Northrop Frye's Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 9781442677920

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Collected Works of Northrop Frye VOLUME 17

Northrop Frye's Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

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 The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions.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

Editorial Committee General Editor Alvin A. Lee Associate Editor Jean O'Grady Editors Joseph Adamson Robert D. Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton David Staines Advisers Robert Brandeis Paul Gooch Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

Northrop Frye's Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries VOLUME 17

Edited by Imre Salusinszky

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Imre Salusinszky (preface, introduction, annotation) 2005 Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3824-7

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991. Northrop Frye's writings on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / edited by Imre Salusinszky. (Collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3824-7 i. English literature - 19th century - History and criticism. 2. Romanticism - Great Britain. 3. English literature - i8th century History and criticism. I. Salusinszky, Imre, 1955- II. Title. HI. Series. 08417^79 2005

820.9

02005-902068-7

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

For Robert Rawdon Wilson

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Contents

Preface xi Credits xv Abbreviations xvii Introduction xix On the Eighteenth Century i The Young Boswell 3 2 Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility 7

3 Nature Methodized 16 4 Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility 24 On Romanticism 5 CBC Goethe Salute

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Contents 6 Long Sequacious Notes

43 7 Lord Byron

50 8 Foreword to Romanticism Reconsidered

72 9 The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism

75 10 A Study of English Romanticism

92 Preface 92 I The Romantic Myth 93 11 Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 125 III Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 150 IV Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 176 ii John Keats 206 12 Kathleen Hazel Coburn 215

13 How It Was 218 14 In the Earth, or In the Air? 219 On the Nineteenth Century 15 Review of Patience and The Silver Box 229 16 Review of H.M.S. Pinafore 233 17 lolanihe 236

Contents

ix 18 Review of lolanthe 237

19 Review of Bradbrook's Ibsen the Norwegian 239 20 James, LeFanu, and Morris 240 21 An Important Influence 241 22 Review of Joan Evans's John Ruskin 242 23 Emily Dickinson 245 24 The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century 271

25 Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 287

26 The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 309 27 The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifal 326 28 Some Reflections on Life and Habit 341 Notes 355

Emendations 383 Index 385

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Preface

This volume contains Frye's published writings on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including his short book, A Study of English Romanticism. It also includes his previously unpublished speech inducting the distinguished Coleridge scholar, Kathleen Coburn, into an honorary degree at the University of Toronto in 1978. The chief omissions are, of course, Frye's writings on Blake, which appear in volumes 14 and 16 of the Collected Works, Fearful Symmetry and Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. The items in the present volume have been arranged in three sections, and, within those sections, chronologically, according to date of first publication. In the case of items that were originally delivered as lectures, the dates given are those of the lectures, but the texts are taken from the printed versions. Headnotes to the individual items specify the copy-text (in the form "From such-and-such a text"), list all known reprintings in English of the item, and 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 proofread by Frye himself. In some cases he did reread essays for inclusion in his own collections, such as The Stubborn Structure, which then become the source of the authoritative text. All substantive changes to the copy-text are noted in the list of emendations. All authoritative versions have been collated. In preparing the text, I 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, I have regularized them silently throughout the

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volume. For instance, Canadian spellings have been substituted for American ones, commas have been added before the "and" in sequences of three, titles of poems have been italicized, and the presentation of dates has been made consistent throughout. Sometimes, where editors have added commas around such expressions as "of course," these have been silently removed to conform with the more characteristic usage in the typescript. Notes identify the source of all quotations. Shakespearean and Biblical sources have been placed in square brackets in the text; and, in review items, citations from the text under review are also provided in square brackets in the text. Notes provided by Frye himself are identified by "[NF]" following the note. Square brackets in Frye's original texts have been replaced with braces. Within quotations, where necessary, punctuation has been silently altered to conform with the edition cited in the notes; more significant changes, however, are noted in the emendations. Authors and titles mentioned in passing are not annotated, but life dates and date of first publication of books are provided in the index. Acknowledgments Many friends and colleagues have helped in the preparation of this volume. At the Northrop Frye Centre of Victoria University, Alvin Lee and Jean O'Grady have been invaluable in their advice and friendly encouragement. Naomi Savage scanned or typed the articles; Ward McBurney prepared the index and provided expert scholarly help of various kinds. Certainly my greatest debt at the Frye Centre, or anywhere, is to Christopher Jennings and Mary Ellen Kappler, without whose superb research skills this volume could never have been completed, at least not by me. Finally, Margaret Burgess provided meticulous copyediting at the Press. Numerous colleagues at the University of Newcastle and elsewhere also provided assistance with the notes. My thanks to: John Baird, Kevin Berland, Vincent Bissonette, Will Christie, Deirdre Coleman, Hugh Craig, Tim Dolin, Michael Ewans, Tony Gibbs, Nick Halmi, Paul Hamilton, Peter Holbrook, Ivor Indyk, Heather Jackson, Robin Jackson, Rosslyn Jolly, Peter Kuch, Eva Kushner, William Levine, David Matthews, Dianne Osland, Christopher Pollnitz, Alistair Rolls, Terry Ryan, Rosalind Smith, Caroline Webb, Joanne Wilkes, Geoff Windon, and Ken Woodgate. I would also like to offer my awed thanks to Google.

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To echo a remark by Michael Dolzani in his preface to volume 9 of the Collected Works, I have been sustained in my work, not just on this book but across the years, by the international "Frye community." Apart from those members of it already mentioned, I would especially like to thank Joseph Adamson, Robert D. Denham, Michael Dolzani, Jeffery Donaldson, Glen Gill, A.C. Hamilton, Ian Singer, Jane Widdicombe, and Tom Willard. I have dedicated my editorial work on this volume to the teacher and critic who first introduced me to the work of Northrop Frye. At the time I had no conception of the ways in which Frye's ideas, and Robert Wilson's friendship, would enrich the next quarter-century of my life.

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Credits

We wish to acknowledge the following sources for permission to reprint works previously published by them. We have not been able to determine the copyright status of all the works included in this volume, and welcome notice from any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from these acknowledgments. The Trustees of Boston University for "How It Was" and "The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris," from Studies in Romanticism (1982). The Carleton Germanic Papers for "The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifal" (1984). Columbia University Press for "Foreword" and "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism," from Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute (1963). The Johns Hopkins University Press for "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility/' from English Literary History and "Varieties of EighteenthCentury Sensibility," from Eighteenth-Century Studies (1990-91). 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 Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. CW Collected Works of Northrop Frye D The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. E The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. EAC The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-1990. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 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. K The Complete Writing of William Blake: With Variant Readings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. LS Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936-1989: Unpublished Papers. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. MM Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. NF Northrop Frye NFCL Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. NFF Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library NFHK The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp. 2 vols. Ed. AC

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Robert D. Denham. CW, 1-2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. NR Northrop f rye's Notebooks on Romance. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 15. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. RE The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. SE Northrop Frye's Student Essays, 1932-1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 3. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. SeSCT The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory. Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. CW, 18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming. StS The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. TEN The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964-1972. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. WP Words with Power: Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature." New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

Introduction

i

This edition presents Frye's reflections on three literary periods that he helped to define, and that help to define him. A feature of the volume is the way that it highlights aspects of Frye's thinking that are seldom given sufficient emphasis, and that place him in a surprisingly modern light. For example, his writings on the eighteenth century reveal a critic with not only a deep historical sense, but also a surprisingly subtle and contemporary way of putting that sense into action. In his writings on Romanticism and on the nineteenth century, we see the extent to which Frye is a cultural critic for whom a "myth" is much more than simply a recurring structural element in literature: it is also the mainspring for a culture, driving its interpretations of the world and of itself. His Romantic criticism shows Frye as a writer who is philosophically, as well as historically, informed. Finally, and perhaps most interesting of all, Frye's essays on major nineteenth-century writers like Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, and William Morris showcase his vastly underestimated skills as a practical critic. And throughout these pieces, we are repeatedly confronted with a question that goes to the heart of our assessment of Frye's work: what exactly was the nature of his relation to the Romantic movement? The essays in the volume treat of a period, from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, that was of more consistent interest to Frye than any other. As evidence of that, consider that the earliest piece in this book (no. 15) was written when Frye was nineteen, and the latest (no. 4) when he was nearly seventy-eight. Of course, it must be conceded that the early musical reviews in Ada

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Victoriana (nos. 15-18), the student magazine at Victoria College, are trifles—albeit precocious and surprisingly acidic ones—so perhaps it makes more sense to note how often Frye returns to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century themes during the period of his most intense intellectual activity, and growing fame: the 19505 and 19605. But as further evidence of the sheer longevity of Frye's interest in these periods, consider two very early items not included here. Frye's extraordinary 35,000word student essay on Romanticism (see Northrop Frye's Student Essays, 1932-1938 [SE], 11-83), written in 1933 when Frye was twenty, has been described by Robert D. Denham as "the first sustained instance we have of what were to become several of Frye's trademarks: his conceptual expansiveness, his ability to organize a large body of ideas, and his schematic way of thinking" (SE, xix). And in another student essay written two years later, "A Study of the Impact of Cultural Movements upon the Church in England during the Nineteenth Century" (SE, 273304), Frye sets out the essentials of an account of the nineteenth century's search for tokens of meaning in the aftermath of Romanticism. In more subtle form, this account will become Frye's 1964 essay on "The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century" (no. 24). The weight of Frye's ruminations on the eighteenth century falls on the period up to, and immediately following, Anatomy of Criticism; the weight of his reflections on Romanticism and on the nineteenth century, however, falls on the period after Anatomy of Criticism. Those reflections therefore have an entirely different context within Frye's own canon, and form part of the thinking towards the "Third Book" that Frye intended to follow Fearful Symmetry and the Anatomy. As Michael Dolzani explains in his introduction to The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye (TEN), while the "Third Book" was never written, the notes Frye made towards that book became the engine room for many other books that he did write. Again and again in those notes, Frye returns to a gigantic eightvolume project that he called his "ogdoad," and to a diagram that controlled that project, the "Great Doodle."1 The Great Doodle resembles the mythic wheel of the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, except that it comprehends philosophy and history as well as literature, describing myths to live by, and not just to imagine. Frye uses the Doodle to structure all his work, post-Anatomy, including, as we shall see, A Study of English Romanticism (no. 10). But what we learn from the "Third Book" Notebooks is that the phase of the ogdoad concerned with romance, and the post-Romantic literary and philosophical universe, is called Rencontre.

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The culmination of this phase of Frye's thinking was The Secular Scripture (1976), his full-length study of romance, which is not included in the present volume but is an indispensable adjunct to it.2 The notebooks make clear that Frye conceived Rencontre as a study of the countermovement to myth that is always implicit in romance but becomes an actualized cultural force after Romanticism. Rencontre, as Dolzani says, could be understood as Frye's account of the fall into history, after mankind is acknowledged as the source of his own myths.3 As with most things in Frye, there are two sides to such a fall. One is the fortunate discovery that heaven, or all we need to know of it, is eternally present to us and consists in a shift in our own consciousness. But the nightmarish counterpart is the response to the end of myth that conjures demonic parodies of myth, visions of the shattering of all meaning, that is apparent in a great deal of modernist writing, including The Waste Land and Ulysses. As we shall see, both aspects of the "fall into history" are everywhere apparent in Frye's writings on Romanticism and its aftermath; but the "Third Book" context for Frye's major statements on Romanticism helps explain why those statements differ in some important respects from the passing remarks on Romanticism that we find in "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility" (no. 2) and other early pieces. In these early pieces Frye maintains a rigid distinction between the romance vision of Blake, where innocence is everywhere apparent to those with the eyes to see it, and the Romantic sublime, where innocence is a lost childhood state recoverable only fitfully through memory. Later Frye narrows this distinction and sees both phenomena as stages in the liberal-humanising of myth. II

If Frye had never written any of the books and essays that made him the most influential English-speaking literary theorist of the second half of the twentieth century, he would still have a permanent place among the canonical critics of eighteenth-century literature and culture. The foundation for that claim, of course, is Fearful Symmetry, a text whose marshalling of the cultural, philosophical, political, and economic mainstreams of eighteenth-century thought remains, for me, its most underrated feature. But a second foundation for the claim is "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," Frye's most influential essay on a literary period. Paul J. Hunter, writing in 1990, thirty-six years after the essay appeared, de-

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scribed it as "the most popular characterization of the second half of the [eighteenth] century."4 Nowhere more clearly than in the way that contrasting ideas of literature as product and process structure this essay can we see Frye's ability to bring new order to an unruly field—ironically, since it is the disordering and indeed disorienting powers of the age of sensibility that he is making such broad claims for. While Frye's claim that "pre-Romantic" is a nonsensical title to give to this period seems perfectly modest and reasonable, by the end of the essay something much more radical has been worked out. Far from being a precursor to Romanticism, the age of sensibility is radically alternate to it. That is because Romanticism sees literature as product—of the imagination— and so in Frye's thinking shares much more with Augustan tendencies than with the age of sensibility, which emerges as a kind of prophetic interregnum between two "conservative"—Frye's own word, and for him it is rarely a positive one—cultural movements. Indeed, if the age of sensibility is "pre-" anything, in Frye's telling, then it is quite clearly pre-Modernist. Frye cites two late nineteenthcentury French poets, Rimbaud and Nerval, as sensibility's descendants, but adds that "even this development had become conservative by the time its influence reached England" (15)—one of hundreds of coded swipes in Frye's work against the school of Eliot.5 But this warning cannot prevent our thinking immediately of Eliot, Pound, and their followers when Frye talks of qualities like assonance, irregularity, discontinuity, trance, and the release of subconscious materials as the attributes of the poetry of sensibility, or when he says that literature as process "tends to seek the brief or even the fragmentary utterance, in other words to centre itself on the lyric" (11). When Frye talks in this highly condensed but pathbreaking essay about the way that literature as process involves the reader, rather than distancing him or her, we are very close to one of his central preoccupations—the transformative power of verbal art, or literature as internal possession. All of Frye's published writings on the eighteenth century come after Fearful Symmetry and clearly draw on the same immense body of research as the Blake study. For Frye, the question that the study of the early- and mid-eighteenth century seems to throw up again and again is the relation of literary history to history generally, and the consequences of this for analysis of the period and its literature. Part of the explanation for this is provided by Frye in his response to a suite of essays on his work in a special issue of the journal Eighteenth-Century

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Studies in 1990-91. Reflecting on the fact that the eighteenth century does not do as well as some periods in Anatomy of Criticism, in terms of number of examples, Frye says that it was natural for him in the Anatomy to focus on the "great mythopoeic periods" in English literature: "the Renaissance period from Spenser to Milton, the Romantic period from Blake to Keats and Shelley, and the great early twentieth-century period of Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, and Pound from 1920 to 1950." But he adds: "I thought it was rather a compliment to the eighteenth century that I felt I could let it speak for itself."6 This may explain why the question of history, and its shaping of literature, obsesses Frye in his considerations of this period. The eighteenth century, as a period in which literature is heavily "displaced," to use Frye's term, away from the mythopoeic and towards the realist end of the spectrum, constantly challenges him to make good a claim that is as basic to his approach as any other: that literary history is not the same thing as social history, because however displaced a work or a period, it is still part of the literary universe and hence a child of myth rather than of social history. These issues confront Frye directly in his review of Bonamy Dobree's history of eighteenth-century literature (no. 3), a book that gives up more of the game to social history than Frye would like. Repeatedly in the review, Frye returns to the question of what literary history is supposed to do. Its task, he says, is not simply to chronologize, but "to reawaken and refresh our imaginative experience" (17). To do justice to the greatest writers of any period, the literary critic must be able to take the measure of the "interlocking relevance" of all the period's literature "conceived as a unit of culture complete in itself" (20). Dobree's chronological method lacks "that final unification of material which is the mark of the completely realized history" (23). In his response to the reassessment of his work by eighteenth-century scholars, too, Frye makes it clear that the historical method of an earlier generation of eighteenth-century scholars was part of what led him in the other direction, towards a "specifically literary history."7 Oddly, perhaps, this ability to see the underlying principle of unity in a body of material, which Frye abundantly possesses but finds lacking in scholars like Dobree, he finds present in a historian of the period itself, James Boswell. In his article on Boswell's London journal (no. i), a piece that showcases his gifts as a book reviewer, Frye admires Boswell's ability to grasp the "organic consistency" in Samuel Johnson's character (4)—in other words, to see the myth of Johnson.

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The idea of a "unit of culture complete in itself" that Frye articulates in 1960 contains an uncanny anticipation of movements in literary studies that only took hold at the very end of his life, including New Historicism and cultural studies. These movements are about nothing if not the "interlocking relevance" of everything produced by a culture. Frye's ability to work in a contemporary and subtle way with a kind of historicist model is indicated in his lecture on "Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility" (no. 4), delivered at the University of Minnesota, barely six months before his death, as part of the celebration of his work by Eighteenth-Century Studies. The dialectics that Frye sets out here—between wit and primitivism, society and solitude—are notable particularly in that he does not limit their application to literature. As we shall also remark in his writings on the nineteenth century, Frye conceives of these large contestive myths as shaping a culture's economics, science, politics, and philosophy, as well as its art. In all of these areas, Frye charts the way that Augustanism's view of everything to do with mankind as socialized, its wilful denial of possibilities of apprehension either above or below the social, creates its own opposite. There is a darker and more primitive vision, a return of the repressed that emerges via the marvellous, the prophetic, and the reflection on the New World and its "primitive" societies. But what Frye is really showing is the way that the protocols of the age of sensibility are already contained as possibilities within Augustanism itself. Frye is no New Historicist, but the essay indirectly reminds us that in their abandonment of the base/superstructure model of earlier historical critics, the New Historicists are conceding Frye's longstanding critique of such "reflective" models. Frye sees myth as shaping everything in a culture's output and self-perception, literary and nonliterary alike. Contemporary historicist critics prefer different terms to myth, but there is some interpenetration between their vision and Frye's: they each see the imagination of a culture as creative rather than "reflective." I don't believe that contemporary historicist critics would argue with Frye's statement forty years ago, in "The Drunken Boat" (no. 9), that what makes a culture coherent is not its explicit statements of belief but its "way of arranging images and providing for metaphors" (77); or with the statement in A Study of English Romanticism that "any given literature is rooted in a specific culture and is contained by the mythological structure of that culture" (123). It is significant, then, that Frye mentions Michel Foucault, the central philosopher of contemporary historicism, at the close of "Varieties of

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Eighteenth-Century Sensibility." Frye is surely reminding his readers, yet again, that it is a fallacy to think of him as a writer who separates literature from society. But the quibble with Foucault over whether the concept of "man" predates the eighteenth century indicates that, while Frye knew very well what cultural studies had to say about the relation of literature to culture, he had developed his own account of that relation. In The Critical Path, in 1971, Frye talks about a "myth of concern" as comprising "everything that it most concerns its society to know" and as functioning to "hold society together, so far as words can help to do this" (36). This, then, is the equivalent in Frye's thinking to the New Historicist focus on ideology. But for Frye, literature is not the same as concern: it "displays the imaginative possibilities of concern" (98). Much later, in Words with Power, published in the same year as "Varieties of EighteenthCentury Sensibility," Frye develops this discussion into a dialectic of "primary concern"—those things that concern all people in all societies at all times—and "secondary concern," the ideological preoccupations of specific societies at specific historical moments: and literature is where secondary and primary concern are brought into relationship (42-3). These reflections are where Frye's historicism veers sharply away from both the literary Marxism he engaged in the first quarter of his career, and the New Historicism he confronted in the final quarter. It is in maintaining the distinction between an ideology and a myth that Frye's criticism preserves the multicultural component that A.C. Hamilton has suggested will give it permanent relevance in "an increasingly globalized world."8 Frye acknowledges in "Varieties" that some of his critical initiatives were "derived" from the study of the eighteenth century that he undertook while writing on Blake. The first example he gives, that he took the word "archetype" from a poem by James Beattie, is, if interesting, trivial; but the second, that the eighteenth century is the focus of anatomical thinking in English literature, is not (25). As Frye describes it, eighteenthcentury anatomy, including the major works of Swift and Sterne, also anticipates elements of sensibility, in its paradoxes, its inconsistencies, and its piling of fact upon fact, erudition upon erudition. He also says that eighteenth-century anatomy "normally approaches its material playfully" (25)—not a bad way to describe Frye's own anatomical method. At the end of the essay he ponders the moment in Tristram Shandy when eighteenth-century anatomy deconstructs itself into word games that have no external referent whatsoever. Again, while such elements may

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not be obvious in Frye's published works, any reader of the notebooks (see, especially, Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance) will hear the echo of Frye's own investment in the mysticism of language, in following word chains and word magic into whatever unlikely places they may lead. It is clear, then, that a good deal in Frye's temper—its wit and sense of play, its tendency to encyclopedic elaboration, and its ultimately satirical delight in the clash of ideas—derives from his early, and deep, immersion in the culture of the eighteenth century. Ill

"Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," with its dismissal of Romanticism as "conservative," and "Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility," with its location of Frye's "critical initiatives" in eighteenth-century currents, are both hints of the danger of thinking about Frye too easily as a Romantic or even a "neo-Romantic" critic. That argument can certainly be made, but not without reservations.9 A different case would see Frye as acquiring almost by default the reputation of Romanticism's staunchest defender in the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, in his brief statement on his own role in the "Romantic revival" for the journal Studies in Romanticism (no. 13, "How It Was"), Frye construes that role as almost accidental, and as arising out of a willful "perversity" in him that wanted to see the anti-Romantic bandwagon derailed simply for the sake of seeing something derailed. It is quite true that Frye enabled the Romantic revivalism of a younger generation of critics at Yale, including Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman. Whether accidental or not, his role in the derailment of the Eliotic bandwagon was a potent one, and he is surely more justified than anyone in announcing in his 1963 "Foreword" (no. 8) that the antiRomantic movement in criticism "is now over and done with" (72). Not only were younger critics inspired by Fearful Symmetry, on which both Bloom's Shelley's Mythmaking and Hartman's Wordsworth's Poetry are largely modelled,10 but more broadly, by sweeping aside the methodology and preconceptions of Eliot and the New Critics, which had dominated criticism in the 19405, Frye had also swept aside a set of values that promoted the intellectualized verse of the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals, and demoted the poetry of prophecy and feeling.11 Frye was always well aware that Romantic criticism is a battleground in this much larger critical war in which he himself had become a central actor.

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In his 1959 essay on Byron (no. 7)—which, like the encyclopedia article on Keats (no. 11), is a fine example of the clarity and ease with which Frye can perform the role of the ordinary, jobbing critic—Frye says that Byron's poetry challenges our critical presuppositions "because it contains nothing that 'modern' critics look for: no texture, no ambiguities, no intellectualized ironies, no intensity, no vividness of phrasing, the words and images being vague to the point of abstraction" (56). It is a clear reference to the, by then, decadent New Critics. Of course there are unmistakably Romantic elements to Frye's own outlook, including a militantly idealistic account of the revelatory function of the poetic imagination, outlined in The Educated Imagination and many other places. Because the poetic imagination reveals, beneath the corrupt forms of our existing societies, an ideal permanent society, there is the argument, common to Frye and the major Romantic writers, that poetry has become the chief medium through which religion may be understood. It is a visionary, not a positivistic, criticism that is required to approach this truth. Thus, Frye is to the criticism of the second half of the twentieth century what Wallace Stevens is to its poetry: his "order of words" and Stevens's "supreme fiction" are as close to being examples of the Romantic sublime as the period affords. But Frye's reservations about High Romanticism are as profound as his affinities with it, and they are pointedly stated in the closing remarks on Collins's Ode on the Poetical Character, Smart's Jubilate Agno, and Blake's Four Zoas in "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility": In these three poems, especially the last two, God, the poet's soul, and nature are brought into a white-hot fusion of identity, an imaginative fiery furnace in which the reader may, if he chooses, make a fourth. All three poems are of the greatest complexity, yet the emotion on which they are founded is of a simplicity and directness that English literature has rarely attained again. With the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, secondary imagination and recollection in tranquillity took over English poetry and dominated it until the end of the nineteenth century. (14) Again and again, it is some version of this point—that the fully-fledged Romantic imagination represents a falling away, or sentimentalization, of the imagination found in the age of sensibility—that Frye introduces into his critique of Wordsworth and Coleridge. And while Frye's relation to the Romantic imagination eventually shifts ground, the critique of

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Coleridge and Wordsworth doesn't. Rather, to give a more positive account of Romanticism, Frye leapfrogs straight to second-generation Romantics like Byron, Shelley, and Keats. But that development occurs in the mid-1960s. In his 1961 essay on "Myth, Fiction, and Displacement," Frye relegates Wordsworth and Coleridge to a tradition of "critical naturalism." His comments there illuminate the claim in "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," five years earlier, that Romanticism shares Augustanism's "conservative" view of imagination as an essentially reflective faculty. Coleridge, says Frye, "does not really think of imagination as a constructive power at all. He means by imagination . . . the reproductive power, the ability to bring to life the texture of characterization and imagery" (FI, 30). With all of that, it must be added that there is one important source of identification with Coleridge. As Michael Dolzani has pointed out (see TEN, xxiv), it is impossible, now, to read Frye's review of Coleridge's notebooks (no. 6) and not be struck by a kind of submerged autobiographical element. While repeating some of his reservations about Coleridge's view of imagination, Frye notes that Coleridge "proposed more books than he ever disposed of"; experienced his thoughts as "a series of aphorisms crystallizing from his reading"; detested "either-thisor-that" thinking; was "much preoccupied with tables of contents, methodological axioms, schemes for others to work out, and intellectual projects and agendas of all kinds"; and found his most "appropriate prose form" in the notebook itself. As Frye's own unpublished works have filtered into the public domain, since his death, it has become increasingly clear that all of these comments could be applied to Frye himself—and there is no doubt that he would have inwardly recognized as much as he was writing the review in 1953. Indeed, much later, Frye acknowledges the connection: The way I begin a book is to write detached aphorisms in a notebook, and ninety-five percent of the work I do in completing a book is to fit these detached aphorisms together into a continuous narrative line. I think that Coleridge worked in the same way, though he seems to have had unusual difficulty when it came to the narrative stage, and so instead of completing his great treatise on the Logos he kept much of what he had to say hugged to his bosom in the form of fifty-seven notebooks.12

Only recently have we learned how much Frye himself kept "hugged to his bosom." And we may detect similar buried echoes of identification in

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Frye's review of a biography of another nineteenth-century polymath, John Ruskin (no. 22). Frye says that he wishes "some student of Ruskin would take his later works on myth and science, with all their allusiveness, digression, cranky absurdities, and sometimes actual free association, more seriously," and that what holds Ruskin together is "the sense of a vast system of design and occult correspondences manifesting itself in art and revealed by nature" (243). A "vast system of design and occult correspondences" is not a bad way to describe Frye's ogdoad. Notwithstanding his reservations about Coleridge and Wordsworth, in his key later statements on Romanticism—all of which, apart from the Blake work, are presented here—Frye's emphasis is on what A Study of English Romanticism calls the "recovery of projection" (100), the clawing back for the human imagination, in Romantic philosophy and aesthetics, of much that had previously been given to God or nature. In "The Drunken Boat," the 1963 essay that would be expanded and revised into the first chapter of A Study of English Romanticism, Frye quotes Coleridge, from his journals, saying that he seeks in nature only a kind of code for what is already inside himself, and comments that "in Romantic poetry the emphasis is not on what we have called sense, but on the constructive power of the mind, where reality is brought into being by experience" (82). This, then, is the sparkplug for all of Frye's mature writings about Romanticism, and also for what he sees as Romanticism's revolutionary cultural consequences down to our own age: once the imagination has recovered for itself what it previously projected onto a "higher" power, civilization becomes a "human artefact" ("Drunken Boat," 81), and the arts become less a reflection of religion and society than the code for remaking them in a more humanly satisfying form. As a further consequence, the artist, while acquiring connotations of the renegade or outcast, also becomes the mover and shaker of society's foundations. Like much else in Frye, the "recovery of projection" theme reveals close similarities between his vision and that of the pre-eminent neoRomantic poet of Frye's own era, Wallace Stevens. In 1948, when Stevens delivered a lecture on "Imagination as Value" at Columbia University, the young author of Fearful Symmetry was in the audience. (In fact, Frye had been fascinated with Stevens since he was a teenager.) In that lecture, Stevens asserted that "the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written," and that the value of imagination "is the value of the way of thinking by which we project the idea of God into the idea of man."13 Three years later, Stevens wrote elsewhere that "our revelations are not the revela-

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tions of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers" and that "The greatest truth we could hope to discover . . . is that man's truth is the final resolution of everything."14 Frye begins A Study of English Romanticism with the claim that Romanticism is pre-eminently a cultural term and represents "a new kind of sensibility" that "comes into all Western literatures around the later part of the eighteenth century" (93). As Robert D. Denham has pointed out (SE, 473n. 7), these ideas are contained in embryo in Frye's 1933 student essay on Romanticism. While that essay is written in a heightened "philosophical" voice that does not resemble the mature Frye—"What is born must live; what lives must die/' it begins (SE, 12)—it is interesting primarily as a reminder of the philosophical underpinning of Frye's major statements on Romanticism. The 1933 essay is in fact much more interested in Romantic philosophy than literature, and was after all an essay in a Philosophy subject. But if Frye's eighteenth-century essays are a corrective to the view that Frye separates literature from history, the references to Sartre and Heidegger in A Study of English Romanticism discountenance the suggestion that his criticism is not philosophically informed. Frye is deeply interested in Continental philosophy and, like his notebooks, his review of Paul de Man (no. 14) shows his attempt, late in life, to come to an accommodation with deconstruction. That accommodation is finally unsuccessful, although, as we see in A Study of English Romanticism, Frye has noticed, before de Man's work on the "aesthetic ideology," the conflict between Romanticism's claim to historical centrality and its demand for "a purely disinterested aesthetic response" (106).15 But Frye's earlier interpenetration with the mid-twentieth-century philosophy of consciousness and Being runs deep, and is a driver of his view that what we see in Romanticism is an adventure of consciousness itself. Indeed, years before Harold Bloom's influential account of Romanticism as "internalized quest romance,"16 Frye has seen that the Romantic poet is undertaking a consciousness quest in which the movement is "inside and downward" ("Drunken Boat," 85). The central Romantic theme is "a romance with the poet for hero" in which the object is "the attaining of an expanded consciousness, the sense of identity with God and nature" (117). It is also his ease with Continental philosophy that engenders such startling and original insights as seeing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a precursor of Camus's The Outsider (122). But what really lies between the 1933 student essay and Frye's mature take on the Romantic movement is, of course, the idea of myth. "What I

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see first of all in Romanticism," he says in "The Drunken Boat," "is the effect of a profound change, not primarily in belief, but in the spatial projection of reality" (78). For Frye, spatial projections of reality are the dialectical structures of imagery, and cyclical structures of narrative, that are expressed directly in mythology, and in displaced form through literature. As expounded most fully in Fearful Symmetry, the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, and The Educated Imagination, the work of imagination, parallel to that of civilization itself, is to create a human home out of a hostile environment. It performs this operation, first, by the dialectical separation of the world mankind most desires from that which he most rejects, creating "levels" of reality; and second, by figuring cyclical movements, between the levels, which impose upon human affairs the pattern of the seasons. These movements, or narratives, are what Frye calls myths. This is why the first chapter of A Study of English Romanticism is titled "The Romantic Myth." There, in "The Drunken Boat," and in the Byron essay too, Frye sets out the revisions that the Romantic revolution effects on the four-tiered schema—incorporating a heaven, a lost paradise, a fallen world, and a hell—that had dominated Western mythology for centuries. While the Romantic projection retains four levels, they are looser and more flexible, as well as being morally ambiguous. And while the heavens are now a cold and forbidding place, or home to a manhating deity such as Blake's Nobodaddy, all movements towards reintegrated consciousness and intensity of being are, as we have noted, "inside and downward," in the direction of a mysterious source of hidden creative energy. As Frye shows (89), this will leave major nineteenth-century thinkers such as Marx, Kierkegaard, and Freud all committed to visions in which dangerous but creative revolutionary energies are construed as bubbling up from below and threatening to smash the polite daylight world, which rushes along on the surface like a "drunken boat." The levels of reality are morally ambiguous because at each of them the "recovery of projection" may succeed or falter: or, in other words, the subject-object dualism, mainstay of Western philosophy since Plato, may be successfully broken down, or reinstated. In his notebooks, Frye talks about Rencontre, the dimension of the ogdoad in which Romanticism and romance are usually included, as tracing the "fragmentation" of Western culture—its descent into the self-consciousness and anarchy that will result in modernism. In the student essay of 1933, this is still conceived in Spenglerian terms. Romanticism, there, is part of the de-

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cline of the West, and Frye is unambiguous in recognizing its affinities with fascism: "Neoromanticism . . . following the war, is actualized politically in National Socialism" (SE, 83). But thirty years later, Romanticism's affinities, for Frye, are no longer with fascism, but with romance: in both the published and unpublished works, he becomes increasingly uninterested in holding those two terms apart, and in The Secular Scripture we learn that in romance, too, the four levels of imaginative reality are "symbolically ambivalent" (98). Romanticism ushers in the fully realized version of what romance—as an alternative tradition to myth, concerned with human, rather than divine, adventures—has always implied: the imagination is intimately involved in the creation, rather than set over against it. In other words, Romanticism is an event in cultural history that completes a process—the recovery of projection—that has always been implicit in the humanistic alternative that romance has provided to myth. Fragmentation still applies as a way to describe the Romantic quest, which, as it turns inward and downward to seek out a lost identity, rejects comic visions of a reintegrated society in preference for loose, isolated, pastoral structures that have nothing fascist or socialist about them, but are closer to a kind of anarchism. By the time we get to The Secular Scripture, Romanticism and its descendants become the sentimental, or self-conscious and extended, phase of romance, with "sentimental" acquiring its Schillerian, nonpejorative connotation. The three main chapters of A Study of English Romanticism trace the putting into action of the new Romantic mythology, as tragedy (Death's Jest-Book), comedy (Prometheus Unbound), and romance (Endymiori). There is in each of these texts a consciousness quest, pursued respectively through death, revolutionary will, and dream (or epiphanic aesthetics). I do not know why Frye did not fill in the fourth quarter of the archetypal quadrant with a chapter on Romantic irony, unless we are to read the 1959 Byron essay, and its comments on Don Juan, as fulfilling that function. However Notebook 19, one of the notebooks that Frye kept while planning the "Third Book," suggests a different story. It tells us that A Study of English Romanticism, which Frye wrote as a series of lectures delivered at Western Reserve University in May, 1966, is intimately tied up with the Great Doodle that Frye sees his work in the 19605 as sketching in via the completion of the ogdoad. The four cardinal points around which the Doodle revolves are: Logos (north), Nous (east), Thanatos (south), and Nomos (west). As Frye employs these four terms in the notebooks, they mean something like: God,

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or the intelligible order; the universal mind, or risen man; death, or nothingness; and the law, or tradition. In Notebook 19 Frye calls the four phases of Romanticism equivalent to these poles "oracular," "revolutionary," "demonic," and "conservative." He associates Keats with oracular Romanticism, Shelley with revolutionary, and Beddoes with demonic, and, rather than a chapter on Byron, projects a chapter on Wordsworth's Prelude that would explore the conservative, or tradition-weighted side of the Romantic vision (see TEN, 51, 73): the side that meditates on emotion recollected in tranquility as it watches the sun sink slowly in the west. In the existing interpretive chapters of A Study of English Romanticism, Frye examines the quest for an intensified consciousness and a "recovery of projection" through three liminal states: Beddoes's search for an identity with nature through death; Shelley's comedy of a renewed human community, reconnected with fallen nature; and Keats's exploration of an identity with what the poet himself has dreamed. Each is an expression of the "in-here" vision of Romanticism, contrasting with the "out-there" vision it replaced. And so the notebooks help us to answer the question, Why, in A Study of English Romanticism, did Frye choose to elucidate Romanticism via three difficult, allegorical, and, broadly speaking, unpopular long poems by second-generation Romantics? Part of the answer, no doubt, is Frye's reservations about the commitment to the imagination that is implied by the poetic theory and practice of Wordsworth and Coleridge: no one could accuse the imagination celebrated by Beddoes, Shelley, and Keats as showing any backsliding from the age of sensibility. But the main point is that the three texts chosen are, while "plotless" (138), explicitly archetypal in their imagery and characterization. They are thus perfectly suited to Frye's purpose—which is to outline a myth, rather than a period, and relate it to the mythological framework that it has transformed. Another way to put this is to say that Frye's increasing sense of Romanticism as a key phase of the "secular scripture," and therefore as a descent into the wellsprings of imagination rather than into mere fragmentation and solipsism, requires Coleridge and Wordsworth to become increasingly sidelined, while allowing the age of sensibility to be reconnected with the Romantic tradition. Once the great revision of Romanticism has taken place and the creation is no longer viewed as external to the imagination, the quest myth becomes a journey from alienation to identity, and both the cyclical and dialectical structures described in Anatomy of Criticism take on a new character.17

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In its detailed and subtle outlining of that myth, A Study of English Romanticism is an important transitional work for Frye, carrying him from The Modern Century, his 1967 study of modernity and alienation, to The Critical Path and his development of the myth of concern. In The Modern Century Frye says that some modern myths of concern are "open" or "liberal," in that they can moderate their own ideological anxieties and allow space for other discourses to operate (114-15; NFMC, 64-5). In A Study of English Romanticism we learn that, through its recovery of projection, Romanticism is precisely an "open" rather than a "closed" expression of what concerns, or unites, the human community—it thus comprehends its own version of "freedom," and is the only form in which a modern mythology can remain vital enough to provide an alternative vision to that of science and technology: The Romantic myth is the form in which the Romantic poet expresses the recovery, for man, of what he formerly ascribed to gods, heroes, or the forces of nature. When man is recognized to be a myth-making animal, mythical language is also recognized to be the language, not for what is true, but for what could be made true. Mythology, thus, with Romanticism, as we have seen, ceases to be fables about the actions of superior powers and becomes a structure of human concern. It thereby takes over some aspects of religion. This does not mean that poetry becomes a religion or a substitute for religion. It means that what was formerly a structure of belief understood rationally, through doctrinal and conceptual statement, is now, from the Romantic movement onward, increasingly understood and interpreted imaginatively, as a structure of what might and could be true. Naturally, this change from what we have called a "closed" to an "open" social use of mythology is bound to make changes in the structure of comprehension itself, chiefly in the direction of making it more flexible. (177)

IV In his 1964 essay on "The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century" (no. 24), Frye reiterates what he has defined as the central metaphor of Romantic and post-Romantic "inside and down" symbology: Wherever we turn in nineteenth-century thought we meet some version of a "drunken boat" construct, where the values of humanity, intelligence, or

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cultural and social tradition keep tossing precariously in a sort of Noah's ark on top of a menacing and potentially destructive force. This is the relation of the world as idea to the world as will in Schopenhauer, of ethics to evolution in Darwin and Huxley, of the ascendant class to the proletariat in Marx, and, later, of ego to libido and id in Freud. (284)

Frye's writings on the nineteenth century are investigations into the afterglow of the Romantic revolution in mythology, as he has construed it. And, significantly, most of Frye's major pieces on the period are also reflections on romance. "The Problem of Spiritual Authority" is really about the nineteenth century's search for new metaphors of authority in a duopolistic romance landscape—order versus chaos, culture versus anarchy—where the ultimate mythic sanctions of a heaven and a hell no longer apply. The references to writers like Mill, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Burke, Pater, and Newman are prolific throughout Frye's work, and outweigh the attention given to the major nineteenth-century novelists. Frye notes at the beginning of "Some Reflections on Life and Habit" (no. 28) that for many years he taught a course on nineteenth-century intellectual prose.18 But that is a function, not a source, of his obsession with these writers. As he says in "The Problem of Spiritual Authority," the aspect of Victorian literature represented by these writers is "one of the seminal developments in English culture," ranking in importance with Shakespeare and Milton (271). While Frye's 1935 student paper on "The Impact of Cultural Movements upon the Church in England during the Nineteenth Century" does not of course use the phrase "recovery of projection," it does clarify that this is precisely what triggers the spiritual enquiries of these seminal nineteenth-century figures. "The rise of technical and engineering developments," says the young Frye, "brought about a sense of human sufficiency and power which made for a completely antinomian attitude to religion." This in turn "gives us two of our leading motives: the idea of the inherent power of humanity to achieve its own ends, and the sense that humanity is an aggregation of individuals" (SE, 274-5). Frye claims that the religious impulses of the nineteenth century can be classified according to their reaction to the Romantic discovery "that time was existence or life and that life was the ultimately real world" (SE, 275). He elaborates four basic reactions: agnosticism, aestheticism, pragmatism, and "creative evolution," the last of which embraces time by historicizing spiritual authority itself.

