into the Fear of Enlightenment," in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, 59-75. 62 "Responsibilities of the Critic," MM, 140. See also 498 in the present volume. 63 W.G. Fleming, Schools, Pupils, and Teachers, vol. 3 of Ontario's Educative Society, 23-5. 64 Letter of 15 July 1932, NFHK, 1:39. NF did not get the scholarship, for whatever reason, but "the authorities" did later hire him. 65 See his report on research in the humanities, September 1972, submitted to the Commission to Study the Rationalization of University Research in Canada (NFF, 1988, box 4, file n), based on no. 56. Here NF recommends awarding the Ph.D. on the basis of course work and language requirements. 66 For another angle on such irony, see Thomas Willard, "The Visionary

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Notes to pages xlvii-9

Education," in Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye's Criticism, ed. Robert D. Denham and Thomas Willard (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 19. 67 Letter to P.O. Reck, 10 March 1972, NFF, 1988, box 38, file 15. 68 University of Toronto Bulletin, 3 March 1972,2-3. 69 "Hard Times in the Ivory Tower," transcript of an interview of October 1983 (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1983), 13. 70 Notes for a senior dinner address, ca. 1976, NFF, 1991, box 38, file i. 71 Similar is his notion that one's belief is revealed, not in one's verbal formulations, but in one's actions; see, e.g., "The Dialectic of Belief and Vision," MM, 98. 72 "Hard Times in the Ivory Tower," 13. 73 For the sake of the completeness of this picture, I have promoted the inclusion of NF's tribute to Gold win French, which Dr. French himself would have modestly omitted. [JO] 74 A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-Two Interviews with Northrop Frye, ed. Robert D. Denham (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1991), 267, 309. i. The Bob

i There was a scrap between the two years, recalled in the review of the following year's Bob. 2. Victoria College Debating Parliament i The house at College and St. George Streets in which the Department of History was located. 3. That Trinity Debate 1 The Tennessee monkey trial was the trial of John Thomas Scopes (1900-70), in July 1925, for teaching evolution in a Tennessee high school. The Boston Book Massacre refers to a surge of book banning in Boston in 1927; the most widely publicized cases concerned Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and Upton Sinclair's Oil! Toronto's Reign of Terror began in 1929 when Toronto's police commission attempted to "stamp out Communism" by banning or breaking up meetings, using strong-arm tactics, and arresting Communists. 2 The SCM or Student Christian Movement was an association for Christians in universities and colleges. Founded in Britain and the U.S. in the late nineteenth century to provide missionaries, it soon became a worldwide federation whose members engaged in discussion groups and Bible study,

Notes to pages 15-30

625

in which liberal theology and left-wing politics were intertwined. On the SCM in the University of Toronto see Catherine Gidney, "Poisoning the Student Mind?: The Student Christian Movement at the University of Toronto, 1920-1965," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, n.s. 8 (1997): 147-64. The Literary Society was originally the principal student organization; at Victoria, the Union Literary Society for men was established in 1894 and the Ladies' Literary Society in 1889-90. 5. Arthur Richard Cragg i This ellipsis is part of NF's original article. 6. On the Frosh: An Editorial 1 It was the custom to inflict a cold shower in the night on each resident freshman (and sometimes even on freshwomen) as a part of the initiation into residence life. The same indignity was inflicted on residents in their graduating year. 2 An allusion to those who (like NF himself) did their last year of high school work in college, an arrangement that was made impossible with the abolition of the four-year Pass Course. See headnote to no. 12. 8. James Delmer Martin i That is, Arthur Cragg (see no. 5). 9. The Question of Maturity: An Editorial i John 8:32: the inscription over the front door of Victoria College. 10. Editorial in Undress (II) 1 The political party formed by progressive farm and labour groups in Calgary in 1932, ancestor of today's New Democratic Party. It was led by Christian social activist J.S. Woodsworth and embraced social-democratic principles. 2 In his "Pointed Memories of a Traveller," Lautenslager had remarked on a Chinese rug selling in Toronto for $150, marked $25 in Peking. As Robert Denham has noted, Earl Lautenslager's name is spelled "Lautenschlager" in several places. He was at first a member of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, a body with German antecedents.

626

Notes to pages 37-62 12. The Pass Course: A Polemic

1 Margaret Ray, "Is a College Education Worth While?" Ada Victoriana, 57, no. 5 (April 1933): 13-18. One issue of Ada Victoriana a year was under the direction of the women staff, here chiefly Mary Carman. 2 See Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," in Twice-Told Tales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 229. 13. A Liberal Education 1 Beland Honderich, Toronto Daily Star, 27 July 1945, 33. 2 See Mark Van Doren, Liberal Education (1943), Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book (1940), Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads (1943), and Walter Lippmann's syndicated columns. 3 Mortimer Adler, quoted in Harry D. Gideonse, "The Coming Showdown in the Schools: A Report on the Battle of the Educators," Saturday Review of Literature, 28, no. 5 (3 February 1945): 6. 4 John Dewey, et al., The Authoritarian Attempt to Capture Education (New York: King's Crown Press, 1945). Contributors include John Dewey, Sidney Hook, Irwin Edman, and Bruce Bliven. [NF] 5 Cf. ibid., 28,77. 6 Arthur Edward Murphy, "Tradition and Traditionalists," ibid., 21-3. 7 William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in Writings, 1902-1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1281-93. 16. For Whom the Dunce Cap Fits i That is, report cards giving not marks but the three categories "outstanding," "satisfactory," and "unsatisfactory." The system was introduced in Toronto in the early 19503. 17. Have We a National Education? i The Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 1951. It led to the creation of the Canada Council to encourage culture and fund artists. 18. The Study of English in Canada i Mill distinguishes between eloquence (heard) and poetry (overheard) in "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties," in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. J.M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 348.

Notes to pages 63-84

627

2 John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 4:319. 20. Humanities in a New World 1 Samuel Butler, Erewhon: or, Over the Range, in Erewhon; Erewhon Revisited (London: Dent, 1932), 138. The colleges are described in chaps. 22 and 23. 2 Philip Sidney, "Defence of Poetry," in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1:204. NF has modernized the spelling. 3 Henry James, The American Scene (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907), 345-6 (chap. 11, sec. 2). 4 Ibid., 346 (chap. 11, sec. 3). 5 T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1960), 54; John Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818), in Letters of John Keats, 4th ed., ed. M.B. Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 227; William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (London: Methuen, 1963), 260; John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 9,11. 20-4. 6 James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 128-9, !347 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letter to Robert Bridges (25 September 1888), in The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 291. 8 Wallace Stevens, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, 11. 496-501. 9 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al. (Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1860), 4:203 (bk. 2, sec. 4). 10 William Blake, Milton, pi. 35,1. 42 (bk. 2). 11 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 212 (bk. 3, chap. 10). 12 William Butler Yeats, Responsibilities, and Other Poems (1916). 13 The primary meaning of the Greek word schole is of course "leisure." There are several passages in Aristotle, however, in which the context clearly demands that the word or its derivatives must mean "school" and "scholarship"—e.g. Politics, I3i3b.3,1323^39. It was hardly necessary for Aristotle to point out the etymological connection, since the words are identical, and NF appears to be remembering his usage rather than his actual statement. (We are indebted to Wallace McLeod for this information.) 14 E = me2 was the formula used by Albert Einstein for his general theory of relativity—that is, the equation of energy and mass in the universe. The other allusions are to President Abraham Lincoln (the Illinois lawyer) and Karl Marx.

628

Notes to pages 86-110 21. Greetings from the Principal

1 The four-year General Course had been introduced by the University of Toronto in 1933 as a programme distinct from the three-year Pass Course (for which see headnote to no. 12). It had become a three-year course by the time NF spoke. 2 The first ellipses have been added for symmetry, but the following two sets are NF's. 22. By Liberal Things 1 The reference is to Russia's launching of the first satellite on 4 October 1957, followed by a second said to contain a dog. Spokesmen for Eisenhower called them "stunts." Nevertheless Eisenhower did restore budgets for scientific research and accelerate the Americans' own space programme. 2 This professor was John Wilson, acting principal in the 1849-50 session; quotation from "Reminiscences of Old College Professors and Old Times," Ada Victoriana, 28, no. 2 (November 1904): 156. 3 Dr. Bennett (1890-1973) had been professor of Classics since 1932, acting president of Victoria University, 1949-51, and principal of Victoria College, 1951-59. 4 In Minutes of Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church in Canada, 7 August 1830 (manuscript in United Church Archives). 5 Ovid, Epistula Sapphus (Heroides, bk. 15,1. 83). The poem is a passionate lament by Sappho for her lost lover Phaon, for whom she had abandoned her Lesbian loves. 6 Thomas Huxley, "A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It," in Essays, ed. Frederick Barry (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 240. 7 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 139 (sec. 213). 8 Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 1. 363. 9 Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, 1.17. 10 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (De Augmentis Scientiarum), in Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum (New York: Colonial Press, 1900), 77 (bk. 3, chap. i). The quotation is not in the original version of the Advancement, but in the revised and expanded Latin version. 11 Byron, The Vision of Judgment, 11. 688-9 (stanzas 86-7). 12 Blake, Jerusalem (hymn), stanza 2. 24. The Critical Discipline i A reference to the "fixing" of television quiz shows. A congressional hearing

Notes to pages 111-25

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in November 1959 in the U.S. had revealed that many contestants were given answers before the broadcast and that television fraud ran deep into the ranks of television producers. 2 Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee, The Academic Marketplace (New York: Basic Books, 1958). 25. Dialogue Begins 1 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 240, 245 (Preface). 2 The Family Compact was the group of interlocking Tory families that exercised great political influence in Upper Canada from the i8oos to the 18405. 3 Quoted in Nathanael Burwash, The History of Victoria College (Toronto: Victoria College Press, 1927), 522. 4 T.S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 75. 26. Push-Button Gadgets May Help—But the Teacher Seems Here to Stay 1 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures: And a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 29. Snow's Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," was first published in Encounter in June and July 1959. In his use of the term "Luddites," Snow was alluding to the smashing of machinery by labourers opposed to mechanization at the start of the Industrial Revolution. 2 The book on advertising published by Vance Packard in 1959. 27. Autopsy on an Old Grad's Grievance 1 The Little Review began publishing Ulysses in March 1918, but publication was suspended in February 1921, when about half the book had been published. Publication became legally possible in the U.S. in December 1933, and in Canada in 1950. 2 "Robert Browning: An Abstract Study," in SE, 85-108. 3 A periodical founded in 1920 as the voice of progressive opinion in politics, literature, and the arts in Canada. Among the contributors and editors were Barker Fairley, S.H. Hooke, C.B. Sissons, John D. Robins, and F.H. Underhill. Sissons, Hooke, and Robins were professors at Victoria. NF became a contributor in 1936, and from 1948 to 1950 he was managing editor of the magazine.

630

Notes to pages 125-55

4 Such Is My Beloved (1934). 5 The Regina Manifesto was the party platform of the CCF, adopted at their conference in Regina in August 1933. It advocated central planning, and "welfare state" measures such as unemployment insurance and medical care. 6 A statute passed by Sir Robert Borden's government in 1919, making it illegal to advocate political or social change by violence. The accused was presumed guilty unless he could be proved innocent. The section was used to persecute Communists. 28. Introduction to Design for Learning 1 The Woods Hole Conference brought together leading scientists concerned with education, along with educators and psychologists, at Woods Hole on Cape Cod, in September 1959, to examine the fundamental processes involved in teaching science. Jerome Bruner was conference chair. 2 P. 151; the quotation omits some words and phrases from the original. 29. The Developing Imagination 1 S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 4. 2 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: Constable, 1932), 93. 3 Walt Whitman, Song of the Exposition, esp. stanzas 2 and 7. 4 This is the title given to the collection consisting of the Preface to Poems (1853) and the Advertisement to the 2nd ed. of Poems (1854), in English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century, ed. Edmund D. Jones (London: Oxford University Press, 1916). 5 John Stuart Mill, "Coleridge," in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 119-21. 6 See no. 26, n. i. 7 "An Articulated English Program: A Hypothesis to Test," PMLA, 74, no. 4, pt. 2 (1959): 13-198 William Frank Buckley Jr. (1925-), an American neo-conservative journalist, edited the National Review, 1955-88; Barry Morris Goldwater (1909-98), U.S. senator for Arizona, was a senior figure in the Republican party and exponent of conservative political views. 9 See, e.g., 72. 10 NF probably found this reference in George Orwell's "Introduction to Love of Life and Other Stories by Jack London," in which Orwell describes how Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya read two of London's stories to him just before his death. Lenin admired the first but found the second "saturated with bourgeois morals." Orwell gives as his source Krupskaya's Memories of Lenin, but the anecdote does not appear in this English transla-

Notes to pages 156-89

631

tion; it may apparently be found in the same writer's Das 1st Lenin (Berlin, 1966), 117-18. 11 See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, chap. 4. 12 Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (London: Williams and Norgate, 1950), 107. 13 Blake, All Religions Are One. 30. To the Class of '62 at Queen's 1 Greer Woods Boyce, the recipient of a D.D. honoris causa, had taught Homiletics and Pastoral Theology at Emmanuel College since 1958. 2 Principal James Alexander Corry. Toronto President Claude Bissell's following remark about the college song hinges on the fact that Victoria had left Cobourg on the shores of Lake Ontario ("the old Ontario Strand") in 1892, whereas Queen's remained in Kingston, another Lake Ontario town. 3 Thomas Chandler Haliburton, The Clockmaker; or, the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville (London: Bentley, 1843), 2:277. 4 Abraham Cowley, Poems, ed. A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 7. 5 All's Well That Ends Well, 4.3.333-4. 6 See no. 18, n. 2. 7 In 1950, U.S. Republican senator Joseph McCarthy launched an attack on the State Department for alleged "softness" toward the Soviet Union and the new People's Republic of China. The senator and his supporters conducted an intensive search for persons involved in "un-American activities," a campaign that touched L.B. Pearson (Vic iTg) and Herbert Norman (Vic 3T3). The latter had been driven to suicide. 31. The Changing Pace in Canadian Education 1 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knightes Tale, 1. 2184, in The Canterbury Tales. 2 Canadian Literature, founded in 1959. 3 Popular bestsellers by, respectively, Marshall Saunders and Lucy Maud Montgomery. 4 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 32 (wording is slightly different). 5 H.G. Wells, Marriage (New York: Duffield, 1914), 507 (bk. 3, chap. 4, sec. 16). 35. We Are Trying to Teach a Vision of Society i See Aristotle, Physics, in The Portable Greek Reader, ed. W.H. Auden (New York: Viking, 1948), 423-4.

632

Notes to pages 193-221 36. Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship

1 The book is Four Ages of Man: The Classical Myths, by Jay Macpherson (1962). I should add that many teachers I have talked to since writing this article prefer to put the beginning of the study of mythology earlier than grade 9, and certainly this book could be used earlier. [NF] 2 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1939), 275n. 6. 3 lona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of School Children (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 17. 4 Cf. ibid., 78. 5 James Reaney, A Suit of Nettles (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958), 30-1. 6 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar, in Minor Poems, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), 17. 7 This is one of the Adagia in Opus Posthumous, 157. [NF] 8 These include both the fundamentalists of the Bible belt and the fundamentalists of the anti-Bible belt. There are many who seem to think that the early study of the Bible in school would lead to obscurantism, racialism, imperialism, and the reactivating of the Inquisition: their mental processes are identical with those of the people who believe that detaching the science of geology from the Book of Genesis will inevitably destroy all moral values. [NF] 9 True in its context, but the real reason for stressing resemblances rather than differences is that discrimination and analysis are not functional in poetic thinking, which is almost entirely constructive. It is different with criticism, as the next paragraph shows, but even criticism must follow the shape of its subject. [NF] 10 Thomas Campion's There is a garden in her face, 11.1-6,13-18, from his Fourth Book of Airs (ca. 1617). 11 Centuries of Meditations, [Century] I, [sec.] 85. [NF] 12 In PMLA, NF remarks that "Both Mr. Keppel and Miss Nicolson have spoken eloquently and soberingly about this, and I have nothing to add to what they have said." 38. Education—Protection against Futility i Newton's speculations on Biblical and world chronology were unpublished, though to some extent known to his contemporaries. For his placing of the Second Coming in 1948, see Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 157-60. 39. The Classics and the Man of Letters 1 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. i, 1.47, describing Satan's life in hell. 2 The context seems to demand an additional phrase such as "and the divine." NF's original is not available.