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"The Problem of Spiritual Authority" is a more subtle, and less schematic, elaboration of these alternatives. Frye examines attempts by the century's major thinkers to find new sources, and new communities, of spiritual authority, in tradition (Burke), revolution (Morris), versions of an elite (Carlyle, Butler, and Mill), and culture (Arnold). All of these are ultimately historical apprehensions that have given up on the possibility that spiritual authority can exist as a "genuine embodiment of revelation" (274). I think that the real clues to understanding Frye's interest in these writings are, first, that he construes them as finally inconclusive and, second, that he sees the twentieth century as still floundering around on the same terrain. Frye, in other words, is the legitimate descendant of these writers: a major literary and cultural thinker struggling to reconstitute spiritual authority out of whatever materials have been salvaged from the Romantic revolution. Indeed, we could see Frye's project as the development of a system that attempts to comprehend all the avenues of the spiritual quest of the Victorians: a "secular scripture" that incarnates the vision of an inherited collective imagination, is expressed through cultural traditions, relies on a critical elite for its clarification, and has a revolutionary position vis-a-vis the structures of established society. In "The Impact of Cultural Movements upon the Church," Frye contrasts the identification of art and religion in writers like Pater, Arnold, and Wilde with Blake. Blake is no "mere aesthete" elevating beauty over justice and truth, the poet over ordinary mortals: the Blakean artist is simply a man with "specialized abilities" (SE, 285). These are the points at which Frye inserts himself into the post-Romantic search for a source of spiritual authority. Like Arnold or Pater, he locates it in the arts, but works it out to a level of detail and structure never attempted by them, an order of words that expresses the inner design of the human, not just the poetic or elite, imagination. It is therefore particularly interesting that in the final pages of "The Problem of Spiritual Authority" there is a clue about why the theory of education and the role of the university preoccupy Frye so much in the second half of his career. In a Western culture that has passed across the threshold of its own mythic projections, educational institutions, rather than churches, become a new source of spiritual authority; and universities, which train the imagination, become a pathway towards the "real" social identity lying hidden behind "the transient appearance of real society" (285). On a social level, the equivalent to the individual's consciousnes quest is the educated imagination, and Frye is one of its central educators.

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The connection of the essays on Morris, Wagner, and Butler (nos. 26, 27, and 28) to romance is obvious, given that each of these figures was either a collector, and/or a reinterpreter, and/or an author of romance texts. Frye once told me that he wrote Fearful Symmetry during the years of the Second World War to ensure that people would understand that Blake's idea of myth had nothing to do with fascism.19 Wagner's work faced the same threat of appropriation, but here too Frye firmly establishes romance, and the recovery of divine projection, as the correct context: "At the end of Gotterdammerung the gods have had it, and the new reign of man is prophesied . .. and no other conclusion for the Ring was conceivable except a humanistic one. What kind of man would genuinely deserve to succeed the gods?" (334). A careful reading of these three essays will reveal that the connecting threads between them are memory, craft, and design—all themes that lead back to the deepest origins of Frye's thinking in his study of Blake. Morris is a writer who obsesses Frye, largely, I think, because the tension between his overt or conscious socialistic drive, and the vision of a social order much more individualistic and anarchistic embedded in his romances, is so productive for Frye's thinking about the political tensions of the succeeding "modern century." As he says in "The Impact of Cultural Movements," Morris "provides an interesting fusion of aesthetic and pragmatic interests" (SE, 291): the young Frye doesn't say so, but there is an obvious parallel with Blake. Like Blake and Wagner, Morris is also the exponent of a skill or craft, and Frye is fascinated both by the "design" it produces and by the "art of unconscious intelligence" that produces it. This art of unconscious memory is the same thing as the inherited "practice memory" that is the subject of the Butler essay: it is an inbuilt, coded principle in the mind that produces certain kinds of shapes and mandalas, not only in physical objects and the plastic arts, but also in the plot structures of literary narrative. In both writers it emerges from the recourse to "creative evolution" that is part of the nineteenth century's search for new meanings: the existence of practice memory deep within ourselves is, paradoxically, the closest we can hope to come to an "external" datum for the existence of higher spiritual authority. Frye's Jungian affinities have been overstated, but they do exist, and by meditating on the inherited structure of human memory in these three pieces, all written in the final decade of his life, Frye is tracing a romance journey to mankind's recognition scene with his own buried identity, which is what the recovery of projection means. He is also winding his way

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back to Blake's insight that "Man brings All that he has or Can have Into the World with him. Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted & Sown This World is too poor to produce one Seed."20 This collective inherited memory of mankind's buried innocence, expressed through the total shape of the arts, is a different faculty entirely to the "reproductive" memory of Wordsworth and Coleridge. If Frye uses his own acquired skill as a pianist as an example of "practice memory" in the Butler essay, most readers will nevertheless think first of the extraordinary power of memory that marks every phase of his critical achievement. Frye was well aware that his own critical system could provide important clues to the structure of inherited memory. He is much less hostile to memory than Blake, and much less intent upon maintaining a strict borderline between memory and imagination. Anatomy of Criticism is a study of the narrative structures employed again and again by the literary imagination; but it is also a study of the structure of the memory of Northrop Frye, and of the cultural memory of the West. In an unpublished letter to Frank Kermode in 1967, responding to Kermode's review of Fools of Time, Frye wrote: "I was interested in your word 'mnemotechnical,' because it has occurred to me that my overall critical structure is in many respects very like a classical memory theatre."21 The present volume illustrates as well as any other of the Collected Works the astonishing powers of Frye's critical recollection: he may have forgotten a detail in the dialogue he quotes from Bernard Shaw's one-act play of 1913, The Music Cure (95), but most Shaw enthusiasts have forgotten that he wrote a one-act play called The Music Cure. When Frye says in his unpublished speech (no. 12) on Coleridge's editor, Kathleen Coburn, that "for annotating Coleridge only one requirement is needed, namely omniscience" (216), he may be winking mischievously at his own future annotators—though fortunately they are in possession of a tool, the internet, that Kathleen Coburn lacked. For many readers of this volume, and I confess for its editor, the highlight will be the two virtuoso pieces of practical criticism that Frye produced in the 19605; "Emily Dickinson" (no. 23) and "Dickens and the Comedy of Humours" (no. 25). While each of the essays is freestanding and complete as a study of its chosen subject, each is also intimately tied up with Frye's meditation on romance and Romanticism. The Dickinson piece is alive to subtleties and nuances in precisely the way that some of Frye's detractors claimed was lacking in his criticism. The poet's search for numinous tokens, fragments of "circumference" within her own con-

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strained orbit, places her very much in Frye's romance tradition. Indeed, when we think of Dickinson and Frye, we understand better why Frye chose a French word that means "encounter" for the chapter of the ogdoad dealing with romance, and why he saw "fragmentation" as one of its defining characteristics: like the sensibility poets, Dickinson deals in "the brief or even the fragmentary utterance" as a way of capturing her momentary encounters with spiritual authority. Dickinson provides a late-Romantic, romance example of the humanistic condition in which "separateness" and "identity" have become the two poles of the imagination and the organizing categories of the narrative cycle. In Dickinson's imaginative world, once again, a projected heaven has been recovered: "It is attainable; the poet has attained it; it is not, therefore, a 'superhuman site,' nor could it survive the extinction of the human mind" (264). It is fascinating, too, that years before Harold Bloom found agon to be such a productive metaphor to describe the relation of the poet to his tradition, particularly in the post-Romantic word, Frye closes this essay by saying that Dickinson "fought her angel until she had forced out of him the crippling blessing of genius" (270). Finally, "Dickens and the Comedy of Humours" is a powerful corrective to those who have suggested that, as practical interpretation, Frye's archetypal method can only lead to pigeonholing. There is not a page of this essay that does not ripple with original insight—insights that could not have been achieved except by the putting into action of Frye's conceptual frame. It is Frye's "system," applied to these novels, that allows us to see Dickens's plots as displaced versions of New Comedy, and Dickens himself as a fully achieved romancer, rather than as a failed realist. Once that insight has been established, hundreds of previously unseen connections emerge, both internally—between Dickens's plots and characters—and externally, between Dickens and the traditional plot- and character-types of the comedy and romance traditions. Dickens's particular emphasis is on the "humours," or obsessive minor characters, who provide a blockage to the achievement of the comic action, but also, frequently, its key. George Eliot or Jane Austen would do as well as Dickens to illustrate the realist displacement of the New Comedy. But Dickens is a popular romance writer and thus illustrates what The Secular Scripture will argue a decade later: that romance is "the structural core of all fiction" (SeS, 15). Dickens is a romancer working within a post-Romantic myth, and instead of the "green world" set over against the humorous world that we

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find in Shakespeare, in Dickens any alternative reality is located in "a vast secret world, the world of privacy, where there is little or no communication." This is a world "associated mainly with dreams, memories, and death," which Frye argues will lead to the preoccupation in ironic twentieth-century fiction with "the bedroom and bathroom world of ordinary privacy" (303). It is also, of course, related to the Romantic myth that Frye has traced in A Study of English Romanticism, particularly in the Beddoes chapter. The post-Romantic energies that flow upwards from such a world cannot revitalize society, at least in anything like its presently constituted form, which is why Frye attaches words like "absurd" and "nihilistic" (307) reconstitutes society on its sexual basis of the family, the shadowy old fathers and mothers being replaced by new and livelier successors" (307). Essentially withdrawn and subjective, but also devoid of any superhuman perspective in how they frame their problems and solutions, Dickens's endings thus satisfy both the "fragmentation" and "recovery of projection" criteria for belonging in the Rencontre project. But if Dickens's novels, as George Orwell also famously argued,22 are devoid of anything but a vaguely anarchistic social message, the recovery of projection insures that they are anything but ahistorical. As Frye says in one of the "Third Book" notebooks: The principle emerging at the end of my Dickens paper is something like this: the traditional belief in Providence, or a designing force in life, is a projected literary conception. The Word of God tells human life as his story, and if we knew the whole story we could see the design. This existential & immanent design is to be distinguished from the objective or teleological design in nature. When we stop projecting the latter, we get science; when we stop projecting the former, we get a philosophy of history. (TEN, 102)

This variety of "self-consciousness"—that humanity is in charge of its own past and future, that there is such a thing as a philosophy of history—is also part of the Romantic revolution, as Frye had argued thirty years earlier in his paper on cultural movements and the Church. And where Frye implicitly locates it in the closing pages of the Dickens essay is in the "absurd" quality of Dickens's novels: the investment in design that takes them in the opposite direction from realism, and towards romance. Design always trumps reality in Dickens, and however absurd the resultant happy endings, they assert that "what is must never

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take final precedence over what ought to be" (308). Implicit in that assertion is that the larger human story, too, is a man-wrought history, and not a divine given. In its combination of individual insights with a broad coordinating perspective, there is a kind of perfection about "Dickens and the Comedy of Humours" that would surely earn it a place in an anthology of the indispensable practical criticism of the twentieth century. And while almost any of the longer pieces in Northrop Frye's Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries would fit the purpose, I think that this is the essay that I would give to a young student of literature today to show him or her what modern criticism in its heyday, and in the hands of its central critic, could do.

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On the Eighteenth Century

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1 The Young Boswell Spring 19511

Review of Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. Frederick A.A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950). From Hudson Review, 4 ( Spring 1951): 143-6. Reprinted in NFCL, 165-9.

It is now well known that a great mass of Boswelliana, recovered from Fettercairn and Malahide castles, has been bought by Yale University, and is in course of publication. The story is summarized by Mr. Christopher Morley in the introduction to the newly published journal kept by Boswell, then aged twenty-two, from November 1762 to August 1763, the year that he met Johnson. The journal is full of narrative and antiquarian interest, but it adds nothing startling to our present knowledge of the period. Its importance is rather that it illustrates a significant stage in the development of a writer of genius. We may feel that Boswell had no right to be a great artist: that biographies should be factual and works of art fictional, and that they should keep apart. But there it is. Without using a single faked or illegitimate device as a biographer, Boswell has given us a real person who is also a great fictional character, and who keeps obstinately getting mixed up in our minds with Falstaff and Micawber. When we talk about Johnson we still tend, even with Boswell to help us, to make him as dull and obvious as a face on a billboard, whether we adopt the "sturdy common sense" cliche or the approach of Churchill's "Pomposo, insolent and loud."1 To contrast either with the subtlety of Boswell is to get some idea of Bos well's achievement. The phrase "a Boswell" generally means a silent stenographer, but Boswell was anything but that, and when we turn to his life and character we are mystified. One of the things the Boswell papers should

4

On the Eighteenth Century

clo is to give us some idea of how this strange creature with his spastic will managed to keep sprawling and shambling up to the top of one of the dizziest technical pinnacles of art. In the art of Boswell's biography two things are remarkable. One is the endless patience and skill with which he drew Johnson out through cunningly chosen questions and situations: Johnson comes to life as a result of what one can only call an exhaustive biographical dialectic, a Platonic dialogue in reverse. The other is his powerful grasp of the organic consistency of Johnson's character: his ability to show that the tenderness and the brutality, the outraged bellows and the flashing epigrams, the heartiness and the misanthropy, were inseparable parts of the same man. He saw the wistful Quixote behind the coffee-house buccaneer, and he saw that Johnson's arrogance was really a high courage because of the loneliness it had to conquer. Boswell possessed a very rare kind of sympathetic Einfiihlungg[empathy! which he applied to others besides Johnson. He succeeded in gaining introductions to both Rousseau and Voltaire by writing a Rousseauist letter, exclamatory and self-deprecating, to Rousseau and a Voltairean one, witty and epatant [sparkling, provocative], to Voltaire. To call the motive for these letters snobbery gets us nowhere: we might as well call it original sin. It is at least fairer to Boswell to notice how well he understood the weaknesses of these men, and how uncynical and tolerant that understanding was. In this journal, after a day of letter-writing, he says: "I have touched every man on the proper key, and yet have used no deceit" [328]. Tolerance, like charity, begins at home in self-tolerance, a quite different thing from self-indulgence or self-conceit, however much of either Boswell also had. The present journal gives one more respect for Yeats's "mask" conception of the psychology of the writer.2 The writer, says Yeats, compensates for his personal deficiencies by projecting an ideal self which is the exact opposite of his real self; his ability as a writer then crystallizes around and expresses this ideal self. Boswell, at twenty-two, noted in himself an infantile confidingness, a desperate urgency to be noticed, and a wit that seemed to come off best when the victim of it was himself. And so, being like other self-conscious young men much preoccupied with social rhythms, he tried to become as exquisitely poised and disciplined as Castiglione's courtier. He assumed that it was possible to grow into the character of "what God intended me and I myself chose" [62] by an act of conscious will. Because his social defences were apt to fall with a crash at the first moment of contact, he stresses the importance

The Young Boswell

5

of being what he calls retenu [cautious]. No one ever died for a backslapper: the magnetic personalities are those who can suggest by their manner that other people should come to them. "I am always resolving to study propriety of conduct" [272], he says; and "[I] pride myself in thinking that my natural character is that of dignity" [258!. There follows a more rueful entry: "Dempster and Erskine breakfasted with me. . . . I said I wanted to get rid of folly and to acquire sensible habits. They laughed" [281-2]. In this deadlock a third character takes over, cold, precise, and ruthless: the character of Boswell, the writer. Boswell the writer works the same miracle of recreation on himself that he was later to work on Johnson, and he does it by the same process of inspired listening, except that here he is able to eavesdrop on thoughts as well. Boswell the writer listens to Boswell reflecting on a spasmodic act of charity: "The creature did not seem so grateful as I could have wished" [127]. He listens to Boswell contemplating his ideal image after telling off the mistress who gave him gonorrhea: "During all this conversation I really behaved with a manly composure and polite dignity that could not fail to inspire an awe" [160]. Then he records how he wrote her to get back his entrance fee of two guineas. And so on. The editor, Mr. Pottle, explains that the journal was, like Swift's Journal to Stella, sent to a friend as correspondence and hence written for a reader, and he notes that Boswell will often, writing several days after an event, build up narrative interest by excluding his later knowledge. Boswell noted his own selectivity, and remarks that he wants his journal "to contain a consistent picture of a young fellow eagerly pushing through life" [206]. But the sinewy narrative drive of the journal and its constant impression of being humorously aware and emotionally on top of all situations comes, not from the man, but from the mask that conceals the man and reveals the artist. The result, as Mr. Pottle also remarks, is quite different both from Rousseau's (and Goethe's) factitious manipulation and from the almost inhuman self-extroversion of Pepys. It is quite different too from the only other English prose writer of the age of sensibility who ranks with Boswell: Sterne. Sterne, like Boswell, is a connoisseur of unstudied simplicity, and, though we know that Toby's reactions will always be military, each one is fresh and spontaneous. "Ilus," says Walter Shandy, rationalizing the disaster of little Tristram and the window-sash, "circumcised his whole army one morning.—Not without a court-martial? cry'd my Uncle Toby."3 But Sterne himself is cunning and artful. Boswell

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On the Eighteenth Century

the subject is naive rather than simple, and Boswell the writer is correspondingly candid. Naive, because, being a prey to conflicting moods, he allows each mood to project its own image of himself and the world in turn. He tries to get a commission in the Guards, and remarks, "I do think my love of form for its own sake is an excellent qualification for a gentleman of the Army" [128]. He climbs into bed with Louisa and says, "I surely may be styled a Man of Pleasure" [140]. And candid, because he records all his moods, and does not conventionalize himself. Aristotle remarks that morally there is little to choose between the boaster and the ironic or selfdeprecating man, as they both lie about themselves.4 And, from a literary point of view, they both produce rather facile autobiographies. Boswell shows an uncanny knack of hitting a tone exactly in the middle, vain and ironic at the same time. "I have an honest mind and a warm friendship. Upon my soul, not a bad specimen of a man. However my particular notions may alter, I always preserve these great and worthy qualities" [80]. Or, perhaps with more obvious artfulness: "I really conducted this affair with a manliness and prudence that pleased me very much. The whole expense was just eighteen shillings" [140]. This kind of thing is the very essence of human self-revelation, and is far above a mere willingness to tell the worst of oneself. It is fascinating too to read the famous 1763 bits of the Lifeein relation to Boswell instead of Johnson. Like most people who struggle for impossible masks, Boswell had father-trouble, and this journal polarizes him between his own father and a new father-figure. We notice for the first time how Boswell's opening conversations with Johnson turn on the relation of father and son, and on the limits of obedience and authority. Boswell's own father, Lord Auchinleck, was a provincial Scotch Presbyterian who despised literature in general and Boswell's writings in particular, and insisted that Boswell should go into law (which, Boswell observes, would force him "to be obliged to remember and repeat distinctly the dull story, probably of some very trivial affair" [202]). Johnson was a Londoner, an Episcopalian monarchist, and a literary figure who specifically encouraged Boswell to keep a journal. A letter to Boswell from his father is printed in an appendix: it is the first document of a long tradition, culminating in Macaulay's essay, which can see nothing in the man Boswell but a deplorable ass.5 Meanwhile, Boswell had been composing, with all his usual tact and skill, his letter of introduction to posterity, which has taken much longer to be delivered, but should give him the last word.

2

Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility June 1956

From FI, 130-7. First published in ELH, A Journal of Literary History, 23 (June 1956): 144-52. Reprinted in Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. James L. Clifford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 311-18; and The Practice of Criticism, ed. Sheldon P. Zitner et al. (Chicago: Scott & Foresman, 1966), 25-31. A note to this paper in ELH notes that "this and the following two papers were read before English Group VIII of the Modern Language Association in 1955.. The purpose of the program was to consider the question of whether the literature of the later eighteenth century is merely transitional or whether it justifies and calls for a distinct kind of esthetic analysis."

The period of English literature which covers roughly the second half of the eighteenth century is one which has always suffered from not having a clear historical or functional label applied to it. I call it here the age of sensibility, which is not intended to be anything but a label. This period has the "Augustan" age on one side of it and the "Romantic" movement on the other, and it is usually approached transitionally, as a period of reaction against Pope and anticipation of Wordsworth. The chaos that results from treating this period, or any other, in terms of reaction has been well described by Professor Crane in a recent article in the University of Toronto Quarterly.1 What we do is to set up, as the logical expression of Augustanism, some impossibly pedantic view of following rules and repressing feelings, which nobody could ever have held, and then treat any symptom of freedom or emotion as a departure from this. Our students are thus graduated with a vague notion that the age of sensibility was the time when poetry moved from a reptilian Classicism, all cold and dry reason, to a mammalian Romanticism, all warm and wet feeling.

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On the Eighteenth Century

As for the term "pre-Romantic," that, as a term for the age itself, has the peculiar demerit of committing us to anachronism before we start, and imposing a false teleology on everything we study. Not only did the "pre-Romantics" not know that the Romantic movement was going to succeed them, but there has probably never been a case on record of a poet's having regarded a later poet's work as the fulfilment of his own. However, I do not care about terminology, only about appreciation for an extraordinarily interesting period of English literature, and the first stage in renewing that appreciation seems to me the gaining of a clear sense of what it is in itself. Some languages use verb tenses to express, not time, but the difference between completed and continuous action. And in the history of literature we become aware, not only of periods, but of a recurrent opposition of two views of literature. These two views are the Aristotelian and the Longinian, the aesthetic and the psychological, the view of literature as product and the view of literature as process. In our day we have acquired a good deal of respect for literature as process, notably in prose fiction. The stream of consciousness gets careful treatment in our criticism, and when we compare Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf on the subject of Mrs. Brown we generally take the side of Virginia Woolf.2 So it seems that our age ought to feel a close kinship with the prose fiction of the age of sensibility, when the sense of literature as process was brought to a peculiarly exquisite perfection by Sterne, and in lesser degree by Richardson and Boswell. All the great story-tellers, including the Augustan ones, have a strong sense of literature as a finished product. The suspense is thrown forward until it reaches the end, and is based on our confidence that the author knows what is coming next. A story-teller does not break his illusion by talking to the reader as Fielding does, because we know from the start that we are listening to Fielding telling a story—that is, Johnson's arguments about illusion in drama apply equally well to prose fiction of Fielding's kind. But when we turn to Tristram Shandy we not only read the book but watch the author at work writing it: at any moment the house of Walter Shandy may vanish and be replaced by the author's study. This does break the illusion, or would if there were any illusion to break, but here we are not being led into a story, but into the process of writing a story: we wonder, not what is coming next, but what the author will think of next. Sterne is, of course, an unusually pure example of a process writer, but

Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility

9

even in Richardson we find many of the same characteristics. Johnson's well-known remark that if you read Richardson for the story you would hang yourself indicates that Richardson is not interested in a plot with a quick-march rhythm.3 Richardson does not throw the suspense forward, but keeps the emotion at a continuous present. Readers of Pamela have become so fascinated by watching the sheets of Pamela's manuscript spawning and secreting all over her master's house, even into the recesses of her clothes, as she fends off assault with one hand and writes about it with the other, that they sometimes overlook the reason for an apparently clumsy device. The reason is, of course, to give the impression of literature as process, as created on the spot out of the events it describes. And in the very beginning of Bosivell in London we can see the boy of twenty-one already practising the art of writing as a continuous process from experience. When he writes of his adventure with Louisa he may be writing several days after the event, but he does not use his later knowledge. In poetry the sense of literature as a finished product normally expresses itself in some kind of regularly recurring metre, the general pattern of which is established as soon as possible. In listening to Pope's couplets we have a sense of continually fulfilled expectation which is the opposite of obviousness: a sense that eighteenth-century music also often gives us. Such a technique demands a clear statement of what sound patterns we may expect. We hear at once the full ring of the rhyming couplet, and all other sound patterns are kept to a minimum. In such a line as And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a-year,4

the extra assonance is a deliberate discord, expressing the difficulties of constipated genius. Similarly with the alliteration in Great Gibber's brazen, brainless brothers stand,5

and the fact that these are deliberate discords used for parody indicates that they are normally not present. Johnson's disapproval of such devices in serious contexts is written all over the Lives of the Poets. When we turn from Pope to the age of sensibility, we get something of the same kind of shock that we get when we turn from Tennyson or Matthew Arnold to Hopkins. Our ears are assaulted by unpredictable

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On the Eighteenth Century

assonances, alliterations, inter-rhymings, and echolalia: Mie love ys decide, Gon to hys death-bedde .. .6 With brede ethereal wove, O'erhang his wavy bed .. 7 The couthy cracks begin whan supper's o'er, The cheering bicker gars them glibly gash . . .8 But a Pebble of the brook Warbled out these metres meet.. .9

In many of the best-known poems of the period, in Smart's Song to David, in Chatterton's elegies, in Burns's songs and Blake's lyrics, even in some of the Wesley hymns, we find a delight in refrain for refrain's sake. Sometimes, naturally, we can see the appropriate literary influences helping to shape the form, such as the incremental repetition of the ballad, or Old Norse alliteration in The Fatal Sisters. And whatever may be thought of the poetic value of the Ossianic poems, most estimates of that value parrot Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's criticisms of Ossian's imagery are quite beside the point. The vague generalized imagery of Ossian, like the mysterious resonant names and the fixed epithets, are part of a deliberate and well-unified scheme. Fingal and Temora are long poems for the same reason that Clarissa is a long novel: not because there is a complicated story to be told, as in Tom Jones or an epic of Southey, but because the emotion is being maintained at a continuous present by various devices of repetition. The reason for these intensified sound patterns is, once again, an interest in the poetic process as distinct from the product. In the composing of poetry, where rhyme is as important as reason, there is a primary stage in which words are linked by sound rather than sense. From the point of view of sense this stage is merely free or uncontrolled association, and in the way it operates it is very like the dream. Again like the dream, it has to meet a censor principle, and shape itself into intelligible patterns. Where the emphasis is on the communicated product, the qualities of consciousness take the lead: a regular metre, clarity of syntax, epigram and wit, repetition of sense in antithesis and balance rather than

Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility

11

of sound. Swift speaks with admiration of Pope's ability to get more "sense" into one couplet than he can into six: concentration of sense for him is clearly a major criterion of poetry.10 Where the emphasis is on the original process, the qualities of subconscious association take the lead, and the poetry becomes hypnotically repetitive, oracular, incantatory, dreamlike, and, in the original sense of the word, charming. The response to it includes a subconscious factor, the surrendering to a spell. In Ossian, who carries this tendency further than anyone else, the aim is not concentration of sense but diffusion of sense, hence Johnson's remark that anybody could write like Ossian if he would abandon his mind to it.11 Literature as product may take a lyrical form, as it does in the sublime ode about which Professor Maclean has written so well,12 but it is also the conception of literature that makes the longer continuous poem possible. Literature as process, being based on an irregular and unpredictable coincidence of sound patterns, tends to seek the brief or even the fragmentary utterance, in other words to centre itself on the lyric, which accounts for the feeling of a sudden emergence of a lyrical impulse in the age of sensibility. The "pre-Romantic" approach to this period sees it as developing a conception of the creative imagination, which became the basis of Romanticism. This is true, but the Romantics tended to see the poem as the product of the creative imagination, thus reverting in at least one respect to the Augustan attitude. For the Augustan, art is posterior to nature because nature is the art of God; for the Romantic, art is prior to nature because God is an artist; one deals in physical and the other in biological analogies, as Professor Abrams's Mirror and the Lamp has shown. But for the Romantic poet the poem is still an artefact: in Coleridge's terms, a secondary or productive imagination has been imposed on a primary imaginative process. So, different as it is from Augustan poetry, Romantic poetry is like it in being a conservative rhetoric, and in being founded on relatively regular metrical schemes. Poe's rejection of the continuous poem13 does not express anything very central in Romanticism itself, as nearly every major Romantic poet composed poems of considerable, sometimes immense, length. Poe's theory is closer to the practice of the age of sensibility before him and the symbolistes after him. In the age of sensibility most of the long poems, of course, simply carry on with standard continuous metres, or exploit the greater degree of intensified recurrent sound afforded by stanzaic forms, notably the Spenserian. But sometimes the peculiar problems of making associative

12

On the Eighteenth Century

poetry continuous were faced in a more experimental way, experiments largely ignored by the Romantics. Oracular poetry in a long form often tends to become a series of utterances, irregular in rhythm but strongly marked off one from the other. We notice in Whitman, for instance, that the end of every line has a strong pause—for when the rhythm is variable there is no point in a run-on line. Sometimes this oracular rhythm takes on at least a typographical resemblance to prose, as it does in Rimbaud's Saison en Enfer, or, more frequently, to a discontinuous blend of prose and verse in which the sentence, the paragraph, and the line are much the same unit. The chief literary influence for this rhythm has always been the translated Bible, which took on a new impetus in the age of sensibility; and if we study carefully the rhythm of Ossian, of Smart's Jubilate Agno, and of the Blake Prophecies, we can see three very different but equally logical developments of this semiBiblical rhythm. Where there is a strong sense of literature as aesthetic product, there is also a sense of its detachment from the spectator. Aristotle's theory of catharsis describes how this works for tragedy: pity and fear are detached from the beholder by being directed towards objects. Where there is a sense of literature as process, pity and fear become states of mind without objects, moods which are common to the work of art and the reader, and which bind them together psychologically instead of separating them aesthetically. Fear without an object, as a condition of mind prior to being afraid of anything, is called Angst or anxiety, a somewhat narrow term for what may be almost anything between pleasure and pain. In the general area of pleasure comes the eighteenth-century conception of the sublime, where qualities of austerity, gloom, grandeur, melancholy, or even menace are a source of romantic or penseroso feelings. The appeal of Ossian to his time on this basis needs no comment. From here we move through the graveyard poets, the Gothic-horror novelists, and the writers of tragic ballads, to such fleurs du mal as Cowper's Castaway and Blake's Golden Chapel poem in the Rossetti MS [£4677X163]. Pity without an object has never to my knowledge been given a name, but it expresses itself as an imaginative animism, or treating everything in nature as though it had human feelings or qualities. At one end of its range is the apocalyptic exultation of all nature bursting into human life that we have in Smart's Song to David and the ninth Night of The Four Zoas. Next comes an imaginative sympathy with the kind of folklore that

Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility

13

peoples the countryside with elemental spirits, such as we have in Collins, Fergusson, Burns, and the Wartons. Next we have the curiously intense awareness of the animal world which (except for some poems of D.H. Lawrence) is unrivalled in this period, and is expressed in some of its best-realized writing: in Burns's To a Mouse, in Cowper's exquisite snail poem, in Smart's superb lines on his cat Jeoffrey, in the famous starling and ass episodes in Sterne, in the opening of Blake's Auguries of Innocence. Finally comes the sense of sympathy with man himself, the sense that no one can afford to be indifferent to the fate of anyone else, which underlies the protests against slavery and misery in Cowper, in Crabbe, and in Blake's Songs of Experience. This concentration on the primitive process of writing is projected in two directions, into nature and into history. The appropriate natural setting for much of the poetry of sensibility is nature at one of the two poles of process, creation and decay. The poet is attracted by the ruinous and the mephitic, or by the primeval and "unspoiled"—a picturesque subtly but perceptibly different from the Romantic picturesque. The projection into history assumes that the psychological progress of the poet from lyrical through epic to dramatic presentations, discussed by Stephen at the end of Joyce's Portrait, must be the historical progress of literature as well. Even as late as the preface to Victor Hugo's Cromwell this assumption persists. The Ossian and Rowley poems are not simple hoaxes: they are pseudepigrapha, like the Book of Enoch, and like it they take what is psychologically primitive, the oracular process of composition, and project it as something historically primitive. The poetry of process is oracular, and the medium of the oracle is often in an ecstatic or trance-like state: autonomous voices seem to speak through him, and as he is concerned to utter rather than to address, he is turned away from his listener, so to speak, in a state of rapt self-communion. The free association of words, in which sound is prior to sense, is often a literary way of representing insanity. In Rimbaud's terrifyingly accurate phrase, poetry of the associative or oracular type requires a "dereglement de tous les sens."14 Hence the qualities that make a man an oracular poet are often the qualities that work against, and sometimes destroy, his social personality. Far more than the time of Rimbaud and Verlaine is this period of literature a period of the poete maudit [accursed poet]. The list of poets over whom the shadows of mental breakdown fell is far too long to be coincidence. The much publicized death of Chatterton is certainly one of the personal tragedies of the age, but an easier one to

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On the Eighteenth Century

take than the kind of agony which is expressed with an almost definitive poignancy by Smart in Jubilate Agno: For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls.15 It is characteristic of the age of sensibility that this personal or biographical aspect of it should be so closely connected with its central technical feature. The basis of poetic language is the metaphor, and the metaphor, in its radical form, is a statement of identity: "this is that." In all our ordinary experience the metaphor is nonliteral: nobody but a savage or a lunatic can take metaphor literally. For Classical or Augustan critics the metaphor is a condensed simile: its real or commonsense basis is likeness, not identity, and when it obliterates the sense of likeness it becomes barbaric. In Johnson's strictures on the music and water metaphor of Gray's Bard16 we can see what intellectual abysses, for him, would open up if metaphors ever passed beyond the stage of resemblance. For the Romantic critic, the identification in the metaphor is ideal: two images are identified within the mind of the creating poet. But where metaphor is conceived as part of an oracular and halfecstatic process, there is a direct identification in which the poet himself is involved. To use another phrase of Rimbaud's, the poet feels not "je pense," but "on me pense."17 In the age of sensibility some of the identifications involving the poet seem manic, like Blake's with Druidic bards or Smart's with Hebrew prophets; or depressive, like Cowper's with a scapegoat figure, a stricken deer, or castaway; or merely bizarre, like Macpherson's with Ossian or Chatterton's with Rowley. But it is in this psychological self-identification that the central "primitive" quality of this age really emerges. In Collins's Ode on the Poetical Character, in Smart's Jubilate Agno, and in Blake's Four Zoas, it attains its greatest intensity and completeness. In these three poems, especially the last two, God, the poet's soul, and nature are brought into a white-hot fusion of identity, an imaginative fiery furnace in which the reader may, if he chooses, make a fourth. All three poems are of the greatest complexity, yet the emotion on which they are founded is of a simplicity and directness that English literature has rarely attained again. With the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, secondary imagination and recollection in tranquillity took over English poetry and dominated it until the end of the nineteenth century. The primitiv-

Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility

15

ism of Blake and Smart revived in France with Rimbaud and Gerard de Nerval, but even this development had become conservative by the time its influence reached England, and only in a few poems of Dylan Thomas, and those perhaps not his best, does the older tradition revive. But contemporary poetry is still deeply concerned with the problems and techniques of the age of sensibility, and while the latter's resemblance to our time is not a merit in it, it is a logical enough reason for re-examining it with fresh eyes.