Notes to pages 223-43

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40. Charles Bruce Sissons, 1879-1965 1 In 1939-40 a determined effort was made by members of the Ontario legislature and the Board of Governors of the University of Toronto to dismiss Professor Frank Underhill, a senior member of the Department of History, on the ground that he had insulted the imperial connection. (Underhill had tried to define Canada's position in the world on its own terms.) Sissons was one of many senior scholars in the university to protest against his dismissal. In the end, informal pressure from the federal and Ontario governments led the board to drop the matter. In 1942, several German students, who had been interned originally in the U.K. as enemy aliens, were released into the care of Canadian sponsors. After a sharp dispute between the board and the senate of the University of Toronto, in which Sissons participated, some were admitted to the university. Among them was David Hoeniger, now professor emeritus of English. 2 Sissons was a close friend of E.C. Drury, who became the first and only United Farmers of Ontario premier in 1919. Sissons was one of those who urged a reluctant Drury to accept office. 3 "Are you quitting? But now take pity on the students, / many generations of whom have had you as a friend, / you as a teacher, you as a father-figure." (Translation courtesy of Wallace McLeod.) Gilbert Norwood was professor of Classics and director of Classical Studies at University College, 1928-51. 42. Report on the "Adventures" Readers 1 Design for Learning is the report for which NF's introduction is reproduced in the present volume (no. 28). The phrase is used in the Social Science report, p. 92, to describe the idealized social universe often presented to children. 2 The allusion is to poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), writer of sentimental and sententious verses such as A Life Lesson and The Old Swimmin' Hole. 3 Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880), 514 (chap. 49). 4 The allusion is to Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who, along with his fellow anarchist Nicola Sacco, was executed for murder on 23 August 1927 after a sensational seven-year trial. His innocence is still being debated. His last interview with a reporter, a few hours before his death, is given as an appendix in The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, ed. Marion Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson (New York: Penguin, 1977), 398-406. 43. Speculation and Concern i An allusion to Snow's Two Cultures lecture of 1959 (for which see no. 26,

634

Notes to pages 243-60

n. i) and F.R. Leavis's reply, 'Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow/' Spectator, 9 March 1962, which attacked not only the lecture but also Snow's career as a novelist and his scientific authority. The Leavis-Snow controversy was much debated, focusing primarily on the relative importance of scientific and literary cultures, but also on issues of courtesy in academic and intellectual debates. 2 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W.D. Robson-Scott (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 52. 3 So-and-so Reclining on Her Couch, in Collected Poems. [NF] 4 This refers to what is usually called spiritualism, not to controlled experiments in extrasensory perception and the like, where there is no question of fraud. [NF] 5 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F.L. Pogson, esp. chap. 2. 6 Moliere, Le Malade Imaginaire, third interlude. 7 Feeling and Form, by Susanne Langer ([New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,] i953)L 109]- [NF] 8 Cf. "The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness" in Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 64 (chap. 3). 9 A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.15-17. 10 NF perhaps has in mind Aristotle's remark, in his discussion of causality, that art does not deliberate though acting for the sake of something (i99b28). 11 William Wordsworth, Prospectus to The Recluse, 1.68. 12 John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 3,11. 48-9. 13 William Blake, The Four Zoas, page 40,1.12 (Night the Third). 14 S0ren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Walter Lowrie (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 184,266. 44. The Time of the Flood 1 Financing Higher Education in Canada, a report commissioned by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, was published in 1965; Vincent W. Bladen, dean of Arts and Science in Toronto, chaired the commission. The report recommended that operating grants for universities be allocated on a formula basis, with doctoral candidates receiving a high weight. 2 The royal charter for Upper Canada Academy, the predecessor of Victoria College, was issued on 12 October 1836. Subsequently it was incorporated into the statute authorizing the establishment of Victoria College. The latter received royal assent on 27 August 1841. Each year, Victoria University celebrates its founding on or about 12 October.

Notes to pages 260-81

635

3 NF is referring to the massive power failure which occurred in Eastern North America in the fall of 1965. 45. The Instruments of Mental Production 1 See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, 2nd ed. (New York: Huebsch, 1918). Veblen does not write of Adam and Eve, but he does discuss the emergence of a leisure class as a consequence of the perception of labour as "irksome" (17-18), and of "a division maintained between men's and women's work in the lower stages of barbarism" (22). 2 Max Weber, "'Objectivity' in Social Sciences and Social Policy" (1904), in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 90-1. 3 See no. 20, n. 13. 4 Aristotle's concept of justice is discussed at various points in the Politics; for Aristotle, justice implies harmonious balance in the community. Plato discusses justice in the Republic in the context of the state's role in effecting moral perfection in its citizens. The Laws envisages an authoritarian state which enforces the law harshly. 5 Vitruvius, De architectura; Columella, De re rustica. 6 Milton, "Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England," in The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 3:5. 7 Sonnet 124,1.11. [NF] 8 The Human Condition (1959). [NF] 9 Thomas Henry Huxley, "A Liberal Education," 240. 10 Robert Hutchins, Some Questions about Education in North America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), 37. 11 Paul Johannes Tillich, "Religion and Secular Culture" (1946), in Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries (London: Collins, 1987), 129-30. 12 In his Opticks, 2nd ed., queries 28 and 31. 13 Shaw's creative will—the power to bring something into being through desire—is an agent of what he calls creative evolution, in which the life force struggles towards godhead through the efforts of living creatures. See Back to Methuselah in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw (London: Bodley Head, 1972), 5:348. 14 The story is attributed to Bar Hebraeus (1226-86) and is recounted in his Historia Compendiosa Dynastiarum. 47. The Knowledge of Good and Evil i The exact words have not been traced, but for the sentiment, see Samuel

636

Notes to pages 283-318

Johnson, Adventurer, no. 95, in The Idler and the Adventurer, ed. WJ. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L.F. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 425-6. 2 These were the experiments by U.S. scientists A.A. Michelson and Edward Morley, first performed in 1881, which were designed to measure the earth's velocity in relation to the supposed "ether," but which failed to do so. 3 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E. Hulme and J. Roth (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1950), 48; Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (published posthumously in 1932). 4 Trofim Lysenko, Address in The Situation in Biological Science: Proceedings of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the U.S.S.R.: July ji-August 7, 1948 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1949), 11-50. 5 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry, in A Defence of Poetry [by] Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Four Ages of Poetry [by] Thomas Love Peacock, ed. John E. Jordan (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 80. 6 William Blake, The Clod and the Pebble, in Songs of Experience. 49. The Question of "Success" i The remark is attributed to the Abbe Sieyes (1748-1836) after the restoration of Louis XVIII. 50. A Meeting of Minds i The distinction between centres and institutes at the University of Toronto has always been a hazy one; see Lorna Marsden, Report of the Provostial Committee on Centres and Institutes (Governing Council, 1984). 52. The University and the Heroic Vision i John Diefenbaker, who became prime minister of Canada in 1957, was elected in 1953 in his home constituency, Prince Albert, in northern Saskatchewan. He was twice rejected as federal Conservative leader. He was a fervent opponent of injustice, and was at least in his own view a voice crying in the wilderness before his election as Conservative leader in 1956. 53. Convocation Address, Franklin and Marshall i The Loyola address (with the order of sentences slightly changed) adds: "By the time we get to 1968, the ready-made role for a graduation speaker has become an unconsciously comic one, a poker-faced clown's turn. If the speaker accepts the ordinary convention, he dramatizes, or rather carica-

Notes to pages 319-37

637

tures, the mixture of resentment and nervousness with which an older man confronts younger people. The nervousness comes out in congratulations and good hopes for your particular future: the resentment in good advice and the expression of worries and misgivings about the future in general." 2 See no. 45, n. 10. 3 In the address to Loyola College, NF remarked, "When I say 'we,' I am thinking of myself both as a teacher and as a member of an older generation." 4 In the Loyola address, NF added an illustration from Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, in which the sheltered prince desires to see the miseries of the world, if only in order to be able to appreciate his own happiness. 5 To the Quebec audience NF added, "Many of you will spot the analogies to the political situation in this country, and more particularly in this province, that I am suggesting." 6 The Loyola address concludes here with the following sentences: "We immerse ourselves in the stream, and struggle with its current until we realize that its current and our own effective struggles form a unity, and relax. To swim with the current, in this sense, is not conformity: it is merely coming to realize, as the ultimate secret of learning, that to reach our genuine goals by our own efforts is the same thing as being guided to our destiny." 55. The Social Importance of Literature 1 Jerry Farber, "The Student as Nigger," written early in 1967, published in the Los Angeles Free Press and frequently republished. See his book The Student as Nigger (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), 90-100. 2 Paul MacRae, "Claude Bissell Talks About: The University, Academocracy, Revolution," Varsity, 89, no. 4 (16 September 1968): 4. 3 See no. 45, n. 11. 56. Research and Graduate Education in the Humanities 1 President Garfield of the United States is said to have remarked that his ideal of a college would be met by a log in the woods with a student at one end and Mark Hopkins at the other. His reference was to Mark Hopkins (1802-87), president of Williams College, 1836-72. 2 S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (London: Constable, 1924). 3 The Bodleian Library obtained its First Folio in 1623 and sold it in 1664 when it was replaced by the Third Folio. The very same copy was repurchased from a private individual in 1906 for £3,000, the money being raised by public subscription.

638

Notes to pages 338-69

4 Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932), 5On. 7. 5 This awkward form of words occurs in both typescripts, and in fact is written in, in the earlier one, as a correction for the typed "a time which makes [sic] a great writer such a long time to come." The word "time" in the revised version appears to stand both for era and for length of time. NF is commenting on the slow pace at which scholarly interpretations change and the degree to which they are conditioned by contemporary circumstances. 6 "Fellowship Lecture: The Imaginative and the Imaginary," American Journal of Psychiatry, 119 (October 1962): 289-98 (rpt. FI, 151-67). Presented to the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto, 7-11 May 1962. 7 The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecomunications Commission (CRTC), of which NF was an advisory member, 1968-77. 57. The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University 1 At the 1968 convention of the Democratic party in Chicago, a large group of students and others who were opposed to the Vietnam war and in general opposed to the status quo organized a major demonstration. Those involved marched down Michigan Avenue toward the convention site, throwing rubbish at the police. The marchers were dispersed forcibly by armed police. Objective observers concluded that the police, not the demonstrators, had rioted. 2 The school of existential analysis or logotherapy founded by psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl (1905-97). 58. The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract 1 The reference is to the unsuccessful poet in Max Beerbohm's Seven Men (1919). 2 H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 4th ed. (New York: Review of Reviews Publishing, 1924), 1:136. 3 Alain Robbe-Grillet, "A Future for the Novel" (1956), in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1984), 19,23. 4 Tommaso Campanella completed De monarchia Hispanica in 1598. He hoped humanity, including the people of the Americas, would be reunited spiritually and politically under Catholic auspices. Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward in 1898. 5 Karl Marx and his colleague, Friedrich Engels, called early nineteenthcentury socialists—Robert Owen, Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, and

Notes to pages 371-402

639

Charles Fourier—Utopian socialists as opposed to their own scientific version of socialism. The former believed that economic and social changes could be effected by reasonable argument and fostering the human willingness to co-operate. Marx and Engels were no more scientific than their predecessors. They were driven by revolutionary zeal, derived in part from the Hegelian notion that history was on their side. Both believed, for no good reason, that the proletariat would carry the torch of revolution. 6 Republic, 2.3746-3766. However, the Greek word phulakes is also rendered as "guardians" by translators Desmond Lee (Penguin), Francis Cornford (Oxford), and G.M.A. Grube (Hackett). 7 See no. 56, n. i. 8 W.B. Yeats, Blood and the Moon, 1. 49. 9 See no. 26, n. i. 10 Stephen Leacock, "Oxford As I See It," in My Discovery of England (Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1922), 113-14. 11 In the conference for which I wrote this paper, the specific topic assigned me was the one indicated in the title: the activism inside the university which was aimed directly at the theory of education. Activism in general forms only the wider context of this. [NF] 62. Convocation Address, York University 1 Cf. p. 354. 2 The John Birch Society was founded in the U.S. in the 19505 by Robert Welch. President Eisenhower, a Republican, was described by the society as "a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy."

64. Hart House Rededicated i The long quotation is from Areopagitica, in The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 4:343-4. It praises lively discussion and predicts the establishment of a new society after a period of civil disputes. 66. A Revolution Betrayed: Freedom and Necessity in Education i The Front de Liberation du Quebec was an ultranationalist organization in that province. In October 1970, cells in that movement kidnapped James Cross, a British diplomat, and Pierre Laporte, minister of labour in Quebec; Laporte was eventually murdered. After the proclamation of the War Measures Act (1970), terrorist activity in Quebec subsided.

640

Notes to pages 404-42

2 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 62. 67. The Definition of a University 1 Alsace and most of Lorraine were ceded by France to Germany by the Treaty of Frankfurt, May 1871. 2 See no. 45, n. 10. 3 W.B. Yeats, Consolation, 1. 9. 4 Richard Lovelace, To Althea. From Prison (1642), 11. 25-6. 5 In Alternatives to Education, which reproduces the speech as given at OISE, NF adds, "even the institution under whose auspices this series of lectures has been offered is sometimes regarded, only by the uninformed, of course, as a cross between an occupying garrison and a colonial governor's mansion." For NF's sense of OISE as an institution "built and financed by the government and staffed by Americans," see "A Literate Person Is First and Foremost an Articulate Person," Interchange, 7, no. 4 (1976-77): 32. 6 Cf. Harry Allen Overstreet, The Mature Mind (New York: Norton, 1949), 104; winner of the Parents' Magazine Book Award in 1950. 7 T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Four Quartets, 11. 44-5. 68. Education and the Rejection of Reality 1 A Special Committee on Mass Media of the Canadian Senate, chaired by Keith Davey, had studied the newspaper industry in 1969-70. They recommended diversified ownership. 2 The period during which Quebec modernized, lessening church influence in politics and developing economically. It is associated with the Liberal government of Jean Lesage, premier, 1960-66. 3 See James Boswell, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:266. 69. On Teaching Literature 1 Moliere, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, act 2, sc. 4. 2 John Bunyan, Upon Time and Eternity, poem no. 72 of A Book for Boys and Girls, in The Poems, ed. Graham Midgeley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 268; Emily Dickinson, poem no. 975, The Mountain sat upon the Plain. 3 The answer to the riddle, for those curious, is a well. 4 T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 289. 5 The Great Ideas: A Synopticon of Great Books of the Western World (1952), ed.

Notes to pages 456-93

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Mortimer J. Adler. Published as vols. 2 and 3 of Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. 6 Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 79 (pt. 2, sec. 6). 70. Wright Report (I) i University of Toronto Bulletin, 3 March 1972, 2-3. 72. Universities and the Deluge of Cant i James Boswell, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 4:221. 73. The Critic and the Writer 1 John Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 22 (chap. i). 2 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. J.M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 35. 3 Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, in A Tale of a Tub with Other Early Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 151. 4 Northrop Frye, "Canada and Its Poetry," Canadian Forum, 23 (December 1943): 207-10, reviewing A.J.M. Smith, The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943). 74. Foreword to The Child as Critic i Kenneth Koch, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (New York: Chelsea House, 1970), 25, quoted 99-100. 77. Presidential Address at the MLA 1 In "Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself," Canadian Forum, November 1949,16970, NF had protested against the exclusion and remarked that Mrs. Fairley (the former Margaret Adele Keeling) had equally arbitrarily been sent home from a peace conference some months before. For their left-wing sympathies, see NFHK, 2: 814. 2 PMLA, 91 (May 1976): 364. 3 To the MLA, NF added in parentheses, "I shall occasionally have to use masculine pronouns in a unisexual sense: Edith Kern, whom you will have next year, will be able to use feminine ones." 4 Martin Heidegger, "Language," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), esp. 198, 209.

642

Notes to pages 493-518

5 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 78. Reminiscences i See no. 64, n. i.

79. The Teacher's Source of Authority 1 See no. 58, n. 10. 2 See no. 20, n. 13. 3 All typescripts and printed versions have a comma after the second "that," thus making the authority the poet's or creative artist's, but the sense surely demands an authority beyond theirs; possibly a small mistake in Weiss's transcription was repeatedly overlooked. 4 G.B. Shaw, The Quintessence oflbsenism, in Major Critical Essays (London: Constable, 1930), 155. 5 See no. 77, n. 4. 6 Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. Stephen Hudson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1941), 434 (the last line of The Remembrance of Things Past).

So. Address on Receiving the Royal Bank Award 1 The British North America Act (1867) constituted the Dominion of Canada by setting the terms for the confederation of the provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. The Quebec Act of 1774 provided for the ' recognition of the distinct social and legal customs of the former French colony of Quebec. 2 The reference is presumably to the incident in September 1935 in which Callaghan accused the Toronto Public Library of banning They Shall Inherit the Earth and Such Is My Beloved from their shelves (see Daily Mail and Empire, and Telegram, 25-6 September 1935). 3 William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 1. 4. 81. Installation Address as Chancellor 1 NF was appointed chancellor by the Board of Regents, Victoria's governing body. As chancellor he presided at convocations and conferred degrees in theology and honorary degrees. He was an ex officio member of the board and chair of the Victoria Senate. Meetings of the latter were conducted very efficiently and were often remarkably brief. As chancellor he kept in touch with as many alumni as possible. 2 For Charter Day, see no. 44, n. 2.

Notes to pages 520-54

643

3 This is probably a reference to the reshaping of the University College Council following the adoption of the Memorandum of Understanding (1974), for which see xxxiii-xxxiv. This action was not well received. 4 NF refers to this conversation in NFC, 66. The speaker was Harold Vaughan. 5 A pamphlet by Pauline Kogan (Montreal: Progressive Books and Periodicals, 1969). NF later remarked of this pamphlet that "the whole series of attacks on me at that time were struck by a CIA infiltrator" (Epilogo to Ritratto di Northrop Frye [Rome: Bulzoni, 1989], 419). 82. The Chancellor's Message i What Do You Say After You Say Hello? The Psychology of Human Destiny (1972), by psychologist Eric Berne. 83. Criticism as Education 1 This remark has not been traced. For Fuller's concept of "generalized principles," see his Intuition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 136-40 (a book NF had in his library). For his ideas on a child's inherent abilities to question and understand, see Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 164, (sec. 445.18), and And It Came to Pass— Not to Stay (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 53. 2 See especially the opening of Arnold's "The Study of Poetry" (1880). 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 167,181-2, (bk. 3, sees. 108,125). 4 See A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904); Ignatius Donnelly, The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888). 5 Chuang Tzu: Genius of the Absurd, ed. Clae Waltham, trans. James Legge (New York: Ace Books, 1971), 312 (chap. 27). This book was in NF's library. 84. The Beginning of the Word 1 See no. 69, n. i. 2 See no. 29, n. 12.

86. The View from Here 1 The University of Waterloo was founded in 1957; the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) became the University of Guelph in 1964; McMaster University moved from Toronto to Hamilton in 1930. 2 Bertrand Russell's one visit to Toronto was on 12 December 1931, when he gave a lecture on "The Sins of Civilization" at Massey Hall; Paderewski

644

Notes to pages 554-77

played Chopin at Massey Hall on 5 November 1930,29 April 1931, and 4 February 1932. 3 A group of painters based in Toronto and including J.E.H. Macdonald, Lawren Harris, and A.Y. Jackson. The group was officially formed in 1920, and opened a new and at the time controversial era in Canadian art with their use of vivid colours to portray the Northern Ontario landscape. 4 Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) was secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; he helped in bringing 3,670 criminals to justice, and destroyed 160 tons of obscene literature and photographs. 5 NF is speaking rather sweepingly here, and it is hard to point to a specific law. Probably he had in mind the fact that such stereotyping is no longer socially acceptable and is contrary to the spirit of legislation such as the Charter of Rights of 1980, the provisions against the dissemination of racial hatred in the Criminal Code, and the human rights codes of various provinces. 6 See no. 40, n. i. 7 Samuel Johnson, "Addison," in Lives of the Poets, ed. Mrs. Alexander Napier (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909), 2:131. 8 See Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (London: Macmillan, 1880), 1:356-7; the snobbish artist was William Collins, R.A. 9 NF is referring to astrological notions that are still fashionable but none the less fictitious. The "precession of the equinoxes" is the phenomenon whereby, over thousands of years, the sun appears to be in a different constellation on the spring equinox, owing to a wobble in the earth's rotation. Its appearing in Aquarius was thought to be propitious. 87. The Authority of Learning 1 Both Arthur Meighen and Adlai Stevenson were brilliant orators who lacked the popular touch and were failures in politics. Meighen, leader of the Conservative party in Canada, was prime minister only briefly twice in the 19205. Adlai Stevenson, American Democratic governor of Illinois, ran unsuccessfully for president against Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. 2 Evidently a reference to E.K. Brown (1905-51), an English professor who was Mackenzie King's secretary in 1942 (see King's 1942 Diary). 3 Orwell's remark has not been located; NF was perhaps recalling Wilfred Owen's statement, in the preface to his Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920), that "All the poet can do to-day is to warn." 88. Language as the Home of Human Life i Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper, 1993), 424.

Notes to pages 577-604

645

2 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), i. 3 Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, chap. 40. 4 William Carlos Williams, "Kenneth Burke," in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1954), 132. 5 PEN (which stands for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) is an organization of writers and publishers founded in 1921 to further the art of writing and freedom of expression through the written word. 90. Farewell to Goldwin French i C.B. Sissons, A History of Victoria University (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), 265, referring to R.P. Bowles. 91. Foreword to English Studies at Toronto 1 See no. 20, n. 2. 2 Egerton Ryerson, in his inaugural address as principal of Victoria College in June 1842, defended the introduction of an English department in the college; it was the first such department in a Canadian university. 3 The "Religious Knowledge option" was a required course in each year of all the honour courses except Commerce and Finance. It was a one-hour-aweek course offered by the federated colleges and with its exam administered by them rather than by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Though it was primarily intended as a way of allowing the colleges to teach religion (for which question see no. 93, p. 609 and n. 2), students could choose instead to study a range of other subjects not normally encompassed in their Honour Course. 4 The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was established in the U.S. by Richard Prosser Mellon in 1969 as a philanthropic organization particularly concerned with higher education. During a hiring freeze in the Department of English in the 19805, the foundation offered bridging funds for several appointments at the assistant professor level; these were to run for five years, after which time the university was expected to find the money for permanent appointments.

92. Preface to On Education 1 These pieces are to appear in CW in the volume of writings on modern culture. 2 The October 1970 murder of Pierre Laporte, minister of labour in the Bourassa government of Quebec, by a cell of the FLQ (for which see no. 66, n. i).

646

Notes to pages 605-15

3 "Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784-1984," OE, 168-82, to appear in CW among the writings on Canada. 93. Preface to From Cobourg to Toronto 1 The family of S.S. Nelles immigrated to Upper Canada from the U.S. Nelles was born in Upper Canada and educated in part in New York state academies; he spent two years at Victoria College (1842-44), but graduated from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., in 1846. 2 The Department of Religious Knowledge was established in 1906, a loose grouping of those who taught religious knowledge courses to undergraduates in the federated colleges and Oriental languages (Hebrew) in University College. The university was suspicious of the "R.K." system until the late 19605 when the Toronto School of Theology emerged, followed by the establishment of a university Department of Religion. In 1978 the University of Toronto Act was amended to enable the university for the first time to grant degrees in Theology. The Memorandum of Agreement between the Toronto School of Theology, the member colleges, and the University of Toronto provides for the granting of degrees in Theology conjointly. 3 Daniel Wilson, president of the University of Toronto, 1887-92, was the chief negotiator for the university in the discussions leading to the federation legislation in 1887; he did believe that the primary objective of the Methodists was to secure a share of the university's endowment. 94. Unpublished Introduction to Beyond Communication 1 Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 1. 298. 2 By Ralph Robynson (1556). The original text was in Latin. 3 Cf. aphorism 25 in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, and chap. 14 of Biographia Litemria.

Emendations

page/line 23/14 33/11 34/20 34/28 39/17 47/1 52/16 60/27 67/34 77/8 116/8 121/14 121/24 134/31 163/18 173/2-3 188/10 188/27 189/6 199/36 208/4 208/24 212/3 222/18 222/20

Perennial for Perennias students' Christian for student's Christian a truth or two for a truth or so Elinor Wylie for Elmer Wylie cannot do for cannot so premises on which for premises in which begin for begins findings for finding (as in OE) take the ablative for take the dative catalyst for catalyzer Of Education for On Education teaching them for teach-them imparting for importing 1960 for 1961 take the ablative for take the dative "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" for "The Problem of the Two Cultures" a curriculum for the curriculum (corrected in NF's offprint) nods wisely and says for nods wisely—says (corrected in NF's offprint) derive from for drive from (as in TS) an agony for agony makes the goal for make the goal instinct is for instinct it is of this view for of its view Life and Letters of Egerton Ryerson for Life of Egerton Ryerson 1930 for 1926

648 222/26 229/23 23O/ 32 233/34 2 43/35

Emendations

Dearest for Dear narcissism/ornarcism narcissistic for narcistic so easy that for so easy to read that Science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be for Science is not an illusion, but it would be an illusion 253/17 exists in art for exists in the art (as in Humanities and the Understanding of Reality) 264/17 whom we can for for whom can (as in TS, Chicago Review; corrected in paperback ed. of StS) 267/29-30 "forgotten tongues" for "dead tongues" 271/23 his society for this society (as in Chicago Review and TS of StS) 286/19 dialectic of concern for dialectic concern (as in Morality of Scholarship and TS of St S) 286/36-7 specific social organization for specific organization (as in Morality of Scholarship and TS of St S) 288/8 preference of for preference for (as in Morality of Scholarship and TS of StS) 289/4 human aspirations for human inspirations (as in Morality of Scholarship) 292/33 arts are included for arts are not included (as in Morality of Scholarship and TS of StS) 297/26 1955 for 1956 315/27 from people in every walk for from every people in every walk 331/26 Bissell nor/or Bissell or 338/11 texts for manuscripts 342/3 relevant for irrelevant (as in OE) 343/17 thriller for thrill 343/28 about the study for about study 343/29 had for has 346/10 is not rooted for is rooted (as in TS and DG; the meaning and correct choice are not clear) 347/37-8 continues . . . continues for continue... continue 410/11 many such speeches for many speeches (as in TS and Alternatives in Education) 416/8 she's not. She's for she's not, She's (as in TS and Alternatives in Education) 418/21-2 of the genuine for of genuine (as in TS and Alternatives in Education) 419/20 no greater for not greater (as in TS and Alternatives in Education) 420/33 would be the spread for would be spread (as in TS and Alternatives in Education)

Emendations 421/1

649

of the autonomy for of autonomy (as in TS and Alternatives in Education) 425/22-3 forms for form (as in OE) 463/12 report on for report of (as in TS) 464/17 reason why I for reason I (as in TS) 489/23 which is why . . . earlier (added from PMLA version) 490/4 In 1976 for By 1976 (as in TS of DG) 498/3 yoga for yogi (as in Curriculum Inquiry) 500/12 goes for go (as in Curriculum Inquiry) 501/32 seat for set (as in TS and Curriculum Inquiry) 504/29 at the end of Shakespeare's period for of Shakespeare's period (as in TS and Curriculum Inquiry) 510/12 around the world for around a world (as in DG) 511/36 with mythology for with the mythology (as in DG) 514/7 had removed for has removed (as in DG) 521/18-19 students say that they need to ... feel that they belong for students say that they belong (clause from earlier TS in file K accidentally omitted in retyping) 521/35 persevere in for preserve in (as in earlier TS in file K) 532/9 So far as it does so for So far it does so (as in original TS) 532/39 in the face of for in the fact of (as in original TS) 553/18-19 no new thing for nothing 555/23 the speech both of children and of adults for both the speech of children and of adults 573/25 the anxieties of for the anxious of (as in TS) 577/27 are no noble savages for is not noble savages (as in TS and OE) 580/27 all along for along (as in TS and OE) 603/7 direction from the for direction the (as in TS) 609/5-6 roughly to decentralize the humanities in the federated colleges and centralize for roughly to centralize (as in TS)

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Index

Books are indexed under their author's name. U of T is used for the University of Toronto, VC for Victoria College/University. Abel, 386 Absurd, 352, 366, 375, 459 Ada Victoriana, xliv, 260,608; NF as writer in, xxvii, 21-2, 26-33 ACUTE (Association of Canadian University Teachers of English), xxix, 604-5 Adam, 252,263-4. See also Eden Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), 564, 565 Addison, Margaret Eleanor Theodora (1868-1940), 177, 608 ADE/ADFL Bulletin, 479-80 Adler, Mortimer Jerome (b. 1902), 40, 46,189, 641 Adolescent, 412-13, 414,491, 580; as construct, 408, 426, 453-4, 555-6; speech of, 583, 602 Adult (full-time) education, xliv, 176, 184,190, 212, 272, 314, 390, 415-16, 427 "Adventures" readers, xli, 227-36, 238,241, 545, 603 Advertising, 66-7, 80, no, 150,196-7, 206, 228,239-40, 272, 323, 363, 419-20, 433, 448, 451, 457/ 575, 53O,

533, 578-9; and social protest, 392 Aeschylus (ca. 525-ca. 456 B.C.), 217; Prometheus Bound, 220-1 Aesop (6th century B.C.), 377, 501, 531 Aesthetics, 341 Africa, 398, 453, 510 Agnew, Marjorie (d. 1977), 179 Ahikar of Assyria, 531 Alcatraz, 410 Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), 552 Alfred the Great (849-99), 495 Algebra, 410 Alger, Horatio (1832-99), 154 Alienation, 264, 295, 375, 534-5 Allegory, 149, 238,442 "All round man," 36 Alumni, 99,104,184, 312, 317, 354, 390, 404, 466, 591 America: discovery of, 301; literature of, 19, 515. See also United States American Constitution, 239, 447, 545, 570, 615 American Revolution, 268, 403, 411 American Weekly, 122

652

Anabaptists, 362 Analogy, 200 Anarchism, and protest movement, 313, 328, 348, 352, 360-4 Anderson, Fulton Henry (1895-1968), 124,125 Anglo-Saxon, 597 Annesley Hall, 178 Anthropology, 226, 308, 341, 343, 375, 557 Anti-intellectualism, 376, 383, 385, 465, 545. 548, 588, 603, 613 Anxiety, 257, 277, 346, 375, 385; and concern, 287-8, 513; of continuity, 531 Apathy, student, 319, 324, 327 Aphrodite, 217 Appearance, and reality, 139 Applied science. See under Sciences Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225-74), 384, 484 Arabian Nights, 67,163,270 Arabic literature, 205, 218 Archeology, 335, 337-8 Archetypes, 65, 435-7, 451-2, 461, 471-2; importance of studying, 203 Architecture, 81, 269; Plato on, 266 Arendt, Hannah (1906-75): The Human Condition (1959), 269 Argonauts, 436 Argument, limited role of, 81 Aristophanes (ca.448-ca.388 B.C.), 220 Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), 46,100,112, 189,219, 253,267, 532; on leisure, 83, 265, 500; Metaphysics, 410; Physics, 253; Poetics, 77 Arithmetic. See Mathematics Army, 507-8 Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), lii, 107, 243, 267, 596; on the Classics, 152, 269; on culture, 62, 91,111,176, 373, 500-1, 527; on freedom, 491,

Index 502; Culture and Anarchy (1869), 117-18,156, 485; Preface to Poems (1853), 218-19 Arnup, Hon. John D. (b. 1911), 3 Arthurian legends, 234-5 Articulated English programme, 153, 194 Articulateness. See under Speech Arts, creative, 243-4,246, 535; and concern, xlvi-xlvii, 274-5, 292; contemporary, 363, 367; detachment in, 283-4; form and content in, 253; do not improve, 50-1, 94, 148, 341, 358,437; individualism in, 256, 371; Marxist attitude to, 361, 363; nature of, 247-51; Plato's division of, 265-6; as subjectmatter of the humanities, xxxvii, 13,273; unschooled view of, 147; at VC, 177, 383; William Morris on, 269; as vision of human world, 81-3,145, 333, 402, 502, 556-7 Arts and sciences (as subjects of study), 67; authority of, 372-3, 467, 468, 561, 574-5; central to university, xlvii, 71-2; distinction between, see under Humanities, Sciences; as end in themselves, 459-60; role of, xxxv, 110-11,141, 158,163,175,191, 206, 265, 321, 353, 403, 414, 425, 505-6, 606 Ascham, Roger (1515-68): The Scholemaster (1570), 148 Asia, 398, 453 Asimov, Isaac (1920-92): The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1960), 134 Assassination, 323 Astronomy, 496, 532 Athabasca University, 587 Atheism, 548,283 Athens, 156

Index Atkinson Charitable Foundation, 129 Atlantic Monthly, 64 Atlantis, 267, 282, 435 Atlas, 235 Atwood, Margaret (b. 1939), xliii, 586 Auden, Wystan Hugh (1907-73), 124, 126 Austen, Jane (1775-1817): Pride and Prejudice (1813), 234, 309, 334, 430 Australia, myth in, 437 Authority: in arts and sciences, xxxii, xxxvi-xxxvii, xlvii, 50-2, 372-3, 381, 414; and freedom, 403; in the humanities, xxix, 43-4, 496-506 passim; in society, 467; true and false, 588; in university, 93, 331-2, 352, 354 Automobiles, 255, 423, 424 Avison, Theodore Lloyd (b. 1912), 5 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750), 49, 503 "Back to basics," 530, 559, 571 Bacon, Francis (1561-1626): The Advancement of Learning (1605), 81, 100 Bacon, Roger (ca. 1214-92), 46 Bagehot, Walter (1826-77): Physics and Politics (1872), 243 Baillie, John (1886-1960), xxvii Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814-76), 361 Ballads, 157, 204, 236, 238, 437, 443, 47i Barker, Arthur (1911-90), 596 Barth, Karl (1886-1968), xxvii Barthes, Roland (1915-80): Mythologies (1957), 533' Writing Degree Zero (1953), 493 Beardsley, Aubrey (1872-98), 26 Beare, Robert (1849-1910), 3, 27 Beatniks, 362