3

Nature Methodized August 1960

Review of Bonamy Dobree, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). From the Griffin, 9 (August 1960): 2-11, which introduces some section headings not here reproduced. Reprinted in NFCL, 147-55-

What is the point of literary history? It must be different from that of ordinary history. If one were to write the history of English literature from 1700 to 1740 simply as history, it might still be a fairly interesting book, because this age happened to be one in which the major writers, Defoe, Swift, and Pope, were deeply involved with the events of their time. But even so the main emphasis would fall on such works as Swift's The Dmpier's Letters and Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters. All really major works of the imagination—Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, The Dunciad—take us into something that is not history, and even the relation to history that they still have is a curious one. Mr. Dobree, naturally, devotes much attention to the political events of his period, and to his writers' involvements with them. But he also comments on the naivete and the black and white melodrama of Pope's political satire, and remarks: "[I]t is this very innocence which gives these satires their pure quality" [553]. A poet can hardly help being a bad politician: he must retain an imaginative simplicity that has little relevance to what goes on in party conflict. Milton saw the Restoration of Charles II as the giving up, by a people chosen by God for the gospel (as Israel was chosen for the law) of its Promised Land, and turning to "a captain back for Egypt."1 Charles himself saw it as a sign that the powerful and wealthy class which had risen in revolt against his father had

Nature Methodized

17

achieved its ends. Charles's view of it was shrewd and accurate and Milton's was preposterous; but it was Milton's apocalyptic fantasies that made him Milton. And if great literature is always out of historical focus, the literary careers of minor or more retired writers are hardly in history at all. Mr. Dobree's book has a chronological table of the main literary events of his period—publications, birth and death dates of authors, and the like—and this useful but hardly fascinating apparatus is really all that literary history, considered as a branch of ordinary history, amounts to. No: The point of literary history is not to articulate the memory of mankind by putting a mass of documents into an ordered and coherent narrative. Its documents are far better worth reading than any history of them could ever be. Its task is to reawaken and refresh our imaginative experience by showing us what unexplored riches of it lie within a certain area. In every age there is a large group of writers who seem to be more or less all the same size. Those who eventually turn out to be the greatest writers are seldom wholly ignored in their own day; but even more seldom are they regarded as greatly superior to their contemporaries. The tragedies of Webster remind us of Shakespeare at every turn because our imaginations are possessed by Shakespeare. But Webster himself lists his influences as first Chapman, then Ben Jonson, then Beaumont and Fletcher, then Shakespeare, Dekker, and Heywood, and we have no reason to suppose that he was being disingenuous. Many decades have to elapse before the final comparative standards emerge. Even Dryden, while writing with great accuracy about Shakespeare, could still say, "[H]owever others are now generally preferr'd before him."2 Comparative standards are established by what may be called the usefulness of the writer to the culture that follows and absorbs him, the slow and gradual discovery, in general cultural practice, that he is indispensable. They cannot be established by the value judgments of individual critics, which are the effects and not the causes of his usefulness. Once they are established, the dilettante is apt to assume that any writer he has not heard of has been "forgotten," and that anyone who has been forgotten deserved to be, because posterity, including himself, is infallible in such matters. The literary historian, trying to absorb himself into the period he is studying, finds himself recapturing some of its perspective, and discovers at once that posterity is the laziest and most incompetent of critics. If, for instance (to switch to another art: the principles of every mode of cultural history are the same), he is writing the history of eighteenth-century music, it is no sign of his feeling for the

i8

On the Eighteenth Century

period if he likes Bach and Mozart: it is merely a sign that he is not quite a fool. If Soler or Mattheson or Cimarosa also burst on him with astonishment and delight; if he has an insatiable zest for rediscovering the most obscure music and the most humdrum composers; if he can sympathize with (which does not mean agreeing with) the councillors of Leipzig in their desire to get Telemann or Graupner for their organist rather than Bach, then he has some claims to historical sense. For even the errors of an age are inseparable from its integrity. A critic who loves Keats may produce fine criticism on Keats; but he will not have a genuinely historical approach to Keats unless he can understand why Croker reviewed Endymion as he did,3 and feels that he might well have written much the same review in the same situation. This is not to say that the literary historian should not use his hindsight, but merely that literary history does not consist entirely of hindsight. For bringing our imaginative experience of the past to life there can be no substitute for history. The Rape of the Lock, embalmed in a freshman survey course, may well seem to the freshman to be little more than a long poem in heroic couplets about airy fairies. There is a limit, in other words, to what a limited literary experience can get out of any poem. And if such a poem is removed from its historical context and presented as one of the few memorable works of its age, limited experience, gazing at itself in the mirror of the poem, may only conclude that the other works must be pretty dismal. If one has read, with gradually increasing relish, and without worrying about any comparative standards, Gay's Trivia, Mandeville's Grumbling Hive, Philips's Splendid Shilling, and Matthew Green's The Spleen, then The Rape of the Lock will grow, with its reader's experience, into something more like its proper proportions. The literary historian is the man who has read everything in his field with equal interest: he has lost his sense of comparative values in order to find them again in their genuine form, when the greatest writers of an age are seen to be mountain peaks and not passing clouds. And mountain peaks should be reached by climbing and descent, not by dropping on and off in a twentieth-century helicopter. The literary historian begins in the "background" which is the subject of the second part of Mr. Dobree's book, in the buzzing gossip of letters and memoirs, the random impressions of travellers, the network of allusions and value judgments in criticism and history writing. The literary historian needs a sharp eye for the historical epiphany, as a student of Joyce might call it: for the kind of remark that sums up not only the

Nature Methodized

19

expressed opinions but also the unconscious assumptions of an age. When Mr. Dobree quotes Lady Wentworth as saying, in her aristocratic spelling, that "mony now adays is the raening passion" [344], we can see the kind of social milieu out of which Pope's Moral Essays, with their stress on the "ruling passion," emerged. Again, Mr. Dobree quotes the critic Gildon, who is echoing Dennis, as saying: Poetry is an Art; for since it has a certain End, there must be some certain Way of arriving at that End. No Body can doubt of so evident a Truth, that in all Things, where there may be a Right and a Wrong, there is an Art, and sure Rules to lead you to the former, and direct you to avoid the latter.

biop

Every age produces these "there must be" statements, full of the desperate pathos of the effort to find values that time and chance will not happen to. But only the eighteenth century could have grounded a defence of the "rules" in so uncertain a pun on "certain." From "background," the literary historian goes on to the foreground, the periodicals and magazines like The Tatler and The Spectator, where the cultural tastes of the age are formed and reflected, where literary and critical issues are discussed and the thought of the time is absorbed into polite conversation. Addison, that round peg in the round hole of his time, is a storehouse of the kind of cultural aphorism that characterizes an age. The arts, says Addison, "are to deduce their Laws and Rules from the general Sense and Taste of Mankind, and not from Principles of those Arts themselves; or in other Words, the Taste is not to conform to the Art, but the Art to the Taste."5 Nothing could be more wrong, or more characteristic of the culture Addison is reflecting, with its confidence in its taste, its absence of any sense of the shaping power of tradition, its conviction that every artist starts all over again to grapple directly with Nature. From this we go on to the intellectual issues of an age, as literature treats them. What Newton and Berkeley meant is important, certainly; but what their contemporaries thought they meant is at least equally important to the literary historian. Nowadays many people feel that there is something about "relativity" or the "principle of indeterminacy" that gives them the best of both worlds: an up-to-date scientific doctrine which enables them to preserve their moral and religious intuitions. But this is tame compared to the kind of excitement that Newton aroused,

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On the Eighteenth Century

with his mathematical genius and his deep religious convictions, his irrefutable laws of motion and his suggestion that space was the sensorium of God.6 Hence, as one poet said, "Newton demands the Muse," the title of a lively study by Miss Marjorie Nicolson7 that Mr. Dobree follows in his penultimate chapter, which deals with the great mass of philosophical poetry in the period, from James Thomson down. Such Newtonian poetry raises an interesting critical problem. Mr. Dobree quotes several passages such as this: Let curious Minds, who would the Air inspect On its Elastic Energy reflect. [5O2]8

Why does this kind of writing not come through to us, when Pope's Essay on Man, certainly no better intellectually, does? To answer this one would need a clear insight into the difference between poetry and discursive writing, between the poet's task of putting words into patterns and the philosopher's task of putting them into propositions, between poetic language of analogy and identification and the scientist's language of accurate description. All this is the literary historian's underpainting, so to speak, the tempering of tones and colours that makes the greatest achievements of an age shine in depth. Here the literary historian meets his real test. It is extremely easy to belittle writers by a historical treatment, through some such formula as this: "Swift and Pope are rationalistic writers in contrast to the Romantics, who put imagination and emotion in the ascendancy." Such formulas assume that a writer's age limits him to half a reality, however great he may be. There is no such blither in Mr. Dobree's book, but there is plenty of it in the kind of pseudohistorical material that inexperienced students are afflicted with. To make a great writer gain rather than lose by a historical treatment takes a sense of the interlocking relevance of all the literature of his age, conceived as a unit of culture complete in itself. The true literary historian can see, under the surface, the conflict of party interests and of social and cultural cliches taking the form of an imaginative vision of life which the great masterpiece reveals. Thus Defoe is an overworked journalist writing incessantly about free trade and inflation and the cost of living and the rise and decline of manufacturing. In his age, the stereotype of the middle-class Englishman was formulated in Arbuthnot's History of John Bull. The paradoxes of

Nature Methodized

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Mandeville's Fable of the Bees about public benefits depending on private vices showed that people were thinking seriously about the economic context of moral behaviour. Voyages of discovery and the plantation of colonies were beginning to show what a modern French writer has remarked, that Teutonic empire-builders impose their own cultural pattern wherever they go, in contrast to the Latin tendency to adapt to the "native" one after the initial massacres and enslavements are over. It was out of this milieu that Robinson Crusoe emerged: Robinson Crusoe who, once alone on his island, instantly opens a journal and a ledger, surrounds himself with pets (for an Englishman's home is his castle), catches his man Friday and promptly converts him to the true faith, which is his own brand of modified Calvinism, oblivious of the irony of Friday's innocent questions. It was out of this milieu that the even greater figure of Moll Flanders emerged. Hypocrisy has been called the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but in Moll's two-way-stretch conscience there is something far more profound than hypocrisy. There is a deep respect for the proprieties, and yet an iron determination to go on living and not be martyred by them, which makes her as impressive a heroine as any in fiction. "[Wlithout my book I should mope and pine," said the applewoman in Lavengro,9 when George Borrow proposed to buy her copy of Moll Flanders, and the feeling that the book actually has enough vitality to sustain life is not wholly fanciful. The sense that the history of Defoe's time gives of being a growing point of social energy is confirmed by its greatest novel. Just as the social life of the time grows into Defoe's fiction, so its intellectual life grows into Gulliver's Travels. The Newtonian universe and the researches of the Royal Society were not simple advances in knowledge—nothing is ever that—but also new modes of sharpening the conflict between civilization and its discontents. All the nightmares of science fiction about the destructiveness of technology and the death wish lurking in much of its progress are anticipated in Swift's Laputa, especially in such episodes as the Lindalinian rebellion. But even this does not kick us in our solar plexus like the Yahoo. Mr. Dobree urges, somewhat plaintively, that Gulliver "is no Yahoo" [447], that Swift "is not saying that man is a Yahoo" [448], that Swift "is careful to make the distinction between civilized man and the Yahoos" [459]. The fact that he feels it necessary to say this shows how Gulliver's Travels can still make us wince and look away:

22

On the Eighteenth Century

When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or human race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in shape and disposition, perhaps a little more civilized, and qualified with the gift of speech, but making no other use of reason than to improve and multiply those vices whereof their brethren in this country had only the share that nature allotted them. When I happened to behold the reflection of my own form in a lake or fountain, I turned away my face in horror and detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo than of my own person.10

Swift is a Christian bishop in attitude if not in fact, and these measured words carry with them the whole weight of the Christian tradition. Man's nature is human nature, which is civilized; he has fallen into physical nature but cannot adjust to it as a gifted animal might do; he must either rise above it into humanity or sink below it into sin and filth; sin and filth are where he spends most of his time. So Gulliver returns to his people, with a hatred not of the human race, but of pride. In Swift this vision runs headlong into the new views of a "natural society," propounded tentatively by Bolingbroke in Swift's day, later developed by Rousseau and now, on the other side of Darwin, one of our central preoccupations. Swift's blistering contempt for the notion that man is primarily a child of nature may be wrong, but in the age of lonesco and Beckett it can hardly be called antiquated. Literary history fulfils itself by ceasing to be history, when its great masterpieces enter our own age, not to be judged by us, but as themselves judges. What I have outlined is, of course, an ideal literary history. Mr. Dobree's book is not ideal, but it contains the kind of material that the reader in search of such a history would be looking for, and could perhaps construct out of it to his own taste. Apart from the apparatus which all the books in the Oxford series have—a general bibliography, shorter bibliographies of the major writers arranged alphabetically, a chronological table, and brief biographical footnotes on the minor writers—the text itself contains a full and clearly written account of every writer of significance in the period. The overall arrangement may be somewhat confusing at first, with the three major writers, Defoe, Swift, and Pope, being split between the first and third parts, but everything essential is covered. Mr. Dobree's sense of proportion is sound: he knows that cliches about the age of reason will not fit the English eighteenth century; he knows

Nature Methodized

23

that such movements as Deism affected only a small fraction of the intellectual life of the time; his introductory chapter gives a good account of what is both distinctive and traditional in the social background of the age. What one misses, perhaps, is that final unification of material which is the mark of the completely realized history, in whatever field: what one has, however, is a most useful reference work in which there is also a great deal of sensitive criticism. I know of no other book which brings together so great a volume of material: from the philosophy of Berkeley to the poetry of Prior, from the incredible profusion of Defoe pamphlets to the spare and articulate paradoxes of Mandeville, any reader or student who loves the period will find it here in all its variety.

4

Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility 26 April 1990

From Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24, no. 2 (Winter 1990-91): 157-72. Reprinted in EAC, 94-108. This was the Joseph Warren Beach Lecture at the University of Minnesota. Three typescripts, two with corrections and one clear, are in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 8.

I

It seems clear that my present assignment is not to produce a scholarly paper, but something in the convention of Denham's famous seventeenth-century poem Cooper's Hill, where the poet climbs a height to survey the available landscape, and is led from his sight of the Thames river to prophesy an age of smooth and unstoppable couplets: Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.1

Such an attempt is bound to be, in its present stage of development at least, a very sketchy, perhaps even tacky essay. Before you start walking out, however, I should add two qualifications. One is that an audience that knows far more about the eighteenth century than I do can fill in some of my gaps from their superior knowledge, assuming that there is anything between the gaps. The other is that certain critical initiatives I derived from my early study of Blake and the reading around his period that I did fifty years ago may still be of interest to you. The reading affected much more than my Blake study: for example, I took the word

Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility

25

"archetype" not from Jung, as is so often said, but from a footnote in Beattie's Minstrel.2 Again, the Anatomy of Criticism owes its title to my special affection for the prose genre that I have tried to identify by that name, the genre that includes the Menippean satire but for me also includes other fiction that expresses itself through information and ideas rather than through story or plot. The eighteenth century is the greatest period in English literature for this genre: eighteenth-century anatomies include not only the main works of Swift and Sterne, but Fielding's Journey from this World to the Next, Amory's John Buncle, and Blake's Island in the Moon, and the genre exerts a strong influence on Tom Jones, Rasselas, The Fool of Quality, and much else besides. What is important about the anatomy is not simply its characteristics, but the fact that it normally approaches its material playfully. We are constantly involved in conflicts of ideas, with all the paradoxes, associated metaphors, and demonstrations of the half-truths of argument that go with such conflicts. The erudition is curious and eccentric for the most part, again bringing out the element of play in collecting information. The period is a refreshing contrast in this respect to the nineteenth century, where, apart from Peacock among the Romantics and Samuel Butler among the Victorians, the soberer virtues of continuity and logical consistency were preferred. As for the contrast with this century of obsessive ideology, the less said the better. Of course this is only one strand in the complex weave of an age where no critical issue was discussed more frequently and eagerly than the theory of wit, and its distinction from humour, raillery, ridicule, and half a dozen other terms. The conception of art as play has a solid theoretical basis in Bacon and Sidney, but no previous age was more keenly aware of the difference between reasoning and rationalizing, or of the extent to which argument was propelled by the internal combustion engines of economic or erotic interest. The eighteenth century is often called an age of enlightenment by those who admire it, and an age of prose and reason by those who like it less. It seems to me that the sense of rational paradox is more profoundly enlightened than a belief in reason as such. Certainly a belief in reason alone can make for very humourless writing, and no one would call Godwin's Political Justice or his novels playful. The common cliche of the good-natured man, whose instincts are educated and who contrasts with the cunning man who plays only for keeps, using his reason to manipulate and—significant word—outwit others, the contrast

26

On the Eighteenth Century

between Blifil and Tom Jones, or between Joseph and Charles Surface, is closely related. The age of wit became an age of satire because human beings are what they are, and it became an age of satire by subordinating the vertical perspective of literature, the sense of worlds above and below normal human experience. Poets had been told by Boileau that the revelations of Christianity were too high for poets and the puerilities of Classical mythology too low.3 Eighteenth-century literature in England begins with the final chorus of Dryden's Secular Masque: Thy Chase had a Beast in View; Thy Wars brought nothing about; Thy Lovers were all untrue.4

These lines are addressed respectively to Diana, Mars, and Venus, and are linked, however obliquely, with a marked decline of interest in mythological language. The Olympian personnel were not totally dismissed like the false gods in the Nativity Ode: the elitism of eighteenthcentury culture kept mythology in the poetic vocabulary. But it became increasingly unfunctional: Cowper's reference to Philomela's "mechanick woe"5 and the fact that Gray's line "And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire"6 was so obviously trade slang for "the sun rises" indicate that we are close to Wordsworth's demythologizing of poetic diction. True, Wordsworth's revolution did not outlive him, but it ends a period when Ovid went, comparatively speaking, out of fashion, and Horace, the incarnation of the man of the world, dividing his time between his rural retreat and the streets of Rome, moved into the foreground. Dryden and Pope were more interested in religious themes than Boileau would have recommended, but Dryden is concerned with the authority of tradition and the social, even the political, application of religious principles. So far as any enthusiasm for adventuring into the mysteries of revelation is concerned, Religio Laid starts with the word "dim" and goes on from there. Pope's Messiah, though a superb paraphrase of Isaiah [9:27; 11:1-9] and Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, similarly does not express the direct impact of religion on experience, like the hymns of Watts, Wesley, and Cowper later in the century, and Swift tends to think of Christian dogma and ritual as a kind of leash necessary to restrain a particularly vicious dog. The aspect of the eighteenth century that we associate with Gold-

Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility

27

smith's term "Augustan"7 is an intensely social aspect: one immediately thinks of the coffee-houses and the various literary circles in what was then, at that social level, the small and gossipy town of London. We know how much London, with its full tide of human existence at Charing Cross, meant to Johnson: the contrast with Blake, for whom London was equally essential, but who went about almost totally unrecognized for what he was, is striking enough. Being a trend within a culture, even though a dominant one for much of the period, the Augustan age kept creating, in true Hegelian style, its own opposite, a cultural climate concerned with solitude, melancholy, the pleasures of the imagination, meditations on death, and the like. In an early article81 tried to characterize a part of this trend as an "age of sensibility," though the word "age" should not be taken too narrowly. The counter-Augustan trend gradually increases as the century goes on, but of course such categories are liquid, not solid. Augustans survive to the end of the century, and poets of sensibility like Anne Finch emerge in Dryden's time. The eighteenth century has a unique symmetry about it: from the Whig Revolution of 1688 to the French Revolution of 1789, from Locke's Treatises of Government in 1690 to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, from the Secular Masque in 1700 to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 1800, it seems to have some sense of what it means to be a century, and to show a proper respect for the decimal system of counting. I think there is also some symmetry or interpenetration between Augustan and counter-Augustan tendencies, especially in the relation of individual to society, and that we can almost see the beginning and end, within the century, of a kind of double-helix movement. First follow nature, the Augustans said, and not many disputed the axiom. The decline of interest in the evangelical, the marvellous, the mythological, was not felt to be a limitation or sacrifice: the Augustans inherited the framework of Locke's Essay and Newton's Principia, and they felt that a new world of reason and sense experience was opening up to be explored in depth by the poets as well, a world full not merely of interest and beauty but of new kinds of reality. Their enthusiasm for such themes often betrayed them into literary tactlessness: everyone knows the famous lapses like "Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!"9 or Stephen Duck's reaction to the microscope: Dear Madam, did you never gaze, Thro' Optic-glass, on rotten Cheese?10

28

On the Eighteenth Century

But the stimulus of new discovery was a genuine one, and it extended from the writer to his reader. This was the first age in which the critic moved up to a position of major importance in literature, as the spokesman of a public that looked first and last for entertainment in its literature and demanded to be pleased. Many writers of the time, including notably Addison, tell us that literature in every age must conform to the expectations of its readers, that the taste of the age is the formal cause of poetry. The famous proof-text here is, of course, Johnson's couplet: The Drama's Laws the Drama's Patrons give, For we that live to please must please to live.11 Granted that this is perhaps more obviously true of drama than of any other genre, the principle was assumed to apply everywhere. Literature was closely associated with a background of good talk and cultivated conversation, verbal communication preserved in amber. In the second of the Night Thoughts Edward Young concludes a panegyric on language in phrases that may sound more ambiguous now than they would have done in his time: 'Tis Thought's exchange, which like th' alternate Push Of waves conflicting, breaks the learned Scum, And defecates the Students standing Pool.12

Johnson's essay on Dryden treats him as having accomplished a revolution in literature, in effect parallel to those of Locke in philosophy and Newton in science. His statement that Dryden found English literature brick and left it marble is an epigram derived from Suetonius's statement about Augustus, and one that helped to build up the Augustan stereotype.13 For us, the revolution accomplished by Dryden in prose was more lasting, and his easy direct speaking style crept into the subtext of English prose rhythm and has stayed there ever since. Before Dryden in verse there were Denham and Waller, and in prose (even though not published at the time) the letters of Dorothy Osborne, but such things do not affect Dryden's originality. The Locke-Newton framework, we notice, was largely a Whig formation, and the great writers—Dryden, Pope, Swift—formed a Tory counter-environment: forming counter-environments is one of the main activities of literature in all ages. The trouble with finding a language brick and leaving it marble is that

Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility

29

one eventually runs out of marble. We notice at once in reading the Essay on Dramatic Poesy that, Dutch fleet or no Dutch fleet, English literature is entering an intensely progressive period, where the crudities of the Elizabethan writers, including Shakespeare, will be out of fashion and a new age of refinement and perfected craftsmanship will succeed. Pope's Essay on Criticism and Peri Bathous are devoted to this craftsmanship in poetry, the sublime tact that succeeds in definitively expressing meaning instead of merely throwing words in the direction of meaning. Such craftsmanship works within a convention: it is the responsibility of a cultivated public to understand and respond to the subtleties in the convention, to hear all the harsh clustered consonants in such a line as: When Ajax strives, some Rock's vast Weight to throw, The Line too labours, and the Words move slow.14

But whenever literature or any other art is improving, it is moving toward a dead end. What has been done to perfection has been done: the appearance of a "faultless painter" like Browning's Andrea del Sarto means that a convention has exhausted its possibilities, and there is nothing for the next painter to do but to start being faulty. This sense of having reached a dead end haunts even Joseph Warton's essay on Pope;15 however appreciative it may be, The Lives of the Poets reflects a similar dilemma. It begins by telling us what was wrong with pre-Augustan poetry, notably Milton's and Cowley's, but the comments on Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith show Johnson's resistance to a dimension of culture in which his standards, flexible as they were, would no longer wholly apply. Johnson's criticism reflects the strengths and weaknesses of all "great tradition" criticism:16 he is nearly always first-rate on the people with whom he is in sympathy, but he can be insensitive or even perverse about those not quite in his mainstream centre. The feeling of an intensely social view of literature within the Augustan trend has to be qualified by an interpenetration of social and individual factors that was there from the beginning. The base of operations in Locke's Essay is the individual human being, not the socially conditioned human being: Locke's hero stands detached from history, collecting sense impressions and clear and distinct ideas. Nobody could be less solipsistic than Locke, but we may notice the overtones in Spectator 413, referring to "that great Modern Discovery . . . that Light and Colours . . . are only Ideas in the Mind."17 The author is speaking of Locke on secondary

3O

On the Eighteenth Century

qualities. All Berkeley had to do with this modern discovery was to deny the distinction between primary and secondary qualities to arrive at his purely subjective idealistic position of esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived."18 If we feel convinced, as Johnson was, that things still have a being apart from our perception of them, that, for Berkeley, is because they are ideas in the mind of God. It is fortunate both for the permanence of the world and for Berkeley's argument that God, according to the Psalmist, neither slumbers nor sleeps [Psalm 121:4]. But Berkeley indicates clearly the isolated individual at the centre of Augustan society who interpenetrates with that society. The same sense of interpenetration comes into economic contexts. In the intensely laissez-faire climate of eighteenth-century capitalism there is little emphasis on what the anarchist Kropotkin called mutual aid:19 even more than the nineteenth century, this was the age of the work ethic, the industrious apprentice, and the entrepreneur: the age, in short, of Benjamin Franklin. A laissez-faire economy is essentially an amoral one: this fact is the basis of the satire of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, with its axiom of "Private Vices, Publick Benefits."20 The howls of outrage that greeted Mandeville's book are a little surprising: it looks as though the age was committed to the ethos of capitalism, but had not realized the intensity of its commitment. The reaction to Mandeville is oddly similar to the reaction to The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, where Defoe's hoax form was the only possible way of showing bigots how brutal their prejudices were. Of course much has to be allowed for the polemical and strident tone of Mandeville: later in the century Adam Smith could say that avarice was the spur of industry, and say it to general applause. And of course Mandeville may have been raising issues far beyond the amoral nature of the open market. Browning's poem on Mandeville celebrates him as a prophet who penetrated a false antithesis of good and evil to discern that God brings good out of evil.21 At least I think that is what the poem says, but as it is written in the gabbling doggerel of Browning's later idiom, it is hard to be sure. The same feeling of the interaction of good and evil in the economic world accounts for the eighteenth-century vogue for picaresque fiction. The heroes and heroines of Defoe may be thieves and whores to begin with, though Defoe carefully explains how they got that way, and shows how it was practically impossible that they could have been anything else. They do not like being thieves and whores, and fully intend to

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repent and become respectable as soon as they can afford it. But the implacable ferocity of the will to survive carries them on. It is no good preaching morality unless morality coincides with self-interest, to say nothing of self-preservation. As William the Quaker says in Captain Singleton, "I would as soon trust a Man whose Interest binds him to be just to me, as a Man whose Principle binds himself."22 George Borrow, one of the few Victorian writers who felt any affinity with the picaresque, tells us in Lavengro of his encounter with an old apple-woman whose Bible is Moll Flanders, and who would not sell it to him for any money, because "without my book I should mope and pine."231 say Bible advisedly, because what she sees in the book is the parable of a prodigal daughter, often wretched and despairing, yet pushing on in the hope of welcome and acceptance at the end. Later in Lavengro Borrow meets a Welsh parson who is sure that he has committed the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. Borrow picks out of him the perversity of pride that has flattered him into believing that he has done something blacker and more Satanic than any other man, and points out that sin is a very common, not to say vulgar, condition that no one escapes. He does this by referring to the apple-woman and the heroine he calls "Blessed Mary Flanders,"24 whose life repeats the situation of the forgiven harlots in the Gospels. Not many novels have the driving power of Defoe's best fiction, but the theme he treats so often is not confined to him. Fanny Hill, for example, though it is certainly no Moll Flanders, also presents us with a young woman unceremoniously dumped in London without resources, so that she has to face the dilemma of whoring or starving. Her decision in favour of life is quite as moral as Moll's, whatever amusement the author or his reader may get from the result. And perhaps the contrast with Pamela is not so great as Richardson would have thought. Pamela is in much the same position as Moll at the beginning of the book, and the energy and resourcefulness with which she gets Mr. B on the bottom line of a marriage contract is by no means free of ruthlessness. Moll Flanders, Roxana, Pamela, Clarissa, all in very different ways reflect the ethos of an age when women, more particularly working-class women, were especially vulnerable to social injustice, and the will to survive had to be an especially powerful one for females. In many of the novels of the Victorian giants, including George Eliot, female characters are presented mainly in relation to the male ones, instead of being representatives of the human race in their own right. The tradition that

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On the Eighteenth Century

runs through Defoe and Richardson and spills over into Jane Austen seems to me in this respect a more mature one. In a novel of Robert Bage two heroines, one conventional and the other pragmatic, are discussing the position of women in a Turkish harem. The conventional one says, "I prefer death a thousand times," and the pragmatic one says, "And I prefer a thousand times—to death."25 In Bage's much better-known Hermsprong the heroine is an insipid idiot of a type common in the minor fiction of the time, with a morbid sense of duty to a father who has no claim to it. But as she is contrasted with a considerably more sensible friend, and as her lover makes a point of the fact that he has not only read but been impressed by Mary Wollstonecraft, it seems clear that deliberate satire is involved. The vogue for horror fiction produces many situations that play a sadistic cat-and-mouse game with its heroines, keeping them surrounded with menace and threats of violation, even though they are often rescued by a divine providence heavily disguised as a public demand on the author. Nevertheless, we occasionally get a glimpse of the frustration and helplessness of an isolated female in a society where she is unable to manipulate any of the social machinery to her advantage, and the glimpse is far more genuinely horrifying than the conventional scary props. The male picaresque heroes of Defoe and Smollett are more obviously related to the ethos of an expanding empire, being adventurers who are often close to being pirates. There is seldom, understandably, the emphasis on violated innocence that we get so often with female protagonists. In Smollett's novels, especially Ferdinand Count Fathom, they are not very likeable, but then Smollett is a tough satirist, and is not out to make you like his characters, but to drive home a thesis closely parallel to Mandeville's. Ferdinand of course "repents" at the end, but that is only to get his repellent story finished, and to satisfy a public like the one assumed to be clamouring for a reprieve at the end of The Beggar's Opera. However, it is only such a time that could have produced the gigantic Robinson Crusoe, the story of the solitary individual cast away on an island who proceeds to reconstruct every element of the expanding British imperial power he belongs to. He makes clothes, surrounds a space to make some privacy for himself, opens a journal and ledger, and governs the "native" Friday with the greatest assurance. As long as the British Empire possessed the will to govern there was never any question of "going native." In his brief reference to Robinson Crusoe in Das Kapital, Marx underlines the interpenetration of individual and social themes in

Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility

33

the book. He also speaks with contempt of Crusoe's amusing himself with religious exercises and the like,26 though one might have expected Marx, of all people, to understand that preserving one's sanity is mostly a matter of preserving one's social conditioning. II

First follow nature; but what is nature? For the ethos I have been loosely calling Augustan it embraced two levels: the physical environment, which human beings are in but not of, and an upper level of a specifically human nature. It is natural to man, though not to any other being in the physical world, to wear clothes and engage in rational discourse. Specifically human qualities are all that is left of the paradise that God originally designed for man, and structures of authority, both spiritual and temporal, have to be established because man is no longer capable of living in paradise. Such structures are all that we have as criteria of the humanly natural; hence the only answer to the question, What is unnatural for man? is, Whatever established authority tells you is unnatural. Even for the revolutionary Milton in Paradise Lost, the state of Adam and Eve before the fall was simple but civilized, with angels dropping in for lunch: they do not resemble anything like noble savages until after their fall. We saw that Locke, like Descartes before him, based his philosophy on a philosophical man abstracted from his social context, in short a theoretical primitive. Also that Robinson Crusoe was an allegory of another abstract primitive, the economic man of capitalist theory, whose outlines are fairly complete already in Adam Smith. These are the individual primitives at the core of Augustan culture. But such primitives have voluntarily entered a social contract and a historical tradition. For this attitude nothing in the area of culture can develop except on the other side of the social contract: literature and the other arts are rooted in a historical context in both time and space. But there were other cultural traditions that implicitly raised the question, Granted that man is not an animal and cannot live like one, can he not find a common ground between the reasonable and the natural in the present physical world? There is no Biblical evidence for any such doctrine as the total depravity of nature. And as certainly no one ever denied that human civilization is both corrupt and over-complicated by luxury, perhaps some simplifying and cleansing process might bring us within

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On the Eighteenth Century

sight of a genuinely natural society, on one level of nature instead of two. Hence the persistence of the pastoral tradition, with its celebration of a simple life in direct contact with the physical world. The pastoral convention was accepted by the Augustans as a complement rather than a contradiction of its prevailingly urban tone: this was of course also the role it had in Virgil and Horace. What is particularly significant about the pastoral tradition, from our present point of view, is its conventional assumption that its simple shepherds are also spontaneous poets, untaught but inspired. Here we have the growing point of a conception of different contexts of the primitive and of a different kind of natural society. Swift at one end of the eighteenth century and Burke at the other are uncompromising defenders of the older two-level view. In the fourth part of Gulliver's Travels Gulliver encounters a society of intelligent horses who have formed a natural society on one level of nature. The filthy and degraded Yahoos illustrate what man would be like if he were purely an animal, and although the Houyhnhnms recognize Gulliver to be of the Yahoo species, they also see that he is a very different kind of Yahoo, being rational and capable of discourse. But as Gulliver goes on talking to his Houyhnhnm master about the conditions of eighteenth-century human life, the latter discovers that all discourse in Gulliver's world is shot through and through with "saying the thing that is not," or lying, a vice incomprehensible to the conscious horses. As for reason, Gulliver's master says, the Yahoos of Gulliver's nation merely have some quality that intensifies their natural viciousness, turning a merely animal ferocity into a uniquely hideous malice and sadism. So Gulliver comes, when looking at his reflection in the water, to hate himself more than the Yahoos, precisely because he is a clean and rational Yahoo.27 But he is stuck with being human on two levels of nature; a natural-rational society on one level of nature is possible only for intelligent animals. So Gulliver returns to his own social context at the end, the same as before, except that his pride in being what his religion calls a fallen creature has been obliterated. For Burke, especially in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, man's social contract is his present social context, the particular continuum of past, present, and future of beings into which he happens to have been born. This continuum provides a structure of authority he is bound to submit to, for "natural rights" do not exist, except as duties connected with safeguarding the health and stability of his cultural tradition, for, Burke says, "Art is man's nature."28 By Burke's time, however, the con-

Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility

35

ception of a natural society on one level of nature had made considerable headway, and in its progress had developed other types of primitive beyond the epistemological primitive of Locke and the acquisitive primitive of Mandeville. If I have not made it clear what I mean by a primitive, I mean an abstract model of a human being, a laboratory specimen, as it were, used as a basis for a study of human behaviour in general, without regard to a specific historical period or social setting. The primitives of Locke and Mandeville, however, relate to a functioning society already in existence. The psychological primitive of David Hartley's Observations on Man, who works by the association of ideas rather than an inborn moral sense implanted by God, again reflects an age devoted to witty discourse. But he also points in the direction of a much more subjectivized society. For Hartley, what the association of ideas is mainly associated with is pleasure, and pleasure creates a hierarchy of higher and lower pleasures that can take us up Jacob's ladder to God. But when the conception of association enters Hume's discussion of causality, it goes in the direction of an almost Buddhist disintegration of a continuous ego, a direction that Hume himself thought too paradoxical to follow up. The discovery of America had brought with it the conception of a society that was also primitive, not in relation to itself, but in relation to a European culture that placed it outside history, and regarded it as a natural society to which only the categories of human being and physical environment applied. From Montaigne's essay on the cannibals down to Voltaire's L'Ingenu, the vision of this society with its allegedly simpler and radically different lifestyle formed a countercultural theme of subdued but distinct significance. Hermsprong, which seems to sum up so many later eighteenth-century tendencies, has a hero conventionally educated in Europe, after which he spent some time with an Indian tribe in North America. This sojourn with a primitive society gave, in a curious reversal of normal standards, the final polish to this education. Other related primitive abstractions had already taken shape. They include the emotional primitive or man of feeling, so unforgettably dramatized by Rousseau in his personal life; the brooding melancholy primitive, who follows Ezekiel into the valley of dry bones [Ezekial 37! to meditate on time, death, and immortality; and the evangelical primitive, who comes into the foreground with the Methodist movement and the hymn-writers previously mentioned, who record a direct religious experience detached from the earlier centuries of religious tradition.

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On the Eighteenth Century

All these contributed to the process of pushing back the boundaries imposed on poetic experience that were assumed by most of the Augustans. These expanded directions give us three new contexts for the primitive, of particular importance: the marvellous, the prophetic, and the cultural. The marvellous provides the vogue for Gothic romance, the prophetic the renewed sense of the relevance of the Bible to the literary imagination, and the cultural the fairly new but rapidly growing sense of the social affinity of poetry with the simplest and most untutored states of life. There are some curious confusions here. A great deal of remarkable historical scholarship accompanied these developments: we have Lowth's very influential lectures on Biblical poetry, Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry, Mallett's Northern Antiquities. The poets responded to this scholarship, and such poems as the Song to David and The Fatal Sisters could not have been written without it. But it is characteristic of these new breeds of primitive that they have no history, their social context not having yet been born. It is obvious that when we turn from Richardson or Fielding to The Castle of Otranto we are in a more primitive world, and this time an unhistorical one: the word "Gothic" to describe such a story means little more than "once upon a time." Ossian, an essential touchstone of sensibility in this period, wanders in an even hazier past; hermetic documents jostle Plato and Aristotle in Berkeley's Sin's; Percy's Reliques may mingle old and new within the same ballad; bards, minstrels, and Druids cover the light of history with the clouds of legend. One by-product of all this primitivism is the rise of the formulaic fiction that has grown so prodigiously since. The forms of the horror story, the detective story (with Mrs. Radcliffe), the Western story (even though the "West" was still very close to the Atlantic coast), were taking shape in this period. One New World story that interests me as a Canadian is Frances Brooke's remarkable epistolary novel Emily Montague, written in Quebec soon after the British occupation, which contains much first-hand observation of Indian life. Formulaic fiction includes the "historical" novel developed later by Scott, though, except for sporadic revivals (e.g., Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose) this form went out of fashion after the nineteenth century, having perhaps fulfilled most of its cultural functions by providing libretti for nineteenth-century Italian operas. Waverley and Rob Roy, however, though they belong to the nineteenth century, record one of the great cultural tragedies of the eight-

Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility

37

eenth, and one very relevant to our present theme: the destruction of the primitive tribal Highland culture by the Hanoverian middle-class establishment in England. But with all this we have in England and Scotland no visionary of a natural society, on a single level of nature, remotely comparable in scope to Rousseau (or, in a very different way, Diderot) in France, Vico in Italy, or Herder in Germany. The closest approach in English-speaking countries, and he is not very close, is Thomas Jefferson, across the Atlantic. Blake, for example, accepted none of the standard Augustan values, but his distrust of anything called natural was equally great. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell does not prophesy a natural society: it ushers in the world of Freud and Marx and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Blake comes much closer to an idealized relation of humanity to nature when he speaks of building a new Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. Here nature is incorporated into human civilization, which has stopped exploiting, dominating, and polluting nature and has begun to cherish and foster it. This hymn expresses as close an approximation in English poetry as I know to what a book of fifty years ago called the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers.29 Otherwise, the natural society remains unborn, not only as a society, but as a conception or model of one. Perhaps, however, it was this unborn society, a classless society where the distinction of elite and popular has disappeared, that Wordsworth was really invoking in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, as the ideal society for whom he was writing and whose language he was endeavouring to speak. If Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island and transforming it into a replica of what for him was his real world, is an allegory of one aspect of the eighteenth-century culture, then Tristram Shandy, complacently soaking in amniotic fluid for half of his autobiography, may represent Crusoe's Hegelian antithesis. When I was about sixteen my favourite novel, by long odds, was Tristram Shandy, though I did not know why at the time. I know now: Tristram Shandy is among other things an allegory of a writer waiting to get born. What really forms Tristram's environment is a world of words, a verbal abstract expressionism represented by the marbled page that Sterne calls his "motley emblem."30 Walter Shandy lives entirely on words: if irritable, he can be soothed at once if he makes a smart repartee, even to the most inane remark of a servant: he believes in the hidden significance of names like Trismegistus, in meanings concealed in an author's subject—in short, he believes in practically every verbal

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On the Eighteenth Century

fallacy there is. Surrounding him is the verbalism of the book itself. If we look at some of the inserted stories—the man who drops a hot chestnut into his open fly; the abbess and novice who try to start a pair of balky mules by shouting obscene words at them (again turning on a linguistic fallacy, that certain words are inherently obscene apart from their context)—we may say that, however exquisitely told, these stories as regards content are simply nothing. Yet we cannot say that they are all style and no substance, because style is itself substantial. We never emerge into a "real world" here, because reality itself has become verbal. Sterne prefigures the cosmos of Mallarme where the function of everything that exists is to border on (aboutir) a book. More immediately, he prefigures the change from eighteenth-century discourse into nineteenth-century language, from wit and Hartleian association into verbal organism, a process completed by Coleridge when he turned against Hartley and began his great treatise on imagination and the Logos, which also remained in embryo. I began the Anatomy of Criticism long ago by remarking that every serious subject, including criticism, seems to go through a kind of inductive metamorphosis, in which what has previously been assumed without discussion turns into the central problem to be discussed [15]. Thus biology assumed that it was a study of the forms of life, but it was only when forms of life became the study instead of the basis of the study that evolution developed and biology became a fully mature science. Years later, when I came to read Michel Foucault's Order of Things, I saw a parallel though greatly expanded thesis in it: that up to the end of the eighteenth century humanity had been assumed to be the basis for studying everything in the human cosmos, and that from the nineteenth century on we have been living in a world in which humanity itself is the study. Therefore, says Foucault, "Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist."311 confess to being puzzled, even baffled, by this way of putting it: it leaves me very unsure what Pope thought the proper study of mankind was. But if the conception "man" emerged after the eighteenth century, it must have been developing during it, which would be sufficient reason for re-examining it, even as tentatively as I have just tried to do.