653 Beattie, (Alexander) Munro (b. 1911), 21,29, 30, 31, 33 Beerbohm, Sir (Henry) Max (1872-1956), 363 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827), 433 Belgium, 348, 362, 554 Belief, 445, 446 Bell, Andrew James (1856-1932), 31, 33 Bellamy, Edward (1850-98): Looking Backward (1898), 369 Benda, Julien (1867-1956): Le trahison des clercs (1927), xlvii, 575 Bennett, Harold S. (1890-1973), 90 Beowulf, 205, 293, 484, 598 Bergson, Henri (1859-1941), on time and space, 247, 292 Berkeley, University of California at, 589, 590; student protest at, xxxi, xxxii, xlviii, 260, 315, 320, 324, 330, 385-8, 391, 392-3, 413 Berman, Ronald (b. 1930), 490 Berne, Eric Lennard (b. 1910): What Do You Say After You Say Hello? (1972), 523 Bible, 52,83, 431, 531; importance of in education, 108,135,151,152, 153,202,239, 240, 536; on leisure, 500, 529; and literature, 443-4, 473, 492; on prophecy, 537; on wisdom, 499, 537 Bickersteth, (John) Burgon (18881979), 126 Bilingualism, 223, 224 Biography, 240 Biology, 133, 283, 532, 558, 572 Birney, Earle (1904-95), 494; Down the Long Table (1955), 125; Trial of a City (1952), 183 Bissell, Claude (1916-2000), 69,70, 71, 84,160, 331, 345, 494

654 Black Panthers, 362, 380 Blacks. See Negroes Bladen Report, 259 Blake, William (1757-1827): 102,158, 169,199, 203, 204,221, 233, 238, 254, 340, 343, 359; NF's study of, xxiv-xxviii passim, 193, 336, 338-9, 473, 539/ 542; on imagination, 158, 564, 566-7; on infinite present, 516; on science, 255; and William Collins, 565-6; Jerusalem (1804-20), 221; Mad Song, 247; Milton (1804-8), 82; Songs of Experience (1794), 295 Bliven, Bruce (1889-1977), 626 Blunden, Edmund (1896-1974), 595, 597 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen (1840-1922), 204 Bob, the, 3,18, 260 Boer war, 398, 408 Bogdan, Deanne Gail (b. 1938), ed.: Beyond Communication (1990), 611-15 Books, 64,419, 429-30, 564; importance of, 268, 339-40, 602-3; supposed obsolescence of, 307. See also Publishing Bottomley, Gordon (1874-1948), 204 Bowles, Richard Pinch (1864-1960), 645 Boyce, Greer Woods (b. 1921), 160 Boys' Life, 232 Bradley, Andrew Cecil (1851-1935): Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), 537 Bree, Germaine (b. 1907), 490 Bretons, 515 Brett, George Sidney (1879-1944), xxvi, 124,125 British Museum, 336 British Columbia, literature in, 182 British North America Act, 510

Index Brooks, Cleanth (1906-94) and William Warren (1905-89): Understanding Poetry (1946), 193 Brown, Edward Killoran (1905-51), 571, 597' 598 Brown, Walter Theodore (1883-1954), 29,90, 620 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-82), 202, 456 Browning, Robert (1812-89), 125;

Epistle ofKarshish, 138; How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, 238 Bruner, Jerome Seymour (b. 1915), xl;

The Process of Education (1960), 108, 133,135 Buckley, William Frank, Jr. (b. 1925), 154 Bunyan, John (1628-88), 439; The

Pilgrim's Progress (1678-84), 404, 615 Bunyan, Paul, 235 Burke, Edmund (1729-97), 146, 368, 285 Burns, Robert (1759-96), 238 Burton, Robert (1577-1640): Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 470 Burwash, Nathanael (1839-1918), xxxix, 607, 609 Bush, Douglas (1896-1983), 596;

Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (1932), 338 Butler, Samuel (1835-1902): Erewhon (1872), 69-70 Byron, George Gordon, Baron Byron of Rochdale (1788-1824), 101,236, 458

Callaghan, Morley (1903-90), 508, 514; Such Is My Beloved (1934), 125

Index Cambridge University, 329, 341-2, 376, 520; Wordsworth on, 162-3 Campanella, Tommaso (1568-1639), 369 Campion, Thomas (1567-1620), 204-5 Canada, 40,176, 361, 550; censorship in, 561, 574; culture of, 19, 24, 57, 272, 554- 557-8, 57^-3, 605; as model, 575-6; nature of, 90, 508-9, 562; and NF's development, 471-4; separatism in, 313, 515, 604, 637; student protest movement in, 346; and the U.S., 46, 53, 58, 394, 411, 484-5, 545, 563; and war, 162, 396; weight of past in, 510 - education in, 181, 518, 600; history of, 222-3; Sissons's works on, 2223, 224; underfunding of, 589-90 - literature of, 13, 542; and the academy, 64-5,71,198-9, 589; and decentralization, 515, 575, 576; maturing of, 585-7, 605; place of, 548; in U of T courses, 554, 597, 598; VC's contribution to, 522, 608 See also North America Canada Council, 587, 626 Canadian Art, 695 Canadian Forum, 49,125, 208 Canadian Literature, 169 Canfield, Dorothy (1879-1958), 235 Cant, 466, 468-9 Capitalism, 361, 601 Caplow, Theodore (b. 1920) and Reece J. McGee (b. 1929): The Academic Marketplace (1958), 111 Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 612; on work, 268-9; Sartor Resartus (1833-4), 83 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-98): Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), 470, 477; Through the Looking-Glass and

655 What Alice Found There (1872), 282 Castiglione, Conte Baldassare (1478-1529): Book of the Courtier (1528), 61,116, 273, 503, 528 Catalogues, in poetry, 199 Gather, Willa (1873-1947), 236 Catullus, Gaius Valerius (ca. 84-ca. 54 B.C.), 400 CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 57,137,180, 569 CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation), xxv, 29, 30, 32, 40; Regina Manifesto of, 311 Censorship, 560, 574 Centre for Culture and Technology (U of T), 306-7 Cervantes (Saavedra), Miguel de (1547-1616): Don Quixote (1605), 441 Chamberlain, (Arthur) Neville (1869-1940), 593 Change, in society, 346-55 passim, 414 Chaplin, Charles (Charlie) (1889-1977), 363 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345-1400), 43,168,195,236, 338, 548 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860-1904), 233 Chemistry, 77,133,250 Chesterfield, Fourth Earl of (Philip Dormer Stanhope) (1694-1773), 429 Chicago, 554, 556; Democratic convention at, 349 Children: literature for, 337, 525-6, 532; as natural aristocracy, 318-19; and poetry, 136,157, 437~9, 543; supposed innocence of, 412, 453, 455, 509; "whole child" theory, 530. See also Education, elementary; Schools, elementary

656 China, 163,175, 265, 278, 315, 360, 361,414,423; literature of, 205, 218; Marxism in, 601; as model, 547, 562; tyranny in, 569. See also Orient Chinese, in pulp fiction, 560, 574 Chopin, Frederic (1810-49), 554 Christ. See Jesus Christianity, 83,182, 267, 333, 352, 365; and anxiety, 257, 561, 573; and humanities, 52; Jesus and, 549; mythology of, 257,277; and social structure, 286; story in, 445-6, 447 Christie, Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa (1890-1976), 233, 587, 605 Christmas, 557, 582 Chuang Tzu (ca. 369-286 B.C.), 537 Church, 278; as educational institution, 546; nature of, 62,68,99,164; and university, 168, 309, 354, 357, 377, 393, 405, 420. See also Religion Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874-1965), 83, 302 Churchyard, Thomas (ca. 1520-1604), 527 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106-43 B.C.), 84,148, 219, 267, 484, 565, 580, 600 Cinderella, 436, 452 "Circle of stories," 441, 442, 460 Civilization, 49,182; changing views of, 253-4; and nature, 409 Civil War (U.S.), 228, 363, 403 Classes, social, 268, 500-2, 527-9; class structure, 286, 513 Classic or model, 50, 52,60,78, 82, 148,149,152, 341, 358, 367, 527 Classics, 125,152, 240, 442; Bush on mythology of, 338; changing status of, 60,72,269,274,487; Department of, at U of T, 481-2; in humanism, 267-8, 336, 374; importance of teaching mythology of, 108,151, 153, 202, 239, 443, 473; influence of

Index on criticism, 144; questionnaire on modern significance of, 215-21; as symbols of prestige, 544; value of study of, 111,342. See also Greek, Latin Cleaver, Eldridge (b. 1935), 386 Clementi, Muzio (1752-1832), 250 Coburn, Kathleen (1905-91), 70, 596 Cochrane, Charles Morris (1889-1945): Christianity and Classical Culture (1940), 125 Cody, Canon Henry John (1868-1951), 597 Cold war, 320,465-6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), 70,107,147, 408, 537, 596, 615 Collective unconscious, 435 Collins, William, R.A. (1788-1847), 566 Colloquium, 306 Columbia University, 59, 554; student protest at, 315, 324, 328, 330, 351 Columbus, Christopher (1451-1506), 301 Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus (b. ist century A.D.), 267 Comedy, 135,151-2,203,230,253, 293, 441-2, 446, 449, 452, 456, 477 Commitment, 174, 286-7, 35O-i< 369, 370 Communications, as a discipline, 170, 196, 547 Communism, 58,84,101,114,132, 147,171,256,278,287, 313, 348, 349, 352, 360; campus, in NF's day, 125, 562; educational theory of, 116; and means and ends, 328; and primary concerns, 615; as religion, 174. See also Marxism Communist, as term of abuse, 397,548

Index Communists, and 1984, 568-9 Comparative literature, xxxvii; at U of T, 597 Computer technology, 558, 573 Comstock, Anthony (1844-1915), 560, 574 Concern, 390-1; and anxiety, 257, 277, 513. 559-61, 573-5; in the humanities, 256-8, 308, 310, 333; and ideology, 615; meaning of, 285-8; and myth, 275, 341; and university studies, xlvi-xlix, 286-96 passim Conditioning. See Social conditioning Confederation, 90 Conferences, 417 Conformity, 279, 349 Congregationalists, 354 Conklin, William D. (1911-77), 31, 32-3 Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), 152; The Secret Agent (1907), 361 Consciousness, 245; as basis of arts, 248 Conservatism, 346, 349, 368, 369, 373, 492, 500, 531; of students, 312 Contemporary society. See Modern age Continuity: anxiety of, 429, 499, 544; two kinds of, 423-3 Convention, 195, 203, 317-18, 434, 584-5 Convocation, 388, 401, 404-5, 466. See also Graduation Cook, James (1728-79), 136 Copernicus, Nicolas (1473-1543), 534 Corinthians, Epistle to the, 51 Cornford, Frances Darwin (18861960), 217 Corry, James Alexander (1899-1985), 160, 297 Council of Constance, 595

657

Cousland, Kenneth (1894-1987), xxvii Cowley, Abraham (1618-67), 161 Cragg, Arthur Richard (1910-97), 14-16 Crane, Stephen (1871-1900), 236 Creativity, 147, 248, 256, 473-4, 492, 493, 538, 541; NF's, 606 Criticism, 107,130,167, 317, 318, 579, 596, 632; books vs. articles in, 339-40; and Classics, 217, 219; contemporary, 536-7, 581, 611, 614-15; as creative, 492, 493, 538, 541; elementary principles of, 130, 144-5, 477/ 525; feminist, 614-15; and gap between critic and plain reader, 61-2; historical, 341; and ideal response, 503, 538; importance of, 60-1,144-5; and metaphor, 346, 509; and myth, 256, 257, 511; New, 193, 340; NF's, 542; progress in, 341, 358, 427; recent and ancient, 336, 338-9, 343; scientific element in, 246,258, 282; and teaching of English, 59-60, 193-4, 201, 2°5- See also Deconstruction, Marxism, Scholarship Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658), 161 CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission), 340 Cuba, 397 Cultural heritage, 487, 544 Cultural environment, 110-11,113, 158 Cultural envelope, 578 Culture, 182; Arnold on, 62,91,111, 118,176, 373, 527; association of with women, 75; as classless, 486, 501; contemporary, 157; decentralization in, 514-15, 575, 604; "freshman" view of, 19; importance of,

658 44, 589, 590; one's own and foreign, 155-6; popular, 584,597 Curriculum: importance of systematic, 132-5,170-1,188,192-3, 418, 480; mistaken "relevance" in, 546; Toronto committee on school, xxxi, xl-xlii, 128-30; rigid, 126; university, reform of, xlv-xlvi, 63, 346, 374, 378, 380, 417, 490, 597-8. See also Ontario Curriculum Institute, English Curwood, James Oliver (1878-1927), 585 Cycles, 553 Cyrus the Great (d. 529 B.C.), 528 Czechoslovakia, 428 Damon, Samuel Foster (1893-1971): William Blake, His Philosophy and Symbols (1924), 336, 343 Dance, 248 Dancing, at VC, 608 Daniells, Roy (1902-79), 182, 472 Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), 49, 446; Inferno, 369, 569 Dartmouth College, 394 Darwin, Charles (1809-82), 275, 365, 534, 608; Origin of Species (1859), 471 David and Goliath, 451 Davidson, Richard (1876-1944), xxvii Davies, Robertson (1913-95), 586 Davison, Earl (b. 1908), 6 Death, 208 Debating, 5-9,207,260, 396 Deconstruction, 614 Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731): Robinson Crusoe (1719), 155-6 Degas, Edgar (1834-1917), 352 Deism, 52 Democracy, 83,101,114-15,278, 332; dynamics of, 349; and education,

Index 171,410,417; and elites, 237,468; of future, 370; ideals of, 147,301-2, 39i, 393,421, 514,601; importance of humanities to, 58,206; participatory, 362 Demonstrations, 466-7 Demosthenes (384-322 B.C.), 84 Demythologizing, 282, 283 Depression, the, 29, 32,103,104,125, 161,168, 328, 348, 360,465,466,562 Detachment, 159,369,370; as attitude to society, 350-1, 352; in humanities, 282-5; and indifference, 276, 285; and irony, 293; in science, 281; in social science, 282; in university studies, 168,274 Detective stories, 152, 434-5, 584 Detroit, 484 Deuteronomy, Book of, 183 Deutsch, John J. (1911-76), 345 Dewey, John (1859-1952), 46,48, 98, 124,189, 451, 501, 529; "Deweyism," 57, 58 Diagrams, 250 Dialogue, 370, 375,417,496-8; in Plato, 262,342, 355, 376, 520,538, 550 Dickens, Charles (1812-70), 236, 239; A Christmas Carol (1843), 229; David Copperfield (1849-50), 233; Dombey and Son (1846-8), 233; Great Expectations (1860-1), 233, 309, 334; Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), 545; Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), 452 Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth (1830-86), 204, 238, 439 Diefenbaker, John George (1895-1979), 80,636 Disarmament, 5 Disciplines, academic. See Subjects Displacement, 151,461 Dobson, Henry Austin (1840-1921), 60

Index Donne, John (1572-1631), 204,241 Donnelly, Ignatius (1831-1901), 537 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821-81), 124 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1859-1930), 232, 262-3 Drama, 149,225, 434; in "Adventures" readers, 233; at Hart House, 395-6; significance of, 504-5 Dreiser, Theodore Herman Albert (1871-1945), 65 Drugs, 363, 392, 409, 468-9; teacher as drug pusher, 550 Drummond, William Henry (1854-1907), 585 Drury, Ernest Charles (1878-1968), 223 Dryden, John (1631-1700), 169 Dubos, Rene (1901-82), 345, 355-6 Duchamp, Marcel (1887-1968), 486 Dunne, Finley Peter (1867-1936), 235 Dystopia, 293 Ecclesiastes, Book of, 553 Eden, Garden of, 182, 205, 235, 386, 435, 453, 502, 509 Edgar, Pelham (1871-1948), xxvi, 33, 124,125, 471, 473, 521-2, 539, 554, 598 Edison, Thomas Alva (1847-1931), 229 Edman, Irwin (1896-1954), 626 Education, 23-4,185,186, 400, 472, 543; and cultural heritage, 155-6, 322, 544; and habit, 63-4, 322, 331, 424, 499-500, 530; history of, 500-3; importance of, 467; lifelong, 213, 303,311-12, 318, 329; and media, 157-8; as militant enterprise, 588; modern attitude to, 148-9,212, 332; and moral improvement, 526-7; nature of secondary, 109-10,111;

659

professional, 467-8; relation to society, xlix-xli, 58, 263-5, 27&, 279-80,426-9; structure in, 137-8, 376-7; student radical view of, 347; as subject of study, 62-3,128; and truth, 385, 390-1; vocational, 41-2, 45 aims of: adjustment theory of, 96-7,158, 447-8, 612-13; to be distinguished from social aims, 132,140; enlightenment theory of, 537-8; examine myths, 275; imaginative vision, 315-16, 322-3; individuality, 458; maladjustment, 48-9, 96, 98, no, 175-6,197, 321, 566; reality, 140-1,158, 163,190-1, 414-15, 425; social vision, 175,190 (see also Social vision) elementary: "back to basics" in, 582; "child-centred" theory of, 354, 356; NF recalls his, 406-10; nature of, 56,107-9, n1/ and social mythology, 289; theories of, 530-1. See also Schools, elementary liberal, xxv, xxviii-xxix, xxxv-xxxvi, 40-9,116,166, 289, 599-600; aim of, 62; arts and sciences in, 243, 273; and Classics, 216, 374; and freedom, 83, 490; in Huxley and Spencer, 269-70; and leisure, 500-1; modern idea of, 270-1; nature of, xlv, 278,308-10, 402, 512; and the past, 485; and professional education, 467-8 theory of, 106-7,108,129-30,1312,480; and class, 527-9; and "goals of teaching," 541; history of, 26572; and social vision, 265. See also Humanism, Progressivism universal: development of, 318-20, 328-9; nature of, 543-4; rationale for, 410, 559, 570-1/ 578