On Romanticism

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5

CBC Goethe Salute 7 October 1949

From the Varsity, 7 October 1949. The CBC last Wednesday night presented Canada's most important contribution to the Goethe celebrations of this year. It was fully up to the standard of CBC Wednesday Nights, which was already high. First there was a talk by Barker Fairley, who undertook to give a coherent general account of Goethe in fifteen minutes, and succeeded. The listener would have found it easy to understand why Fairley is one of the world's best Goethe critics. Then there was a performance of Goethe's tragedy Egmont, no doubt the first radio performance in Canada, with the overture and incidental music (including two lovely songs sung by Frances James) specially written for it by Beethoven. Professor Fairley's eloquence and Beethoven's noble overture hardly prepare us for the curiously vague exuberance of the play. Its theme is the treacherous seizure and brutal execution of the sixteenth-century Dutch patriot Count Egmont by the Duke of Alva during the Spanish reign of terror in the Netherlands. The "tragic flaw" in Egmont's character is a rather sentimental attachment to the symbols of authority, first to the helpless regent Margaret, then to the distant King of Spain. Both, of course, let him down, and his colleague William the Silent, who has no such illusions, refuses to walk into Alva's trap, and lives to fight another day and to free Holland. His youthful egoism, which is capable of keeping three couriers waiting while he finishes his soliloquy, plays him false too, as one of his reasons for not escaping is a romantic attachment to a girl who, when she can do nothing for him, poisons herself and persuades her rejected lover to do the same. The historical Egmont had a wife and eleven children who were reduced to beggary by his murder—

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On Romanticism

surely a far more genuinely tragic situation. Goethe's Egmont calls himself, in a remarkable speech, a kind of sun-god driven to a predestined heroic career by an overmastering force.1 But it is difficult to disentangle this force from the force represented by Alva, the solemn and owlish march of stupidity and cruelty over all man's efforts to gain peace and freedom. Alva also talks about destiny, and has also a romantic attachment, the fruit of which, his bastard son Ferdinand, is an irresolute weakling who hankers to be like Egmont. In short, Egmont accepts too much of Alva's attitude to life to illustrate the complete contrast between liberty and tyranny which is the play's theme. Lister Sinclair's adaptation seemed excellent, and preserved an archaic quality in the language which, for an English listener, is well suited to a play that has so many echoes of Shakespeare (especially Julius Caesar). The reading was excellent too: perhaps one may make special mention of Margot Christie for building up the minor figure of Margaret of Parma into an integral part of the play.

6

Long Sequacious Notes Winter 1953

From Hudson Review, 5 (Winter 1953): 603-8. Review of Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Prose Writings, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon, 1951); and The Notebooks of Matthew Arnold, ed. Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young, and Waldo Hilary Dunn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952). Reprinted in NFCL, 170-7. Coburn was a colleague of Frye's in the Department of English at Victoria College. She was slightly older than he, and had even taught the young Frye when she was a sessional fellow and he was a first-year student in 1929-30. For her early friendship with Frye's future wife Helen Kemp, see NFHK, passim. At NFHK, 1:388, 395-6, Kemp upbraids Frye for being rude to Coburn and he apologizes with a description of what he dislikes about her, including "her complete and pedantically smug ignorance of her subject" (letter of 16 January 1935). But for his gracious tribute to her scholarship later, see no. 12. Most of us think of Coleridge, at least for a time, as a writer of bits and pieces. I can still remember the nugget I had to memorize about him in grade 8: "A writer of great powers and promise, but incapable of steady work." There is a good deal of patronizing biography and criticism in the same tone, implying that if the critic had had Coleridge's genius and his Wedgewood pension, he would have laid off the opium, not married until he met the right Sara, finished his books and poems, and led a tidier life. But it is slowly becoming apparent that, while Coleridge certainly proposed more books than he ever disposed of, the impression of bits and pieces is not altogether due to Coleridge. Within the last twenty years more and more of the vast bulk of what he actually did write has

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On Romanticism

been coming into view. His letters, his table talk, his Shakespearean and other literary criticism, all form big collections, and Miss Kathleen Coburn, who has already edited his Philosophical Lectures, is now, as she says, "working towards an edition of Coleridge's note books" [23], of which there must be at least fifty-four, the highest number in her references. Preparatory to this, she offers us a collection of over three hundred numbered short notes and aphorisms, gathered partly from the unpublished notebooks and marginalia, partly from prose writings not reprinted in this century, such as The Friend and Aids to Reflection. It makes excellent reading, and though the editing is unobtrusive, the selection could not have been made without a complete and thoroughly wellproportioned knowledge of Coleridge. For the student of English literature I should say it was practically indispensable, even though some of it can be found in other Coleridge collections. By the time all of Coleridge has been printed, we shall be unlikely ever to ask again, Why couldn't he finish anything he started? If we have a question of such a type, it is more likely to be, Why did a man who may well have had a profounder mind than Goethe, and was at least intellectually nearly as versatile, have failed so utterly to make Goethe's impact on modern culture? Coleridge's thoughts obviously came to him much as the images of Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner did, as a series of aphorisms crystallizing from his reading. Because these aphorisms contained his essential ideas, the process of translating them into a continuous prose narrative was, in theory, a mechanical piece of copying, to be done at any leisure time. In practice, of course, it turned out to be a deadly dull and painful drudgery, in which he found that he had, so to speak, no gear low enough to keep him moving. Hence he would assert that books were finished because, in one sense, that was true, though in any sense that would interest a publisher they had not been begun. His reputation has suffered from the fact that literature has not yet developed anything analogous to the sculptor's stonecutter. Everyone is familiar with the way that he floundered through the Biographia Literaria. He hung a donkey's carrot in front of himself in the form of a great chapter on the imagination, to which the earlier chapters were the prolegomena. Eventually the chapter arrived, "On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power," followed by three portentous harrumphs in English, Latin, and Greek quotations, and a preliminary flourish on the history of philosophy. Then his will power digs its heels in and balks; his pen trails off: he writes a long letter to himself advising himself to

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postpone his chapter until he has time to write a supercolossal work on the Logos, and then, as it is no longer necessary to go in one direction rather than another, he plunges into the critique of Wordsworth that he has had on his mind all along, and the rest of the book again is bits and pieces. Miss Coburn's method of anthologizing is much fairer to Coleridge than he was to himself, because she preserves the aphoristic quality of his real thinking. In continuous prose, even at his best, he is, as Chesterton says of Shaw,1 long-winded because he is quick-witted: he thinks of all the qualifications of his idea at once, hence his contemporary reputation for murkiness. In his discontinuous notes we get the bite and point of what he has to say, because it is said in the rhythm of his thinking. Miss Coburn provides, up to a point, something that Coleridge badly needed as a discursive writer: an appropriate prose form. Like Bacon, Coleridge was much preoccupied with tables of contents, methodological axioms, schemes for others to work out, and intellectual projects and agendas of all kinds. But unlike Bacon, he could not be complacent about this, or about the possibility that his vast Opus Maximum might never be finished. He seems to have felt it imperative to write a long piece of continuous prose in the conventional treatise form. Writing continuous prose is (as I think Kafka says somewhere) an art of causality,2 in which the ideas form a linear progression. But when Coleridge got an idea, it became a centre to which other ideas simultaneously attached themselves. His importance in the history of semantics is due to his ability to ask of common and significant words, like "mind," "reason," and the like, the same question that, according to Mill, made him the great seminal conservative mind of his age:3 "What does this word mean by being there, by having all the different associations which it actually does have in the language?" (See the fine aphorism numbered 73 in Miss Coburn's book.)4 The Aristotelian treatise-book form, what he calls (no. 70) "the paideutic continuous form," was simply not his form. Still less congenial to him, however, was the method of the Platonic dialogue: whatever his opinion of Plato, he detested the whole dialectic either-this-or-that procedure, and maintained that no argument could ever be refuted except by being contained in a more comprehensive system of thought, and so shown to be incomplete. The form that would best have suited his habits of thought was the intellectual autobiography, in which there is no logical continuity, and yet no digression, because the essential informing power—

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On Romanticism

himself—remains in the centre, and everything radiates from it. The Biogmphia Literaria starts with this form, and that is why it is the most sustained of his writings. But it is too strongly attracted toward the systematic treatise to remain in the tradition of, say, Montaigne, or even of the Rabelais whom Coleridge, rather unexpectedly, admired. Carlyle's grasp of romantic ideas was not as secure as Coleridge's, but Sartor Resartus is a far better attempt at finding a form in which to expound them. A great achievement results from the union of a great mind with a great idea: Coleridge had both, but some coagulating or—well— esemplastic power seems to be lacking. The failure to find a prose form is not the cause of this, but one result of it. The glib explanations of the cause—opium, weak will, unhappy love, and the like—clearly will not do, even if Coleridge himself offers them. I give my own guess for what it is worth. Coleridge seems to have lacked the kind of detachment which is usually the product of a comfortable egotism (he says of Milton, no. 131, "The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit"). Miss Coburn is, rightly, impressed by Coleridge's many-sidedness, and has arranged his aphorisms in various divisions: psychology, philosophy, science, public affairs, linguistics, religion, and others. A certain remoteness from the subject seems to be an emotional advantage to Coleridge. He never claimed to be a man of affairs, and the political section is of an almost unvarying decency and good sense. He never claimed to know much about science and medicine, and he makes some fascinating speculations about them. But in fields where he was more expert, a panting desire to teach and improve gives a bothered, blustery, self-conscious quality to his style. He can hardly write about the moral side of religion for very long without beginning to scream. In his literary criticism one never knows when he is going to be seized by a moral spasm, and when he strikes a virtuous pose, he can be more pachydermatous than Johnson at his worst. As value judgments in criticism are largely based on moral metaphors, his sense of literary values suffers accordingly. In his ceaseless denigration of everything French he is little better than the culture-blatherers of our own day who see everything in German thought from Luther to Nietzsche as potential Nazism. His remarks about Gibbon are embarrassing; his persistent undervaluing of Virgil is clearly derived from his moral disapproval of the Second Eclogue, and so on. Miss Coburn's only editorial appearance in the text is in the headings

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she gives to the aphorisms, and no. no, where Coleridge says, "It is still the great definition of humanity, that we have a conscience," she has headed "Conscience—Freedom to Will and Think." But a careful reading of the paragraph shows that while Coleridge may mean that too, he also means conscience in its unregenerate sense of a please-mamma moral compulsion—the conscience of which Huck Finn complained that it nagged him even when it knew no more about the situation than he did.5 In the same paragraph he distinguishes "the turbulent heat of temporary fermentation from the mild warmth of essential life." It is important to notice that when he expresses one of his major literary ambitions, his mood is usually turbulent and fermenting. (Compare the project for six hymns in the Gutch Memorandum Book: "In the last Hymn a sublime enumeration of all the charms or Tremendities of Nature—then a bold avowal of Berkeley's System!!!")6 One can get becalmed not only through failing to love God's creatures, but through being too anxious to help them hatch their eggs. Miss Coburn also emphasizes the modernity of Coleridge in her introduction, and in expressing it she favours the rhetorical question. "[W]as he not groping towards a Gestalt psychology before the gestaltists? . . . had he not a glimmering of Freudianism before Freud? . . . would he not have recognized in Jung's doctrine ..." [15]—and so on. True, no doubt, and one could fall into the same rhythm almost ad libitum. Does he not anticipate Newman when he distinguishes positiveness from certainty, no. no; Kierkegaard in his note on Dread, no. 37; Schopenhauer in his conception of will and reason, no. 235; the logical positivists when he stresses the necessity of "criterional logic," no. 88; perhaps even Wittgenstein's opening aphorism when he says, "The phrase, true in all cases, is preferable to universal," no. 92; etc., etc.? I am not one of those, however, who feel that the ultimate justification of something great in the past is its relevance to the present instead of its own greatness. For instance, in the Biographia, chapter 6, where Coleridge cites the case of a hysterical girl to prove that, taking in all levels of consciousness, we never forget anything, he does show "a glimmering of Freudianism before Freud." He goes on to suggest that this total recollection of experience may actually be the last judgment we experience as we pass from flesh to spirit7—an idea that no Freudian would get a glimmering of in a million years. And I think the "seminal" quality in Coleridge's thought, the quality that will keep the reader of Miss Coburn's anthology finding good things in it for months after he buys it, can be explained in another way.

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On Romanticism

Miss Coburn remarks, "The more one reads Coleridge the more impressed one becomes with what can only be called a psychological approach to all human problems" [14], and goes on to suggest that the whole shape of Coleridge's thought is psychological. Her opinion is authoritative, and she doubtless has reams of evidence for her statement in the notebooks of which I know nothing. But such an approach to Coleridge seems to me to be bound up with the indefensible view that in Coleridge, as in Blake, the central coordinating principle is the psychological one of imagination. The imagination is instrumental in Coleridge: it is the power that unifies, but not the thing to be unified, the real coordinating principle. The latter is the Logos, and every aspect of Coleridge's thought is an application of this conception. It leads him, in politics, to see human destiny as emanating from the Incarnation, in contrast to the "psilanthropic" liberal humanism that starts by trying to improve human nature.8 It leads him in religion to the same perspective, and to a theism which makes the knowledge of nature depend on reason, and reason on the presence of the Logos in the mind (see no. 99). It leads him in philosophy to hail the "second triumphant Coming" of medieval realism, after a reign of nominalism that ran through Bacon and Descartes to the French philosophes (no. 99, and compare the powerful analysis of Cartesianism in no. 52). It leads him in criticism to the conception of all literature as contained within an order of words identical with one personal Word—perhaps his greatest legacy to modern thought, and one still unexplored. It leads him even in science to a type of speculation aimed at restoring the system of analogies and correspondences on which medieval symbolism was based (compare no. 185). And although Coleridge's thought remains fragmentary, the fragments are priceless not because they are imaginative but because they are logia. Just as Blake urges us to see the world in a grain of sand, so in Coleridge we have to see the vast ramifying body of the Logos in all the brilliant facets and prisms of these aphorisms, as they come tumbling over one another in a wonderful sweep of mental richness, like the drops in the Cumberland waterfalls that he loved so much to watch. The reader unacquainted with The Notebooks of Matthew Arnold should be told immediately not to expect anything like Miss Coburn's "basket of plucked plums and windfalls" [23], as she calls it. There is hardly anything by Arnold in them; they are not strictly his notebooks but his commonplace books, lists of sentences quoted from his reading. They are in Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, and English, the first five being

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left untranslated "By the wishes of the members of Arnold's family and of the publishers" [xiv], according to the preface. Such lists of adagia or sententiae are a normal part of the training of a humanist scholar: they help him to see his reading as a program of life, and focus in his mind the best that has been thought in the way in which it has best been said. They throw a light too on Arnold's stylistic habit of repeating a thematic phrase all through a book. Along with the supplementary lists provided by the editors at the end of the book, it forms a valuable guide to Arnold's reading. Otherwise it is difficult to know what to say about this book, which has been edited with great pains and erudition, and is clearly the product of a touching personal devotion to Arnold. The long series of sentences in Greek from the New Testament and Marcus Aurelius, for instance, do not seem to illustrate the way Arnold read them as his published writings do. One can, perhaps, build up a picture of a harassed nineteenth-century contemplative, turning eagerly to Senancour and a Kempis, but forced to listen also to Goethe bellowing into his other ear about the vast and vague merit of getting something done. The conclusion of the main part of the book, a series of quotations dated a week after his death [see 438], has in it the melancholy withdrawing roar of the sea of faith, leaving beached a number of shored fragments like those at the end of The Waste Land: When the dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest; and be comforted for him when his spirit is departed from him. (Ecclesiasticus [38:23]) Ipse suas artes, sua munera, laetus Apollo Augurium citharamque dabat celeresque sagittas. Ille, ut depositi proferret fata parentis, Scire potestates herbarum usumque medendi Maluit, et mutas agitare inglorius artes. (Aeneid, 12>9 Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect. (Karl Marx)10 Si est gaudium in mundo, hoc utique possidet puri cordis homo. (Imitation of Christ)11

7

Lord Byron

1959

From FI, 168-89. Originally published as "George Gordon, Lord Byron," in Major British Writers, enlarged ed., ed G.B. Harrison et al. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), 2:149-234, where it introduced a selection of Byron's work edited by Frye. A note in FI points out that "When this essay appeared in Major British Writers (1959) it was accompanied by 'Reading Suggestions' recording some of my obvious debts to Byron scholars, notably Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 1957" (2155).

I

It is hardly possible to discuss Byron's poetry without telling the story of his life in some detail. His father was Captain Jack Byron, a nephew of the fifth Baron Byron, and a psychopathic spendthrift and sponger on women who had run through the fortunes of two heiresses. The first, a marchioness, he had acquired by divorce from her husband, and by her he had a daughter, Augusta Byron, later Augusta Leigh, the poet's halfsister. The second was a Scotswoman, Catherine Gordon of Gight, an explosive, unbalanced, ill-educated but affectionate woman whose only child was the poet. Byron was born in London on 22 January 1788, in great poverty and distress as his mother was returning from France to Scotland to get some relief from her rapacious spouse. He was handicapped at birth with a lameness that embittered his life (what was wrong, and which leg was affected, are still uncertain points), and he also had some glandular imbalance that forced him to a starvation diet in order to avoid grotesque corpulence. The mother brought up her boy in Aberdeen, where his religious training was naturally Presbyterian, giv-

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ing many a later critic a somewhat dubious cliche about the "persisting Calvinism" in Byron's mind. When Byron was three his father died; when he was six his cousin, the heir to the Byron title, was killed; and when he was ten his great-uncle, who held the title, died and the poet became the sixth Lord Byron. The fact that Byron made so professional a job of being a lord is perhaps the result of his entering on that state when he was old enough to notice the difference his title made in the attitude that society took toward him. He was then educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge. The most important of the friendships he formed there was with John Cam Hobhouse, in later life Lord Broughton, who founded a "Whig Club" at Cambridge, and whose influence had much to do with Byron's left-of-centre political views. Byron's chief athletic interests were swimming and pistol-shooting, the latter a useful accomplishment in the days when gentlemen were expected to fight the odd duel, and he got around a regulation against keeping a dog at Cambridge by keeping a bear instead. What with his extravagance, his lack of discipline, and the liberties he took with his rank, he was anything but a model student. He announced more than once that he wished he had gone to Oxford instead, and the Cambridge authorities must often have wished so too. However, he acquired the usual gentleman's Classical education, and while still an undergraduate he produced a slim volume of melodious if not very arresting lyrics. This volume was, after some vicissitudes, published in 1807 under the title given it by the publisher, Hours of Idleness. Hours of Idleness got roughly handled in the Edinburgh Review, and the result was Byron's first major satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). Although the motivation for this poem was revenge on the Edinburgh reviewer, Byron took the opportunity to satirize most of his poetic contemporaries, including Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Meanwhile Byron had been planning a variant of the "Grand Tour" that it was fashionable for young well-to-do Englishmen to take. Instead of the usual journey to France and Italy, he decided to go first to Portugal and Spain, bypass Italy by way of Malta, and then travel in what were at that time Turkish dominions: Greece, Asia Minor, and the practically unknown Albania. He set out with Hobhouse on 2 July 1809, on the "Lisbon Packet." The Peninsular War was in progress, but life was made easy for people in Byron's social position, and one would never dream from his letters that this was the time and place of Goya's Disasters of War. The travellers passed through Malta, where a Mrs. Spencer Smith

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became the "Florence" of some of Byron's love poems, and on to Albania. Byron and his party were hospitably received by a local ruler, Ali Pasha, who found Byron as attractive as most people did, besides having political reasons for welcoming English visitors. Once, on suspicion that was no more than gossip, he had had fifteen women kidnapped and flung into the sea. Another woman narrowly escaped the same fate on a charge of infidelity: this incident was used by Byron as the basis for his tale The Giaour, and rumour maintained that Byron himself had been her lover. Next came Greece and Asia Minor, where Byron duplicated Leander's famous swim across the Hellespont, pondered over the sites of Marathon and Troy, and deplored the activities of Lord Elgin, who was engaged in hacking off the sculptures now called the Elgin Marbles from the ruined Parthenon and transporting them to England. Byron's satire on Lord Elgin's enterprise, The Curse of Minerva (i.e., Athene, the patron of Athens), was not published until 1815. Meanwhile he had begun to write a poem about his travels, Childe Harold, the first two cantos of the poem we now have. On his return to England in July, 1811, he went back to Newstead, the estate of the Byrons, where he had established himself before he left, a rambling "Gothic" mansion he was later forced to sell. His mother died suddenly soon after his arrival, and the deaths of three close friends occurred about the same time. The relations between Byron and his mother had always been tense, especially after she had begun to see some of his father's extravagance reappearing in him, but they were fond enough of each other when they were not living together. Byron now entered upon a phenomenally successful literary and social career. Childe Harold, as he said, made him famous overnight, and it was followed by a series of Oriental tales, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara, which appeared in 1813 and 1814. He wrote with great speed, completing the thousand-odd lines of The Bride of Abydos in four days,completing the thousand-odd lines of The Bride of Abydos in four days, and he seldom revised. "I am like the tyger," he said: "[Ilf I miss my first Spring—I go growling back to my jungle. There is no second. I can't correct; I can't, and I won't."1 When Byron said in Beppo: I've half a mind to tumble down to prose, But verse is more in fashion—so here goes, [st. 52] the last statement, incredible as it may seem now, was true when he wrote. Nobody would turn to poetry for stories nowadays, but in Byron's

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day there was a popular demand for verse tales that Byron did not create, though he did much to expand it. The melancholy misanthropy, so full of romantic frisson, the pirates and the harems, the exotic Orientalism, the easy and pleasant versification, swept London as they were later to sweep the Continent. As a celebrity Byron could hold his own even in the most absorbing period of the Napoleonic War. The Corsair sold 10,000 copies on the day of its publication by John Murray, and ran through seven editions in a month. Byron probably made more money from his poetry than any other English poet, though being a lord who derived his income from rents, he often gave his royalties away to friends. The first money he accepted on his own account was £700 for the copyright of Lara. Apart from literature Byron had many other activities, both serious and scandalous. Before he had left England he had taken the seat in the House of Lords that his title gave him, and he now became active in Whig circles. His first speech was made in defence of the "framebreakers," or workers who had destroyed some textile machines through fear of unemployment. He also supported a number of other liberal causes, including the relief of Catholics in Ireland. When Napoleon was banished to Elba, Byron wrote an ode on him in which he contrasted him unfavourably with Washington as a fighter for liberty. (There is an impressive musical setting of this ode, for orchestra and Sprechgesang solo, by Arnold Schonberg.)2 But his hatred of the reactionary English government, especially Lord Castlereagh, was strong enough to give him a considerable admiration for Napoleon, even to the point of regretting the outcome of Waterloo: he had hoped, he said, to see Castlereagh's head on a pole. In fact his attitude to Napoleon always retained a good deal of self-identification. Meanwhile Byron was carrying on some highly publicized affairs with several women of fashion. Lady Caroline Lamb, always something of an emotional exhibitionist, kept London, which on Byron's social level was still a small town, buzzing with gossip over her pursuit of Byron, her visits to him disguised, her tantrums, and her public scenes. Lady Oxford, whose children, in an erudite contemporary joke, were known as the Harleian Miscellany, was another mistress of his,3 and there were briefer encounters with others. Despite his crowded schedule, Byron began seriously to consider marriage, making a trusted confidante of Lady Melbourne, Caroline Lamb's mother-in-law, to whom he wrote many frank and unaffected letters. Given Byron's temperament, he could only marry some kind of femme fatale; and the only really fatal type of

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woman for him would be an earnest, humourless, rather inhibited female who would represent everything that was insular and respectable in English society. His choice fell on Annabella Milbanke, heiress to a title in her own right and niece of Lady Melbourne, and who otherwise reminds one a little of Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. She was highly intelligent and had many interests, including mathematics (Byron called her the "Princess of Parallelograms," as in those days any woman with such an interest could expect to be teased about it), but her mind ran to rather vague maxims of general conduct, and to an interest in the moral reformation of other people which boded ill for marriage to an unreformed poet with an unusually concrete view of life. The marriage lasted a year (January 1815 to January 1816) and then fell apart. A separation (they were never divorced) was agreed upon, and Lady Byron obtained custody of their daughter, Augusta Ada. Byron appears to have gone somewhat berserk in his matrimonial bonds, and his wife's doubts about his sanity were probably genuine. The situation was aggravated by financial difficulties and by the fact that gossip had begun to whisper about Byron and his half-sister Augusta. That there were sexual relations between them seems obvious enough, though the matter is hotly disputed, and the relevant documents have been carefully removed from the prying eyes of scholars. The combination of this exceptionally delicious scandal with the matrimonial one, along with his expression of some perverse pro-French political views, made things unpleasant for Byron, and although social disapproval was perhaps not as intense as he pretended or thought, he felt forced to leave England once more. He set out for the Continent on 25 April 1816, never to return to England. He made his way to Geneva, where he met, by prearrangement, Shelley and his wife Mary Godwin, along with her stepsister, Claire (or Jane) Clairmont. The last named had visited Byron before his departure from England and had thrown herself, as biographers say, at his head, the result of this accurate if morally unguided missile being a daughter, Allegra, whom Byron eventually placed in an Italian convent to be brought up as a Roman Catholic, and who died there at the age of eight. The association with Shelley, one of Byron's few intellectual friends, is marked in the new poetry that Byron now began writing—the third canto of Childe Harold; Manfred; the two remarkable poems Darkness and The Dream; and the most poignant of his tales, The Prisoner of Chilian. Shelley's reaction to Byron may be found in his poem Julian and Maddalo,

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but for all the scepticism he ascribes to Byron, he was unable to convince him that Christianity was less reasonable than his own brand of Platonism. In the fall of 1817 Byron went over the Alps and settled in Venice. His Ode to Venice, Beppo, the opening of the fourth canto of Childe Harold, and two of his dramas, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari, are some of the evidence for the fascination that this dreamlike World's Fair of a city had for him. At Venice he plunged into an extraordinary sexual debauch, but he also wrote some of his best poetry, including the fourth canto of Childe Harold and the beginning of his greatest work, Don Juan. In the spring of 1819 he met Teresa Guiccioli, the wife of an elderly count, who was both attractive enough to hold Byron and astute enough to keep other women away from him. Byron moved into the Guiccioli household in Ravenna, and settled down with Teresa into what by Byronic standards was practically an old-fashioned marriage. Ravenna saw the composition of Sardanapalus and Cain, as well as The Vision of Judgment, but his poetic energies were increasingly absorbed by Don Juan. At that time the two great centres of Classical civilization, Greece and Italy, were under foreign occupation: Greece was a Turkish dependency, and most of northern Italy was controlled by Austria. Byron and Shelley were passionate supporters of the efforts of Italian and Greek nationalists to get free of their foreign yokes. Teresa's family, the Gambas, were also Italian nationalists in sympathy, and hence were, as was Byron, closely watched and reported on by the Austrian police. The Gambas were forced to move from Ravenna to Pisa, and Byron followed them. At Pisa Byron rejoined the Shelleys, and here Shelley, on 8 July 1822, was drowned at sea and cremated on the shore. The cremation was carried out by Byron and their friend Edward Trelawny, an extraordinarily circumstantial liar who had reconstructed his past life along the general lines of a Byronic hero. Meanwhile Byron had broken with his publisher John Murray, and had formed an alliance through Shelley with Leigh Hunt, whom he brought to Pisa. The plan was to found a literary and left-wing political magazine, and this magazine, called The Liberal, printed a good deal of Byron's poetry, including The Vision of Judgment, in its four numbers. Hunt, however, was somewhat irresponsible (he is the original of Harold Skimpole in Dickens's Bleak House), and his absurd and even more Dickensian wife and their demonic children helped to keep relations strained. Eventually the Gamba-Byron menage was forced to move on to Genoa, where Byron wrote some unimportant poems and finished what we

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have of Don Juan—sixteen cantos and a fragment of a seventeenth. Meanwhile a group of revolutionaries in Greece had been planning an insurrection against the Turkish authority, and knowing of Byron's sympathy with their cause, they offered him membership in their committee. Byron had been meditating the possibility of going to Greece for some time, and on 23 July 1823 he left in the company of Trelawny and Pietro Gamba, Teresa's brother. He established connection at Missolonghi on 5 January 1824 with Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, the leader of the Western Greek revolutionaries, and put his money and his very real qualities of leadership at the service of the Greek cause. His health, which had been precarious for some time, broke down in a series of fevers, and he died at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824, three months after he had passed the thirty-sixth birthday which his valedictory poem records. II

The main appeal of Byron's poetry is in the fact that it is Byron's. To read Byron's poetry is to hear all about Byron's marital difficulties, flirtations, love for Augusta, friendships, travels, and political and social views. And Byron is a consistently interesting person to hear about, this being why Byron, even at his worst of self-pity and egotism and blither and doggerel, is still so incredibly readable. He proves what many critics declare to be impossible, that a poem can make its primary impact as a historical and biographical document. The critical problem involved here is crucial to our understanding of not only Byron but literature as a whole. Even when Byron's poetry is not objectively very good, it is still important, because it is Byron's. But who was Byron to be so important? Certainly not an exceptionally good or wise man. Byron is, strictly, neither a great poet nor a great man who wrote poetry, but something in between: a tremendous cultural force that was life and literature at once. How he came to be this is what we must try to explain as we review the four chief genres of his work: the lyrics, the tales (including Childe Harold), the dramas, and the later satires. Byron's lyrical poetry affords a good exercise in critical catholicity, because it contains nothing that "modern" critics look for: no texture, no ambiguities, no intellectualized ironies, no intensity, no vividness of phrasing, the words and images being vague to the point of abstraction. The poetry seems to be a plain man's poetry, making poetic emotion out of the worn and blunted words of ordinary speech. Yet it is not written

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by a plain man: it is written, as Arnold said, with the careless ease of a man of quality,4 and its most striking and obvious feature is its gentlemanly amateurism. It is, to be sure, in an amateur tradition, being a romantic, subjective, personal development of the kind of Courtly Love poetry that was written by Tudor and Cavalier noblemen in earlier ages. Byron's frequent statements in prefaces that this would be his last work to trouble the public with, his offhand deprecating comments on his work, his refusal to revise, all give a studious impression of a writer who can take poetry or leave it alone. Byron held the view that lyrical poetry was an expression of passion, and that passion was essentially fitful, and he distrusted professional poets, who pretended to be able to summon passion at will and sustain it indefinitely. Foe was later to hold much the same view of poetry, but more consistently, for he drew the inference that a continuous long poem was impossible,5 whereas Childe Harold has the stretches of perfunctory, even slapdash writing that one would expect with such a theory. In Byron's later lyrics, especially the Hebrew Melodies of 1815, where he was able to add some of his Oriental technicolour to the Old Testament, more positive qualities emerge, particularly in the rhythm. The Destruction of Sennacherib is a good reciter's piece (though not without its difficulties, as Tom Sawyer discovered),6 and anticipates some of the later experiments in verbal jazz by Poe and Swinburne. Some of the best of his poems bear the title Stanzas for Music, and they have the flat conventional diction appropriate to poems that depend partly on another art for their sound: One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impair'd the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress, Or softly lightens o'er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.7

(If the reader would like a clue to the caressing rhythm of this stanza, he should read the iambic metres so as to give the stresses twice the length of the unstressed syllables. Then the lines will fall into four bars of threefour time, beginning on the third beat, and the rhythm of a nineteenthcentury waltz will emerge.) We notice that while Byron's amateur predecessors wrote in a convention and Byron from personal experience,

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Byron was equally conventional, because his personal experience conformed to a literary pattern. Byron's life imitated literature: this is where his unique combination of the poetic and the personal begins. Byron was naturally an extroverted person, fond of company, of travel, of exploring new scenes, making new friends, falling in love with new women. Like Keats, in a much more direct way, he wanted a life of sensations rather than of thoughts. As he said: "I can not repent me (I try very often) so much of any thing I have done—as of anything I have left undone—alas! I have been but idle—and have the prospect of early decay—without having seized every available instant of our pleasurable year."8 In the records of his journeys in his letters and Hobhouse's diaries, it is the more introverted Hobhouse who dwells on the dirt and the fleas, and it is Hobhouse too who does the serious studying and takes an interest in archaeology.9 It is Byron who swims across the Hellespont, learns the songs of Albanian mountaineers, makes friends with a Moslem vizier, amuses himself with the boys in a monastery school, flirts with Greek girls, and picks up a smattering of Armenian. He was continually speculating about unknown sensations, such as how it would feel to have committed a murder, and he had the nervous dread of growing older that goes with the fear of slowing down in the rhythm of experience. His writing depends heavily on experience; he seldom describes any country that he has not seen, and for all his solitary role he shows, especially in Don Juan, a novelist's sense of established society. It was an essential part of his strongly extroverted and empirical bent that he should not be a systematic thinker, nor much interested in people who were. He used his intelligence to make commonsense judgments on specific situations, and found himself unable to believe anything that he did not find confirmed in his own experience. In his numerous amours, for example, the absence of any sense of sin was as unanswerable a fact of his experience as the presence of it would have been to St. Augustine. He thought of sexual love as a product of reflex and mechanical habit, not of inner emotional drives. When he said, "I do not believe in the existence of what is called Love,"10 we are probably to take him quite literally. Nevertheless, his extroversion made him easily confused by efforts at self-analysis, and he flew into rages when he was accused of any lack of feeling. One reason why his marriage demoralized him so was that it forced such efforts on him. Now if we look into Byron's tales and Childe Harold we usually find as

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the central character an inscrutable figure with hollow cheeks and blazing eyes, wrapped in a cloud of gloom, full of mysterious and undefined remorse, an outcast from society, a wanderer of the race of Cain. At times he suggests something demonic rather than human, a Miltonic Satan or fallen angel. He may be a sinister brigand like the Corsair, or an aloof and icily polite aristocrat like the Lucifer of The Vision of Judgment, but he is always haughty and sombre of demeanour; his glance is difficult to meet; he will not brook questioning, though he himself questions all established social standards, and he is associated with lonely and colourful predatory animals, as ordinary society is with gregarious ones like sheep and domestic fowl. "The lion is alone, and so am I," says Manfred [canto 3, st. 2]. The name of the Corsair is "Link'd with one virtue, and a thousand crimes" [canto 3, st. 24]: the virtue is manifested when he refuses, as a prisoner, to assassinate his captor to escape being impaled. Fortunately his mistress Gulnare was less scrupulous. As for Lara, who is the Corsair returned from exile to his estates: He stood a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurled, [canto i, st. 28]

This type of character is now known as the "Byronic hero," and wherever he has appeared since in literature there has been the influence, direct or indirect, of Byron. And if we ask how a witty, sociable, extroverted poet came to create such a character, we can see that it must have arisen as what psychologists call a projection of his inner self, that inner self that was so mysterious and inscrutable even to its owner. It happened that this type of character had already been popularized in the "Gothic" thrillers or "horrid stories" of Mrs. Radcliffe, M.G. Lewis (a friend of Byron's, known as "Monk" Lewis from his violent and sadistic tale The Monk), John Moore, whose Zeluco, a much more serious work, Byron greatly admired, and lesser writers. The period of their greatest popularity was the last decade of the eighteenth century, but they survived through Byron's lifetime. Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey was written as a parody of them in 1798, but it still had a point when it was published in 1818. These thrillers were intended for an English Protestant middle-class reading public: consequently their horrid surroundings were normally Continental, Catholic, and upper-class, though Oriental settings also had a vogue. Into such settings stalked a character type, sometimes a villain, sometimes presented in a more sympathetic,