66o See also Educational contract, Knowledge Educational contract, xlvii, lii, liii, 372-3, 505-6 Eedy, Helen Elizabeth (1912-97), 29, 30 Egypt, 255,267 Einstein, Albert (1879-1955), 251, 275, 385, 588 Eisenhower, Dwight David (18901969), 84, 377 Elementary schools. See Schools, elementary Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans; 1819-80): Middlemarch (1871), 412; Silas Marner (1861), 234 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearnes) (18881965), 64, 77,114, 200, 217,235, 365, 368; on Arnold, 527; as conservative, 269,473; on poet as catalyst, 77, 356, 358; on poets, 439; on Protestantism, 118; Burnt Norton (1935), 640 Elites and elitism, 237, 305, 329, 415-16, 479,468, 486, 548, 588 Elizabethan literature, 200, 202, 204, 238, 338, 484 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82), 48, 235 Emmanuel College, 226, 517, 519; NF and, xxiii; NF as student of, xxvii-viii, 522 Empire Club of Canada, 401 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 60 Engagement. See Commitment Engels, Friedrich (1820-95), 369; Anti-Duhring (1878), 116 Engineering, 71,77, 467-8, 469, 558, 573 England, 264, 414, 423; Classical education in, 544. See also Great Britain English Institute, 59

Index English literature: in "Adventures" readers, 236; and Classics, 217-19; tradition of, 548 English (language): pidgin, 556, 580; teaching of, 409 English (discipline), 41, 61; criticism and, 59-60,193-4; Department of, at U of T, 482; goal of, xxxvii-xxxix passim, 63; history of, 595-6; Honour Course in, at U of T, 540-1, 554, 596-8; increased specialization in, 169; NF studies, xxv-xxvii, 240-1,492; solidarity of teachers of, 65; two aspects of, 134,145,150; university curriculum of, xlv-xlvi, 64, 324-5' 337 - teaching of in schools: curriculum for, 192-4, 205-6, 334, 418; as deductive study, 201; deficiencies in, 73,195-6; in elementary schools, 134-5,137- HO, 196-202, 203; as a foreign language, 155-6; remedial, 55-6; report on, in Ontario schools, 129-30; in secondary schools, 138, 202-6; and social mythology, 511-12 See also Literature, Reading, Writing Enlightenment, 537-8 Entropy, 275-6 Environment, 558, 572 Equality, 529 Erickson, Arthur Charles (b. 1924), 508 Eros, 288 Eskimos, 437 Establishment, 331, 349, 352, 367, 459/ 466,468, 546 Ethics, 177 Euclid (fl. 300 B.C.), 542 Europe, 576; cities in, 468; student power movement in, 546 Evolution, 269-70, 365; and

Index mythopoeic world picture, 275; and social theories, 292 Examinations, xxvii, xliv, 138; evils of, 10-13; value of, 126 Existentialism, 254-5, 257, 285, 364, 367, 368, 458, 505 Experiment, 133,137,146, 201,245, 274, 425 Extrasensory perception, 247 Failure, in examinations, 86-7, 280, 284, 299-300, 468 Fairley, Barker (1887-1986), 484 Fairley, Margaret (1885-1968), 484 Fairy tales, 135,151, 239, 438 Faith, 590 Fantasy literature, 477 Faraday, Michael (1791-1867), 82 Farber, Jerry (b. 1932): "The Student as Nigger," 327 Fascism, 44-5, 348, 349, 362, 364 Faulkner, William (1897-1962), 124, 155, 236 Feminism, 324, 614-15. See also Women Fiction, 64, 218; in "Adventures" readers, 230,232; NF's ideal programme of, 239; relation to fact, 457. See also Literature, popular Fielding, Henry (1707-54): Tom Jones (1749), 580 Films. See Movies Fisher, Douglas (b. 1919), 591, 592 Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), 284; Bouvard and Pecuchet (1881), 450; Madame Bovary (1857), 450 FLQ (Front de Liberation de Quebec), 402, 413 Folk songs, 238,443 Folk tales, 108,151,157, 239, 435, 437, 443, 471-2, 583, 584 Ford, Corey (1902-69), 232 Ford, Gerald (b. 1913), 483

661

Ford, Henry (1863-1947), 328, 366 Foreman, Phyllis (b. 1911), 6 Formalism, 614 France: literature of, 155, 205, 586-7; Resistance in, 287; separatism in, 515 Frankl, Viktor E. (1905-97), 357 Franklin, Benjamin (1706-90), 228, 229, 236, 289, 447, 545 Franklin and Marshall College, 317 Fraternity, 529, 531 Frazer, Sir James George (1854-1941), xxiv, xxviii, 177,217; The Golden Bough (1890-1915), 483 Freedom, 45, 459, 514, 529, 535; and authority, 332, 402-4, 414, 502-3; in curriculum, 480; as Englishspeaking value, 156; involves discipline, xlv, 63, 98-9,101, 424, 490-1, 582; and leisure, 82-3; Mill on, 373; Milton on, 116; source of, 278; of speech, 8-9, 43-4 - academic, xxxii, 99,111,167,189, 262, 326-7, 353, 404, 421, 589, 592, 601; and religion, 518; Sissons and, 223 French, Goldwin (b. 1923), 522, 593-4, 608, 624 French (language), 42; in Canada, 181 French Revolution, 162,268, 300, 565 Freshman and woman, character of, 17-20 Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), 263, 290, 348, 363, 504; The Future of an Illusion (1927), 243, 244, 257 Freudianism, 288, 372 Frost, Robert (1874-1963): Fire and Ice, 391; Stopping by Woods, 231-2 Frye, Catherine Mary Maud Howard (NF's mother; 1870-1940), xxiv, 542 Frye, Helen Kemp (1910-86), 29, 30, 609

662 Frye, (Herman) Northrop (1912-91): his books as teaching books, 508, 542; comes to love English, 240-1; education of, 143; ordination of, 522; as president of MLA, 483,484, 489; religious attitude of, xxviii (see also United Church); as teacher, xxiii-xxiv, xxviii, xxxiv-xxxv, xlii-xliv, 324-5, 380-1, 539, 600, 612-13 - works: "Academy without Walls," 600,605; Anatomy of Criticism (1957), xxxvi, xxxix, xli, 193, 605-6; "The Bridge of Language," 600; "The Changing Pace in Canadian Education," 600; The Critical Path (1971), xlvi-xlvii, xlix; "Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784-1984," 605; "The Day of Intellectual Battle," 604; ed., Design for Learning (1962), xl-xli, 130-42 passim, 228, 603; The Double Vision (1991), xlvii-xlix; The Educated Imagination (1963), xxxviii; "Fellowship Lecture: The Imaginative and the Imaginary," 339, 638; ed., Literature: Uses of the Imagination, xli-xlii, 227, 432-61 passim; The Modern Century (1967), xliv, xlix; On Education (1988), 599-606; On Teaching Literature (1972), xxxviii, xlii, 603; "A Revolution Betrayed," 604; "Speculation and Concern," xxxvii; "The Study of English in Canada," 604; Words with Power (1990), xlviii Frye, Vera (NF's sister; 1900-66), 555-6 Fuller, Buckminster (1895-1983), 525 Fundamentalism, 282, 362,632 Future, 315, 322, 352; as infinite present, 516; and past, 367,562; as

Index realized imagination, 485; shock of, 510; vision of possible, 575-6 Galileo (Galileo Galilei; 1564-1642), 211, 212, 251, 291, 534, 559-60, 573, 588 Games, 435, 582, 584 Gandhi, Mahatma (1869-1948), 315, 348, 361 Gandier, Alfred (1861-1932), 21 Gardner, David (b. 1928), 591, 592 Garibaldi, Giuseppe (1807-82), 361 General Motors, 423 General Course (U of T), 86,113,419. See also Pass Course Genesis, Book of, 255,271,282,632 Genre, 435, 442 Gentleman, as educational ideal, 412,44, 93,113, 415, 500 Geography, 108,146, 434, 446 Geology, 263, 282, 532, 632 Geometry, 250 Geophysics, 263 George VI (1895-1952), 606 German, 595 Germany, 45, 339, 360, 397,408, 596 Giacometti, Alberto (1901-66), 250 Gibbon, Edward (1737-94), 565 Gibran, Kahlil (1883-1931), 234 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (1836-1911) and Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900): The Pirates of Penzance (1880), 200 Gilson, Etienne (1884-1978), 125 Globe and Mail (Toronto), 616 God, 244,247,267; and creation, 512-13; ironic, 458; in modern thought, 253; and science, 276; as a word, 283,533 Godwin, William (1756-1836), 596 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832), 49, 484

Index Goldwater, Barry Morris (1909-98), 154 Good Samaritan, 295, 303 Googe, Barnabe (1540-94), 527 Gospels, 561 Gosse, Sir Edmund William (18451928), 60 Gothic novel, 337 Gould, Ernest (b. 1910), 31, 33 Graduate school, 225, 319, 390, 394, 416, 508, 540 Graduation, college: NF's addresses at, xxxix, xlvi, 600; significance of, 160-1,165, 210-14 passim, 179-80, 184, 311-12, 317-18, 384, 410. See also Convocation Grammar, 56,75,135, 201-2, 409, 548; Latinate, 595-6 Grant, John Webster (b. 1919), 609 Grant, William Carroll (1911-94), 6 Great Britain, 510,607; army of, 301; education in, 579-80, 595, 596; history of, 408; separatism in, 515. See also England Great man, 302. See also Leadership Great books curriculum, 46, 48, 170-1, 640-1 Greatness, in literature, 542 Greece: heritage of, 156, 355; mythology of, 436-7, 451, 532, 584; oracles in, 563 Greek, 45,72-3. See also Classics Grimm's fairy tales, 151 Group of Seven, 554 Guevara, Ernesto (Che) (1928-67), 361 Gurus, 497-8, 508, 537 Habit, 414; in education, 56, 63-4,94, 322, 331, 424, 530; two kinds of, 411, 499-500 Haggard, Rider (1856-1925), 343

663 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler (17961865): The Clockmaker (1836-40), 161 Ham, James (1920-97), 519 Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928), 26 Harris, Robin Sutton (1919-2000), xl, 608; English Studies at Toronto (1988), 595-9 passim Harrison, Jane Ellen (1850-1928), 217 Hart House, 6, 33,126, 395-9,495 Harvard, 589, 590; English at, 596; NF at, 53, 604 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-64), 239, 626; The Scarlet Letter (1850), 154, 234 Heaven, 251 Hebrews, 156; Epistle to the, on faith, 590 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831), 243, 246, 532 Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976), 251, 254, 367; on being, 577; on language, 493, 505, 577 Heisenberg, Wernel Karl (1901-76), 275 Hemingway, Ernest Millar (1899-1961), 124, 598; "The Killers" (1927), 124 Hemon, Louis (1880-1913): Maria Chapdelaine (1914 and 1916), 585 Henry, O. (William Sydney Porter; 1862-1910), 232, 235 Hephaestus, 220-1 Heraclitus (ca. 540-0. 480 B.C..), 347, 497 Herbert, George (1593-1633), 241 Hercules, 235 Heroes, 161-2, 293-4, 295-6, 315-16 Herrick, Robert (1591-1674), 241 Hesperides, Garden of, 205 Hilton, Conrad Nicholson (1887-1979), 229

Index

664

Himmler, Heinrich (1900-45), 48 Hindus, 516 Hinman, Charlton Joseph Kadio (b. 1911), 338 Hippies, 312, 321, 362,491, 547, 583 History, 72, 76, 77, 80, 93, 94,101, 310, 374, 446, 601; and concern, 258,275,290,292; detachment in, 274; of ideas, 596; impatience with, 366; importance of in Canada, 510; of language, 240; of literature, 472; Marxist view of, 458; scientific element in, 246,282; and St. Augustine, 482; teleology in, 365, 370; values in, 459 - teaching of: in primary school, 108, 146-7; at U of T, 520, 609 Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945), 92, 385, 606 Hodgetts, Alfred Bernie (1911-87), 5,6 Hodgetts, John Edwin (b. 1917), 297-8 Hoeniger, F. David (b. 1921), 633 Holy Roman Empire, 267 Homer (8th century B.C.), 50, 82,114, 149,151,153, 205, 217, 234, 240, 294, 365/ 451/ 584; language of, 532; Iliad, 96, 293, 563-4; Odyssey, 445, 45i Honour Courses (U of T), xxiii, xxv-xxvi, xxx, xxxiii, xlv, 37-8, 86, 93,113, 419, 472, 481-2, 619, 620-1; development of, 34; in English, 540-1,596-8; loss of, 609 Hook, Sidney (1902-89), 626 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-89), 79, 470 Hopkins, Mark (1802-87), 335, 375 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus; 65-8 B.C.), 400, 514, 580 Hosek, Chaviva (b. 1946), 608

Housman, Alfred Edward (1859-1936), 239 Howard, Rev. Eratus Seth (1833-1923), xxiv Howells, William Dean (1837-1920), 235 Hudson Review, 339

Hughes, Samuel Harvey Shirecliffe (b. 1913), 9 Hugo, Victor Marie (1802-85), 60 Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest) (1883-1917), 473 Humanism, educational theory of, 148-50, 267-8, 269, 374, 485-6, 488; Horace as exemplar of, 400 Humanist, NF as, 599-603 Humanities: and anxiety, 513, 514; authority in, 43-4, 50-2, 63, 496-508 passim; changing nature of research in, 335-44; and Christianity, 52; and concern, xlvii, 308; literature central to, 72,77-8; and the past, 510; professional problems for teachers of, 479-80, 489-90; role of, xxix, xxx, xlix, 57-8; and sciences, xxxvi-xxxvii, xxxix, 42, 91,114,153,173,190, 242-4, 246-7, 256, 258, 274, 277, 332-3, 374-5, 519-20; value of university study of, 78-9,93, 558-9, 571-3 Hume, David (1711-76), 565 Humphrey, Hubert (1911-78), 327 Hungary, 287 Hutchins, Robert Maynard (1899-1977), 40, 641; on U.S. education as playpen, 270,319,408 Huxley, Aldous (1894-1963), 28; Ape and Essence (1948), 293; Ends and

Means (1937), 366 Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-95), 95, 243, 269

Index Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906), 586; A Doll's House (1879), 320 Ideas, importance of, 208 Identity, 200; as central myth, 461; personal, 295-6, 304, 423, 424. See also Individual Ideology, xlvii, xlviii, 58,268, 365, 446, 488, 601; transcending of, 612, 614-15 Illusion, no, 533, 567 Imagery: in the Bible, 444; cyclical and dialectical patterns of, 203; poetic, 203, 205, 438-9. See also Archetypes Imagination, 309,476, 558, 567, 572; and arts, 248,402; and belief, 445; changing meaning of, 564; consensus in human, 205; and literature, 145,197, 200, 203, 227,228, 237, 439-40; realization of, 485; role of, xxxviii, 95, 80-2, 206, 316, 322-3, 432-3; in school years, 147,150, 153,158-9 Imitation, 253, 440, 457 Immortality, 208, 294 Impersonality. See Detachment India, 163,175,265, 342, 374,404, 414, 423, 460; literature of, 205 Indians, North American, 454; mythology of, 435-7, 451 Individual, and society, 370-2, 428, 458, 5°3/ 512, 514, 53*/ 564-6- See also Identity Individualism, 308-9, 332, 352; and contemporary radicalism, 372 Indoctrination, 533 Information retrieval, 430 Innis, Harold Adams (1894-1952): The Bias of Communication (1951), 142 Institute of Bio-Medical Electronics, 307

665

Institutions, 353, 368, 372 Intellect, and achievement, 300-1, 305; Huxley on, 95 Intellectuals, 61; in politics, 562, 575 Intelligence, 94-5,197; source of practical, 173-5 Interdisciplinary relations. See Scholarship, specialization in; Subjects, relations between Introversion, 602-3 Iran, 588 Ireland, literature of, 587 Irishman, stereotype of, 364 Irony, 135,151, 203, 230, 256-7, 293, 310, 441, 442, 443, 449, 454, 455, 477; in elementary education, 477; in modern life, 579; Socratic, 549 Isaiah, 244 Isherwood, Christopher (1904-86), 124 Islam, 226, 573, 588 Israel, 511 Italy: literature of, 205; NF in, 528 Ivory tower, 49, 75,262, 284-5, 49/ 384, 425, 468 Jack the Giant Killer, 451-2 Jackson, Robert William Brierley (1909-79), 189,190 Jacobs, Leland Blair (1907-92), xlii, 525, 526 James I of England (1566-1625), 561, 575 James, Henry (1843-1916), 124,152, 155, 235, 454,471; The American Scene (1907), 75 James, William (1842-1910), 49,124, 189 Japan, 163,175,265, 414, 423; puppet theatre in, 504 Jargon, 73-4, 76, 534, 547, 579; academic, 581