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or more-sinned-against-than-sinning, role, but in either case misanthropic, misunderstood, and solitary, with strong diabolical overtones. The devil is a powerfully erotic figure, his horns and hoofs descending from the ancient satyrs, and the various forms of sadism and masochism glanced at in these thrillers helped to make them extremely popular, not least with the female part of the reading public. Childe Harold and the other lowering heroes of Byron's tales not only popularized a conventional type of hero, but popularized Byron himself in that role. For Byron was a dark and melancholy-looking lord with a reputation for wickedness and free thought; he seemed to prefer the Continent to England, and took a detached view of middle-class and even Christian morality. He owned a gloomy Gothic castle and spent evenings with revellers in it; he was pale and thin with his ferocious dieting; he even had a lame foot. No wonder he said that strangers whom he met at dinner "looked as if his Satanic Majesty had been among them."11 The prince of darkness is a gentleman, and so was Byron. Again, when a "nameless vice" was introduced into a Gothic thriller, as part of the villain's or hero's background, it generally turned out, when named, to be incest. This theme recurs all through Romantic literature, being almost obsessive in Shelley as well as Byron, and here again a literary convention turns up in Byron's life. Even a smaller detail, like the disguising of the ex-Corsair's mistress in Lara as the pageboy Kaled, recurs in Byron's liaison with Caroline Lamb, who looked well in a page's costume. Byron did not find the Byronic hero as enthralling as his public did, and he made several efforts to detach his own character from Childe Harold and his other heroes, with limited success. He says of Childe Harold that he wanted to make him an objective study of gloomy misanthropy, hence he deliberately cut humour out of the poem in order to preserve a unity of tone.12 But Byron's most distinctive talents did not have full scope in this part of his work. Most of the Gothic thriller writers were simple-minded popular novelists, but the same convention had also been practised on a much higher level of literary intelligence. Apart from Goethe's early Sorrows of Werther, an extraordinarily popular tale of a solemn suicide, Addison in The Vision ofMirza and Johnson in Rasselas had used the Oriental tale for serious literary purposes. Also, Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764) and William Beckford in Vathek (1786) had written respectively a Gothic and an Oriental romance in which melodrama and fantasy were shot through with flickering lights

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of irony. They were addressed to a reading public capable, to use modern phraseology, of taking their corn with a pinch of salt. It was this higher level of sophistication that Byron naturally wanted to reach, and he was oppressed by the humourless solemnity of his own creations. His sardonic and ribald wit, his sense of the concrete, his almost infallible feeling for the commonsense perspective on every situation, crackles all through his letters and journals, even through his footnotes. But it seems to be locked out of his serious poetry, and only in the very last canto of Don Juan did he succeed in uniting fantasy and humour. Byron's tales are, on the whole, well-told and well-shaped stories. Perhaps he learned something from his own ridicule of Southey, who was also a popular writer of verse tales, sometimes of mammoth proportions. In any case he is well able to exploit the capacity of verse for dramatizing one or two central situations, leaving all the cumbersome apparatus of plot to be ignored or taken for granted. But he seemed unable to bring his various projections of his inner ghost to life: his heroes, like the characters of a detective story, are thin, bloodless, abstract, and popular. Nor could he seem to vary the tone, from romance to irony, from fantasy to humour, as Beckford does in Vathek. Byron was strongly attracted by Beckford, and is thinking of him at the very opening of Childe Harold, as Beckford had lived for two years in Portugal. When Byron writes Deep in yon cave Honorius long did dwell, In hope to merit Heaven by making earth a Hell [canto i, st. 20]

he obviously has in mind the demure remark in the opening of Vathek: "[H]e did not think . . . that it was necessary to make a hell of this world to enjoy paradise in the next."13 But though Byron is the wittiest of writers, the Byronic hero cannot manage much more than a gloomy smile. Here, for instance, is Childe Harold on the "Lisbon Packet": The sails were fill'd, and fair the light winds blew, As glad to waft him from his native home . . . And then, it may be, of his wish to roam Repented he, but in his bosom slept The silent thought, nor from his lips did come One word of wail, whilst others sate and wept, And to the reckless gales unmanly moaning k e p t . . . [canto i, st. 12]

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And here is Byron himself in the same situation: Hobhouse muttering fearful curses, As the hatchway down he rolls, Now his breakfast, now his verses, Vomits forth—and damns our souls . . . "Zounds! my liver's coming up: I shall not survive the racket Of this brutal Lisbon Packet." [Lines to Mr. Hodgson, 11. 53-6,62-4]

The same inability to combine seriousness and humour is also to be found in the plays, where one would expect more variety of tone. The central character is usually the Byronic hero again, and again he seems to cast a spell over the whole action. Byron recognized this deficiency in his dramas, and to say that his plays were not intended for the stage would be an understatement. Byron had a positive phobia of stage production, and once tried to get an injunction issued to prevent a performance of Marino Faliero. "I never risk rivalry in any thing," he wrote to Lady Melbourne,14 and being directly dependent on the applause or booing of a crowd (modern theatres give us no notion of what either form of demonstration was like in Byron's day) was something he could not face, even in absence. Besides, he had no professional sense, and nothing of the capacity to write for an occasion that the practising dramatist needs. Hence, with the exception of Werner, a lively and well-written melodrama based on a plot by somebody else, Byron's plays are so strictly closet dramas that they differ little in structure from the tales. The establishing of the Byronic hero was a major feat of characterization, but Byron had little power of characterization apart from this figure. Like many brilliant talkers, he had not much ear for the rhythms and nuances of other people's speech. Here again we find a close affinity between Byron's personality and the conventions of his art. For instance, in his life Byron seemed to have curiously little sense of women as human beings. Except for Lady Melbourne, he addressed himself to the female in them, took a hearty-male view of their intellectual interests, and concentrated on the ritual of love-making with the devotion of what an earlier age would have called a clerk of Venus. This impersonal and ritualistic approach to women is reflected in his tales and plays, where again it fits the convention of Byronic romance. It is difficult for a heroine of strong character to make much headway against a gloomy misan-

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thropic hero, and Byron's heroines, like the heroines of Gothic romance in general, are insipid prodigies of neurotic devotion. But if Byron's plays are not practicable stage plays, they are remarkable works. Manfred, based on what Byron had heard about Goethe's Faust, depicts the Byronic hero as a student of magic whose knowledge has carried him beyond the limits of human society and given him superhuman powers, but who is still held to human desire by his love for his sister (apparently) Astarte. At the moment of his death the demons he has controlled, with a sense of what is customary in stories about magicians, come to demand his soul, but Manfred, in a crisp incisive speech which retains its power to surprise through any number of rereadings, announces that he has made no bargain with them, that whatever he has done, they can go to hell, and he will not go with them. The key to this final scene is the presence of the Abbot. Manfred and the Abbot differ on all points of theory, but the Abbot is no coward and Manfred is no villain: they face the crisis together, linked in a common bond of humanity which enables Manfred to die and to triumph at the same time. Two of Byron's plays, Cain and Heaven and Earth, are described by Byron as "mysteries," by which he meant Biblical plays like those of the Middle Ages. Wherever we turn in Byron's poetry, we meet the figure of Cain, the first man who never knew Paradise, and whose sexual love was necessarily incestuous. In Byron's "mystery" Cain is Adam's eldest son and heir, but what he really inherits is the memory of a greater dispossession. "Dost thou not live?" asks Adam helplessly. "Must I not die?" retorts Cain [act \, sc. i]. Adam cannot comprehend the mentality of one who has been born with the consciousness of death. But Lucifer can, for he too has been disinherited. He comes to Cain and gives him what he gave Adam: fruit of the tree of knowledge, of a kind that Raphael, in the eighth book of Paradise Lost, warned Adam against: a knowledge of other worlds and other beings, a realization that the fortunes of humanity are of less account in the scheme of things than he had assumed. From such knowledge develops the resentment that leads to the murder of Abel and to Cain's exile. And just as Milton tries to show us that we in Adam's place would have committed Adam's sin, so Byron makes us feel that we all have something of Cain in us: everybody has killed something that he wishes he had kept alive, and the fullest of lives is wrapped around the taint of an inner death. As the princess says in The Castle of Otranto, "This can be no evil spirit... it is undoubtedly one of the family."15 The other "mystery," Heaven and Earth, deals with the theme of the

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love of angels for human women recorded in some mysterious verses of Genesis, and ends with the coming of Noah's flood. Angels who fall through sexual love are obvious enough subjects for Byron, but Heaven and Earth lacks the clear dramatic outline of Cain. All Byron's plays are tragedies, and as Byron moved further away from the easy sentiment of his earlier tales he moved toward intellectual paradox rather than tragedy. It is particularly in the final scenes that we observe Byron becoming too self-conscious for the full emotional resonance of tragedy. In Sardanapalus, for example, we see the downfall of a king who pursued pleasure because he was too intelligent to want to keep his people plunged into warfare. His intelligence is identified by his people with weakness, and his pursuit of pleasure is inseparably attached to selfishness. What we are left with, despite his final death on a funeral pyre, is less tragedy than an irony of a kind that is very close to satire. Byron's creative powers were clearly running in the direction of satire, and it was to satire that he turned in his last and greatest period. In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers Byron spoke of Wordsworth as "that mild apostate from poetic rule" [1. 236]. This poem is early, but Byron never altered his opinion of the Lake Poets as debasers of the currency of English poetry. His own poetic idol was Pope, whom he called "the moral poet of all civilization,"16 and he thought of himself as continuing Pope's standards of clarity, craftsmanship, and contact with real life against the introverted metaphysical mumblings of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Byron's early models were standard, even old-fashioned, later eighteenth-century models. English Bards is in the idiom of eighteenth-century satire, less of Pope than of Pope's successors, Churchill, Wolcot, and Gifford, and the first part of Childe Harold, with its pointless Spenserian stanza and its semi-facetious antique diction—fortunately soon dropped by Byron—is also an eighteenth-century stock pattern. Byron was friendly with Shelley, but owes little to him technically, and in his letters he expressed a vociferous dislike for the poetry of Keats (considerably toned down in the eleventh canto of Don Juan). His literary friends, Sheridan, Rogers, Gifford, were of the older generation, and even Tom Moore, his biographer and by far his closest friend among his poetic contemporaries, preserved, like so many Irish writers, something of the eighteenth-century manner. It was also an eighteenth-century model that gave him the lead for the phase of poetry that began with Beppo in September 1817, and exploited the possibilities of the eight-line (ottava rimd) stanza used there and in Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment. Byron seems to have derived this

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stanza from a heroi-comical poem, Whistlecraft, by John Hookham Frere, whom Byron had met in Spain, and which in its turn had owed something to the Italian romantic epics of the early Renaissance. Byron went on to study the Italian poems, and translated the first canto of one of the best of them, Pulci's tale of a good-natured giant, Morgante Maggiore. But there was one feature in Frere that he could not have found in the Italians, and that was the burlesque rhyme. In Italian the double rhyme is normal, but it is a peculiarity of English that even double rhymes have to be used with great caution in serious poetry, and that all obtrusive or ingenious rhymes belong to comic verse. This is a major principle of the wit of Hudibras before Byron's time, as of W.S. Gilbert and Ogden Nash since, and without it the wit of Don Juan is hardly conceivable: But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all? [canto i, st. 22] Armed with this new technique, Byron was ready to tackle a narrative satire, and in narrative satire he found not only a means of exploiting all his best qualities, but of turning his very faults as a poet into virtues. He could digress to his heart's content, for digression is part of the fun in satire—one thinks of Tristram Shandy and the "Digression in Praise of Digressions" in A Tale of a Tub. He could write doggerel, but doggerel in satire is a sign of wit rather than incompetence. He could be serious if he liked, for sudden changes of mood belong to the form, and he could swing back to burlesque again as soon as he was bored with seriousness, or thought the reader might be. It is particularly the final couplet that he uses to undercut his own romantic Byronism, as in the description of Daniel Boone in canto 8: Crime came not near him—she is not the child Of solitude; Health shrank not from him—for Her home is in the rarely trodden wild, Where if men seek her not, and death be more Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled By habit to what their own hearts abhor— In cities caged. The present case in point I Cite is, that Boon lived hunting up to ninety, [st. 62] In the new flush of discovery, Byron wrote exultantly to his friend Douglas Kinnaird: "[Don Juan] is the sublime of that there sort of writ-

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ing—it may be bawdy—but is it not good English?—it may be profligate—but is it not life, is it not the thing?—Could any man have written it—who has not lived in the world?"17 But even Byron was soon made aware that he was not as popular as he had been. The women who loved The Corsair hated Don Juan, for the reason that Byron gives with his usual conciseness on such subjects: "the wish of all women to exalt the sentiment of the passions—& to keep up the illusion which is their empire."18 Teresa, as soon as she understood anything of the poem, boycotted it, and forced Byron to promise not to go on with it, a promise he was able to evade only with great difficulty. His friend Harriet Wilson, significantly enough a courtesan who lived partly by blackmail, wrote him: "Dear Adorable Lord Byron, don't make a mere coarse old libertine of yourself."19 Don Juan is traditionally the incautious amorist, the counterpart in love to Faust in knowledge, whose pursuit of women is so ruthless that he is eventually damned, as in the last scene of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. Consequently he is a logical choice as a mask for Byron, but he is a mask that reveals the whole Byronic personality, instead of concealing the essence of it as Childe Harold does. The extroversion of Byron's temperament has full scope in Don Juan. There is hardly any characterization in the poem: even Don Juan never emerges clearly as a character. We see only what happens to him, and the other characters, even Haidee, float past as phantasmagoria of romance and adventure. What one misses in the poem is the sense of engagement or participation. Everything happens to Don Juan, but he is never an active agent, and seems to take no responsibility for his life. He drifts from one thing to the next, appears to find one kind of experience as good as another, makes no judgments and no commitments. As a result the gloom and misanthropy, the secret past sins, the gnawing remorse of the earlier heroes is finally identified as a shoddier but more terrifying evil—boredom, the sense of the inner emptiness of life that is one of Byron's most powerfully compelling moods, and has haunted literature ever since, from the ennui of Baudelaire to the Angst and nausee of our own day. The episodes of the poem are all stock Byronic scenes: Spain, the pirates of the Levant, the odalisques of Turkish harems, battlefields, and finally English high society. But there is as little plot as characterization: the poem exists for the sake of its author's comment. As Byron says: This narrative is not meant for narration, But a mere airy and fantastic basis, To build up common things with common places, [canto 14, st. 7]

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Its wit is constantly if not continuously brilliant, and Byron's contempt of cant and prudery, his very real hatred of cruelty, his detached view of all social icons, whether conservative or popular, are well worth having. Not many poets give us as much common sense as Byron does. On the other hand the opposition to the poem made him increasingly selfconscious as he went on, and his technique of calculated bathos and his deliberate refusal to "grow too metaphysical" [canto 9, st. 41]—that is, pursue any idea beyond the stage of initial reaction—keep the poem too resolutely on one level. The larger imaginative vistas that we are promised ("a panoramic view of hell's in training" [canto i, st. 200]) do not materialize, and by the end of the sixteenth canto we have a sense of a rich but not inexhaustible vein rapidly thinning out. As Don Juan is not Don Juan's poem but Byron's poem, it could hardly have been ended, but only abandoned or cut short by its author's death. The Mozartian ending of the story Byron had already handled, in his own way, in Manfredd. The Vision of Judgment is Byron's most original poem, and therefore his most conventional one; it is his wittiest poem, and therefore his most serious one. Southey, Byron's favourite target among the Lake Poets, had become poet laureate, and his political views, like those of Coleridge and Wordsworth, had shifted from an early liberalism to a remarkably complacent Toryism. On the death of George III in 1820 he was ill-advised enough to compose, in his laureate capacity, a Vision of Judgment describing the apotheosis and entry into heaven of the stammering, stupid, obstinate, and finally lunatic and blind monarch whose sixty-year reign had lost America, alienated Ireland, plunged the country into the longest and bloodiest war in its history, and ended in a desolate scene of domestic misery and repression. George III was not personally responsible for all the evils of his reign, but in those days royalty was not the projection of middle-class virtue that it is now, and was consequently less popular and more open to attack. The apotheosis of a dead monarch, as a literary form, is of Classical origin, and so is its parody, Byron's poem being in the tradition of Seneca's brilliant mockery of the entry into heaven of the Emperor Claudius.20 Byron's religious views were certainly unusual in his day, but if we had to express them in a formula, it would be something like this: the best that we can imagine man doing is where our conception of God ought to start. Religions that foment cruelty and induce smugness, or ascribe cruelty and smugness to God, are superstitions. In Heaven and Earth, for example, the offstage deity who decrees the deluge at the end is

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clearly the moral inferior of every human creature he drowns. In The Vision of Judgmenttthe sycophantic Southey is contrasted with John Wilkes, who fought King George hard all his life, but who, when encouraged to go on persecuting him after death, merely says: I don't like ripping up old stories, since His conduct was but natural in a prince, [st. 70!

This is a decent human attitude, consequently it must be the least we can expect from heaven, and so the poet takes leave of the poor old king "practising the hundredth psalm" [st. 106]. Ill

Byron has probably had more influence outside England than any other English poet except Shakespeare. In English literature, though he is always classified with the Romantic poets, he is Romantic only because the Byronic hero is a Romantic figure: as we have seen, he has little technically in common with other English Romantics. But on the Continent Byron has been the arch-Romantic of modern literature, and European nineteenth-century culture is as unthinkable without Byron as its history would be without Napoleon. From the painting of Delacroix to the music of Berlioz, from the poetry of Pushkin to the philosophy of Nietzsche, the spell of Byron is everywhere. Modern fiction would be miserably impoverished without the Byronic hero: Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, have all used him in crucial roles. In the more advanced political atmosphere of England, Byron was only a Whig intellectual, whereas in Greece and Italy he was a revolutionary fighter for freedom, a poetic Mazzini or Bolivar, though, like them, not a class leveller. As he said: I wish men to be free As much from mobs as kings—from you as me. [canto 9, st. 35]

Among English readers the reputation of the Romantic and sentimental Byron has not kept pace with his reputation as a satirist, but it would be wrong to accept the assertion, so often made today, that Byron is of little importance apart from his satires and letters. An immense amount of imitation and use of Byron, conscious or unconscious, direct or indirect,

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has taken place in English literature, too, and nearly all of it is of the Romantic Byron. Melville (whose Ishmael is in the line of Cain), Conrad, Hemingway, A.E. Housman, Thomas Wolfe, D.H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden—these writers have little in common except that they all Byronize. The most important reason for Byron's great influence is that he was a portent of a new kind of sensibility. For many centuries poets had assumed a hierarchy of nature with a moral principle built into it. For Dante, for Shakespeare, for Milton, there was a top level of divine providence; a level of distinctively human nature which included education, reason, and law; a level of physical nature, which was morally neutral and which man could not, like the animals, adjust to; and a bottom level of sin and corruption. This hierarchy corresponded to the teachings of religion and science alike. But from Rousseau's time on a profound change in the cultural framework of the arts takes place. Man is now thought of as a product of the energy of physical nature, and as this nature is subhuman in morality and intelligence and capacity for pleasure, the origin of art is morally ambivalent, and may even be demonic. The Byronic hero, for whom, as for Manfred, pride, lack of sympathy with humanity, and a destructive influence even in love are inseparable from genius, dramatizes this new conception of art and life alike more vividly than anything else in the culture of the time. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that Byron released a mainspring of creative energy in modern culture. Byron's immediate influence in his own country, on the other hand, though certainly very great, was qualified in many ways, by queasiness about his morality, by a refusal to separate him from his posing heroes, by a feeling that he lacked the sterner virtues and wrote with too much pleasure and too few pains. The first canto of Don Juan centres on the nervous prudery of Donna Inez, who is, not surprisingly, modelled on Byron's wife. But Donna Inez was Britannia as well. The sands of the Regency aristocracy were running out, the tide of middle-class morality had already set in, and the age that we think of as Victorian, with its circulating libraries, its custom of reading aloud to large family circles, and its tendency not to be amused, at any rate by anything approaching the ribald, was on the way. As Byron admitted ruefully of the opening cantos: . . . the publisher declares, in sooth, Through needles' eyes it easier for the camel is To pass, than those two cantos into families, [canto 4, st. 97]

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A more important barrier was raised by the lack of any sense of moral involvement in Don Juan, already mentioned. With the British Empire developing, and a greater number of poets and intellectuals issuing stentorian calls to duty, such detachment seemed inadequate, except for the fact that Byron himself took matters out of Don Juan's hands and died for a cause in Greece. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle summed up the later view of Byron as a poet who had gone through a gloomy stage of denial and defiance, an "Everlasting No," had then moved into a "Centre of Indifference," but had never gone on to the final "Everlasting Yea." For this final stage, Carlyle recommended, "Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe."21 However, Carlyle himself hardly succeeded in closing his Byron, as when he went on to work out his conception of the Great Man what he actually produced was a vulgarization of the Byronic hero. The author of The Corsair would have raised a quizzical eyebrow at Carlyle's hero journeying forward "escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the Archdemons and Archangels."22 This tendency to underestimate Byron without surpassing him has recurred more than once. Bernard Shaw, in the preface to his Don Juan play, Man and Superman, dismissed Byron's Don Juan as a mere "vagabond libertine."23 Yet Byron had certainly anticipated Shaw's central idea, that woman takes the lead in sexual relations and that Don Juan is consequently as much a victim as a pursuer. No, Byron will not stay closed. It is a better idea to open Goethe, and when we do we find a more liberal view of Byron. Goethe in fact was fascinated by Byron, who dedicated Sardanapalus to him, and he referred to him in the second part of Faust as Euphorion, a kind of Eros-figure whose passion for liberty, if self-destructive, is also an acceptance of life simply because it is there, and has nothing of the compulsion to justify existence that is often close to a distrust of its worth. We have not yet shaken off our nineteenth-century inhibitions about Byron. A frequent twentieth-century jargon term for him is "immature," which endorses the Carlyle view that Byron is a poet to be outgrown. One thinks of Yeats's penetrating remark that we are never satisfied with the maturity of those whom we have admired in boyhood.24 Even those who have not admired Byron in boyhood have gone through a good deal of Byronism at that stage. There is certainly something youthful about the Byronic hero, and for some reason we feel more defensive about youth than about childhood, and more shamefaced about liking a poet who has captured a youthful imagination. If we replace "youthful" with

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the loaded term "adolescent" we can see how deeply ingrained this feeling is. Among intellectuals the Southey type, who makes a few liberal gestures in youth to quiet his conscience and then plunges into a rapturous authoritarianism for the rest of his life, is much more common than the Byron type, who continues to be baffled by unanswered questions and simple anomalies, to make irresponsible jokes, to set his face against society, to respect the authority of his own mood—in short, to retain the rebellious or irreverent qualities of youth. Perhaps it is as dangerous to eliminate the adolescent in us as it is to eliminate the child. In any case the kind of poetic experience that Byronism represents should be obtained young, and in Byron. It may later be absorbed into more complex experiences, but to miss or renounce it is to impoverish whatever else we may attain.

8 Foreword to Romanticism Reconsidered 1963

From Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), v-ix. Page references in the text are to this volume. Frye's piece introduces his own essay, "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism" (no. 9 below), and three other essays: ''English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age," by M.H. Abrams; "The Fate of Pleasure: Wordsworth to Dostoevsky," by Lionel Trilling; and "Romanticism Re-Examined," by Rene Wellek. This book consists of four papers read at the English Institute in September, 1962, under my chairmanship. The four contributions are entirely independent of one another, and whatever similarity there may be, such as the fact that the first three papers all quote the same passage from Wordsworth, is pure accident. Consequently the resemblances among them, and the unity which they present, are all the more significant. The anti-Romantic movement in criticism, which in Britain and America followed the Hulme-Eliot-Pound broadsides of the early 19205, is now over and done with/ and criticism has got its sense of literary tradition properly in focus again. That this movement should ever have had so much authority is an impressive negative tribute to the coherence of critical theory in our time. There are a few references to the movement in my own paper, which is intended to serve as a general introduction both to the topic and to the three papers that follow. But it was not the influence of this movement which was the main reason for holding a session on the subject of "Romanticism Reconsidered" at this date. The main reason was to examine the degree of real content which the term "Romanticism" has. It is a datum of literary experience that when we cross the divide of 1798 we find ourselves in a different kind of poetic

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world, darker in colour, so to speak, than what has preceded it. Our initial attempts to define the difference may be very vague: "more emotional," "more sense of nature," and the like. At this stage, as Mr. Wellek remarks, an "extreme nominalism" like that of Lovejoy,2 in demonstrating that there is no conceptual unity to the term "Romanticism" at all, seems unanswerable. But the feeling of difference remains, and critical theory has not done its job until it accounts for the feeling. Mr. Abrams's paper singles out one difference so concrete and well documented that it is unanswerable evidence for the other side. The Romantic movement found itself in a revolutionary age, of which the French Revolution was the central symbol. The impact of this event is testified to on all sides, and (as Mr. Abrams remarked in the discussion afterwards) it is always a sound critical method to assume that serious poets mean what they seriously say. The fact of revolution was linked in many poetic minds with the imminence of apocalypse—the association of ideas that Mr. Abrams quotes from Coleridge as: "The French Revolution. Millennium. Universal Redemption. Conclusion" [48].3 But the apocalyptic word did not remain revolutionary flesh for very long: anticlimax and disillusionment quickly followed. Mr. Abrams connects the frequent later Romantic theme of the plunging of hope into despair with this disillusionment, and shows that, as the only place in which hope springs eternal can be the human mind, the theme of revolution fulfilling itself in apocalypse had to be transferred from the social to the mental world. The only part of the mind to which such conceptions as revolution and apocalypse belong is the creative imagination; hence Wordsworth's real revolution was a literary one, a "levelling" revolution in diction, and in the location of archetypes in common rather than heroic life. Such a feat was not a neurotic subjective substitute for revolution, but the articulating of a new kind of imaginative power—and also, of course, the bringing into literature of that new movement which we know as Romanticism. The pattern of an outburst of enthusiasm followed by disillusionment is picked up again, and greatly extended, in Mr. Trilling's essay. Here the attitude of Wordsworth and Keats toward pleasure is seen as an element in the new consciousness of the central importance of the arts and of what they can yet do for man. The sense of the goodness of pleasure, even of a frankly luxurious kind, is part of the exuberance of individuality which is present in both poets. But the same thing happens to Romanticism that happens to Satan in Paradise Lost: the separation of consciousness from what supports it is exhilarating at first, and then restrictive. The individual becomes the ego, and the ego turns to a kind of

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perversion of puritanism, seeking the principle of its own being in a pure detachment which rebuffs everything that it might come to depend on or be indebted to, especially pleasure. The undying ego, whose rasping, querulous monologue enters literature with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, is a parody of what used to be called an immortal soul; and pleasure, so often thought of as a threat to that soul, turns out to be the most dangerous enemy of the ego, so that Wordsworth's conception of pleasure as "the naked and native dignity of man"4 is rejected but not refuted. Many features of Mr. Trilling's eloquent paper indicate that contemporary culture is post-Romantic, in other words still a part of what began with the Romantic movement. Both Mr. Abrams's paper and Mr. Trilling's deal with central and essential aspects of the Romantic movement. Still, they could conceivably have been written without using the term "Romanticism." The question still remains, Is this term a necessary or functional one for studies of what happened between the fall of the Bastille and our own day? The question cannot be answered until it has been properly asked. Poets work with images rather than concepts; hence an historical literary term, such as "Romanticism," really belongs to the history of imagery rather than to the history of ideas in the sense of concepts or theses. Mr. Wellek's exhaustive and erudite survey indicates that attempts to define the term "Romanticism" have been successful in proportion as they have moved away from the dead end of Lovejoy's conceptual approach, toward studying what the Romantics did with images and symbols, in their effort "to identify subject and object, to reconcile man and nature, consciousness and unconsciousness by poetry" [133]. It is a hazardous enterprise to introduce three papers that one has not read, and my attempt at doing so was perhaps more fortunate than it deserved to be. Their main theses are to some extent adumbrated in my introduction. That Romanticism is primarily a revolution in poetic imagery; that it is not only a revolution but inherently revolutionary, and enables poets to articulate a revolutionary age; that as the noumenal world of Fichte turns into the sinister world-as-will of Schopenhauer, Romanticism's drunken boat is tossed from ecstasy to ironic despair— these are the chief points I make, and they are the ones so fully documented and analysed later. At the very least, the editor can say with some confidence that there is enough which is both new and important in the present book to encourage the reader to reconsider Romanticism for himself.

9

The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism 1963 From StS, 200-17. Originally published in Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 1-12. For Frye's comments on this paper, see no. 8, above. Expanded into chapter lofA Study of English Romanticism.

Any such conception as "Romanticism" is at one or more removes from actual literary experience, in an inner world where ten thousand different things flash upon the inward eye with all the bliss of oversimplification. Some things about it, however, are generally accepted, and we may start with them. First, Romanticism has a historical centre of gravity, which falls somewhere around the 1790-1830 period. This gets us at once out of the fallacy of timeless characterization, where we say that Romanticism has certain qualities, not found in the age of Pope, of sympathy with nature or what not, only to have someone produce a poem of Propertius or Kalidasa, or, eventually, Pope himself, and demand to know if the same qualities are not there. Second, Romanticism is not a general historical term like "medieval": it appears to have another centre of gravity in the creative arts. We speak most naturally of Romantic literature, painting, and music. We do, it is true, speak of Romantic philosophy, but what seems to us most clearly Romantic in that are such things as the existential ethic of Fichte or the analogical constructs of Schelling, both of them, in different ways, examples of philosophy produced by an essentially literary mind, like the philosophies of Sartre or Maritain in our day. So at least they seemed to Kant, if one may judge from Kant's letter to Fichte suggesting that Fichte abandon philosophy, as a subject too difficult for him, and confine himself to lively popularizations.1

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Third, even in its application to the creative arts "Romanticism" is a selective term, more selective even than "Baroque" appears to be becoming. We think of it as including Keats, but not, on the whole, Crabbe; Scott, but not, in general, Jane Austen; Wordsworth, but not, on any account, James Mill. As generally used, "Romantic" is contrasted with two other terms, "Classical" and "realistic." Neither contrast seems satisfactory. We could hardly call Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads antirealistic, or ignore the fact that Shelley was a better Classical scholar than, say, Dryden, who, according to Samuel Johnson, translated the first book of the Iliad without knowing what was in the second. Still, the pairings exist, and we shall have to examine them. And yet, fourth, though selective, Romanticism is not a voluntary category. It does not see Byron as the successor to Pope, or Wordsworth as the successor to Milton, which would have been acceptable enough to both poets: it associates Byron and Wordsworth, to their mutual disgust, with each other. Accepting all this, we must also avoid the two traps in the phrase "history of ideas." First, an idea, as such, is independent of time and can be argued about; an historical event is not and cannot be. If Romanticism is in part an historical event, as it clearly is, then to say with I.E. Hulme, "I object even to the best of the Romantics"2 is much like saying, "I object to even the best battles of the Napoleonic War." Most general value judgments on Romanticism as a whole are rationalizations of an agreement or disagreement with some belief of which Romantic poetry is supposed to form the objective correlative. This latter is the second or Hegelian trap in the history of ideas, which we fall into when we assume that around 1790 or earlier some kind of thesis arose in history and embodied itself in the Romantic movement. Such an assumption leads us to examining all the cultural products we call Romantic as allegories of that thesis. Theses have a way of disagreeing with each other, and if we try to think of Romanticism as some kind of single "idea," all we can do with it is what Lovejoy did: break it down into a number of contradictory ideas with nothing significant in common.3 In literature, and more particularly poetry, ideas are subordinated to imagery, to a language more "simple, sensuous, and passionate" than the language of philosophy.4 Hence it may be possible for two poets to be related by common qualities of imagery even when they do not agree on a single thesis in religion, politics, or the theory of art itself. The history of imagery, unlike the history of ideas, appears to be for

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the most part a domain where, in the words of a fictional Canadian poetess, "the hand of man hath never trod."5 Yet we seem inexorably led to it by our own argument, and perhaps the defects in what follows may be in part excused by the novelty of the subject, to me at least. After making every allowance for a prodigious variety of technique and approach, it is still possible to see a consistent framework (I wish the English language had a better equivalent for the French word cadre) in the imagery of both medieval and Renaissance poetry. The most remarkable and obvious feature of this framework is the division of being into four levels. The highest level is heaven, the place of the presence of God. Next come the two levels of the order of nature, the human level and the physical level. The order of human nature, or man's proper home, is represented by the story of the Garden of Eden in the Bible and the myth of the Golden Age in Boethius and elsewhere. Man is no longer in it, but the end of all his religious, moral, and social cultivation is to raise him into something resembling it. Physical nature, the world of animals and plants, is the world man is now in, but unlike the animals and plants he is not adjusted to it. He is confronted from birth with a moral dialectic, and must either rise above it to his proper human home or sink below it into the fourth level of sin, death, and hell. This last level is not part of the order of nature, but its existence is what at present corrupts nature. A very similar framework can be found in Classical poetry, and the alliance of the two, in what is so often called Christian humanism, accounts for the sense of an antagonism between the Romantic movement and the Classical tradition, in spite of its many and remarkable affinities with that tradition. Such a framework of images, however closely related in practice to belief, is not in itself a belief or an expression of belief: it is in itself simply a way of arranging images and providing for metaphors. At the same time the word "framework" itself is a spatial metaphor, and any framework is likely to be projected in space, even confused or identified with its spatial projection. In Dante Eden is a long way up, on the top of a mountain of purgatory; heaven is much further up, and hell is down, at the centre of the earth. We may know that such conceptions as heaven and hell do not depend on spatial metaphors of up and down, but a cosmological poet, dealing with them as images, has to put them somewhere. To Dante it was simple enough to put them at the top and bottom of the natural order, because he knew of no alternative to the Ptolemaic picture of the world. To Milton, who did know of an alternative, the

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problem was more complex, and Milton's heaven and hell are outside the cosmos, in a kind of absolute up and down. After Milton comes Newton, and after Newton ups and downs become hopelessly confused. What I see first of all in Romanticism is the effect of a profound change, not primarily in belief, but in the spatial projection of reality. This in turn leads to a different localizing of the various levels of that reality. Such a change in the localizing of images is bound to be accompanied by, or even cause, changes in belief and attitude, and changes of this latter sort are exhibited by the Romantic poets. But the change itself is not in belief or attitude, and may be found in, or at least affecting, poets of a great variety of beliefs. In the earlier framework, the disorder of sin, death, and corruption was restricted to the sublunary world of four elements. Above the moon was all that was left of nature as God had originally planned it before the fall. The planets, with their angel-guided spheres, are images of a divinely sanctioned order of nature which is also the true home of man. Hence there was no poetic incongruity in Dante's locating his Paradise in the planetary spheres, nor in Milton's associating the music of the spheres with the song of the angels in the Nativity Ode, nor in using the same word "heaven" for both the kingdom of God and the sky. A postNewtonian poet has to think of gravitation and the solar system. Newton, Miss Nicolson has reminded us, demanded the muse,6 but the appropriate muse was Urania, and Urania had already been requested by Milton to descend to a safer position on earth for the second half of Paradise Lost. Let us turn to Blake's poem Europe, engraved in 1794. Europe surveys the history of the Western world from the birth of Christ to the beginning of the French Revolution, and in its opening lines parodies the Nativity Ode. For Blake all the deities associated with the planets and the starry skies, of whom the chief is Enitharmon, the Queen of Heaven, are projections of a human will to tyranny, rationalized as eternal necessity and order. Christianity, according to this poem, had not abolished but confirmed the natural religion in the Classical culture which had deified the star-gods. The doom of tyranny is sealed by the French Revolution, and the angel who blows the last trumpet as the sign of the final awakening of liberty is Isaac Newton. The frontispiece of Europe is the famous vision of the sky-god Urizen generally called the Ancient of Days, holding a compass in his left hand, and this picture is closely related to Blake's

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portrait of Newton, similarly preoccupied with a compass and oblivious of the heavens he is supposed to be studying. Blake's view, in short, is that the universe of modern astronomy, as revealed in Newton, exhibits only a blind, mechanical, subhuman order, not the personal presence of a deity. Newton himself tended to think of God still as "up there"; but what was up there, according to Blake, is only a set of interlocking geometrical diagrams, and God, Blake says, is not a mathematical diagram. Newtonism leads to what for Blake are intellectual errors, such as a sense of the superiority of abstractions to actual things and the notion that the real world is a measurable but invisible world of primary qualities. But Blake's main point is that admiring the mechanisms of the sky leads to establishing human life in mechanical patterns too. In other words, Blake's myth of Urizen is a fuller and more sophisticated version of the myth of Frankenstein. Blake's evil, sinister, or merely complacent sky-gods—Urizen, Nobodaddy, Enitharmon, Satan—remind us of similar beings in other Romantics: Shelley's Jupiter, Byron's Arimanes, the Lord in the Prologue to Faust. They in their turn beget later Romantic gods and goddesses, such as Baudelaire's female "froide majeste" [icy majestyl,7 Hardy's Immanent Will, or the God of Housman's The chestnut casts his flambeaux, who is a brute and blackguard because he is a sky-god in control of the weather, and sends his rain on the just and on the unjust. The association of sinister or unconscious mechanism with what we now call outer space is a commonplace of popular literature today which is a Romantic inheritance. Perhaps Orwell's 1984, a vision of a mechanical tyranny informed by the shadow of a Big Brother who can never die, is the terminal point of a development of imagery that began with Blake's Ancient of Days. Not every poet, naturally, associates mechanism with the movements of the stars as Blake does, or sees it as a human imitation of the wrong kind of divine creativity. But the contrast between the mechanical and the organic is deeply rooted in Romantic thinking, and the tendency is to associate the mechanical with ordinary consciousness, as we see in the account of the associative fancy in Coleridge's Biographia or of discursive thought in Shelley's Defence of Poetry. This is in striking contrast to the Cartesian tradition, where the mechanical is, of course, associated with the subconscious. The mechanical being characteristic of ordinary experience, it is found particularly in the world "outside"; the superior or organic world is consequently "inside," and although it is still called