666 Jaynes, Julian (b. 1935), 563 Jeans, Sir James Hopwood (1877-1946), 78 Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826), 48, 84, 362-3 Jehovah's Witnesses, 354 Jesus, 66,78,181,282, 287, 294-5, 3°3> 355, 444, 445, 537, 549, 561 Jewkes, William Thomas (b. 1928), xli, 432 Jews, 333, 409, 584 Job,l Joblin, Kingsley (b. 1912), 517 John Birch Society, 392 Johnson, Samuel (1709-84), 236, 281, 408, 429, 468, 537, 564-5, 596; Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), 270, 637 Jones, Sir William (1746-94), 596 Jonson, Ben (1572-1637), 241 Joshua, Book of, 521 Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 339 Journalism, 196-7, 530 Journals, of opinion, 208 Jowett, Benjamin (1817-93), 371 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882-1941), 114, 284, 561, 574; Dubliners (1914), 235; Finnegans Wake (1939), 197,251; Ulysses (1922), 124,198, 514 Judaeo-Christian tradition, 355 Judaic studies, 226 Jungk, Robert (b. 1913): Brighter than a Thousand Suns (1958), 173 Jupiter (god), 217 Kafka, Franz (1883-1924): In the Penal Colony (1919), 293 Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), 246, 252, 37L 532 Kawabata, Yasunari (1899-1972), 474

Index Keats, John (1795-1821), 77, 205,235,

597 Keller, Helen (1880-1968), 228, 545 Kelly, John Michael (b. 1911), 226 Kemp, Helen. See Frye, Helen Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (1917-63), 315 Kenney-Wallace, Geraldine (b. 1943), 616 Kenyan Review, 339 Keppel, Francis (1916-90), 192, 632 Kern, Edith (b. 1912), 641 Keyes, Gordon (b. 1920), 481-2; Christian Faith and the Interpretation of History (1966), 482 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich (1894-1971), 84 Kierkegaard, S0ren (1813-55), 254, 367,458, 560; Either/Or (1843), 256 King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929-68), 315 King, William Lyon Mackenzie (1874-1950), 571 King's College, London, 34 Kinsey, Charles Gwyn (b. 1914), 21 Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936), 230, 235 Klaeber, Friedrich (1863-1954), 484 Knight, Charles Norman (1910-95), xxv, 21, 29, 30 Knight, George Wilson (1897-1985), 125 Knowledge: as better questions, 211; general, as higher social mythology, 289-90; never pure, 391; Newman on liberal vs. useful, 373; Plato on, 265-6; speculative and practical, xlvi, 171-5,181-2; true and false, 323; utilitarian view of, 271; and wisdom, 51, 52, 67-8, 163-4,273, 375,488; worth of all, 261-2, 272

Index Knox, John (ca. 1513-72), 30 Knox College, 226 Koch, Kenneth (b. 1925), 476 Koestler, Arthur (1905-83), 345, 356, 357; Darkness at Noon (1940), 293 Kogan, Pauline (pseud.): Northrop Frye: The High Priest of Clerical Obscurantism (1969), 522 Koran, 277, 531 Kropotkin, Prince Petr Alekseevich (1842-1921), 361 Kushner, Eva (b. 1929), 616 Labour. See Work Lagerkvist, Par Fabian (1891-1974), 474 Laissez-faire, 42, 49, 272, 278 Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864), 60 Langer, Susanne (1895-1985): Feeling and Form (1953), 250 Langford, Norman (1914-95), 33 Language, 479, 515; community of, 535; fossilized aspects of, 556-7, 581-2; Heidegger on, 505; importance of, 493, 569-72, 577-81; and music, 251; and social class, 555-6; and thinking, 559; types of, 532-3. See also Literature, Words Languages, modern, 129; question of early learning of, 132; as subjects of study, 337, 339; teaching of, 487, 489, 491-2; at U of T, 520, 609 Laporte, Pierre (1921-70), 604 Latin, 41, 42, 45, 72-3, 94,107,148, 163, 318, 328, 411, 414, 499, 514, 530; and English vocabulary, 240; influence on English studies, 595-6; as status symbol, 579-80. See also Classics Lautenslager, Earl (1906-73), 30 Law, and language, 74

667

Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885-1930), 235, 254, 255, 561, 574 Leacock, Stephen (1869-1944), 376, 471, 497, 585 Leadership, 302, 562, 594 Learned journals, 169,170,486 Learned Societies of Canada, 551, 552 Learning process, 108-9,131/ *89/ 417,460; and habit, 411; pioneering and consolidating forces in, 135-41,145 Leavis, Frank Raymond (1895-1978), 243 Lectures, 327, 330, 417 Lee, Alvin (b. 1930), 551-2,608; The Guest-Hall of Eden (1972), 551. See also Lee, Hope Lee, Hope (1929-98), and Alvin Lee, ed., Wish and Nightmare, xli, 432, 451, 455 Leisure, and the arts, 82-3; and education, 265, 303, 500-1; increase of, 213; and work, 263-4, 271, 529 Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich (1870-1924), 150,155, 291, 348, 361 LePan, Douglas V. (1914-98), 260 Levi-Strauss, Claude (b. 1908), 532 Lewis, C(live) S(taples) (1898-1963), 471, 477 Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair (1885-1951): Main Street (1920), 234 Liberalism, 180,267, 473; NF and, 601 Liberals, and education, 42,43,44, 45 Liberty. See Freedom Libraries, 336 Library of Congress, 336 Life: and death, 183,276; and dream, 398 Lincoln, Abraham (1809-65), 84,115, 233, 236, 239, 240, 289, 363, 545 Line, John (1885-1970), xxvii

668 Linguistics, 135,193, 201, 341, 427, 547, 595-6 Lippmann, Walter (1889-1974), 46 Literature, 13, 80, 93,130,268, 308, 310, 427, 535, 558, 573; authority in, 43, 589; Bible and, 443-4,492; centrality of, 72,77-8, 309-10, 333-4, 375; children's, 337, 525-6, 532; as concerned, xlvi-xlvii, xlviii-xlix, 275, 292-4, 341, 560, 573; and criticism, 60-1; history of, 472; and ideology, 614-15; and imagination, 197, 200, 203, 206, 237, 432-3, 439-40, 567; impersonality in, 77,283-4; as informing language, 72,155, 242, 249, 273-4, 491; meanings in, 340-1; and myth, 443, 473, 511, 532; Nobel prizes in, 586; pastness of, 374, 485, 506, 536; Foe's influence on modern, 364-5; and reality, 227, 253,457-8; sex in, 288; structure of, 256-7 (see also Structure); as total context, 503-4, 614; value judgments in, 336-8, 343, 526-7 - popular, 337, 435, 471; sex and violence in, 231; as social mythology, 227, 229 - teaching of: and "Adventures" readers, 227-36; as coherent structure, 138, 203-4, 433-5,440-3; as deductive study, xl, 147; in elementary schools, 108,150-2,153, 476-8, 535; important goal of, xxxvii-xxxix, xlix, 158-9, 206, 445-6, 449-50, 459-60, 526-7, 547-50; NF's ideal programme for, 238-41; and progressivism, 227, 237; in secondary schools, 109-10, 139, *53-7; theory of, 147-50; and total verbal experience of student, 449, 451-2, 480, 490, 511-12; in

Index university, 78-9,144, 273 See also Criticism, English, Language, Poetry, Words Locke, John (1632-1704), 251, 372 Loeb Classical Library, 215 London, Jack (1876-1916), 155, 585 Lord, Albert Bates (1912-91): The Singer of Tales (1960), 157 Lovelace, Richard (1619-58), 241, 410 Loyalty, 351, 368 Lucian (ca. A.D. 120-180), 218 Luddites, intellectual, 121, 376 Luther, Martin (1483-1546), 519 Lyell, Sir Charles (1797-1875), 534 Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich (1898-1976), 291 McCall, Christina (b. 1935), 591, 592 McCarthy, Joseph (1908-57), 164, 2 79, 3!3, 363, 560, 631; era of, 385, 569, 601 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron (1800-59), 565 MacCallum, Reid (1897-1949), xxvi, 124,125 Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527): The Prince (1532), 266, 528 McGill University, 29, 53 McGinley, Phyllis (1905-78), 234 MacKinnon, Archie Roderick (b. 1927), 143,145,150,153 MacKinnon, Frank (b. 1919): The Politics of Education (1960), 132 McLennan, William Gordon Lawson (b. 1944), 89 McLuhan, Marshall (1911-80), 307, 486, 597; on the book, 340,419; on hot and cool media, 557, 564, 572; on medium is message, 248-9; The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), 173-4; The Mechanical Bride (1951), 533 McMaster University, 554, 616

Index MacNeice, Louis (1907-63), 124,126 Macpherson, (Jean) Jay (b. 1931): Four Ages of Man: The Classical

Myths (1962), 632 Macpherson, Jessie Hall Knox (1900-69), 177-8, 382-3, 608 Macpherson Report, xxxiii Mallarme, Stephane (1842-98), 439 Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471): Morte Darthur, 90

Malraux, Andre (1901-76), 124,126 Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766-1834), 275 Manitoba, universities in, 212 Mao Tse-tung or Zedong (1893-1976), 361, 387, 392 Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979), 363 Maritain, Jacques (1882-1973), 46, 125 Martin, James Delmer (b. 1905), 23-5 Marvell, Andrew (1621-78), 241,400 Marx, Karl (1818-83), 49,124,125, 257, 268, 290, 291, 295, 313, 361, 362, 363, 368; and study, 467; Das Kapital (1867), 84, 349; Theses on Feuerbach (1932), 290 Marxism, 254, 324, 393, 511, 562; and anxiety, 257, 277; attitude to literature, 150, 350, 560, 573, 614; attitude to science, 291,292; and concern, 285,286, 288, 290; doctrinaire, 305, 601; and history, 458; mythology of, 257, 446; and study, 467; of the 19205 and 19305, 309, 327-8, 348, 360-5 passim, 601; Utopian, 369-70 Masefield, John (1878-1967), 204,234 Massey Report, 57 Mathematics, 50,129,155,170,227, 237,433, 491; as an art, 251; curriculum of, 192; in humanist education, 268; and imagination,

669

76; as language of sciences, xxxix, 72,77-8,134, 246,251,252, 273-4, 535; Plato on, 265; social necessity of, 543-4, 559, 570-1; structure in, 138,146, 434 Maturity, meaning of, 370-1, 372, 413-14 Maupassant, Guy de (1850-93), 232 Media, mass, 140, 233, 272, 277, 289, 326, 603; and the arts, 248-9; and definition of news, 422-4; in education, 64; effects of, 419-20, 428,430; electronic, vs. print, 340, 564; and social mythology, 447-9; and student unrest, 392 Medicine, 71 Meditation, 534 Meighen, Arthur (1874-1960), 571 Mellon Foundation, 598 Melville, Herman (1819-91), 124,199, 235,236,239; Moby-Dick (1851), 154 Memory, 63, 94,136-8,145-6,147, 157- 434 Merlin, 282 Metaphor, 60, 200, 346, 439, 456; in conceptual discourse, 172, 509, 510, 572, 577; and contemporary literature, 65; content of arts as, 252-3; importance of, 196, 532-3; in science, 134 Metaphysics, 251, 252-3 Methodism, xxiv-xxv, 15, 91, 607-10 passim Meyerson, Martin (b. 1922), 345, 357, 358 Michelangelo (Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti; 1475-1564), 50 Michelson, Albert Abraham (1852-1931), 283 Michener, James (1907-97): Hawaii (1959), 232

6yo Microbiology, 255 Middle Ages, 72,200,275,278,442, 530; as closed society, 305; liberal arts in, 268; mythology of, 291 Middleton, Peter Douglas (b. 1944), 260 Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 162, 84, 153, 473: on liberty, 373, 502 Milton, John (1608-74), 43/ 5*, 84, 115,149, 205, 236, 241, 267, 359, 365, 384, 458, 472, 519, 565, 595, 596; on education, 264; on freedom, 116, 491; on reason, 63,164,172, 502; Aeropagitica (1644), 116, 396, 495; Lycidas (1637), l69; Of Education (1644), 116; On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629), 246; Paradise Lost (1667), 73, 77,182,199, 220,254, 440, 502, 503 Mimesis, 149 Mind: awakening of at university, 95-6, 98-9; creative, 100-1; faculties of, 95, 372; Plato on, 371 Miro, Joan (1893-1983), 250 MLA (Modern Language Association), xl, 1,153, 483-93 passim.; awful papers at, 474-5 Modern age: change in, 508-9; characteristics of, 161-2,173-4, 183,205,208,212-13; introverted, 602-3; revolutionary, 174-5; technology in, 255 Modern Philology, 339 Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; 1622-73): Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1671), 438,547; Le Malade Imaginaire (1673), 247-8 Moncton, xxiii, xxv Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-92), 48, 49 Montgomery, Lucy Maud (1874-1942): Anne of Green Gables (1908), 169

Index Montreal, 170 Moore, Arthur Bruce Barbour (b. 1906), 297, 591,608 Moore, George Edward (1873-1958), 177 Moral law, and nature, 255 Morality: and convention, 555; in imaginative works, 203, 442-3; and knowledge, 164,171-2, 468; and nature, 255; in scholarship, 280, 281-5,286-96 passim, 421; in society, 530 More, Thomas, St. (1478-1535): Utopia (1516), 266-7, 371, 372, 612-13 Morgan, James Richard Henry (b. 1907), 189 Morley, Edward Williams (1838-1923), 283 Morris, William (1834-96): on the arts, 269, 501; News from Nowhere (1891), 361 Moses, 359 Movies, 337, 419, 455, 587, 597 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-91), 57, 503 Murphy, Arthur Edward (1901-62), 48 Murray, Gilbert (1866-1957), 217 Music, 249, 253, 352, 383, 434; and convention, 250-1; ideal, 503-4; and literature, 238; in Middle Ages, 268; NF and, 240,407; Plato on, 265; rhythm in, 440; as structured subject, 433 Mythology: in the Bible, 444; Classical, 217,218,338; definition of, 443, 460,583-4; and ideology, 614-15; as language of concern, 275-6, 289-90, 308, 374-5; and literature, xxxviii, 60, 65, 227, 256-7, 446, 473; as mythos, 436; and religion, 283; types of, 532-4, 578

Index - social: and education, 227-9, 237-8, 446-50, 453, 511-13; and literature, 154-5; nature of, 80,206,277, 289, 457; open and closed, 310 - study of: importance of, 239, 443-4; in primary school, 108,135,151, 153,202, 477; in secondary school, 193, 203-4 See also Archetypes Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), 567 Napoleonic wars, 301 National Endowment for the Humanities, 490 Natural theology, 246 Nature: in the arts, 253; changing views of, 253-4; and civilization, 409-10, 440-1, 577-8; God and, 276; Huxley on, 270; NF's view of, xxxv; scientific view of, 145, 244, 245, 251, 252, 253, 254, 274, 341, 534 Nazis, xlvii, 43, 44,162,163,172,175, 254, 261, 265, 364, 368, 414, 423, 494; and anti-Jewish propaganda, 409; Neo-Nazis, 300; resistance to, 287 Negroes, 454; emancipation of, 287, 294, 309, 313, 3*5, 328, 329, 348, 363; and student movement, 347, 377, 380; stereotype of, 364, 452-3. See also Slavery Nelles, Samuel Sobieski (1823-87), 118, 608, 609, 610 New Brunswick, 108, 241, 595 New Criticism, 193, 351, 597 New Left, 327-8, 348, 360, 361 New Testament, 287 New Yorker, 182,197, 541 New York Times, 120-1 Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801-90), xlviii, 61,91,113, 267; on the gentleman, 269, 270,415, 500; on the university and the church,

6/1 168; on useful knowledge, 373, 374; Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 470; The Idea of a University (1873), 116, 353; Lead Kindly Light, 418 News, 312, 323, 422 Newspapers, 557, 581. See also Media Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), 43, 50, 82, loo, 213, 256, 275, 519 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope (1894-1981), 192, 632 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-1900), 98, 254, 529; on death of God, 533; The Birth of Tragedy (1872), 125 Nigeria, 598 Nightmares, 455 Nineteenth century: beliefs of, 352; NF teaches, 472, 540 Nixon, Richard Milhous (1913-94), 327, 4H Nobel Prize, 474, 586, 598 Nonconformists, 117,118, 473, 482 Nonfiction: in "Adventures" readers, 232-3; ideal programme of, 239-40 Norse myths, 239 North America: anti-intellectualism in, 588; education in, 97-8,117, 128-9,231; protest movement in, 321; social unrest in, 391, 393 Norwood, Gilbert (1880-1954), 125, 224 Nuremberg trials, 287 Nursery rhymes, 437-8 Nursing, 225 Objectivity. See Detachment OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), 187, 603, 640 Old Testament, 240, 437, 511, 584 Omar, Caliph (ca. 581-644), 277 Ontario, 143; curriculum research in, 188; education in, xl-xli, xlvii-xlviii, 55-6,117,130,131-2,