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On Romanticism

superior or higher, the natural metaphorical direction of the inside world is downward, into the profounder depths of consciousness. If a Romantic poet, therefore, wishes to write of God, he has more difficulty in finding a place to put him than Dante or even Milton had, and on the whole he prefers to do without a place, or finds "within" metaphors more reassuring than "up there" metaphors. When Wordsworth speaks, in The Prelude and elsewhere, of feeling the presence of deity through a sense of interpenetration of the human mind and natural powers, one feels that his huge and mighty forms, like the spirits of Yeats,8 have come to bring him the right metaphors for his poetry. In the second book of The Excursion we have a remarkable vision of what has been called the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers, cast in the form of an ascent up a mountain, where the city is seen at the top.9 The symbolism, I think, is modelled on the vision of Cleopolis in the first book of The Faerie Queene, and its technique is admirably controlled and precise. Yet surely this is not the real Wordsworth. The spirits have brought him the wrong metaphors; metaphors that Spenser used with full imaginative conviction, but which affect only the surface of Wordsworth's mind. The second level of the older construct was the world of original human nature, now a lost paradise or golden age. It is conceived as a better and more appropriate home for man than his present environment, whether man can regain it or not. But in the older construct this world was ordinarily not thought of as human in origin or conception. Adam awoke in a garden not of his planting, in a fresh-air suburb of the City of God, and when the descendants of Cain began to build cities on earth, they were building to models already existing in both heaven and hell. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the agencies which helped to raise man from the physical to the human world were such things as the sacraments of religion, the moral law, and the habit of virtue, none of them strictly human inventions. These were the safe and unquestioned agencies, the genuinely educational media. Whether the human arts of poetry and painting and music were genuinely educational in this sense could be and was disputed or denied; and the poets themselves, when they wrote apologies for poetry, seldom claimed equality with religion or law, beyond pointing out that the earliest major poets were prophets and lawgivers. For the modern mind there are two poles of mental activity. One may be described as sense, by which I mean the recognition of what is pre-

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sented by experience: the empirical, observant habit of mind in which, among other things, the inductive sciences begin. In this attitude reality is, first of all, "out there," whatever happens to it afterwards. The other pole is the purely formalizing or constructive aspect of the mind, where reality is something brought into being by the act of construction. It is obvious that in pre-Romantic poetry there is a strong affinity with the attitude that we have called sense. The poet, in all ages and cultures, prefers images to abstractions, the sensational to the conceptual. But the pre-Romantic structure of imagery belonged to a nature which was the work of God; the design in nature was, as Sir Thomas Browne calls it, the art of God;10 nature is thus an objective structure or system for the poet to follow. The appropriate metaphors of imitation are visual and physical ones, and the creative powers of the poet have models outside him. It is generally recognized that Rousseau represents, and to some extent made, a revolutionary change in the modern attitude. The primary reason for his impact was, I think, not in his political or educational views as such, but in his assumption that civilization was a purely human artefact, something that man had made, could unmake, could subject to his own criticism, and was at all times entirely responsible for.11 Above all, it was something for which the only known model was in the human mind. This kind of assumption is so penetrating that it affects those who detest Rousseau, or have never heard of him, equally with the small minority of his admirers. Also, it gets into the mind at once, whereas the fading out of such counter-assumptions as the literal and historical nature of the Garden of Eden story is very gradual. The effect of such an assumption is twofold. First, it puts the arts in the centre of civilization. The basis of civilization is now the creative power of man: its model is the human vision revealed in the arts. Second, this model, as well as the sources of creative power, are now located in the mind's internal heaven, the external world being seen as a mirror reflecting and making visible what is within. Thus the "outside" world, most of which is "up there," yields importance and priority to the inner world, in fact derives its poetic significance at least from it. "In looking at objects of Nature," says Coleridge in the Notebooks, "I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new."12 This principle extends both to the immediate surrounding world which is the emblem of the music of humanity in Wordsworth and to the starry heavens on which Keats read "Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance."13

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Hence in Romantic poetry the emphasis is not on what we have called sense, but on the constructive power of the mind, where reality is brought into being by experience. There is a contrast in popular speech between the romantic and the realist, where the word "romantic" implies a sentimentalized or rose-coloured view of reality. This vulgar sense of the word may throw some light on the intensity with which the Romantic poets sought to defy external reality by creating a uniformity of tone and mood. The establishing of this uniformity, and the careful excluding of anything that would dispel it, is one of the constant and typical features of the best Romantic poetry, though we may call it a dissociation of sensibility if we happen not to like it.14 Such a poetic technique is, psychologically, akin to magic, which also aims at bringing spiritual forces into reality through concentration on a certain type of experience. Such words as "charm" or "spell" suggest uniformity of mood as well as a magician's repertoire. Historically and generically, it is akin to romance, with its effort to maintain a self-consistent idealized world without the intrusions of realism or irony. For these reasons Romanticism is difficult to adapt to the novel, which demands an empirical and observant attitude; its contribution to prose fiction is rather, appropriately enough, a form of romance. In the romance the characters tend to become psychological projections, and the setting a period in a past just remote enough to be recreated rather than empirically studied. We think of Scott as within the Romantic movement; Jane Austen as related to it chiefly by her parodies of the kind of sensibility that tries to live in a self-created world instead of adapting to the one that is there. Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, Catherine in Northanger Abbey, and, of course, everybody in Love and Freindship, are examples. Crabbe's naturalistic manifesto in the opening of The Village expresses an attitude which in itself is not far from Wordsworth's. But Crabbe is a metrical novelist in a way that Wordsworth is not. The soldier in The Prelude and the leech-gatherer in Resolution and Independence are purely romantic characters in the sense just given of psychological projections: that is, they become temporary or epiphanic myths. We should also notice that the internalizing of reality in Romanticism proper develops a contrast between it and a contemporary realism which descends from the pre-Romantic tradition, but acquires a more purely empirical attitude to the external world. The third level of the older construct was the physical world, theologically fallen, which man is born into, but which is not the real world of

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human nature. Man's primary attitude to external physical nature is thus one of detachment. The kind of temptation represented by Spenser's Bower of Bliss or Milton's Comus is based on the false suggestion that physical nature, with its relatively innocent moral freedom, can be the model for human nature. The resemblances between the poetic techniques used in the Bower of Bliss episode and some of the techniques of the Romantics are superficial: Spenser, unlike the Romantics, is consciously producing a rhetorical set piece, designed to show that the Bower of Bliss is not natural but artificial in the modern sense. Man for pre-Romantic poets is not a child of Nature in the sense that he was originally a primitive. Milton's Adam becomes a noble savage immediately after his fall; but that is not his original nature. In" Romanticism the cult of the primitive is a by-product of the internalizing of the creative impulse. The poet has always been supposed to be imitating nature, but if the model of his creative power is in his mind, the nature that he is to imitate is now inside him, even if it is also outside. The original form of human society also is hidden "within." Keats refers to this hidden society when he says in a letter to Reynolds, "Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbour . . . and Humanity . . . would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees!"15 Coleridge refers to it in the Biogmphia when he says, "The medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in common."16 Whether the Romantic poet is revolutionary or conservative depends on whether he regards this original society as concealed by or as manifested in existing society. If the former, he will think of true society as a primitive structure of nature and reason, and will admire the popular, simple, or even the barbaric more than the sophisticated. If the latter, he will find his true inner society manifested by a sacramental church or by the instinctive manners of an aristocracy. The search for a visible ideal society in history leads to a good deal of admiration for the Middle Ages, which on the Continent was sometimes regarded as the essential feature of Romanticism. The affinity between the more extreme Romantic conservatism and the subversive revolutionary movements of fascism and nazism in our day has been often pointed out. The present significance for us of this fact is that the notion of the inwardness of creative power is inherently revolutionary, just as the pre-Romantic construct was inherently conservative, even for poets as revolutionary as Milton. The self-identifying admiration which so many Romantics expressed for Napoleon has much to do with

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the association of natural force, creative power, and revolutionary outbreak. As Carlyle says, in an uncharacteristically cautious assessment of Napoleon, "What Napoleon did will in the long-run amount to what he did justly, what Nature with her laws will sanction."17 Further, the Romantic poet is a part of a total process, engaged with and united to a creative power greater than his own because it includes his own. This greater creative power has a relation to him which we may call, adapting a term of Blake's, his vehicular form. The sense of identity with a larger power of creative energy meets us everywhere in Romantic culture, I think even in the crowded excited canvases of Delacroix and the tremendous will-to-power finales of Beethoven. The symbolism of it in literature has been too thoroughly studied in Professor Abrams's The Mirror and The Lamp and in Professor Wasserman's The Subtler Language for me to add more than a footnote or two at this point. Sometimes the greater power of this vehicular form is a rushing wind, as in Shelley's Ode and in the figure of the "correspondent breeze"18 studied by Professor Abrams. The image of the Aeolian harp, or lyre—Romantic poets are apt to be sketchy in their orchestration—belongs here. Sometimes it is a boat driven by a breeze or current, or by more efficient magical forces in The Ancient Mariner. This image occurs so often in Shelley that it has helped to suggest my title; the introduction to Wordsworth's Peter Bell has a flying-boat closely associated with the moon. Those poems of Wordsworth in which we feel driven along by a propelling metrical energy—Peter Bell, The Idiot Boy, The Waggoner, and others—seem to me to be among Wordsworth's most central poems. Sometimes the vehicular form is a heightened state of consciousness in which we feel that we are greater than we know, or an intense feeling of communion, as in the sacramental corn-and-wine images of the great Keats odes. The sense of unity with a greater power is surely one of the reasons why so much of the best Romantic poetry is mythopoeic. The myth is typically the story of the god, whose form and character are human, but who is also a sun-god or tree-god or ocean-god. It identifies the human with the nonhuman world, an identification which is also one of the major functions of poetry itself. Coleridge makes it a part of the primary as well as the secondary imagination. "This I call I," he says in the Notebooks, "identifying the Percipient & the Perceived."19 The "Giant Forms" of Blake's Prophecies are states of being and feeling in which we have our own being and feeling; the huge and mighty forms of Wordsworth's Prelude have similar affinities;20 even the dreams of De

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Quincey seem vehicular in the same sense. It is curious that there seems to be so little mythopoeic theory in Romantic poets, considering that the more expendable critics of the time complained as much about the obscurity of myth as their counterparts of today do now. One striking feature of the Romantic poets is their resistance to fragmentation: their compulsion, almost, to express themselves in long continuous poems is quite as remarkable as their lyrical gifts. I have remarked elsewhere that the romance, in its most naive and primitive form, is an endless sequence of adventures, terminated only by the author's death or disgust [AC, 186]. In Romanticism something of this inherently endless romance form recurs. Childe Harold and Don Juan are Byron to such an extent that the poems about them can be finished only by Byron's death or boredom with the persona. The Prelude, and still more the gigantic scheme of which it formed part, has a similar relation to Wordsworth, and something parallel is beginning to show its head at once in Keats's Sleep and Poetry and Shelley's Queen Mob. We touch here on the problem of the Romantic unfinished poem, which has been studied by Professor Bostetter.21 My present interest, however, is rather in the feature of unlimited continuity, which seems to be connected with the sense of vehicular energy, of being carried along by a greater force, the quality which outside literature, according to Keats, makes a man's life a continual allegory.22 We have found, then, that the metaphorical structure of Romantic poetry tends to move inside and downward instead of outside and upward; hence the creative world is deep within, and so is heaven or the place of the presence of God. Blake's Ore and Shelley's Prometheus are Titans imprisoned underneath experience; the Gardens of Adonis are down in Endymion, whereas they are up in The Faerie Queene and Comus; in Prometheus Unbound everything that aids mankind comes from below, associated with volcanoes and fountains. In The Revolt of Islam there is a curious collision with an older habit of metaphor when Shelley speaks of A power, a thirst, a knowledge . . . below All thoughts, like light beyond the atmosphere, [canto 6, st. 30] The Kubla Khan geography of caves and underground streams haunts all Shelley's language about creative processes: in Speculations on Metaphysics, for instance, he says: "But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose

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rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards.... The caverns of the mind are obscure, and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautifully bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals."23 In pre-Romantic poetry heaven is the order of grace, and grace is normally thought of as descending from above into the soul. In the Romantic construct there is a centre where inward and outward manifestations of a common motion and spirit are unified, where the ego is identified as itself because it is also identified with something which is not itself. In Blake this world at the deep centre is Jerusalem, the City of God that mankind, or Albion, has sought all through history without success because he has been looking in the wrong direction, outside.24 Jerusalem is also the Garden of Eden where the Holy Word walked among the ancient trees; Eden in the unfallen world would be the same place as England's green and pleasant land where Christ also walked; and England's green and pleasant land is also Atlantis, the sunken island kingdom which we can rediscover by draining the "Sea of Time and Space"25 off the top of the mind. In Prometheus Unbound Atlantis reappears when Prometheus is liberated, and the one great flash of vision which is all that is left to us of Wordsworth's Recluse uses the same imagery: Paradise, and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was ? . . . —I, long before the blissful hour arrives, Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse Of this great consummation. [11. 800-4, 809-11]

The Atlantis theme is in many other Romantic myths: in the Glaucus episode of Endymion and in De Quincey's Savannah-la-Mar, which speaks of "human life still subsisting in submarine asylums sacred from the storms that torment our upper air."26 The theme of land reclaimed from the ocean plays also a somewhat curious role in Goethe's Faust. We find the same imagery in later writers who continue the Romantic tradition, such as D.H. Lawrence in the Song of a Man Who Has Come Through:

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If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.27

In The Pilgrim's Progress, Ignorance is sent to hell from the very gates of heaven. The inference seems to be that only Ignorance knows the precise location of both kingdoms. For knowledge, and still more for imagination, the journey within to the happy island garden or the city of light is a perilous quest, equally likely to terminate in the blasted ruin of Byron's Darkness. In many Romantic poems, including Keats's nightingale ode, it is suggested that the final identification of and with reality may be or at least include death. The suggestion that death may lead to the highest knowledge, dropped by Lucifer in Byron's Cain, haunts Shelley continually. A famous passage in Prometheus Unbound associates the worlds of creation and death in some inner area, where Zoroaster meets his image in a garden [11. 191-202]. Just as the sun is the means but not a tolerable object of sight, so the attempt to turn around and see the source of one's vision may be destructive, as the Lady of Shalott found when she turned away from trie mirror. Thus the world of the deep interior in Romantic poetry is morally ambivalent, retaining some of the demonic qualities that the corresponding pre-Romantic lowest level had. This sense that the source of genius is beyond good and evil, that the possession of genius may be a curse, that the only real knowledge given to Adam in Paradise, however disastrous, came to him from the devil— all this is part of the contribution of Byron to modern sensibility, and part of the irrevocable change that he made in it. Of his Lara Byron says: He stood a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurl'd; A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped By choice the perils he by chance escaped; But 'scaped in vain, for in their memory yet His mind would half exult and half regret... But haughty still and loth himself to blame, He call'd on Nature's self to share the shame, And charged all faults upon the fleshly form She gave to clog the soul, and feast the worm;

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On Romanticism Till he at last confounded good and ill, And half mistook for fate the acts of will, [canto i, st. i8]28

It would be wrong to regard this as Byronic hokum, for the wording is very precise. Lara looks demonic to a nervous and conforming society, as the dragon does to the tame villatic fowl in Milton. But there is a genuinely demonic quality in him which arises from his being nearer than other men to the unity of subjective and objective worlds. To be in such a place might make a poet more creative; it makes other types of superior beings, including Lara, more destructive. We said earlier that a Romantic poet's political views would depend partly on whether he saw his inner society as concealed by or as manifested in actual society. A Romantic poet's moral attitude depends on a similar ambivalence in the conception of nature. Nature to Wordsworth is a mother-goddess who teaches the soul serenity and joy, and never betrays the heart that loves her; to the Marquis de Sade nature is the source of all the perverse pleasures that an earlier age had classified as "unnatural." For Wordsworth the reality of Nature is manifested by its reflection of moral values; for de Sade the reality is concealed by that reflection. It is this ambivalent sense (for it is ambivalent, and not simply ambiguous) of appearance as at the same time revealing and concealing reality, as clothes simultaneously reveal and conceal the naked body, that makes Sartor Resartus so central a document of the Romantic movement. We spoke of Wordsworth's Nature as a mother goddess, and her psychological descent from mother-figures is clearly traced in The Prelude. The corn-goddess in Keats's To Autumn, the parallel figure identified with Ruth in the Ode to a Nightingale, the still unravished bride of the Grecian urn, Psyche, even the veiled Melancholy, are all emblems of a revealed Nature. Elusive nymphs or teasing and mocking female figures who refuse to take definite form, like the figure in Alastor or Blake's "female will" types; terrible and sinister white goddesses like La Belle Dame Sans Merci, or females associated with something forbidden or demonic, like the sister-lovers of Byron and Shelley, belong to the concealed aspect. For Wordsworth, who still has a good deal of the pre-Romantic sense of nature as an objective order, nature is a landscape nature, and from it, as in Baudelaire's Correspondances, mysterious oracles seep into the mind through eye or ear, even a bird with so predictable a song as the cuckoo being an oracular wandering voice. This landscape is a veil dropped over

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the naked nature red in tooth and claw29 which haunted a later generation. Even the episode of the dog and the hedgehog in the Prelude is told from the point of view of the dog. But the more pessimistic, and perhaps more realistic, conception of nature in which it can be a source of evil or suffering as well as good is the one that gains ascendancy in the later period of Romanticism, which extends to our own day. The major constructs which our own culture has inherited from its Romantic ancestry are also of the "drunken boat" shape, but represent a later and a different conception of it from the "vehicular form" described above. Here the boat is usually in the position of Noah's ark, a fragile container of sensitive and imaginative values threatened by a chaotic and unconscious power below it. In Schopenhauer, the world as idea rides precariously on top of a "world as will" which engulfs practically the whole of existence in its moral indifference. In Darwin, who readily combines with Schopenhauer, as the later work of Hardy illustrates, consciousness and morality are accidental sports from a ruthlessly competitive evolutionary force. In Freud, who has noted the resemblance of his mythical structure to Schopenhauer's, the conscious ego struggles to keep afloat on a sea of libidinous impulse. In Kierkegaard, all the "higher" impulses of fallen man pitch and roll on the surface of a huge and shapeless "dread." In some versions of this construct the antithesis of the symbol of consciousness and the destructive element in which it is immersed can be overcome or transcended: there is an Atlantis under the sea which becomes an Ararat for the beleaguered boat to rest on.30 I give an example from Auden, partly to show that the Romantic structures of symbolism are still ours. In Freud, when the conscious mind feels threatened by the subconscious, it tries to repress it, and so develops a neurosis. In Marxism, the liberal elements in an ascendant class, when they feel threatened by a revolutionary situation, develop a police state. In both cases the effort is to intensify the antithesis between the two, but this effort is mistaken, and when the barriers are broken down we reach the balanced mind and the classless society respectively. For the Time Being develops a religious construct out of Kierkegaard on the analogy of those of Marx and Freud. The liberal or rational elements represented by Herod feel threatened by the revival of superstition in the Incarnation, and try to repress it. Their failure means that the effort to come to terms with a nature outside the mind, the primary effort of reason, has to be abandoned, and this enables the paradise or divine presence which is locked up inside the human mind to manifest itself

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after the reason has searched the whole of objective nature in vain to find it. The attitude is that of a relatively orthodox Christianity; the imagery and the structure of symbolism is that of Prometheus Unbound and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Romanticism proper a prominent place in sense experience is given to the ear, an excellent receiver of oracles but poor in locating things accurately in space. This latter power, which is primarily visual, is associated with the fancy in Wordsworth's 1815 preface, and given the subordinate position appropriate to fancy. In later poetry, beginning with symbolisme in France, when there is a good deal of reaction against earlier Romanticism, more emphasis is thrown on vision. In Rimbaud, though his Bateau ivre has given me my title, the poet is to se faire voyant,^ the illuminations are thought of pictorially; even the vowels must be visually coloured. Such an emphasis has nothing to do with the pre-Romantic sense of an objective structure in nature: on the contrary, the purpose of it is to intensify the Romantic sense of oracular significance into a kind of autohypnosis. The association of autohypnosis and the visual sense is discussed in Marshall McLuhan's book, The Gutenberg Galaxy?2 Such an emphasis leads to a technique of fragmentation. Foe's attack on the long poem is not a Romantic but an anti-Romantic manifesto, as the direction of its influence indicates. The tradition of symbolisme is present in imagism, where the primacy of visual values is so strongly stated in theory and so cheerfully ignored in practice, in Pound's emphasis on the spatial juxtaposing of metaphor, in Eliot's insistence on the superiority of poets who present the "clear visual images" of Dante.33 T.E. Hulme's attack on the Romantic tradition is consistent in preferring fancy to imagination and in stressing the objectivity of the nature to be imitated; less so in his primitivism and his use of Bergson.34 The technique of fragmentation is perhaps intended to reach its limit in Pound's publication of the complete poetical works of Hulme on a single page.35 As I have tried to indicate by my reference to Auden, what this antiRomantic movement did not do was to create a third framework of imagery. Nor did it return to the older construct, though Eliot, by sticking closely to Dante and by deprecating the importance of the prophetic element in art, gives some illusion of doing so. The charge of subjectivity, brought against the Romantics by Arnold36 and often repeated later, assumes that objectivity is a higher attribute of poetry, but this is itself a Romantic conception, and came into English criticism with Coleridge. Anti-Romanticism, in short, had no resources for becoming anything

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more than a post-Romantic movement. The first phase of the reconsideration of Romanticism is to understand its continuity with modern literature. All we need do to complete it is to examine Romanticism by its own standards and canons. We should not look for precision where vagueness is wanted; not extol the virtues of constipation when the Romantics were exuberant; not insist on visual values when the poet listens darkling to a nightingale. Then, perhaps, we may see in Romanticism also the quality that Melville found in Greek architecture: Not innovating wilfulness, But reverence for the Archetype.34

10

A Study of English Romanticism 1968

From A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968). The second printing in 1968 contained one correction requested by Frye: the change of "same mind" to "sane mind" at p. 204 (see NFF, 1988, box 61, file 6). This change was not, however, adopted when the book was reprinted in paperback in slightly larger format (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983). The text in all these editions was followed by a brief bibliography of Romanticism, not reproduced here, prepared by Jay Macpherson as Frye's research assistant. A typescript with printer's annotations in is NFF, 1988, box 22, file 6.

Preface This book is an attempt to introduce the reader to the conception of "Romanticism," more particularly as found in English literature. The first chapter grows out of an earlier essay, to be found in Romanticism Reconsidered (1963), which treated the Romantic movement as primarily a change in the language of poetic mythology, brought about by various historical and cultural forces. This thesis is then illustrated by critical discussions of three major works of Romantic English literature: Beddoes's Death's Jest-Book, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Keats's Endymion. Any reader who finds the approach to these poets somewhat peripheral is asked to remember that this is not a book on Beddoes or Keats or Shelley, but a book on Romanticism as illustrated by some of their works. There is a good deal of excellent and central criticism available on the major Romantic poets, and the present book makes no effort to compete with it, much less replace any of it.

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The essays on the three poems have grown out of a series of public lectures delivered to the Graduate School of Western Reserve University in May 1966. I am much indebted to my hosts there for stimulating discussions and criticisms. I am also indebted to the Canada Council for a grant which enabled me to work on this and other projects.

N.F. Toronto, 1967 The Romantic Myth The word "Romanticism" is a cultural term, and partly a historical one as well. Historically, it refers to the literature, and in lesser degree the painting, music, and some of the philosophy, produced in the period ca. 1780-1830, the period of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the nationalistic movements in Greece, Italy, and Germany that followed. It is not however purely a historical term like "medieval," for within the Romantic period we feel that some artists are Romantics and that others are not, or are much less so. The further we move from the arts, the less sure we are of the importance of the term. If we were studying the history of science, the notion of a Romantic movement would hardly occur to us, even though we can see some parallel developments in the science of the time when we compare it with other aspects of culture. The implication seems to be that, for the literary critic at least, the word "Romanticism" refers primarily to some kind of change in the structure of literature itself, rather than to a change in beliefs, ideas, or political movements reflected in literature. We begin by studying Romanticism on the level of vogue or fashion, which can be characterized only vaguely: literature becomes less rational and more emotional, less urbanized and with more feeling for nature, less witty and more oracular, and so on. But as these formulations gradually cease to satisfy us, we are driven to more and more central reconsiderations about the nature of literature to account for what is, after all, a genuine fact of literary experience: the feeling that a new kind of sensibility comes into all Western literatures around the later part of the eighteenth century. The informing structures of literature are myths, that is, fictions and metaphors that identify aspects of human personality with the natural environment, such as stories about sun-gods or tree-gods. The meta-

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phorical nature of the god who is both a person and a class of natural objects makes myth, rather than folk tale or legend, the direct ancestor of literature. It also gives to myth, in primitive cultures, a particular importance in establishing a society's views of its own origin, including the reasons for its divisions into different classes or groups, its legal sanctions, and its prescribed rituals. The canonical significance which distinguishes the myth from less important fictions also causes myths to form large unified structures, or mythologies, which tend to become encyclopedic in extent, covering all aspects of a society's vision of its situation and destiny. As civilization develops, mythology divides into two main aspects. Its patterns of stories and images, attracting and absorbing those of legend and folk tale, become the fictions and metaphors of literature. At the same time, there are also germs of conceptual ideas in myths which extend into theology, philosophy, political theory, and, in earlier ages, science, and become informing principles there as well. There are thus two structures in a culture which descend from mythology: one is literature, which inherits the fictional and metaphorical patterns of mythology, and the other is a body of integrating or cohering ideas, also mainly fictional, in religion, philosophy, and kindred disciplines. At any given period of literature the conventions of literature are enclosed within a total mythological structure, which may not be explicitly known to anyone, but is nevertheless present as a shaping principle. In every age, the most ambitious literary structures, such as the works of Dante, Milton, Victor Hugo, or Joyce, tend to become cosmological, and hence nearest to suggesting what the total structure is like. Such cosmological works have conceptual forms analogous to and roughly contemporary with them: thus Dante's Commedia has a conceptual analogy in the summa form of St. Thomas. In Western Europe an encyclopedic myth, derived mainly from the Bible, dominated both the literary and the philosophical traditions for centuries. I see Romanticism as the beginning of the first major change in this pattern of mythology, and as fully comprehensible only when seen as such. The starting point of most mythologies is a creation myth, the story of how things came to be. This myth has normally two parts, a cosmological myth of the origin of the world, and a proto-historical myth of the origin of man. It is probable that the earliest creation myths were sexual and cyclical in shape, assuming that man and the world simply came into existence in the same way that babies are born and seeds grow in spring. The etymology of the Latin natura and the Greek physis connects them

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with ideas of growing and being born. Such myths tend to become mother-centred myths, where nature is an earth-goddess renewing her vitality (in more sophisticated versions her virginity) every spring. If the role of the male in conception is understood, the earth-goddess may be thought of as impregnated by sun or wind or rain, or she may be attended by a subordinate male figure who is successively her son, her lover, and eventually her sacrificial victim. The mother-goddess seems to be morally a most ambiguous figure, who, depending on her phase, may be anything from the blushing bride of the Song of Songs to the ferocious Cybele of Catullus's Attis Ode. We can only guess about these ancient myths from their vestiges in historical times. The mother-centred myth has always been attractive to poets, and the creation stories of Ovid and Lucretius owe a great deal to it. But the more aggressive myths of Judaism, Christianity, and Plato's Timaeus reflect an urban, tool-using, male-dominated society, where the central figure usually develops out of a father-god associated with the sky. Poets, said Horace, are born and not made: Bernard Shaw remarks that that is a rather silly thing to say, in view of the fact that everybody is born and not made.1 But not according to the most influential of the mythological structures which have controlled our thinking from the dawn of history to the middle of the eighteenth century. This mythology said that the world was made, as an artefact or creature, by a divine artisan or demiurge; and that whatever may be true of men and women now, the first man and the first woman were also made, as watches and tables and pictures are made. The alternation of chicken and egg has to stop somewhere, and Christianity, along with most other religions and philosophies, stopped it firmly with the chicken. In the centuries preceding Romanticism, especially during the Middle Ages, the mythology that begins with this artificial creation myth reached its highest point of development. According to it, man and nature were both creatures of God: there are no gods in nature, and what man should look at nature for is the evidence for the intelligent design in its creation that it presents. This attitude naturally gave central prominence to the subject-object relationship, and stressed the rational in contrast to the empirical attitude to nature. The subject-object relation is most marked, and the sense of design clearest, in the study of the stars. The movements of the stars were, so to speak, the diagram of the universe as a created order, and astronomy was the one science that a learned medieval poet, such as Dante or Chaucer, would naturally be assumed to know. Dante's

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Paradiso is symbolized by the heavenly bodies, and the starry spheres, with their unheard harmonies, form the central image of nature as God had originally designed it, before the lower part of it "fell" with man into an unsymmetrical chaos. God's work in nature was most clearly revealed in what Sir Thomas Browne calls "the mysticall Mathematicks of the City of Heaven,"2 and except in the most refined and sophisticated aspects of philosophy, his connection with the sky was considerably more than a poetic metaphor. Occasionally one glimpses what may be traces of an older matriarchal mythology, partly outlawed and partly absorbed into its successor. Christianity replaced the earth-goddess and her dying god with a Queen of Heaven receiving her crown from the son whom she had nursed and whose death she had lamented. Nietzsche's formula "Dionysus versus Christ" is present in institutional Christianity too, in reverse. The enemies of Christ and his mother are the devil and his dam: the devil has the horns and hoofs of a woodland god, and his dam is incarnate in the witch who worships him. The theory that a cult of a "horned god"3 identified with the devil actually existed in the Middle Ages is difficult to swallow, but that the symbolic outlines of a "Satanic" perversion of Christianity could be extracted from suspected witches by torture, in an insane parody of psychoanalysis, is obvious enough. In the miracle plays about the flood, Noah's wife is often recalcitrant and unwilling to enter the ark, perhaps recalling an earlier version of the story in which the ark, the container of all life, was her body and not his artefact. But in general there was little opposition to the principle that there were no gods, or goddesses either, in nature, and that if man looked to find deities there they would turn into devils. Man should see nature, the myth said, with his reason as the work of God. If he attempted to approach it differently, in search of mysterious power or the sense of the numinous, he found powerful forces pulling him in the opposite direction, toward his own reason and his own society. He found that he was a moral being capable of sin, and could not imitate the innocence of animals. Christianity explained this by saying that his nature was originally designed by God to be something essentially different from animal nature, and that his present natural context was a "fallen" one. Identification with the forces and powers of nature is a tendency that Christianity regarded as pagan, the effective pagan gods, from this point of view, being Eros and Dionysus, sexuality and emotional abandon. To regain his true identity man had to keep the barrier of

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consciousness against nature, and think of himself first as a social being. The supreme symbol of the distinction between human nature and physical nature was the city, along with the constituent or supporting images of the city, such as the court, the cathedral, the highway, the castle. Heaven, the place of the divine presence, is a habitation, a city of God. However, if man could completely recover his lost identity as a child of God, through the social disciplines of law, morality, and religion, he would also find a renewed identity with nature, back in the garden in which God had originally put him, the garden being the symbol of nature made over in the image of conscious man. This wistful longing for a reintegration with nature is what is expressed in literature by the pastoral, the vision of a simplified rural shepherd's life where art and love-making have recovered some of their lost spontaneity and innocence. Outside the pastoral, and even often within it, images of plants and animals tended to be stylized and heraldic, serving for religious emblems, moral lessons, mythological allusions, and social metaphors. The poets knew, of course, much better than the theologians and philosophers, how powerful the "pagan" forces of nature were. The poets in fact reincorporated the pagan deities into their poetry and developed an elaborate mock-theology around the god Eros, in which a morally ambiguous goddess-figure, at once adorable and sinister, reappears. But this was understood to have its own subordinate place in the scheme of things, the controlling framework being one of stability and harmony. Man was subject to moral law, nature to natural law; the two forms of law had one source in the will of God, and the circling of the stars symbolized the perfection of obedience which would be man's perfect freedom. The universe of this myth was a projection of man's own body: the rational design was visible on top, just as the reason is on top of the human body, and the two were connected by the sense of distance, the eye. The erotic and Dionysian world was much lower down, always potentially subversive, always apt to get above itself and seek less rational forms of communion. Poetry attempts to unite nature with man by the primitive and simple forms of union, analogy and identity, simile and metaphor. In doing so it shows its affinity with and descent from the myth, the story about a god, who, we said, as sun-god or sea-god or what not, identifies a personality and an aspect of nature. The Christian myth told the story of how there was once an identity of God, man, and nature, how man fell from God and broke the harmony with nature, and how man is to be reintegrated.

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In its fully developed form this myth was, down to the seventeenth century, comprehensive enough to unite the theologian and the philosopher with the poet and the scientist. The poet, on the whole, accepted an attitude to the world which put faith and reason above the response to poetry, but the scientist was in a more difficult position. The attitude to nature as an objective system is congenial enough to the scientist, for whom nature is always the world out there, to be studied by the rational consciousness. At the same time, the scientist was working within a mythological construct which had been founded on identity and analogy, on correspondences and simple symmetries. His sciences, in short, were full of myths, in which astronomy and chemistry had not yet been completely separated from astrology and alchemy. To the scientist, myth is simply illusion: or perhaps one should say that science creates its own mythology. Sooner or later, as science developed, it was bound to break loose from the mythological construct. And in proportion as it took on its own form, it forced poets to look for another construct, and, in doing so, to realize that all myths are poetic in origin. For example: we said that for the sense of nature as created order the primary images were those of the heavenly bodies, all that is now left of nature as God had originally designed it. But from the point of view of science, such imagery rested on illusion, the illusion of a geocentric universe, of planets revolving in symmetrical spheres, probably guided by angels, of mysterious correspondences of the seven planets with the seven metals and seven aspects of human temperament. When the new science of Copernicus and Galileo began to make its impact, this illusion became more and more of a historical relic. Newton spiced his scientific and mathematical findings with philosophical and religious speculations which aroused great enthusiasm at the time. But the enthusiasm was temporary and the poetry it inspired mediocre.4 The old feeling of heaven, in the sense of the sky, as an image of heaven in the sense of the place of the presence of God, was undeniably going, and could never return in quite the same form. The more man learned about the heavenly bodies, the less emotionally convinced he could be that they were different in kind from the sublunary nature he was more familiar with. They were not made out of quintessence, but out of the same elements as the lower world; they did not move in perfect circles or symbolize an immortal purity from corruption. The sky seemed just as indifferent to human concerns, just as permeated with mindless law, as the least conscious

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part of the earth. An apocalyptic vision of a day when the sun would be turned into darkness and the moon into blood had to give place to a science which turned the sun into a blast furnace and the moon into a stone. The crystal spheres of Milton's Nativity Ode, making up full consort with the angelic symphony, eventually become Thomas Hardy's Monsters of magnitude without a shape, Hanging amid deep wells of nothingness.5

Much more is involved here than merely the loss of a traditional poetic metaphor. Poets are dependent on images, and the image of the order and harmony of the "up there" was the guarantee of the order and harmony of the "out there," the sense of nature as a structure or system, a vertical chain of being, looked at by the rational and conscious subject. Once the heavenly bodies come to be seen as a dead and mechanical part of creation, the highest aspect of nature that man can perceive becomes the living part of it, the world of organisms, of animals and plants, and of man so far as man is an organic and vital being. One's relationship to the rest of life then becomes a participating relationship, an identity of process rather than a separation of subjective and objective creatures or products. When we start reading Wordsworth and Coleridge we are struck with the way in which the old subject-object relationship has been demoted. The reason founded on a separation of consciousness from nature is becoming an inferior faculty of the consciousness, more analytic and less constructive, the outside of the mind dealing with the outside of nature; determined by its field of operation, not free; descriptive, not creative. The artist, the Aristotelian tradition had said, imitates nature: this means, according to Coleridge, not that he studies the natura naturata, the world out there, like the scientist, but that he "imitates" the natura naturans or living process of nature by seeking a union of himself, as a living and creating being, with nature as process or genesis.6 Here physical nature becomes symbolically related to human nature; as Beddoes says: Thus it is with man; He looks on nature as his supplement, And still will find out likenesses and tokens Of consanguinity, in the world's graces, To his own being, [^.j.^-vj]7

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Of all the great English Romantic poets, William Blake was the one who grasped the implications of this change in mythology most completely. For Blake, the God who created the natural order is a projected God, an idol constructed out of the sky and reflecting its mindless mechanism. Such a God is a figment of man's alienation, for the tyranny of an absurd and meaningless nature suggests and guarantees the tyranny of exploiting ruling classes. Thus the projected sky-god is really Satan, the accuser of man and the prince of the power of the air. The true God is Jesus, who is identified with struggling and suffering humanity. In Europe (1794) Blake shows how the tyranny of the Roman Empire, backed by the mysterious hierarchy of star-gods, was threatened by the Incarnation, how eighteen centuries of institutional Christianity had managed to contain the threat, and how, after Newton had blown the last trumpet for its mythology, revolution had begun again in "the vineyards of red France."8 Similarly Shelley argues for the "necessity of atheism,"9 and urges in his notes to Queen Mob that "All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars."10 Whatever one thinks of this argument, Shelley is right in maintaining that the miserable tale is not an integral part of the modern science of astronomy, as it is, for example, of the astronomical speculations of Dante's Convivio. At the same time "the hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe"11 remains unaltered for Shelley. That is, God, if he exists at all, can exist only as existence, as an aspect of our own identity, and not as a hypothesis attached to the natural order. In Prometheus Unbound Jupiter is a projected sky-god of the same type as the sky-gods in Blake, Urizen, Nobodaddy, and Satan. In Byron's Vision of Judgment and the Prologue to Goethe's Faust the traditional conception of God as a miraculous juggler of planets is only a subject for parody. We are now in a position to see that one central element of this new mythological construction is a recovery of projection. In the older myth, God was ultimately the only active agent. God had not only created the world and man: he had also created the forms of human civilization. The traditional images of civilization are the city and the garden: the models of both were established by God before Adam was created. Law, moral principles, and, of course, the myth itself were not invented by man, but were part of God's revelation to him. Gradually at first, in such relatively isolated thinkers as Vico, then more confidently, the conviction grows

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that a great deal of all this creative activity ascribed to God is projected from man, that man has created the forms of his civilization, including his laws and his myths, and that consequently they exhibit human imperfections and are subject to human criticism. For Hooker in Elizabethan times, law had its origin in the divine mind: the perfection of natural law was a part of it, and obedience to laws of church and state followed deductively from certain mythical premises like "natural right." In the Romantic period an iconoclastic development of legal reform took place (although very little of it was carried out by people that we think of as Romantics), and the assumption of this reform was that such mythical premises were mostly rationalizations of class privilege. Again, liberty, for Shelley, is what man wants and what the gods he invents out of cowardice and superstition oppose his getting. But in the pre-Romantic period,12 even for the revolutionary Milton, liberty is what God wants for man, and not anything that man naturally wants for himself. Romanticism, thus considered, is the first major phase in an imaginative revolution which has carried on until our own day, and has by no means completed itself yet. (It may look from my account as though it would be complete when everything formerly ascribed to God has been transferred to man or nature, but that would in my opinion be far too simple a solution.) This means that everything that has followed Romanticism, including the anti-Romantic movements in France and England of fifty to sixty years ago, is best understood as post-Romantic. Many aspects of Romanticism become much more clearly understood if we look forward to what later writers did with them. In particular, I find that the major works of loyce, Eliot, Proust, Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence provide essential clues to the nature of literary trends and themes that began with the Romantics. Then again, many Romantic writers, both philosophical and literary, were deeply interested in contemporary science, and made heroic efforts to unify the humanistic and scientific perspectives, usually on some basis of a philosophy of organism. In English literature, the social sciences13 had as much if not more prestige than the physical sciences, De Quincey's enthusiasm for Ricardo being as typical in its way as Goethe's interest in colour perception and comparative anatomy.14 But with the hindsight of another century and a half, one century of which has been after Darwin, we can see that the scientific vision of nature was inexorably splitting away from the poetic and existential vision of Romantic mythology. Every generation since then has produced a cosmology attempting to unite the two again (Teilhard

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de Chardin is the leading example at present)/5 but cosmologies have a high rate of mortality, and in any case are usually founded, not directly on scientific principles, but on mythological analogies to scientific principles. The separating of science from what we may call the myth of concern, society's view of its situation and destiny, has another important consequence. Romanticism is a new mythology, but society uses its mythology in different ways. The Christian mythology of the Middle Ages and later was a closed mythology, that is, a structure of belief, imposed by compulsion on everyone. As a structure of belief, the primary means of understanding it was rational and conceptual, and no poet, outside the Bible, was accorded the kind of authority that was given to the theologian. Romanticism, besides being a new mythology, also marks the beginning of an "open" attitude to mythology on the part of society, making mythology a structure of imagination, out of which beliefs come, rather than directly one of compulsory belief. Beliefs for a long time continued much as they had been held, except that the Romantic expression of belief in, say, traditional Christianity often becomes vaguer and more purely rhetorical in statement. At the same time, the new mythology caused old things to be believed in a new way, and thus eventually transformed the spirit of their belief. It also made new types of belief possible, by creating a new mythical language that permitted their formulation. Of these, two are of particular importance for the present argument. One is the revived sense of the numinous power of nature, as symbolized in Eros, Dionysus, and Mother Nature herself. With the Romantic movement there comes a return to something very like a polytheistic imagination. The avenging spirit of the Ancient Mariner is a portent of much to follow: the forsaken Classical gods who haunt so many German Romantics, the spirits of Strindberg and Yeats, the angels of Rilke, the dark gods of Lawrence. All these illustrate the principle which Freud perhaps more than anyone else has made us aware of. When our attention is focused on ourselves and our existential relation to nature, as distinct from the attention of science which is turned toward natural law and the attention of theology which is turned toward an intelligent personal God, we become immediately conscious of a plurality of conflicting powers. The second type of new belief comes from the ability that Romantic mythology conferred of being able to express a revolutionary attitude toward society, religion, and personal life. We shall return to this in a moment.

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In the older mythology the myth of creation is followed by a gigantic cyclical myth, outlined in the Bible, which begins with the fall of man, is followed by a symbolic vision of human history, under the names of Adam and Israel, and ends with the redemption of Adam and Israel by Christ. The two poles are the alienation myth of fall, the separation of man from God by sin, and the reconciling, identifying, or atoning myth of redemption which restores to man his forfeited inheritance. Translated into Romantic terms, this myth assumes a quite different shape. What corresponds to the older myth of an unfallen state, or lost paradise of Eden, is now a sense of an original identity between the individual man and nature which has been lost. It may have been something lost in childhood, as in Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality, or it may be something hazier like a racial or collective memory, but it haunts the mind with the same sense of dispossession that the original Eden myth did. The context of what corresponds to the "fall," or the myth of alienation, changes accordingly. Man has "fallen," not so much into sin as into the original sin of self-consciousness, into his present subject-object relation to nature, where, because his consciousness is what separates him from nature, the primary conscious feeling is one of separation. The alienated man cut off from nature by his consciousness is the Romantic equivalent of post-Edenic Adam. He is forcefully presented in Coleridge's figure of the Ancient Mariner, compelled recurrently to tell a story whose moral is reintegration with nature. The Romantic redemption myth then becomes a recovery of the original identity. For the sense of an original unity with nature, which being born as a subjective consciousness has broken, the obvious symbol is the mother. The lost paradise becomes really an unborn world, a pre-existent ideal. As a result something of the ancient mother-centred symbolism comes back into poetry. Wordsworth leaves no doubt that he thinks of nature as Mother Nature, and that he associates her with other maternal images. In the myth of recovery we often have a bride whose descent from a mother-figure is indicated by the fact that, in Shelley, in Byron obliquely, and in Blake's Preludium to America, she is frequently a sister as well. Wordsworth and Coleridge, especially Wordsworth, had, to an extent that they hardly realized themselves, inherited a recent (i.e., eighteenthcentury) conception of a "natural society" which, for the first time in many centuries, had raised a central question about human identity. In the older myth, man was morally and intellectually separated from

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nature, hence his identity was primarily a social one, and the symbol of that social identity was, as said above, the city. In his evolution as a child of God, the city of God came first, then the garden of man. as its suburb. Milton thinks of man's original nature in Eden as simple and pastoral but nevertheless civilized; Adam, for Milton, does not become the archetypal noble savage until after his fall. Rousseau had suggested that perhaps the anomalies and injustices of civilization were so great as to make one doubt whether this city-garden order is the right one or not. Perhaps man should seek an identity with nature first, not nature in its humanized form of a garden or park but simply nature as physical environment. After that, the genuine form of human society may have a chance to emerge. The sense of antagonism to the city, as a kind of cancerous growth destroying the relation of man and nature, which later comes out so strongly in Baudelaire's fourmillante cite, Eliot's "unreal city," and Verhaeren's villes tentaculaires,16 is already emerging in the London scenes of Wordsworth's Prelude. By contrast, it is rude or uncultivated nature, nature "unspoiled" by man and not transformed into a narcissistic image of himself, that comes to be thought of as complementing human nature and completing its being. In Wordsworth also man first finds his identity in his relation to physical nature, in its rude or uncultivated form. In the older myth there were two levels of nature: an upper level of human nature, represented by the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age, which God had originally intended for man, and a lower level of physical nature, permeated by death, corruption, and, for man at least, sin, which man fell into. According to this construct, man is in the physical world but not of it, and only an elaborate social training, comprising education, law, morality, and religion, can help to raise him toward his proper level. In Wordsworth the existing social and educational structure is artificial, full of inert custom and hypocrisy. Nature is a better teacher than books, and one finds one's lost identity with nature in moments of feeling in which one is penetrated by the sense of nature's "huge and mighty forms."17 Thus already in Wordsworth it is the "pagan" or latent numinous powers in nature that man turns to. Wordsworth shook his head over the Hymn to Pan in the first book of Keats's Endymion and called it "a very pretty piece of paganism."18 But Wordsworth had done much, was probably the decisive influence, in making the Hymn to Pan possible, and Keats in his turn helped to create a new sensibility that ultimately led to the rebirth of Eros and Dionysus in Yeats and D.H. Lawrence.

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Similarly, the redemption myth in the older mythology emphasized the free act of God in offering man grace, grace being thought of as essentially the transformation of the human moral will. Such grace proceeded from a divine love or agape. Romantic redemption myths, especially the revolutionary ones like those of Shelley, throw the emphasis on an eros, or love rooted in the human sexual instinct. Such an eros develops a distinctively human idealism, and for such idealism the redeeming agent is also human-centred. The agape or love of God for man creates grace, but what man's love and idealism create is essentially a gnosis, an expanded knowledge or consciousness, and one that is more inclusive and profound than the conscious knowledge of the detached subject. This greater gnosis is identified with the imagination in Wordsworth's Prelude and in Coleridge: it is often, as in Coleridge, considered to be a superior kind of reason; it is explicitly identified with love (in the sense of eros, of course) in Shelley; in many French and German Romantics it acquires a quasi-occult or theosophical cast; in some, such as Novalis, it could be called a mystical consciousness. In the more conservative and nostalgic it is apt to become simply an overwhelming of the reason with mysteries that only faith, thought of as an intuitive or nonanalytic mode of consciousness, can reach. In any case it is the power both of creation and of response to creation, just as the reason is equally the power which can construct or follow a rational argument. This transposition of the traditional myth makes for a considerable change in the poet's view of his social function. Earlier poets and critics had been well aware of the "creative" nature of the arts and of the poet's role in articulating society, or being what Shelley calls an unacknowledged legislator. But if nature was, to quote Sir Thomas Browne again, the art of God/9 the human artist could hardly compete with nature, and if the myths and moral principles of society were divinely revealed, the primary instrument for understanding them was the reason. The fulfilment of right knowledge is right action, but knowledge by itself does not lead to virtuous action. The bridge is built, in the older mythology, by a careful education in moral and religious behaviour, and poetry, rightly used, is one of the instruments of this education. Hence the commonplace among pre-Romantic critics that poetry provides a vivid image, or speaking picture,20 a kind of controlled hallucination, of virtue and of its opposite vice, which persuades the emotions as well as the intelligence to identify with virtue and repudiate vice. The poet is thus to be judged rhetorically, by his skill in ornamenting or embellishing a certain kind of

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content in such a way as to help the reader to pass from enlightenment to moral freedom. This freedom is not, of course, a mere moralism: it includes every aspect of civilized life, but then civilized life itself was thought of as essentially moral, in the broad sense. Even Milton thought of his authority as prophetic rather than strictly poetic: he was a great poet and he knew it, but because he knew it he felt responsible for using his genius rightly, that is, allied to certain moral and religious attitudes. The Romantic conception of the poet had several new and revolutionary aspects. First comes the principle that if man has invented the forms of his own civilization, then the artist becomes the man professionally concerned with developing and shaping those forms, which makes him the central figure in that civilization. Along with this goes the conception of the serious writer, the writer who, in contrast to the popular entertainer, does not aim to please but to enlighten and expand the consciousness of his audience. Such a writer would instinctively set his face against most of society, both in his art and in his mode of life. With Romanticism came the conception of artists as forming a Davidsbund21 out to kill the Goliaths or Philistine giants of the social establishment, a conception which expanded into the later vie de Boheme and other expressions of art as not only a social craft but a means of building up a kind of countersociety. There is of course nothing new in the conception of the serious writer as such: what is new is the conception of genius as autonomous, as having an authority of its own apart from its moral context. Blake had a strong sense of the moral responsibility of the poet, and understood very well what Milton meant by "that one talent which is death to hide."22 But Milton could never have uttered Blake's aphorism, "Genius has no Error."23 Hence a feature in Romanticism which at first glance seems contradictory. The Romantic poet often feels, even more oppressively than his predecessors, that his calling as a poet is a dedication, a total way of life, and that a commitment to it has an importance for society far beyond poetry itself. Yet it was the Romantic conception of the authority of genius that finally made it possible for criticism to base itself on a purely disinterested aesthetic response to which all moral factors have to be subordinated. Both elements, the sense of dedication to art and of freedom from moral factors in the experience of art, were greatly intensified later in the nineteenth century. The conception of the autonomy of creative power reinforces the question, Is this power a special function of the mind, distinct from reason or memory? This takes us back to the gnosis already referred to, and which

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is generally called imagination. The question of a special function hardly needed to be raised as long as the poet's work was thought of rhetorically, as a particular kind of expertise with words. But, we have seen, Romantic poets felt that the reason of the detached consciousness was something different from and inferior to the imagination or faculty of bringing poetic forms into existence. Imagination participates with nature as a process, and imitates specifically its power of bringing organisms to birth. In English literature, Shakespeare is the most impressive example of a poet who creates people, societies, even complete worlds, much as nature herself does, and this conception of imagination raised Shakespeare almost to divinity, as the supreme example of its power. The imagination is a "sympathetic" faculty, as Hazlitt called it,24 allied to love, in contrast to the reason, which is often aggressive and analytical. The Romantics in general did not go so far as to suggest that the conception of God as creator and maker of the world had been projected from the fact that man creates and makes things. What they felt was rather an analogy between God and man as creators, between God's Word and the poet's word, between God's revelation in the scriptural myth and the poet's revelation, which for most Romantics was also a distinctively mythopoeic revelation. In the centuries before Romanticism, the poets worked out their imagery within a mythological structure derived from certain organizing conceptions—the chain of being, the Ptolemaic universe, and the like. The historians of science, of philosophy, and of religion will look at this structure in different ways, and for the historian of literature it is different again. It may most conveniently be summarized, for the purposes of literary criticism, as a schema of four levels, the levels being best understood, again within a critical context, as spatial. On the top level is God, and the place of the presence of God, or heaven. The only language that can describe this top level is analogical language, and, as we have seen, the imagery of heavenly bodies was central to the analogy, the most conspicuous example being Dante's Paradiso. A medieval poet would not necessarily use such imagery in direct relation to God: Chaucer, for instance, often makes it symbolize a malignant fate, as in the star-crossed love of Troilus and in the address to the primum mobile in The Man of Law's Tale. The malignant influence of the stars does not contradict their divine associations, but constitutes a subordinate aspect of them. In making so functional a use of astronomical imagery, and in seeing in the sky the images of law, purpose, design, the cycle of seasons, and the

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order of creation, as well as of fate and the source of tragedy, Chaucer is almost closer in mental attitude to the builders of Stonehenge than he is to us. Next come the two levels of nature, an upper world of human nature, where man was originally intended to live, and a lower world of physical nature, established as man's environment after the fall of Adam. The upper level is represented by the imagery of the Garden of Eden, the Golden Age, and the City of God. Man is no longer in this world, but everything that is good tends to detach him from physical nature and raise him toward his proper level. We may adopt Blake's terms "innocence" and "experience" to describe the two natures. Man fell from innocence into experience: his education, religion, and social discipline help him to recover (at least in part: the process is completed in purgatory) his freedom of will which he lost with his innocence. Below the two levels of nature is the demonic world, or hell. We see that this schema has a moral principle incorporated into it: God is good, hell bad, and the human level of nature better than the physical one. Hence, though any form of imagery can be used in either an idyllic or a sinister context, a great deal of the imagery of literature before Romanticism tended to conventionalize itself along moral lines. Reversals of the convention, such as the use of paradisal imagery in a sinister sense, as in Spenser's Bower of Bliss, are as a rule quite clearly marked as such. Again, the structure is an inherently conservative one, providing no place for revolutionary activity, unless initiated by God. In the Romantic period this schema becomes profoundly modified. There is of course nothing to stop a Romantic or post-Romantic poet from employing the pre-Romantic structure, and we shall later on be looking at a remarkable example of a Romantic poem written mostly in the older tonality, Keats's Endymion. But most Romantic poems give marked evidence of a change of attitude. We can still trace a schema on four levels, and we shall try to outline it, for convenience, but the structure becomes much more ambiguous. In the first place, the tendency to moral conventionalizing disappears: all four levels can be seen either as ideal or as demonic, or as anything between. Secondly, we have traced the process by which the imagery of the sky ceased to have a special kind of significance attached to it, and became simply assimilated to the rest of nature. From Blake on, there is a prevailing tendency to see the machinery of the stars and its demiurge as demonic, because expressed only in a mindless automatism. We meet this for instance in Thomas

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Hardy's Dynasts, where the medieval astronomical imagery of fate and fortune is employed without any sense of an intelligent personal God having a power of veto. The moon, largely because of its traditional associations with "lunacy," enjoys a favoured position in the poetry of Laforgue and Yeats, but, again, in an ironic context. Sometimes, of course, the heavenly bodies may retain their older role as witnesses of order, though with a stronger emphasis on their purely symbolic function in inspiring a mood of what Tennyson calls higher pantheism.25 Sometimes too, as frequently in Shelley and Foe, in Byron's Cain, and elsewhere, the poet or hero is carried on a journey through the skies, usually in a "car" or other symbol of technological exuberance, which gives him a new (and occasionally, as in Byron, disastrous) knowledge. Out of this convention comes a good deal of modern "science fiction" with its ambiguous attitude to the mysteries of outer space. The relation of the two levels of nature, human and physical, is also transformed in Romantic poetry. Let us begin with the world of experience, the social structure we live in. In Romanticism we become aware of an increased self-consciousness in historical perspective and in the sense of tradition. The myth of the fall into self-consciousness is projected into history as well, earlier ages being thought of as more spontaneous, naive, and unspoiled in their relation to nature. The structure of contemporary civilization is thought of more as having accumulated a past, as less creative because later in time, and more preoccupied with its past because that past is the source of its very self-consciousness. The conservative Romantics who accept the structure of civilization, as something to be imaginatively trusted, tend to stress the traditional elements in it, such elements as church and aristocracy in particular, and lament their decline or hope for their renewal. The Romantic period was a time when aristocracy was fast losing its essential social functions, though its power and prestige remained for much longer, and nostalgia for a vanishing aristocracy is a large element in Romantic fiction. It comes into the "Gothic" and medieval vogues that are so conspicuous in the period, and the popularity of Scott has much to do with his idealizing of Jacobitism and the feudal loyalties of the Scottish Highlands as against the middleclass Hanoverian society that destroyed them.26 In this vanishing culture the "last minstrel," or symbol of a decline in the traditional function of poetry, also has a place. In religion, many Romantics, especially on the Continent, adopted a conservative or traditional Christian position, usually Roman Catholic,

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and saw in Romanticism a revival of an age of faith, in reaction to the sterile enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when a rational and analytic perspective was thought to have reached an extreme. In British Romanticism, Edmund Burke, with his conception of a continuous social contract and his elegy over the passing of the age of chivalry with the French Revolution, and Carlyle, with his effort to reactivate the aristocracy and his vision of the "organic filaments"27 of a new religion, represent this conservative tendency, along with the later religious writings of Coleridge. It is still surviving in the historical nostalgia of the early Yeats and in the various mythical constructs28 which show us Western culture as having steadily declined since the Middle Ages, a historical fall being sometimes associated with a certain phase which the mythologist particularly dislikes, such as the Reformation, the philosophy of Bacon, the secularism of the Renaissance, "usura" (Pound),29 or "dissociation of sensibility" (Eliot).30 On the other hand, of course, civilization may be thought of in revolutionary or Rousseauist terms as corrupt and perverted. This view of it immediately involves its relation to the other order of nature, the "unspoiled" nature which corresponds to, yet contrasts with, the older innocent nature. The more irrational society is, the more readily the reasonable may be associated with the natural; and the more unnatural society is, the more readily physical nature becomes the image of its regeneration. For Rousseau, man has lost the identity with physical nature which is also his own identity as a man, and in consequence his civilization has grown artificial, in a new and pejorative sense of that word, in need of a revolution which will recreate the natural society of liberty and equality. This is of course an extreme formulation, though very influential for that reason, of the central Romantic view of man's "fall," or what corresponds to it, as a fall into a self-consciousness separated from nature. The feeling that physical nature provides the missing complement to human nature takes many forms. In proportion as the old celestial imagery declined, it was replaced by the "sublime," which included it but gave it a different context. The sublime emphasized a sense of mystery and vagueness, not of order or purpose, coming through uncultivated nature, and addressing the individual or solitary man rather than the community. There is nothing new in this as a principle, but locating the sublime in mountains and oceans and wildernesses, where a solitary traveller confronts it, is relatively new as an emphasis in poetic imagery. Longinus, the main source of the theory of the sublime, had discussed it

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in a professional rhetorical context which is very different from its eighteenth-century picturesque developments. We may also notice the growth of the cliche (for it becomes that) that the "fancy," nourished on solitude and landscape imagery, may cling to some idea or notion that reason or doctrine rejects, with the corollary that it possesses its own kind of truth independently of the truth founded on the subject-object relationship. From the sublime develops the sense of nature as oracular, as dropping hints of expanding mysteries into the narrowed rational consciousness. One of the most famous, and certainly one of the most eloquent, expressions of this is Baudelaire's sonnet Correspondances, but it is also, of course, the central conception in Wordsworth, and it finds its way into popular Romanticism as well. It accounts for much of the use of superstition in the more sensational brands of Romantic fiction, such as the Gothic novels of the 17905, with their shivery occult imagery, their emphasis on the sensibilities engendered by solitude and sublime landscape, their paternalistic nostalgic conservatism, and their exploiting of the picturesque (the alienated seen as happy) and the exotic (the unfamiliar seen as pleasurable). Mrs. Radcliffe, it is true, writes from a relentlessly enlightened point of view that first summons up a supernatural mystery and then sandbags it with a rational explanation, but she shows her adherence to the oracular tradition in her sensitive heroines, who follow the general Gothic pattern. We may wonder why any literary convention should have produced these absurd creatures, drizzling like a Scotch mist and fainting at every crisis in the plot; but there is clearly something mediumistic about such females—in fact, if the author's interests are explicitly occult they may be actual mediums, like the heroine of Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Story. Their sensibility puts them closer to superior forms of consciousness and perception, which are reflected in their fragile and exquisite appearance and their affinity with trance and tears. Jane Austen, in Love and Freindship, recommends that such heroines should go mad rather than faint, as a means of getting more fresh air and exercise. Those who take her advice become the wild women or gypsies of Romantic fiction, like the Meg Merrilies and Madge Wildfire of Scott, who also suggest something of the oracular mysteries of nature. Just as some Romantics are conservative and others radical in their attitudes to the structure of civilization, so some Romantics regard Mother Nature as a benevolent teacher and others as a bloodthirsty ogress, like the Indian Kali. The Christian Holy Spirit, who is the source of life but not of death, gives place to the ancient and ambiguous "white goddess"

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who is both destroyer and preserver, in the phrase of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind [1. 14], which adopts the traditional Christian image of the Holy Spirit, the wind, but transfers it to nature. The interaction of beneficence and savagery in nature is so obvious that no poet can altogether avoid the fact that nature is a moral riddle, and that the more directly it is contemplated, the less easy it is to believe in it as something essentially related to the moral structure of human life. Wordsworth's assertion that the "external world is fitted to the mind"31 carries less conviction (except for science, which is not what Wordsworth is talking about) than Baudelaire's suggestion of a teasing, unpredictable, and ambivalent relation. But even so, such pre-Romantic symbolism as that of Spenser's allegory of the Castle of Alma or Bunyan's Holy War, which depicts the temperate or virtuous soul as a fortress beleaguered by an external environment and resisting it on all fronts, gives place to the feeling that the soul has much to learn from parleying with its traditional enemies. The paradoxical relation of civilized and rude nature, a relation partly antithetical and partly complementary, is often expressed in Romantic fiction and drama by some variant of the struggle-of-brothers theme. This has several Biblical archetypes—Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, Ishmael and Isaac—which become important in its development. In the conventional interpretation of the Bible the figures of the social establishment, Isaac and Jacob, are the accepted ones; with Romanticism, there comes a transfer of sympathy to their exiled brethren. The so-called Byronic hero is often a Romantic version of the natural man, who, like Esau or Ishmael, is an outcast, a solitary much given to communing with untamed nature, and who thus represents the potentially expanding and liberating elements in that nature. He has great energy, often great powers of leadership, and even his vices are dignified enough to have some aesthetic attraction. He is often aristocratic in birth or behaviour, with a sense that, like Esau, he is the dispossessed rightful heir—here the theme combines with the sense of nostalgia for a vanished aristocracy. When he is evil, there is often the feeling that, as with Byron's Cain, his evil is comprehensible, that he is not wholly evil any more than society is wholly good, and that even his evil is a force that society has to reckon with. The greatest of all his incarnations in English literature, Emily Bronte's Heathcliff, has in full the sense of a natural man who eludes all moral categories just as nature itself does, and who cannot be simply condemned or accepted. In contrast, the Jacob-figure, the defender of the establishment, often seems unheroic and spoiled by a soft or decadent

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civilization. It was of course Byron himself who popularized the moral ambiguity of the Byronic hero, both in his poetry and, with his reputation as a wicked and infidel lord, in his life. Childe Harold illustrates, like Scott's last minstrel, the close relation of a distinctive social attitude with a distinctive type of poetic imagination. In Byron the struggle-of-brothers theme goes all the way back from Cain and Abel to the rivalry of Lucifer, the dispossessed elder son of God, and the younger and more favoured Son. Thus of Lara it is said: He stood a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurl'd. [canto i, st. 28]

In the Vision of Judgment Lucifer is an icily polite aristocrat: his rival does not appear, but while the prince of darkness is a gentleman, St. Peter is not quite a gentleman, and his chief is clearly operating a somewhat square and bourgeois establishment, one that finds George III easier to absorb than Wilkes. In the older structure, human nature was almost invariably thought of as above physical nature, in imagery as in value. Eden is usually on a mountain-top, and the structure of civilization and social discipline raises man above the level of physical nature, in imagery as in conceptual metaphor. In Wordsworth physical nature has inherited a good deal of the older conception of the lost state of innocence, hence it is easier to think of it as above the state of experience. Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality follows the same general pattern as the poems by Vaughan and Traherne in the seventeenth century, in which the infant soul descends to a lower world. This spatial schema recurs later in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, in Strindberg's Great Highway, in Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, where the mountain-top carries similar associations of an escape from the limitations of ordinary experience. But for a more conservatively pessimistic Romantic, such as Schopenhauer, it is easier to think of the structure of civilization, or the state of experience, as on top of a subhuman and submoral "world as will," an ark or bateau ivre carrying the cargo of human values and tossing on a stormy and threatening sea. This figure becomes the prevailing one later in the nineteenth century, both for the revolutionary optimists, with Marx at their head, who see the traditional privileges of a ruling class threatened with destruction from below, and for more sombre thinkers—Schopenhauer himself, Freud, Kierkegaard—all of whom think of the values of intelli-

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gence and imagination as above, but very precariously above, a dark, menacing, and subhuman power—Schopenhauer's world as will, Freud's id, Kierkegaard's dread. For all of these, the boat and sea image is an appropriate one, and this structure in particular shows us how the Romantic mythological schema, unlike its predecessor, enables poets and philosophers to express a man-centred revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary, attitude to society. It is Blake, as usual, who gives us the complete structure of the Romantic revolutionary myth. In his Songs of Innocence and Experience the child is the symbol of the state of innocence, not because he is morally good but because he is civilized: that is, he assumes that the world is protected by parents and that it is an order of nature that makes human sense. As he grows into an adult he loses this innocent vision and enters the lower world of experience. The innocent vision is then driven underground into the subconscious, as we now call it, where it becomes a subversive revolutionary force with strong sexual elements in it, which Blake calls Ore. If this force is released, it permeates the world of experience with its energy; if it is suppressed, it turns demonic. For the quest of the soul, the attaining of man's ultimate identity, the traditional metaphors were upward ones, following the movement of the ascension of Christ, though they were there even before the Psalmist lifted up his eyes to the hills [Psalm 121:1]. In Romanticism the main direction of the quest of identity tends increasingly to be downward and inward, toward a hidden basis or ground of identity between man and nature. It is in a hidden region, often described in images of underground caves and streams like those of Kubla Khan, that the final unity between man and his nature is most often achieved. The word "dark" is thematically very important in Romanticism, especially in Germany, and it usually refers to the seeping of an identity with nature into the hidden and inner parts of the mind. Beddoes speaks of the depth And labyrinthine home of the still soul, Where the seen thing is imaged, and the whisper loints the expecting spirit. [3.3.76-80]

This fourth region corresponds in situation to the hell or demonic world of the previous schema, which was also usually underground, and it carries over some echoes from its predecessor, as the mysterious depths

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of the soul may be a place of great wickedness as well as of inner illumination, like Milton's Pandemonium with its fantastic lighting. In the first place, the imagery of the oracular cave, so prominent in Shelley and elsewhere, is a revival of a pre-Christian mythology that goes back to the old earth-mother myths. The oracle of Apollo was taken over from an earlier female chthonic cult, but even in its reformed version it ceased to function at the coming of Christ, hence Shelley's use of such imagery indicates an anti-Christian bias. Second, the identity achieved may be with a God who is the ultimate reality of both man and nature, or it may simply be with an amoral nature. Those who manifest this inner identity are the great men, but some great men are creative and others, like Napoleon, are destructive, and there is no guarantee which form greatness will take. The ambiguity of "destroyer and preserver" is found here too. Thirdly, the only point at which one visibly enters into an identity with nature is death. Thus death is all we can usually see of what may or may not be the fullest entering into life. This paradox haunts many Romantic and post-Romantic poets. The suggestion dropped by Lucifer in Byron's Cain, "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge" [2.2.164], is amplified in Beddoes and Shelley, as we shall see. In Rimbaud the poet descends not through death but through a dereglement de tous les sens which is so sinister and disastrous that the world of identity becomes simply the old demonic world again, and the poet's sojourn in it a saison en enfer. Hence Rimbaud remarks that the old theologians were right after all, and that hell is downward.32 The Romantic movement transforms all the generic plots of literature: there is a new and Romantic form of tragedy, of irony, of comedy: there is even—in fact there is very centrally—a new and Romantic form of romance. We shall proceed to a brief review of the Romantic developments of these four types of fictional structure, beginning with romance itself. Conventionally, the poet is the celebrator of the hero, whose brave deeds he chronicles and whom he follows at a respectful distance. But this convention relates to a time so remote and primitive that, if it ever existed, little if any literature has survived from it. The poet, as Aristotle says, deals with the generic or universal event, not the particular historical one [Poetics, sec. 9], and it is the hero recreated by the poet who becomes the hero of literature. As long as we have had written literature, what the poet really is directly related to in society is not the hero but a more settled order, usually presided over, in pre-Romantic times, by a

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prince or patron in whose court or hall the poet recites his poems or performs his dramas. In this setting the hero becomes a legendary figure from an earlier age, and predominantly a tragic figure as well, like the heroes of Ossian who went forth to battle, but always fell. This is as true of Beowulf as it is of Achilles, and it is still true of King Lear and Hamlet. In Shakespeare the balancing social figure, Queen Elizabeth or King James, remains offstage, or is symbolized in such figures of comedy as Duke Theseus in the last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Romantics take the next step. In their age the patron is beginning to disappear, and the poet is becoming immersed in society as a whole. But though he loses his traditional specific social functions (unless he preserves them by accident, like Goethe in Weimar), he gains a more important function, at least in his own eyes. He sees society as held together by its creative power, incarnate in himself, rather than by its leaders of action. Thus he himself steps into the role of the hero, not as personally heroic but simply as the focus of society. For him, therefore, the real event is no longer even the universal or typical historical event, but the psychological or mental event, the event in his own consciousness of which the historical event is the outward sign or allegory. This involves a rejection of history, which becomes a "gilded cheat" in Keats,33 a "devil's scripture" in Byron,34 and the literal Word of God (with overtones of St. Paul's observation that the letter kills) in Blake, as the main source of poetic fictions. It may seem very strange to describe Romanticism as antihistorical, when we think of how central historical novels and narrative poems are to it. Yet when we look more carefully at the historical fictions in Romanticism, we see that earlier ages of history are being recreated in a specifically Romantic form, as symbols of certain aspects of the poet's own age. In Schiller's terms, an age thought of as comparatively "naive" is rendered in a self-conscious or "sentimental" way.35 Scott, in Ivanhoe and elsewhere, and, later, William Morris both write historical fictions about the Middle Ages. They are by no means uninformed about the Middle Ages: Morris at least could be called a medieval specialist. But they are not interested in rendering the Middle Ages directly. There is nothing in the language of Middle English, for example, that corresponds even remotely to Morris's brocaded Teutonic diction or to Scott's antiquated lingo. What is being rejected, one feels, is the social reality of the earlier age; what is being preserved is a latent or potential Utopia in it: a social ideal with some meaning for the writer's attitude to his own time. Scott is

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conservative, and his medieval world is an age of chivalry contrasting with his own age; Morris is radical, and his medieval world, deprived of its two pillars, church and aristocracy, is similarly an ideal age of craftsmanship confronting the nineteenth century. Thus what is being called "gilded cheat" and "devil's scripture" is not so much history as the social process of which actual history is the record. The rejection of history in this sense is an antimimetic tendency, a rejecting of social reality in favour of a social ideal. The people contemporary with Romanticism that we think of as realists we also think of as outside the Romantic movement, like Crabbe in English literature. The Middle Ages itself, like all ages, had its own antimimetic tendencies, which it expressed in such forms as the romance, where the knight turns away from society and rides off into a forest or other "threshold symbol" of a dream world. In Romanticism this romance form revives, so significantly as to give its name to the whole movement, but in Romanticism the poet himself is the hero of the quest, and his turning away from society is to be connected with what we have been discussing, the demoting of the conception of man as primarily a social being living in cities. He turns away to seek a nature who reveals herself only to the individual. The most comprehensive and central of all Romantic themes, then, is a romance with the poet for hero. The theme of this romance form is the attaining of an expanded consciousness, the sense of identity with God and nature which is the total human heritage, so far as the limited perspective of the human situation can grasp it. To use the traditional metaphors, the great Romantic theme is the attaining of an apocalyptic vision by a fallen but potentially regenerate mind. Such an event, taking place in an individual consciousness, may become a sign of a greater social awakening, but the latter is usually implied in it or takes place offstage. Wordsworth's Prelude, certainly the great Romantic epic of English literature, deals with the growth of the individual poet's mind; more social aspects of the theme were contemplated but came to very little. In Blake the great poem of individual awakening, Milton, is followed by Jerusalem, a less completely concentrated poem partly because of its attempt at a wider social vision. In Prometheus Unbound we are aware of the extent to which social change is symbolized by a psychological change: mankind is treated as a single gigantic individual, which Prometheus represents. Nor does Keats's Hyperion, as we have it, get beyond the moment of Apollo's self-awareness, though the Moneta pas-

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sages in the revised version indicate Keats's sense of the importance of the social side of his subject. It seems as though Romanticism finds it difficult to absorb the social perspective, and we notice that the poems that deal with the attaining of integrated consciousness often tend to bypass the more realistic tragic, ironic, and comic themes. The "romantic" has in popular speech a reputation for taking a facile or rose-coloured view of things, and even great works of Romanticism sometimes show us a mental quest achieved without having passed through any real difficulties or dangers on the way. A reader completely unsympathetic to, for example, the conception of the quest of the soul set out in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress could still appreciate the honesty and realism of the Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or the dungeons of Giant Despair. In contrast, Wordsworth's Excursion employs the normally tragic or ironic figure of the Wanderer; but Wordsworth is so nervous about the tragic and ironic aspects of experience explored, for example, by Byron, so anxious to "correct despondency"36 and avoid the seductions of a Voltairean spirit of mockery, that The Excursion impresses us more as a barrier against the great adventure of the soul than an account of it. The Prelude is, of course, infinitely more successful, complete, and flexible, but the more tragic Vaudracour and Julia episode is cut out of the 1850 version even of that poem. Later, Matthew Arnold omitted Empedocles on Etna from his 1853 collection, on the grounds, really, that it added an ironic dimension to his poetry which gave him great uneasiness. Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus, gives us a Romantic quest of the soul which passes through a tragic and Wertherean "Everlasting No," an ironic and Byronic "Centre of Indifference," and finally reaches an "Everlasting Yea." The last is, in the first place, the identifying of the individual, symbolized, in the "sartor resartus" imagery, by George Fox's self-made suit of leather. This stage corresponds in Wordsworth to the vision of the leech-gatherer in Resolution and Independence, whose self-sufficiency corrects the melancholy of the poet. There follows, in Carlyle, the integrating of the identified individual, through his productive capacities, with society. Carlyle deserves every credit for attempting to unite the social with the individual perspective, but unfortunately he reverts to the older conception of the hero as the centre of society, to whom the rest of us, including the poet, have first of all to relate. There are two types of such leaders: leaders dejure, royal or aristocratic figures like the Duke Theseus of Shakespeare, who symbolize the unity

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of their society, and leaders de facto, represented by the "captains of industry" in Carlyle's day and by earlier tyrannos figures like Napoleon, Cromwell, and Frederick the Great. This perspective was the natural one for Shakespeare's historical plays, but for a Romantic poet, who sees society in relation to the creative rather than the kinetic function, it is an anachronism. And because Carlyle endorses, rather than simply observing, the view he adopts, one has a nagging feeling that his hero worship is not only anachronistic but literally mistaken: the authentic form of what was later to be called the trahison des clercs. When we look more closely at his view of the hero we see one reason why it is mistaken: in literature the hero is normally and naturally a tragic figure, and Carlyle's conception of the hero is associated with a vulgar fear of tragedy. All his heroes must be successful: if a great spirit appears in history, things ought not to go wrong, and, by the same view, any man who makes a considerable mark in history must be a hero. We should expect to find tragic, ironic, and comic themes, because of their more social and realistic setting, less completely developed in Romanticism, but there are of course great Romantic contributions in all three areas, especially in tragedy. From what we have said about Romantic mythology, we should expect the dominant form of Romantic tragedy to be the tragedy of self-awareness, the sense of losing the spontaneity of one's relationship to nature and becoming an isolated and subjective consciousness. The story of Faust, disillusioned with everything that the conscious mind can give him, feeling that he wants nothing except a return to a youthful state of spontaneity and yet finding his conscious awareness betraying him once more, is a central Romantic tragedy. PreRomantic tragedy was concerned mainly with the hero as social leader: even the most psychological studies of a sick society in Jacobean dramatists still keep their central figures inseparable from their communities and their social functions. The theme of the disintegration of society is essential even to Hamlet, which makes the closest approach to the Romantic preoccupation with the excess of conscious awareness over the power of action. Romantic tragedies of course often retain the general form and structure of pre-Romantic tragedy, if only out of respect for its prestige, but their central figures are more likely to reflect the vogue of the "Byronic" hero already glanced at, the hero who is placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often of leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting.