6/2

223; hostility to professors in, 40; NF and, 474; teaching of English in, 204 Ontario Curriculum Institute, 127, 187-91, 603 Ontario Housing Committee, 223 Opie, lona (b. 1923) and Peter (1918-92): The Lore and Language of School Children (1959), 198 Oram, Helen Mary (Mrs. Morrison; b. 1905), 31 Orient, 295, 304, 509; painting in, 157; pidgin English in, 580 Oriental studies, 226,609 Original sin, 356 Originality, 585 Orpheus and Eurydice, 436 Orton, J.E., 464 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair; 1903-50): 1984 (1949X 84, 293, 352, 366, 568-70, 575, 579, 580, 581 Over-production, 423 Overstreet, Henry Allen (1875-1970): The Mature Mind (1949), 413, 640 Ovid (Publius Ovidus Naso) (43 B.C.-A.D. 17 or 18), 94, 338, 400 Oxford University, 329, 341-2, 376, 520; Bodleian Library at, 337; English studies at, 126,430, 595, 596; NF at, xxiii, xxviii, xlii, 470-1, 472 Packard, Vance Oakley (b. 1914): The Hidden Persuaders (1959), 121 Paderewski, Ignace Jan (1860-1941), 554 Painting, 50-1, 57, 82, 249, 361, 434, 514; as informing language, 249, 250; modern, 64,240,395; nineteenth-century, 352; picturesque, 585; Plato on, 266; representation in, 253; still life, 151 Palgrave, Francis Turner (1824-97):

Index ed., The Golden Treasury of English Lyrics (1861,1896), 241 Paranormal, attractions of, 534-5 Paris, student unrest in, 328, 346 Pascal, Blaise (1623-62), 560 Pass Course (U of T), xxiii, xxvii, 29, 34-9, 619 Past: alienating elements in, 487; continuity with, 355, 459, 485; fixation on, 322; flight from, 366-7; and future, 182-3; as rear-view mirror, 510-11, 516; relevance of, 310, 323, 548 Pastoral, 293,443 Pastoral myth, 228, 289, 453, 509, 530 Pater, Walter Horatio (1839-94), 47O Paul, St., 191, 513 Pearson, Lester Bowles (1897-1972), 80 Pedantry, 284 PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists), 589 Perelman, Sidney Joseph (1904-79), 202, 239 Persona, 457,505 Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter) (d. A.D. 66), 218 Ph.D., xlv, 71,144,169,195,215, 319, 340, 342, 343-4, 480; NF and, 539 Philistinism, 383 Philology, 220,258, 339, 341, 596 Philosophy, 72,76,77,80, 93,94, 226, 254,265, 308, 310, 352, 374, 402; and concern, 258, 275,290, 292; first question of, 577; history of, 310; and language, 60,249, 274; NF studies, xxv-xxvi, 240, 410, 548; scientific element in, 246; at U of T, 520,609 Physician, 174, 377 Physics, 50, 77, 82,133, 244, 255, 258, 263,408, 558, 573 Physiology, 408

Index Piaget, Jean (1896-1980), 417 Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973), 82 Planck, Max Karl Ernst (1858-1947), 163, 275 Plato (427-346 B.C.), 85,100,112, 201, 219,267, 340,440,484,498, 500, 532; on the arts, 265-6; on Atlantis, 267; dialogue in, 262, 342, 355, 376, 496-7, 520, 538; and teaching, 549-50; Apology, 549; Laws, 113, 497, 549; Meno, 612; Phaedo, 287; Republic, 115,174,175, 266, 267, 268, 371, 372; Symposium, 497 Plautus, Titus Maccius (ca. 250-184 B.C.), 219 Plot, 436 PMLA, 484, 486-7 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49), *54< *55/ 239; "The Poetic Principle" (1845), 364-5 Poetry, 50, 248, 249, 601; in "Adventures" readers, 229-30, 232, 233, 234; centrality of in literary training, 196-201, 437-9, 547; children's affinity for, 136,157, 543; and the Classics, 217-18; and convention, 195; and cosmological constructs, 200-1, 252; impersonality in, 114; NF's ideal programme of, 238-9; Plato on, 265, 266; powers needed for, 76, 473-4; and prose, 156-7, 196; revival of oral, 363; rhythm in, 440; in secondary school, 204-5; social milieu of, 161; use of words in, 77-8,79; thought in, 632; and tradition, 32; translation of, 216. See also Literature Police, 393, 397, 467 Political Economy, Department of (UofT),226 Political theory, 93, 274, 308, 310, 374, 518; and concern, 275, 341 Politics, and centralization, 575, 604

673

Pollution, 409-10, 468, 511, 560, 570, 574/ 590 Pollution Probe, 427 Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 239, 400; Essay on Criticism (1711), 98, 612; Rape of the Lock (1712), 598 Popular culture. See under Culture Pornography, 337, 392, 585 Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885-1972), 33, 2i7/ 235. 365- 473; Cantos (1919-69), 363 Pratt, E(dwin) J(ohn) (1882-1964), xxvi-xxvii, 124, 471, 473, 522, 539, 591/ 598; The Truant, 494 Present: infinite, 516; realization of, 316, 322-3 Priestley, F(rancis) E(thelbert) L(ouis) (1905-88), 596 Primitive societies, 435, 437, 438 Princeton: Institute of Advanced Studies at, 61; NF at, xlii Professors. See Scholarship; Teachers, relation with students; Teaching, at university Progress: doctrine of, xlix-li, 211, 213, 285, 290, 292, 318, 365, 366; in education, 490 Progressive education, xliv, 44-9 passim, 57, 98,107, no, 131,132, 140,199, 227, 380; revolt against, 237 Prohibition, 409, 555 Proletariats, 314, 319, 320, 324, 329, 330 Prometheus, 220-1 Propaganda, 206, 228,240,272, 323, 433, 448, 533, 578-9; useless, 409 Propertius, Sextus (ca. 5O-ca. 16 B.C.), 400 Prophecy, 355, 492-3, 537, 586 Prose: importance of good, 32,76; misconceptions about, 156-7,196, 198,199, 204, 438, 547

674 Protestantism, 28,118-19,253 Proust, Marcel (1871-1922), 152; Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27), 425, 506 Proverbs, in Bible, 429, 492 Psychiatry, 339 Psychology, 43,177, 226, 255, 263, 283, 308, 310, 341, 343, 374-5, 471; and concern, 275, 285 Public Health, 225 Publishing, 587-8; increase in scholarly, 169-70,194 Punch, 556 Puritans, 362, 557, 582 Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937): Gravity's Rainbow (1973), 512 Pyramus and Thisbe, 338 Pythagoras (6th century B.C.), 251, 497

Quakers, 354, 538, 556, 581-2 Quebec, 637; literature in, 585; Quiet Revolution in, 422; separatism in, 348, 362, 515 Quebec Act, 510 Queen's Quarterly, 298 Queen's University, 160,163,165, 345- 346 Questions, 497-8, 543, 549; silly, 475 Rabelais, Francois (ca. 1494-ca. 1553), 389 Racism, 313, 348, 362, 402, 580 Radcliffe, Ann (1764-1823), 337 Radicals, 346, 348-50, 353, 361-72 passim, 392, 412-13, 421, 562-3. See also Student protest movement Radio, 434, 587 Rationalization, 402 Ray, Margaret Violet (1898-1982), 37 Reader's Digest, no, 229 Reading, 73,109, 535; contemporary

Index theories of, 486, 611, 612; and community of readers, 613; importance of, 429-31; process of, 450-1; social role of, 446, 449, 490, 512, 530, 543-4, 559- 57O-1, 57& teaching of, 206, 231, 476-7; as translation, 537 Reagan, Ronald Wilson (b. 1911), xxxii, 389-7, 392, 558, 575, 594 Real self. See Identity, Individual Realism, 253, 477; socialist, 309, 350, 363 Reality: and appearance, 139; existential view of, 254-5; reality principle, 145; two types of, 227,332-3; and university studies, xxxvi, 158, 163, 206, 265, 425, 592,606 Reaney, James (b. 1926): A Suit of Nettles (1958), 199-200 Reason, 164, 248, 402, 502 Rebel, The, 489 Recreation, 536-7 Reeve, Clara (1729-1807), 337 Relevance, 310, 327, 342, 347, 351, 374, 392,404, 425,459,467, 546, 612-13 Religion, 274, 352, 374, 398, 514; and art, 81-2; and class structure, 286; and concern, 275, 276, 287, 288, 292, 294-5, 308, 310, 333, 341; and contemporary protest movements, 362; Freud on, 243, 257; and leisure, 83, 500; and science, 243, 246-7, 282-3 - and education: in Canada, 88-9, 222-3; confusion between, 367, 526, 527; in university, 19, 33; at U of T, 117-19, 225-6, 518-19, 597, 609-10; at VC, 91-2,186, 482, 592 See also Bible, Church Religious Knowledge, 93, 597 Renaissance, 200, 219, 420, 442; education in, 266-7, 502-3, 528

Index Repetition. See Habit Republicans, 84 Research. See Scholarship Restoration, 472 Revolution, 323; always betrayed, 403; nature of in twentieth century, 309, 313, 349-50, 351, 354-5, 36o, 605-6 Rhetoric, 60, 80,109, 202, 239, 240, 353, 448, 600 Rhythm, 440 Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong) (1893-1979), 474; Practical Criticism (1929), 614 Richler, Mordecai (b. 1931), 586 Riddles, 439 Riley, James Whitcomb (1849-1916), 230 Rite of passage, 179-80 Ritual, 401, 404, 460, 466-7 Roaring twenties, 312 Robbe-Grillet, Alain (b. 1922), 366 Robertson, John Charles (1864-1956),

33 Robins, John Daniel (1884-1952), xxvi, 124, 471, 494, 495, 522, 554, 598 Roles, 457-8 Roman Catholic Church, 180, 354, 362 Romance, 135,151-2, 203, 230, 257, 441, 442, 443, 449, 452, 477, 584; nature of its vision, 292-4 Romantic movement, 201, 249,473; and imagination, 464 Rome, ancient, 255; relation to Greece, 267. See also Classics Rosenberg, Stuart (b. 1922), 299, 300, 301, 303 Ross, Murray (b. 1912), 389, 390 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78), 286, 290, 368, 372, 458, 565; Emile (1762), 116

675 Rowland, Henry Edgar (b. 1910), 29, 32 Royal Society of Canada, 170, 223 Royal Bank Award, xxxiv, li, 507-8 Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 269 Russell, Bertrand (1872-1970), 554 Russia, 155, 360, 366, 428; effect of on North American education, 97, 320, 603; literature of, 218; Western views of, 568-9, 601. See also Soviet Union Ryerson, (Adolphus) Egerton (1803-82), 117, 118, 222, 518,

519,

596,607, 608,610 St. Michael's College, 91,125, 226, 609 St. John's College, Annapolis, 40, 46, 48 Samson and Delilah, 445 Sandburg, Carl (1878-1967): Fog, 450-1 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80), 245, 254, 367 Saskatchewan, 42, 311 Satire, 441 Saturday Review, 123 Saunders, (Margaret) Marshall (1861-1947): Beautiful Joe (1893), 169 Schaefer, William (b. 1928), 483 Scholarship (research), 12, 59, 367; and administration, 302, 314, 321-2, 332, 551-2; authority of, 277-8; changing nature of, 61, 70-1, 89-90,168-70,194-5; and concern, 285, 288-96 passim; as creative, 474, 493; and leisure, 83, 265, 500; morality in, 281-5, 286-96 passim; specialization in, 258, 262, 273, 290-1, 306, 309, 343, 486-7, 551-2; and the student body, 92-3;

676

and teaching, xliii, 112,129-30, 192-4, 322, 375-6, 416-17, 462-4, 474-5. 493, 508, 541, 542. See also Criticism Schools: derivation of word, 83, 265, 500 - elementary, 189; learning process in, 136-8,145-7, 4i7~J8; relation with other divisions, 188; science in, 132,136-7,138,146; structured curriculum in, 133-5; and student interest, 139; teaching of English/ literature in, 108,150-2,153,193, 196-202, 203, 476-8, 535 - secondary, 189; and humanities, 310; learning process in, 138-41, 152-7; science in, 140; teaching of English/literature in, 109-10,138, 1 39» !53~7' 202-6; and university, 36,128-9,188,195 See also Curriculum, Education, Teachers, Teaching Sciences, 76, 94,130,140,141,197, 203, 211, 237, 269, 367, 402, 434, 600, 601; and alienation, 254-5, 534-5; applied, 71-2, 81, 255, 275; authority in, 496, 588-9; as communal activity, 256; and concern, 257-8, 291, 292, 559-60, 573-4, 588-9; and the creative arts, 81-3, 247-8, 358; diagrams in, 250; effect of development of, 42; existential view of, 254-5; history of, 310; and humanities, xxxvi-xxxvii, xxxix, 50-2, 91,153,173,190, 242-4, 246-7, 258, 274, 277, 332-3, 374-5, 519-20; as mathematical subjects, 72; and mythology, 275-6, 532; and nature, 145,251,252,253,274,341; Nobel prizes in, 586; objectivity in, 43, 63, 77, 93,114, 230, 244-6, 281, 293; paradigm shifts in, 100; and

Index progress, 47-8; theses in, 344, 480; truth in, 308; and values, 446,459; verbal and mathematical, 134 - teaching of: in elementary schools, 132,133-4,136-7,138,146; and progressivism, 227; report on, in Ontario schools, 129; role of experiment in, 201; in secondary schools, 140 SCM (Student Christian Movement), 9, 33,126 Scotland, 348, 472 Scott, Duncan Campbell (1862-1947), 598 Scott, Edmund Forrest (b. 1911), 5 Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832): Guy Mannering (1815), 580; The Lady of the Lake (1810), 449 Sculpture, 249, 250,266, 514 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), xxxi, xxxii, 386-7, 392, 547 Seaborn, Robert Lowder (b. 1911), 9 Semantics, 79-80 Seminars, 309, 330, 380, 417, 497 Senior (college), character of, 23-4 Sense, 145 Service, Robert William (1874-1958), 585 Sewanee Review, 339 Sex and violence, 231, 235,409, 453-4, 514 Sexual energies, 288 Sexual revolution, 312 Shahane, M.D., 21 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), 43, 5i, 77,124,125,199, 203, 268, 337, 338, 359- 369, 458, 485, 504, 506, 526, 527, 546, 554, 564, 565, 598; age of, 586, 595; study of, 472, 536, 537; All's Well That Ends Well (ca. 1603-4), 162; Coriolanus (1608), 501, 505, 529; Cymbeline (1608), 504;

Index Hamlet (1604-5), 73/ X39/ 24*>/ 293, 429,457, 485, 504, 505; King Lear (1604-5), 96, 282, 440, 503, 538; Macbeth (1603-9), 273, 358, 427, 561, 574-5; Measure for Measure (1603-9), 416, 445; A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), 252, 456-7; Othello (1604), 169; Romeo and Juliet (1594-8), 233, 442; Sonnets (1609), 204; The Tempest (1611), 442, 477-8, 504; The Winter's Tale (1608), 504 Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), 26, 347, 504; and evolution, 275, 292; Man and Superman (1901-3), 34 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 471; Defence of Poetry (1821), 292, 356 Sherlock Holmes. See Doyle Short stories, 232 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86), 73, 484, 595 Sieyes, Emmanuel Joseph (1748-1836), 636 Simile, 200, 439 Simpson, N(orman) F(rederick) (b. 1919): The Hole (1964), 260 Sirluck, Ernest (b. 1918), 494 Sissons, Charles Bruce (1879-1965), 222-4; Bi-lingual Schools in Canada (1917), 223; Church and State in Canadian Education (1959), 223; Egerton Ryerson: His Life and Letters (1937-47), 222; History of Victoria University (1952), 222, 594; ed., My Dearest Sophie (1955), 222; Nil Alienum (1964), 223 Sixteenth century, 602 Sixties movements, 591,609. See also Student protest movement Skelton, John (ca. 1460-1529), 527

677 Skinner, B(urrhus) F(rederic) (1904-90), 121 Slavery, 161, 288, 363, 510 Sloan, Glenna Davis (b. 1930): The Child as Critic (1975), xlii, 476-8 Smith, Arthur James Marshall (1902-80), 494; ed., The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), 474 Smith, Sidney Earle (1897-1959), 55, 92 Snow, C(harles) P(ercy) (1905-80): The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), 121,173, 242, 243, 376 So This Is College, 183-4 Social conditioning, 356, 368, 459, 512, 531, 543 Social contract, xlvii, 278, 356, 367-8, 372-3, 505 Socialism, 45. See also Marxism Social justice, university and, xlvi-xlviii Social sciences, 43, 80,130,141,163, 270; and concern, 290; conferences of, 168,172; detachment in, 282; and the humanities, 246, 487; and the observer, 535 - teaching of: in elementary schools, 134,136-7; report on, in Ontario schools, 129; in secondary schools, 138-9,140; at U of T, 520, 609 Social vision, 533; art as, 83, 333, 567; as brain of society, 531; fragmentation of, 428; and literary imagination, 433, 445, 449, 459~6o, 558-9, 572; as metaphor, 141; as model for work, 174, 305, 502; as product of education, xxxviii, xxxix, xlix, 1, li, 94,101,104-5,164,175,190, 264-5, 278, 280, 393,403; threats to, 420 Social work, 174, 502 Society: change in, 173, 346-55

678 passim; mature, 370-1, 385, 391; mob spirit in, 280; morality in, 529-30; of neighbours, 294-5, 303-4; open, 286, 292, 305; question of improvement in, xlix-li, 301, 485; superficial aspect of, xxxv, 66-7, 84, 92, 94, 96,109, no, 140-1, 158,175,190, 206, 264-5, 2/8, 300-1, 414-15, 424, 505-6, 543, 558, 573, 606. See also Individual Sociology, 375, 488 Socrates (469-399 B.C.), 96,174,175, 287, 371, 372, 458, 537; and dialogue, 342, 355, 376, 496, 498, 538; as teacher, 549-50 Sontag, Frederick Earl (b. 1924), 342 Sophocles (ca. 496-405 B.C.): Oedipus Rex, 504 Sorcerer's apprentice, 510 Sorel, Georges (1847-1922), 290 Soul, 252 South Africa, 161, 397 Southern Review, 339 Soviet Union, 147, 313, 348, 350, 362, 393, 488, 511; and doctrinaire Marxism, 588, 601 Space, and time, 244, 245, 247, 257 Spanish-American war, 398 Sparling, Ruth (Mrs. Bannon) (b. 1909), 6 Specialization: for the student, 38, 86, 171; by professors, see under Scholarship Speculation, 256 Speech: of adolescents, 555, 565; of children, 198; and correct grammar, 409; freedom of, 602; and writing, 498, 536 - articulate: dangers of facile, 417; importance of, 195-6,197,201, 476, 490-1, 547, 582-3; reading and, 231, 527

Index Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903), 269 Spender, Stephen (1909-95), 124,126 Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936), xxiv, xxviii, 125; The Decline of the West (1918), 365 Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552-99), 199, 202, 596; The Faerie Queene (1590-6), 73,146, 200 "Spiral curriculum," 133,134,142 Spiritualism, 634 Sputnik, 88,122,132, 320, 324, 328-9, 489, 603 Stalin, Joseph (losif Vissarionovich) (1879-1953), 348, 360, 361, 385, 568, 569, 601; Stalinism, 348 Star (Toronto), 126 Star Wars, 511 Star Weekly (Toronto), 49 Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946), 438 Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955), 79, 202, 235, 245, 454,456; Description without Place, 511, 531-2 Stevenson, Adlai Ewing (1900-65), 571 Stock response, 121-2, 227, 228, 231, 237, 447, 513,614 Stoicism, 52 Stories, importance of, 135,150-2, 153-4, 202-3, 445-6 Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-96): Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), 154, 351 Strachan, Bishop John (1778-1867), 91, 518 Strand, The, 86, 260 Structure, importance of in education, 133-5,137,146, 233, 235,239, 375, 376-7,540 (see also Curriculum); in literature, 151-2,614; and texture, 152, 204; as unfashionable term, 346,347 Student: complacent, as source of dismay, 96-7; and distraction, 397,

Index 404, 465-6; maturity in, 26,28, 321-2, 330, 354; of today, 175, 419; relation with teacher, see under Teacher; types of, 613; verbal experience of, 449, 451-2,480, 490, 511-12 Student protest movement, xxx-xxxiv, xliv-xlviii, 260, 313-15, 320-31 passim, 346-59 passim, 364, 367, 374-8, 385-8, 392-3, 413, 426, 466, 546-7, 603-4 Studies in Philology, 339 Stykolt, Stefan (1923-62), 207-9 Style, 202 Subject and object, 244-5,252/ 293, 532-3; meaning of, 535 Subjective and objective, in arts and sciences, 247-8 Subjects (of study), authority of, 331-2, 356-7, 417, 456, 472-3, 498-9, 550, 559-6o, 573-4; and modern research, 408; non-transfer of skills in, 107; process of change in, 114, 263, 427, 431; relations between, 306-7, 358, 600; science in, 282; student's choice of, 36-7, 38, 261-2, 272; worth of all, 113, 459, 540 Substance, 252 Success, meanings of, 299-305 Sully-Prudhomme, Rene Francois Armand (1839-1907), 586 Superman, 451 Superstition, 499 Survival, 508-9 Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 239, 473; Gulliver's Travels (1726), 369, 441, 570 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (18371909), 60 Switzerland, 576 Symbols, 65,139,153, 460; social, 317

679 Symposium, 497, 520, 550 Synopticon, 442 "Tapping," 18 Taylor, Harold (1914-93), 123-6 passim Teachers: characteristics of good, 130-1,137,146; as gurus, 497-8, 508; as medium for subject, xliii, 356, 358, 429, 498-9, 542-3, 547-50; NF's, 407; NF's work with, xxxi, xxxix-xl, xlii, 508, 542; popular prejudice against, 40-1; power of self-criticism in, 142; professionalization of, 112-13, 318, 328; ranking of, 491; as students, 329, 456; university graduates as, 68,99, 105,165, 384 - relation with students: challenging examples of, 35, 96-7, 542-3; as embarrassing, 456, 498, 508; subject supreme in, 417-18,456,472-3; in university, 112, 279, 321, 326-7, 330, 356-7, 377, 421, 524 See also individual subjects; Teaching Teaching, 312, 318; four questions in, 189-91; "goals of," 541; in humanities, nature of, 342, 578; and induction, 201; mechanical aids in, 120-2, 338; nature of, 342,611-12 - at university, 86, 498; changing status of, 169; and lack of instruction in teaching, 62-3,111-12,167; NF and, 508, 539, 542; relation with students, see under Teachers; of returned soldiers, 426-7; and scholarship or research, 112, 129-30,192-4, 322, 375-6, 416-17, 462-4, 474-5, 493, 541. See also Frye, H.N. Technology, 72,109,140, 255, 256;

68o colleges of, 310; and introversion, 602 Teleology, 352, 365, 370, 511, 605 Telepathy, 245 Television, 84, no, 152, 203,233, 434-5, 526; advertising on, 150, 451, 475; influence of, 419-20, 428, 448-9, 454, 587; quiz shows on, 94, 137,147; and student protests, 313, 604; study of, 597; in teaching, in Temperance movement, 555 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-92), 27, 28,195, 452, 486; Charge of the Light Brigade, 238 Tenure, 169, 563, 589 Textbooks, 408, 438, 447; of literature, 442; censorship of, 453. See also "Adventures" readers Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-63): Vanity Fair (1847), 442 Theme, 436 Theology, 249, 251, 471, 520; modern, 253; at Toronto, 609,646 Thinking, 56, 63-4, 76-7, 95, 98,114, 171-2, 377, 500, 534; imaginative, 437/ 439-40, 632; justly, 564-5; and language, 559 Thomas, Dylan (1914-53), 65, 200, 238 Thomas, Gordon (b. 1919), 508 Thomism, 291 Thoreau, Henry David (1817-62), 48, 235, 363, 447; Walden (1854), 154, 233 Thurber, James (1894-1961), 202, 239 Tiananmen Square, 615 Tillich, Paul Johannes (1886-1965), xlvi, 275, 333 Tillyard, Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall (1889-1962): The Elizabethan World-Picture (1943), 200 Time, 212

Index Time, 244,245, 247, 257, 352, 365-7, 375, 506, 535 Times, The, 182 Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805-59), 545 Tolkein, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) (1892-1973), 199, 471 Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich (1828-1910), 49,124, 458, 586; Resurrection (1899-1900), 126; What Is Art? (1898), 152 Tories, attitude to education, 40-1 Toronto, 8, 469, 530; cultural milieu of, 19-20,124,125; growth of, 212, 513-14, 554; joint board of schools and university at, 127-30,143 Totalitarianism, 385 Tourneur, Cyril (ca. 1575-1626): The Atheist's Tragedy (1611), 283 Tradition, 322, 323, 366, 522; in literature, 205; in modern age, 218; in universities, 94. See also Past Tragedy, 135,151, 203, 230,293, 441-2, 454, 477 Traherne, Thomas (ca. 1637-74), 205 Translation, 216, 537 Treason, 369 Trilling, Lionel (1905-75), 474 Trinity College (Toronto), 8-9, 91, 226, 609 Trotskyism, 350 Truman, Harry S. (1884-1972), 451 Truth, 101; scientific, 245, 308, 374, 385, 390-1; in VC inscription, 27, 99, 522 Tutorial system, 417 Twain, Mark (Samuel Longhorne Clemens; 1835-1910), 235,236; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 154, 363, 367, 580; Tom Sawyer (1876), 239 Twentieth century. See Modern age Tyrrell, Joseph Burr (1858-1957), 223

Index Unamuno, Miguel de (1864-1936), 367 Underground press, 392 Underbill, F(rank) H(awkins) (1882-1971), xxiv, 563, 633 United Church of Canada, 15,28; formation of, xxiv, 90; NF and, xxiii, xxiv, xv, 311; relation to VU, xxv, 88, 91-2. See also Emmanuel College United Farmers of Ontario, 223 United States, 124,190, 265,608; and Canada, 188, 394, 411, 474, 484, 563; cultural tradition of, 362-3, 364-5, 366-7, 479, 511; democracy in, 161, 264, 286, 403; literature of, 154, 235-6; NF in, 53-4; persecution in, 484, 560, 569, 573-4, 601 (see also McCarthy); political system of, 483, 588, 594; protest movements in, 288, 313, 323, 327; segregation in, 484-5; social mythology of, 228-9, 277, 289, 291, 446-8,603; and Vietnam, 423, 428 - education in, 55,116, 600, 603; and American way of life, 97-8, 544-6 (see also "Adventures" readers); church and state in, 88, 518, 526; college system in, 90-1; as playpen, 270, 319, 408; and progressivism, 44, 45-9, 58,132. See also America, North America Unity vs. uniformity, 429 University, 83,189, 289, 600; administration of, 302, 314, 321-2, 332, 551-2, 593-4; authority in, 309, 414, 467; and church, 168, 309, 354, 357, 377, 393, 405; and class, 555-6; continuing education in, see Adult education; definition of, 71; and educational theory, 406; and freedom, 401-4; of the future,

681

175-6; learning process in, 141, 158; NF and, xxviii; nineteenthcentury roots of, 480; popular prejudice against, 19-20, 40, 92, 284-5, 421, 465-6, 557; question of ideal, 379-81; relation to secondary schools, 36,128,188,195; specialization in, 170-1; and speculative knowledge, 171,175,176; student participation in administration of, 35«, 354, 377-8, 380, 390, 418-19; teaching at, 62-3, 86,111-13,167, 356-7, 498 (see also Scholarship); value of education in, 37, 38,67, 92-3, 95-6, 98, 210-11, 213-14, 515-16, 524, 561-2 (see also Graduation); wider, 68,164-5,180, 384, 393 - as an institution: changing fortunes of, lii-liii, 104,166-7,168-9,183-4, 279, 280, 347; growth of, 115, 212, 380, 516; reduced spending on, 489, 552, 558, 590; radical view of, 385, 487-9 - role of: and adult education, 272; Butler on, 70; and democratic values, 115,171; educating reading public, not writers, 78-9; in loco parentis, 315, 319, 321; limitation of, 358-9, 367, 393; moral dimension of, 468; showing reality, xxvi, 175, 265, 592; in society, xxix, xxxii, xxxix, xlvi-xlviii, 61-2, 93, 99, 110-11, 113,181-2, 303, 345-6, 353-4, 373, 39*, 39», 405, 420-1, 485-6, 495, 512, 558-9, 572-3, 589-90; teaching thinking, 63,114 See also Arts and sciences; Education, liberal; Humanities; Scholarship; Student protest movement University College, 598,643; religion and, 91, 518, 609

682

University of British Columbia, 179, 180 University of Chicago, 40,46, 589, 590 University of Gottingen, 173 University of Guelph, 554 University of Manitoba, 210,212, 213 University of Saskatchewan, 312 University of Toronto, lii, 29, 30,185, 345; adminstration at, 89; examination system at, 10-13; Faculty Association of, xlvii, 463, 464; graduate school of, 225-6; joint committee with Toronto Board of Education, 127-30,143; NF and, xxx, li, lii, 143; relation to federated colleges, xxv, xxx, xxxiii-xxxiv, 90-1,118, 223, 481, 482, 519-21, 523-4, 616; remedial English at, 55-6; reorganization of in 19603, xxxiii-xxxiv, 598, 609; social context of, 421; study of religion at, 225-6, 518-19, 597, 609-10. See also General Course, Honour Course, Pass Course, Victoria College University of Toronto Press, 169 University of Washington, NF at, 54 University of Waterloo, 465, 466, 554 University of Western Ontario, 384-5 University of Windsor, 401, 405 Upper Canada Academy, 607 Utopianism, in U.S., 362, 479 Utopias, 1,174/265, 266-7, 268, 272, 293, 368, 369-73 passim; value of, 425 Value judgments, 203, 234, 261, 336-8, 343, 526-7 Values, 256, 374 Vancouver, 183 Van Doren, Mark (1894-1972): Liberal Education (1943), 46

Index Van Gogh, Vincent (1853-90), 532 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo (1888-1927), 236 Varsity, The, 331, 397 Vaughan, Henry (1622-95), 241 Veblen, Thorstein (1857-1929): Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), 82, 264 Venus, 217 Victoria College/University: character of, 5, 6,9,14-15, 21, 25, 28, 29, 30,185, 207, 381, 382; crest of, 90; cultural milieu of, 124-6,177; expansion of, 259; founding of, 634; history of, 607-8; motto of, 94; NF as student at, xxiii, xxv-xxvii, xliv, 92,103,161, 395, 5i5-l6> 5i7/ 521-2, 553-5, 598; NF's career at, xxiii-xxiv, xxix, xxx, xxxiv, xxxix, 297, 299-300, 471-5, 494-5, 518, 539-41, 642; principal of, 90; relation to U of T, xxxiv, 91, 481-2, 520-1, 523-4, 594, 616; religion at, 117-19,186, 482, 518-19, 592, 609-10; song of, 160; staff of, 222, 297-8, 481-2, 593-4; student activities at, 3-9,103, 207, 259-60; tradition of, 521, 591-2; and United Church, 88, 91-2; and the U.S., 53; women's residence at, 178, 389 Victorian age, 343, 392; attitude to women in, 412,426, 452 Vietnam war, xxxi, xlviii, 287, 309, 313, 328, 346, 348, 351, 363, 366, 369, 391, 402, 411, 423, 428, 466, 511 Violence, 364, 469, 515 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70-19 B.C.), 51, 82, 267, 400, 566 Virgin Mary, 346 Vision of society. See Social vision Vitruvius (ist century B.C.): De Architectura, 267

Index Wales, 348, 515 Wallace, George Corley (b. 1919), 327, 349 Wallace, Edward Wilson (1880-1941), 620 War, 101-2,162, 264, 272, 276, 387-8, 413, 513, 562; futility of, 397-8; moral equivalent of, 49 Warhol, Andy (1926-87), 598 War of 1812, 411 Washington, George (1732-99), 228, 229, 233, 289, 447, 545 WASP, NF as, 473 Waste, 264, 272 Watergate, 478 Watt, James (1736-1819), 100 Weber, Max (1864-1920), 265 Weldon, Col. Douglas (1895-1980), 384 Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (18661946), 174; The Outline of History (1920), 365 Wesley, John (1703-91), 519 Western (genre), 152 White, T(erence) H(anbury) (1906-64): The Sword in the Stone (1938), 235 Whitehead, Alfred North (1861-1947), xxiv, xxviii, 189; The Aims of Education (1929), 158, 550; Science and the Modern World (1926), 252 Whitman, Walt (ca. 1819-92), 48,149, 199, 447 Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807-92), 27 Widsith, 199 Wilde, Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills (1854-1900), 26; The Decay of Lying (1891), 457 Williams, Charles Walter Stansby (1886-1945), 471

683 Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963), 586 Wilson, Sir Daniel (1816-92), 91, 609-10 Wilson, Ethel (1888-1980): Lilly's Story (1952), 182-3 Wisdom, xlvi, 424, 499, 537, 544; Bible on, 83; and knowledge, 51, 52, 67-8,163-4,273, 375,488; and prophecy, 492-3 Wishing, 455-6 Wodehouse, P.G. (Sir Pelham Grenville) (1881-1975), 75 Women: and culture, 75; education of, 392, 396; language of, 582; subordination of, 412,426, 452, 513, 555; at university, 178, 382; at VC, 608; votes for, 288, 314, 320-1, 329-30 Woodhouse, A(rthur) S(utherland) P(igott) (1895-1964), 540, 596, 597, 598 Woods Hole Conference, 133 Woodsworth, James Shaver (1874-1942), 223 Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882-1941), 598 Word recognition tests, 140 Words: different functions of, 72,80, 249-50, 251-2; etymology of, 240; and ideas, 56, 77; importance of, 268, 493; importance of correct, 74-6, 83-5; semantic theory of, 79-80. See also Literature, Writing Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 77,204,238,254, 256; The Prelude (1805), 144,162-3, 606 Work, 263-4, 268-9, 271/ 4*0, 529; of children, 318; vs. continued education, 319, 408; work ethic, 309, 313, 328, 348, 361, 362

684 World War I, 365, 396 World War II, 104, 397, 465, 494-5, 554 Wright, Douglas (b. 1927): Report of the Commission on Post-Secondary Education (1972), xlvii, 462-4 Writing: of college student, 73-4; social importance of, 206, 446,449, 543-4,559/ 57*/ 5/8; an