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Another modulation of this type is the exile or wanderer, who is usually isolated by an introverted quality of mind. Byron's Childe Harold, the Ancient Mariner, and Shelley's Alastor and Wandering Jew figures show us, in very different contexts, aspects of the tragic situation, from a Romantic point of view, of being detached from society and its conventional values. None of these characters are thinkers: they are brooders or visionaries, but the convention often assumes that they are thinkers, centres of a mental activity too intense for social intercourse. Thus Childe Harold: Yet must I think less wildly:—I have thought Too long and darkly, till my brain became, In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame, [canto 3, st. 7]

Notice how natural it is for a Romantic poet to use the word "darkly" in connection with thought. The archetype of all such brooding outcasts is Rousseau, and Rousseau's Confessions illustrates two recurring features of the Romantic tragic formula. The formula often expresses itself in a confessional genre, where the main figure is apt to be a perfunctory mask for the author himself, and it often uses the image of the lost mother as a symbol for the fall into excessive awareness. The role of various maternal figures in Rousseau, notably Madame de Warens, has much more than a simply biographical significance. Perhaps the overtones of "Childe" in Childe Harold also have echoes beyond the allusion to medieval romance: certainly Byron himself, and his publisher, were well aware of the appeal of such heroes to women readers. Other confessional forms, such as De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, gain considerably in significance if one relates them to their proper context. We said that the central theme of Romanticism is that of the attaining of an expanded consciousness, and this phrase, to a reader in the 19605, suggests current talk about the virtues of LSD and marijuana. But even from the point of view of Romanticism with its isolated visionaries, there is still a distinction between the genuine or creative consciousness and the introverted or subjective one. De Quincey's account of his miserable exile from the maternal figure of Lady Carbery, of his sterile union in bitter cold with Ann, and of the way in which his vision broke up, under the influence of opium, into a shower of tantalizing and elusive glimpses, is, seen in relation to Romanticism as a whole,

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one of the profoundest and most moving of Romantic autobiographical tragedies. Traditionally, the tragedy, or at least the Renaissance European tragedy, has been polarized by two themes: social heroism and sexual passion. The tragic hero of Romanticism is usually a tragic lover, and here again it is an excess of consciousness, which isolates the lover instead of uniting him to his beloved, that causes the tragedy. What begins as love ends in frustration, torment, or suicide. The convention is the old convention of Courtly Love, where the mistress may kill her lover with her "cruelty," but the treatment of the convention emphasizes rather the lover's growing morbid awareness of what would now be called the metaphysical absurd. This theme gives us the Werther syndrome in Romantic literature, of which Ugo Foscolo's Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, and, with a less rigorous conclusion, Constant's Adolphe and Hazlitt's Liber Amoris are other examples. Genuinely tragic themes, as distinct from ironic ones, are relatively rare in Romantic literature, partly because they come so close to placing the poet himself in a heroic but defeated role. Perhaps we have to wait for Proust before we find the full tragic counterpart to the great Romantic epics: Proust's account of a growing consciousness which, like Wordsworth's, has intermittent flashes of paradisal vision, but finally realizes that there are no paradises except lost ones, that this realization confers on the narrator the tragic dimension of defeated heroism, the ability to see mankind as giants immersed in time, and that maturity means among other things the irreparable and final loss of the mother. Romantic irony revolves around de Sade and the so-called "Romantic agony," the sense of the interpenetration of pleasure and pain, beauty and evil, intensity and destructiveness. There are two chief recurring characters. One is an exile or outcast figure similar to the one that we find in tragic stories, except that he is without the support that nature gives to the more genuinely tragic hero's contest with society. The ironic outcast is rather a desdichado figure, a sad Quixote whose aristocratic pretensions are an illusion. His female counterpart is an elusive or sinister femme fatale, the Romantic embodiment of the cruel mistress of Courtly Love. It is unfortunate that Praz's influential book37 concentrates so much on the purely psychological elements of sadism, for sadism is far more important as a sardonic parody of the Rousseauist view of society. According to de Sade, nature teaches us that the greatest good of life is pleasure, and there is no keener pleasure than the inflicting (or, for

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masochists, who complete the theory, the suffering) of pain. A society of sadistic masters and masochistic slaves would therefore be a "natural" society. There is no evidence that Rousseau's natural society ever did, could, or will exist: the evidence that it is natural for man to form societies that condemn the majority to misery and humiliation and give a small group the privilege of enjoying their torments is afforded by the whole of human history. The sense that ecstasy and pain are really the same thing is connected with the fact, just mentioned, that for Romantic mythology the greatest experiences of life originate in a world which is also the world of death and destruction. For the great ironic developments that come out of Romanticism we have to turn to a later poetic tradition that begins with Baudelaire and a fictional one that begins with Flaubert. In English there is of course Byron's Don Juan, which belongs to the more militantly ironic form of satire, Byron having an affinity with the more realistic age of Pope that makes him unique among English Romantics. Shelley's Cenci, depicting Beatrice's revolt against the sadistic onslaughts of her father, is revolutionary so far as it creates a dramatic sympathy for Beatrice, and ironic so far as it portrays her as involved in the evil she fights against. An almost equally remarkable example of Romantic irony is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This story is not, as it is often said to be, a precursor of science fiction: it is a precursor rather of the existential thriller, of such a book as Camus's L'Etmnger. The whole point about the monster is that he is not a machine, but an ordinary human being isolated from mankind by extreme ugliness, Blake's "different face."38 The number of allusions to Paradise Lost in the narrative indicate that the story is a retelling of the account of the origin of evil, in a world where the only creators that we can locate are human ones. Frankenstein hunts down his monster in the same way that moral good attempts to destroy the moral evil it has itself created: Frankenstein is quite as much a death principle as his quarry, and is surrounded by the vengeful spirits of the monster's victims. The traditional structure of comedy is one which leads up to the birth of a new society, usually crystallizing around the marriage of the hero and the heroine, in the conventional "happy ending" of the final scene. Certain individuals whose behaviour is threatening or eccentric, misers, bragging soldiers, tyrannical parents, and the like, try to obstruct this ending and are thwarted or converted. Comedy restructures society by expanding it and making it more flexible; it exhibits the individual as eccentric and makes society triumph over him. It thus tends to be a

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realistic form with a strongly social emphasis which is not particularly congenial to Romanticism. The novels of Jane Austen are pure comedies, and for that reason not quite what we think of as typically Romantic. There is, however, one form of comedy which Romanticism has more in common with, and that, as we should expect, is the "romantic" comedy of Shakespeare. Shakespeare often presents his action in the form of a collision of two societies, one the ordinary society of experience, generally a court, the other a mysterious world often associated with magic and fairies, with strongly erotic and Dionysian overtones. In the Romantic comedies this world, represented, for example, by the forest of Arden in As You Like It, the wood of Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Portia's house in The Merchant of Venice, establishes an ascendancy over the other world and forces a comic conclusion on it. Shakespearean comedy has clearly been a strong influence on Prometheus Unbound and Endymion at least. But even in Shakespeare the emphasis is social, and Romantic comedy takes rather the individual form, the attaining of an expanded consciousness, already spoken of. Thus, in Romanticism, comedy and the successful completing of the romance quest tend to be much the same form. To sum up: any given literature is rooted in a specific culture and is contained by the mythological structure of that culture. Pre-Romantic literature in Western Europe was contained by a structure that, for the critical purpose of interpreting the imagery of poetry, is best understood as a structure on four spatial levels, though of course if it were interpreted differently, by a philosopher or a theologian, there would not literally be any levels or places. These four levels are heaven, the unfalien world which is man's original and proper home, the ordinary world of experience, and the demonic world of eternal death. In this schema there are two principles involved, one cyclical and the other dialectical. The two levels of nature in the middle are related cyclically: imagery of fertility, youth, and perpetual spring, and gardens of flourishing trees and flowing water describe the world man fell from at the beginning of the cycle of history, and to which he should return at the end of it. Heaven and hell, on the other hand, are worlds of eternal separation, one being a community of identity and the other a pseudo-community of alienation. These two worlds are normally, in poetic imagery, "up" and "down," associated respectively with the starry skies and the underground world of the dead. Romanticism brought in a new mythological construction. We can still

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think of it as a four-tiered structure, but it is much less concretely related to the physical world as we ordinarily perceive it. What corresponds to heaven and hell is still there, the worlds of identity and of alienation, but the imagery associated with them, being based on the opposition of "within" and "without" rather than of "up" and "down," is almost reversed. The identity "within," being not purely subjective but a communion, whether with nature or God, is often expressed in imagery of depth or descent. (In contemporary theology there appears to be a determined effort to get rid of "up there" metaphors in relation to God, but somehow it sounds right to say that God is the "ground" of being.) On the other hand, the sense of alienation is reinforced, if anything, by the imagery of what, since Pascal, has increasingly been felt to be the terrifying waste spaces of the heavens.39 The two inner worlds of nature, human nature and physical nature, are also still there, but their relation to each other is also usually reversed. In pre-Romantic imagery the world of social and civilized life, however evil or corrupt, and however thoroughly denounced, was still the gateway to identity: man for pre-Romantic poets was still primarily a social and civilized being and could not progress except through his social heritage. In a great deal of Romantic imagery human society is thought of as leading to alienation rather than identity, and this sense increases steadily throughout the nineteenth century as literature becomes more ironic in both tone and structure. In Romanticism there is an emphasis on the false identity of the conforming group—even for the most conservative Romantics the real social values are in a tradition which has probably been lost anyway—and, by contrast, on a kind of creative and healing alienation to be gained from a solitary contact with the order of nature outside society. For many writers today this sense of creative alienation has disappeared, and only the ironic view of society remains. But the Romantic appeal to nature is a mighty force yet, even in an age when "nature" has become practically reduced to the human sexual instinct. The difficulty we mentioned in Romanticism of incorporating a social theme with the theme of individual enlightenment is still with us. Romanticism has brought into modern consciousness the feeling that society can develop or progress only by individualizing itself, by being sufficiently tolerant and flexible to allow an individual to find his own identity within it, even though in doing so he comes to repudiate most of the conventional values of that society. The bourgeois democracies of

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America and Western Europe, Marxist countries, and fascist and nationalist movements, all of which have political principles derived from different aspects of Romantic mythology translated into programs of social action, have tried to overcome this situation in different ways, sometimes with the help of some of the poets, as our comments on Carlyle show. But the residual anarchism at the heart of the Romantic movement is still with us, and will be until society stops trying to suppress it. What follows are brief studies of the structure and imagery of three major works of English Romantic literature. The sequence is not chronological, but is a series of phases of myth,40 in which each work in the sequence takes in a wider scope than its predecessor. All three are works of second-generation Romanticism, and all three take a liberal, sometimes a revolutionary attitude to religion and politics, in which the break with the older symbolic language is easier to see. Beddoes revolves around the heart of Romantic imagery, at the point of identity with nature of which death is the only visible form. Shelley deals with the theme of Romantic comedy as outlined above, the regenerating of the alienated community through a renewed understanding of nature as the complement of humanity. The theme of Keats's Endymion is the bringing to birth of the imagination as the focus of society. The whole sequence should give some idea of the range and scope of the mythical structure within which the literature of our own day is still operating, and which with the Romantic movement completed its first major phase. Yorick: The Romantic Macabre The masterpiece of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death's Jest-Book, never seems really to have been integrated into the study of Romanticism. The reasons are partly a matter of biographical accident. The poet published The Bride's Tragedy in 1822: Shelley and Keats were dead, Byron was soon to follow them, and Beddoes became with this work their only immediate successor on anything like their level of achievement. Contrary to the usual practice of Romantic criticism when faced with genius, The Bride's Tragedy was generously praised, and Beddoes was well launched as a poet. He then began several other projects, including Death's Jest-Book, the first version of which was apparently complete by 1829. But instead

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of publishing it then,41 and making it the bridge between Keats and the early Tennyson, he kept working at it and revising it until his suicide in 1849. As he had been living in Germany and studying medicine, he had become a somewhat peripheral figure in English literature by the time of his death. Hence Death's Jest-Book crept into English poetry almost unnoticed, an easy victim for the kind of generalizer who calls it "morbid." To put such an epithet against this gorgeous plum pudding of a poem, filled to bursting with heady lines and breathtaking images, is a sufficient comment on the accuracy of critical cliches. From the beginning Beddoes was possessed, not so much by death, as by the idea of the identity of death and love, Thanatos and Eros. Both states are themselves identifications of an isolated and conscious being with something else not itself. The imagery of such songs as Dirge and Hymeneal or The Two Archers tells us that the darts of love and death are aimed at the same target, that all lovers are demon lovers, all brides incarnations of Mother Earth. Frustration in love (as the character Athulf, in Death's Jest-Book, shows us in particular) is very apt to turn into a death wish. Thus the highest and most intense aspects of life, which love represents, are not the opposite of death, but part of the drive toward death which is the momentum of life itself. The complete identity with nature, which is the fulfilment of life, is achieved visibly only by death; hence death is the most accurate symbol of the ultimate meaning of life. The question whether life drives to death or through it remains, for most of us, an unanswerable question. Beddoes answers, not that there is a "life after" death, but that life and death are different aspects of the same world, related as day is to night, summer to winter. Man, says Beddoes, is the seed of a ghost, and just as Samuel Butler remarks that a chicken is an egg's way of producing another egg,42 so Beddoes presents us with a world in which a human life is a ghost's way of producing another ghost. The matter is not as straightforward as this, even in Beddoes, but one principle is clear enough to go on with. In our account of the Romantic myth we spoke of two orders of nature, one the world of ordinary social human experience, the other a world connected with uncultivated nature, the physical environment outside society. This latter world is the world of the "sublime," and it is Wordsworth's benevolent teacher, but we noted that in later Romanticism it is often more pessimistically regarded. It becomes, for example, Schopenhauer's world as will. Beddoes makes a startling and yet oddly suggestive identifica-

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tion. For him the world of experience is the world of life, which has its focus and climax in love, and the world outside it becomes, quite simply, the world of death. The demon-lover theme is thus, in his work, the symbol of a life-death identity which he calls eternity. This identity can manifest itself only in the form of an antithesis, the antithesis we know as life and death. Its main symbol in Beddoes, as so often elsewhere in Romanticism, is that of the struggle of brothers, of which one represents ordinary life driving toward death, the other death seeping back into life. The Bride's Tragedy is based on the theme of the demon lover. The villain hero, significantly named Hesperus, loves Floribel, who is called a nymph of the wood and is associated with Diana. Their secret meeting at sunset in the forest opens the play, and it soon becomes clear that, for Hesperus, Floribel is going to be not a Diana but a Proserpine. A story is told about a bee and a red rose with the conventional dying-god conclusion: the guilty blossom His heart's blood stained. [1.1.59-60]

Certain thematic images are established: there is the imagery of flowers and wind, which are associated with love and death respectively, and of a false paradise where everything is dark, hidden, and possessed in secret, and where grapes and poison fruit are near together. The ominous images set a tone which leads up to the murder of Floribel. Hesperus is provided by Beddoes with three sets of motivations for his act: one, his father is imprisoned by a Duke who wants Floribel for himself and is trying to force Hesperus into marrying his sister Olivia; two, Hesperus sees Floribel kissing a pageboy and is seized with irrational jealousy in the regular Beaumont and Fletcher convention; and three, most interesting of all, he has a Freudian trauma: in infancy he lay on his nurse's breast when she was killed by a lightning bolt, which inspires him with a cyclical madness. This last, in particular, has possessed him with the sense of the identity of birth, love, and death. After he kills Floribel he turns to Olivia, but the same secret and possessive imagery recurs ("We'll build a wall between us and the world" [4.3.67!), and he speaks also to her of death as the real consummation of love as well as of life: For when our souls are born then will we wed; Our dust shall mix and grow into one stalk. [2.3.76]

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There is also a suggestion of a cycle of death moving opposite to the cycle of life, of ghosts begetting ghosts. To nerve himself for his murder Hesperus stands on the grave of another murderer, and feels the latter's spirit passing into himself. We understand that the real murderous impulse is within him: as the Duke shrewdly remarks: 'Tis but one devil ever tempts a man, And his name's Self. [2.6.H-12]43

And yet one feels that there is something sacrificial about all the deaths in the play, the direction of the sacrifice being not, as with ritual sacrifice, to safeguard the living, but to strengthen the community of death. Hints are thrown out about forms of life beyond life, and Olivia's attendant tries, as she says, to persuade myself this intercourse Of disembodied minds is no conjecture, No fiction of romance. [5.3.81-3]

And although Hesperus goes through agonies of remorse and other appropriate emotions, he seems oddly to have extended his experience by his crime in a way that makes it something more than merely a crime. Of various dramatic fragments that Beddoes began shortly after The Bride's Tragedy, the most remarkable, and the most nearly completed, is The Second Brother, over four acts of which survive. There are really three brothers in this play: a Duke of Ferrara, who dies without appearing in the action; Marcello, the next oldest, an exile presumed dead; and Orazio, the heir apparent by default. The action opens with the return of Marcello and his encounter with Orazio. The encounter is in the tonality of death confronting life, the skeleton or death's head at the scene of festivity. Orazio, handsome, popular, extravagant, with all eyes on him, is brought up short in his public triumph by his beggared brother. In this moment of contact they symbolize the opposition of living and dead worlds, as Marcello says: We are like two mountain peaks, Of two close planets, catching in the air: You, King Olympus, a great pile of summer, Wearing a crown of gods; I, the vast top Of the ghosts' deadly world, naked and dark. [1.1.144-8]

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Several other contrasts are involved, including one rather like that of Mark Antony and Octavius. Orazio is a Dionysus, a lord of love and wine, spilling over with life and energy; Marcello is a votary of Apollo, who prays to a god he thinks of as remote and withdrawn: Great solitary god of that one sun, I charge thee by the likeness of our state. [1.1.221-2]

As an "Apollonian" he stands for order, form, everything that is fixed in a place. He is also the Jupiter of the earth and heaven, as Orazio is the Neptune of the liquid world. In this last set of archetypes the dying Duke would correspond to the Pluto gone to the shades below. As the rivalry develops, Orazio's extravagance leads him to bankruptcy and Marcello succeeds to the dukedom, recognized as the rightful heir. Another demon-lover theme then develops, centred on the heroine Valeria, who is apparently about to be murdered when the main fragment ends. These two themes, the demon lover whose love is death and the two brothers who symbolize the two orders of nature, the living and dead worlds, are combined in Death's Jest-Book. The central idea of this play is that of death as fool, an invisible jester who appears only in the form of a grinning skull, like Shakespeare's Yorick. This idea is announced in a verse letter to a friend written in 1826, where Beddoes says that his play will not only rob death of all his traditional terrors, but will actually make "a mock, a fool, a slave of him," and that the action will show him as a comic butt or "unmasked braggart." The doctrine that death is unreal, that it is properly to be regarded as comfort, and that it is a major obstacle to human development to "believe in" death, appears already in The Bride's Tragedy in a speech by Olivia—in Beddoes it is usually the heroine who attains these intuitions. But Beddoes seems to have felt, at least at this time, that his medical studies gave scientific support to his beliefs: "I owe this wisdom to Anatomy," he says.44 To regard death as something so impotent that it can actually be treated like a miles gloriosus indicates an optimism, if that is the word, so intolerable that one doubts if any serious poet, least of all Beddoes, could give sustained expression to it. Shakespeare does use the term fool in the passive sense of comic butt, meaning someone who cannot control events, in such phrases as "time's fool" or "the natural fool of fortune." But death is not Beddoes's fool in this sense: on the contrary, he is the undisputed victor of the play's action. The wisdom of anatomy may have let Beddoes down, but in any

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case his poetic instinct would have led him to a much more ambiguous treatment of the death-fool theme than he suggests here. The plot of Death's Jest-Book, which was not essentially altered by revision, revolves around two brothers, Wolfram and Isbrand, disguised as a knight and a court fool respectively, in the service of Melveric, Duke of Miinsterberg. Isbrand has a melancholy and sardonic temperament like the "malcontent" type popularized by Marston: more generally, he is the kind of highly articulate tragic hero who can act as chorus to his own action, of the family of Hamlet, Bosola, and Vendice.45 Isbrand is dedicated to revenge on the Duke, who has killed their father: Wolfram, a saintly and chivalric spirit, has renounced revenge and in a complicated action, which takes place in Egypt, saves the Duke's life after the Duke has tried to poison him, out of rivalry over the heroine Sibylla. Exasperated by Wolfram's invulnerable virtue and his sense of inferiority to it, the Duke finally succeeds in murdering him and returns to Miinsterberg with Sibylla, followed by Isbrand. Once home, the Duke's love slips back to the memory of his dead wife, in a way typical of Beddoes's dramatic actions. Similarly, Hesperus can only love what he is about to try to destroy, and Orazio does not really love the heroine Valeria until after he has neglected her to the verge of killing her with a broken heart. The late Duchess's body, in a grisly scene, is exchanged for that of Wolfram by Isbrand. The Duke attempts to call up the ghost of his wife by necromancy; he thus, because of the exchange, calls up Wolfram instead, who cannot be dismissed because he has been definitely summoned. Wolfram's ghost, like the Sweet William of the ballads, renews his earthly love for the now neglected Sibylla, who dies to join him. Isbrand organizes a conspiracy against the Duke and is temporarily successful, but once vested with authority he becomes tyrannical. The main action for the latter half of the play shifts to the Duke's two sons, the dutiful and heroic Adalmar and the self-indulgent Athulf. Isbrand has planned their deaths as part of his revenge, but their love for the same woman, Amala, which repeats the main theme in counterpoint, leads to the same climax, with Athulf murdering his brother. In the amazing final scene, where a danse macabre painted on the walls of a crypt comes to life, Athulf stabs himself, Isbrand is killed by a blind devotee of liberty named Mario, and Wolfram, who replaces Isbrand as fool in the last scene, pulls the Duke down into his grave, "still alive, into the world o' th' dead" [5.4.357], "dead" being appropriately the last word in the play.

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This account gives little indication of the skill with which Beddoes manages to make all these deaths individually plausible and cumulatively convincing to the emotions. It has been noticed that every great Romantic poet in English literature leaves some major and central work unfinished, or revises and reworks it incessantly.46 The reasons naturally vary, but some features recur. Byron's Childe Harold and Don Juan are unfinished because they are, in very different moods, parodies of the Romantic completed quest. That is, they are endless poems in their very inception, and could only be abandoned when the author tired of the persona. Keats's Hyperion, Blake's Four Zoas, and Wordsworth's Prelude were revised and reworked partly because they were, in a sense, definitive poems, expressing the heart of what their creators had to say. Both these reasons apply to Death's Jest-Book, and with Beddoes something also has to be allowed for personal temperament. He tells us little about himself in his letters, but a tone of selfdeprecation recurs which suggests some doubts about his ability ever to finish his work to his own satisfaction. There is nothing neurotic in his writing, but an increasingly self-destructive streak in him, which destroyed first a large body of his work and then his life, links him more closely than any other English Romantic to some of the tormented and self-mutilated geniuses of German Romanticism, such as Kleist and Holderlin. A more technical reason for the long delay in giving Death's Jest-Book to the world, however, was Beddoes's desire to make it a real stage play, to be acted in a theatre. True, there was an audience for verse tragedies in his time—Keats even had a notion that Otho the Great would make money—but it is hard to see how Death's Jest-Book could have succeeded on the stage. Yet, before we assign Beddoes to that unhappy, obsessed, and somewhat masochistic band of modern poets who have tried to "revive poetic drama," we should glance at the courage and common sense with which he defines his attitude: I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling fellow . . . . With the greatest reverence for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think we had better beget than revive—attempt to give the literature of this age an idiosyncrasy & spirit of its own, & only raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with.47

Beddoes had learned from the dramatists of Shakespeare's age how an intense concentration on scenes of horror and violence impregnates the

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tragic with a comic mood that T.S. Eliot calls "farce," and recognizes in The Jew of Malta.*8 Similarly, although Death's Jest-Book is subtitled "The Fool's Tragedy," its pervading tone is not so much tragic as a combination of the tragic and the comic which we may call the grotesque. What Beddoes was trying for was a tragic action based on the mood of the porter scene in Macbeth, or, again, the grave-digging scene in Hamlet in which Yorick, or at least his skull, appears. Perhaps it is really the discovery of the tragicomic grotesque that Beddoes is announcing in the verse letter referred to above, a discovery as crucial for him as that of the comic rhyme was for Byron. The root of the conception of the grotesque is the sense of the simultaneous presence of life and death. Ghosts, for example, are at once alive and dead, and so inspire the kind of hysteria that is expressed equally by horror and by laughter. The grotesque is also the expression in literature of the nauseated vision, man's contemplating of himself as a mortal body who returns to nature as "dung and death," in the phrase of East Coker [1. 46]. Death, so far as it is a physical process, is always firmly attached by Beddoes to complete dissolution and a return to the nitrogen cycle: "Turning to daisies gently in the grave."49 The most concentrated symbol of this aspect of the grotesque is perhaps the cannibal feast, the subject of two strategically placed lyrics in the play, one sung by Isbrand and the other by Wolfram, both in their character as fools. Isbrand's song "Harpagus, hast thou salt enough?" [4.4.63-98] deals with the theme, used by Seneca in Thyestes and imported into Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, of serving up an enemy's children to him as food, traditionally the most shocking of all tragic themes, and therefore close not only to tragedy but to "farce," in Eliot's sense. The other song uses the slightly less nauseating theme of ravens eating dead bodies: the ravens, however, are called Adam and Eve [5.4.95-118]. Other similar images evoke a vision of nature as a vast cannibal banquet of the same kind, a Hieronymus Bosch landscape in which men turn into animals and animals into men. As Isbrand says: Some one of those malicious Gods who envy Prometheus his puppet show have taught all confounded sorts of malcontent beasts, saucy birds and ambitious shell-fish, and hopping creatures of land and water, the knack of looking human to the life. How? is the mystery of the cookerybook. [1.1.116-20]

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The conception of the grotesque, and more particularly the conception of death as fool, takes us back to the practice of medieval and Renaissance courts of collecting fools, dwarfs, cripples, and the like to serve the purpose of a memento mori. Man is the only animal that knows he is going to die: this consciousness is now regarded as the source of anxiety (Angst), and hence, usually, as something feared and to be avoided, even (if not especially) in thought. Elaborate defence mechanisms against the awareness of death are among the commonest reactions to the human situation: one of the most elaborate is the associating of death with dignity or purity, as in the description of the death of Little Nell. The insistence on the grotesque was not much liked in Beddoes's day: one thinks of Bagehot's somewhat prissy comments on the grotesque in Browning,50 and of the resentment aroused by the appearance of the same theme in Beddoes's great contemporary Edgar Allan Poe. He who could write King Pest, said the horrified Stevenson, had ceased to be a human being.51 But Beddoes is a portent of a change in sensibility, also marked by the absorption of Poe into Baudelaire, which regards the grotesque as exuberant rather than "morbid." All genuine humour in one sense is gallows humour, because humour begins in the accepting of the limits of the human condition. The desire for knowledge may begin as a revolt against the consciousness of death, but being directed toward the conquest of the unknown and mysterious, and the ultimate unknown mystery being death, the goal of the impulse to know becomes the same as its source. In a world where the process of living is the same thing as the process of dying, knowledge interpenetrates with the absurd; hence wisdom is identical with folly. "He who hath no leaven of the original father Donkey in any corner of him," says a "zany" named Homunculus Mandrake, who supplies some ghoulish comic relief in the play, "may be an angel, black, white or piebald: he has lost title to humanity" [1.1.57-9]. We shall see later how important this antagonism to "angelism" is in the argument of the play. What is distinctive and most original about Beddoes's version of the grotesque is his realization that normal waking consciousness is a deliberately chosen point of view, and that other points of view are conceivable. If life interpenetrates with death, then sanity interpenetrates with insanity, and waking with dreaming. To explore such a theme a poet needs what Beddoes, alone of the great English Romantics, had: the distinctively modern quality of fantasy. To come back to Death's Jest-Book

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as a stage play, Beddoes saw clearly that tragedy could not be permanently "revived" except in a grotesque, and consequently antiheroic, context. To attempt a play in which death has the role of jester makes Beddoes a precursor of the theatre of the absurd. It was hardly possible for Beddoes to create such a theatre in his time, but it is easiest to understand certain features of Death's Jest-Book in the light of later theatrical developments. The play begins with an epigraph from Aristophanes' Frogs, and The Frogs is perhaps closest of any earlier play to Beddoes in its portrayal of a world of the dead related to the world of life in a way that makes us wonder which is really which. Beddoes's characters live in a kind of subterranean world like that of Eliot's Waste Land, where the life of ordinary consciousness is, like the life of the isolated Ancient Mariner, a life in death, the cemetery of reality. The ship which carries the chief characters from Egypt to Germany is called the Ban's, the name of Charon's ferry boat in the underworld, and the fact that Isbrand and the Duke are both in disguise helps to emphasize the feeling that the actors are "hollow men," or shadows. Wolfram the ghost is no more but no less solid than the other characters; Ziba, the necromancer who is the Duke's servant, is said to have been found in the underworld, and Mandrake expresses the complementary view about living people: "there is many a fellow with broad shoulders and a goodly paunch who looks and behaves as if he were alive, although in soul and spirit he be three times more dead than salt fish in Lent" [2.2.111-14]. We are constantly in a twilight world between life and death, like the world of Beckett, or a world between physical objects and mysterious forces of which the objects are symbols, like the world of lonesco, or a world like the "Bardo" world between death and rebirth which Yeats imported from the Orient.52 One of the most haunting songs in the play is actually about reincarnation, in its grotesque form of rebirth into animals, and the three characters we meet in the first scene, Mandrake the zany, whose name of Homunculus suggests something deformed or dwarfish, the saintly Wolfram, and the court fool Isbrand, remind us of the approaching chaos of the end of Yeats's lunar cycle of which "Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents."53 Yeatsian too is the sense of a world moving from life to death interpenetrating with another world moving in the reverse direction through dreams, in a continuous weaving shuttle or "double gyre." The characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, however melancholy and withdrawn in temperament they may be, are, we said earlier,

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always essentially related to a society. But the characters in Beddoes are essentially lost in themselves, like the characters in Chekhov or Strindberg. One occasionally feels, perhaps, that, as often in Dickens, the complicated plot is not the natural narrative sequence of the action, but a force externally applied to keep the action moving and interrelated. The characters are not acting out what they are but are being made to do things, like a social gathering organized into games and charades instead of being left to conversation. We shall return to this point, but we have to recognize that this movement of spasmodic and galvanized action, of characters driven into complications of incident by their passions as helplessly as inanimate objects, is a part of Beddoes's conception of the play, and of human action in general. It is connected too with a philosophical cast of mind which reminds us of Seneca, especially in the way that Beddoes associates heroism more with consciousness than with action. It is the mind that triumphs or gets defeated rather than the will, even when the character is pre-eminently a man of action, as the Duke is. We are still in the Romantic area where the poetic imagination is the real centre and the hero is projected from it. Beddoes is Senecan too in the way that a uniform rhetorical texture seems to obliterate most of the differences in the speaking idioms of the characters. Part of this is a melodramatic tendency which Beddoes shares with most of the tragic drama of his time, and which shows itself in the creation not of individual but of romantic and stylized characters: stock heroes and villains and heroines and comic servants. Such characters are archetypes in a Jungian sense, with the glow of projection around them: Sibylla, for instance, the heroine, is a Jungian anima-figure, as Ziba, the Duke's slave, is a Jungian "shadow." In a sense the Romantic rejection of the social process as the centre of human reality, already mentioned, would, carried to its logical limits, make any original drama except some form of the drama of the absurd ultimately impossible. The curious treatment of historical period in Death's Jest-Book is interesting and typical. The action of the play is said to take place in the thirteenth century, although the use of the danse macabre brings it closer to the fifteenth: it occasionally sounds rather like an Everyman rewritten by Dunbar. For it was when the medieval world began to break up that the danse macabre became popular, partly as a form of social protest. Death the leveller, who came equally to emperor and clown, was the only visible democrat, the only effective reminder of human equality. Beddoes's political sympathies, which were liberal by

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British standards and practically revolutionary by Continental ones, are consistent with his treatment of death. But the real setting is simply Romantic Gothic, and its atmosphere is not that of a definite period of the past, but of a historical essence suspended in time, like the curious Roman-Renaissance background of Shakespeare's Cymbeline. There are some deliberate anachronisms, references to Columbus and to English critics, and Mario, the blind man who kills Isbrand, has "seen" the assassination of Julius Caesar, perhaps not wholly in imagination. People move about with the dignity, passion, and rhetoric of a generalized traditional past: the absence of any definite historical community is one of the things that create the sense of something alive and dead at the same time. The feeling is similar to the later romances of William Morris and the Celtic twilight period of Yeats, except that there is much less sense of subjectivity: Beddoes differs from them somewhat as Strindberg differs from Maeterlinck. The tendency to fragmentation in Beddoes's work generally is another significant feature. We may sometimes wonder whether Beddoes, like Goethe,54 was less of a serious dramatist than a great lyrical poet who was primarily interested, not in the overall dramatic structure, but in decentralized emotional foci, especially those of the interspersed songs. The lyrical element in the play actually increased as Beddoes went on revising it: some of the finest of the songs are later additions. Further, death is the fool, and one of the functions of the fool is to act as a "touchstone," whose jokes indicate something central in the characters of others. Death as fool is a touchstone in this way: everyone dies, as he has lived, in a way distinctive of himself. The speech uttered at the point of death in a tragedy is often a character's "signature" speech, summing up what is most profoundly characteristic of him. This principle of the signature in the death speech is particularly clear not only in Shakespeare's tragedies but in The Duchess of Mai ft, where everyone who dies says something essential to the understanding of his or her character in the final words. Often in Beddoes, most remarkably in a fragment called The Last Man, and again in the last scene with Sibylla in Death's Jest-Book, the dramatic action leads up to, or even seems a mere pretext for, a monologue uttered at the point of death. Perhaps Beddoes's real form, so far as it was dramatic, was less the stage play than the kind of near-death monologue represented by Browning's Bishop Orders His Tomb, Eliot's Gerontion, or Tennyson's Ulysses. We have several times referred to Eliot, whom Beddoes resembles in

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the way in which he combines a close study of Jacobean dramatists with an ingenuity of imagery that reminds us of Donne and the metaphysicals. Eliot's conception of unified sensibility is really a more complete and flexible version of Beddoes's grotesque. But the pectin, so to speak, that coagulated Eliot's style was a colloquial element derived from French symboliste poets and applied to a sense of ironic contrast between a glamorous past and a squalid present. Such an element is related to content: it demands contemporary themes where the presence of the past is part of the irony. One can see Beddoes on the verge of discovering this combination of styles, in some of the deliberately anachronistic passages in the play. But he was too close to the Romantic movement not to adhere in the main to a more conventionally poetic diction: he is even Romantic enough occasionally to distrust the metaphysical and intellectual aspect of his own imagery, and to compare his style, to his own disadvantage, with the true voice of feeling in Shelley.551 do not wish to suggest that Beddoes was an Eliot manque: far from it. But he was a poet of brilliant fragments and powerfully suggestive torsos of unfinished plays, and perhaps his genius was pulling him also in the direction of the kind of epic of creative fragmentation represented by The Waste Land. In his dramatic criticism Eliot remarks how the signature speech in Shakespeare, not necessarily the death speech but any speech in which the character is acting as his own best chorus, like the "tomorrow" speech of Macbeth, throws us more intensely into the dramatic action instead of withdrawing us from it.56 But although such speeches help to integrate the drama in Shakespeare, they seem to have a tendency to disintegrate it in Beddoes; and even in Eliot himself the detached monologue of Prufrock or Gerontion seems better adapted to the creating of memorable characterization than the more voluntarily constructed stage plays. In any work of fiction there are two reasons why one episode succeeds another episode. One reason is that it is logically the next episode in the plot: the other is that the author wants it to come next. In most Classical dramas which have held the stage there is a plot constructed with sufficient objectivity to enable the dramatist to project his own sense of sequence through it. Such a plot is the "soul" of the action, in Aristotle's phrase,57 a kind of counter-soul to the poet, and it belongs to an aspect of literature in which the poet is, so to speak, the secretary or recorder of the social process, and is not thinking of his own creative power as itself the centre of that process. From the Romantic movement on, the author's

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desire to have a certain episode come next may be independent of the requirements of the plot; or the plot may disappear in favour of a sequence depending solely on the author's will. This purely thematic, rather than fictional, type of episodic sequence is often rationalized as being like that of a dream, as in Strindberg's Dream Play, although the construction of that play is not really dreamlike. Or it may be said to be like that of a pointless and absurd universe, where everything is inconsequential, but this again is a rationalization of the fact that the dramatist wants it that way. In Death's Jest-Book one has a feeling that the complex plot is not the inevitable form of what Beddoes has to say, but a separable artefact, and that he did not sufficiently realize that the plot was an obstacle to his dramatic utterance. This is a question of technique which strikes its roots into the centre of Romanticism, and we shall return to it in discussing the plotless narratives of Shelley and Keats. In his characterization, however, as we noted, Beddoes takes a freer hand, and creates not fully realized people, but functional archetypes, that is, characters who illustrate what he has to say rather than what the plot demands that they do. It is natural that the sense of a hidden identity between the inner life of man and the organic processes of nature, the natura naturans, should have been accompanied by a good deal of quasiscientific and pseudo-scientific speculation about the new kinds of knowledge that an apprehension of such an identity would reveal. We noticed in the previous chapter how in "Gothic" fiction many ancient superstitions—the making of homunculi, the conjuring of spirits, vampirism, and the like—took on a new significance as symbolizing the kind of knowledge, whether fascinating or merely sinister, that man might obtain through his renewed contact with the mysteries of nature. Such figures as the mysterious alchemist and mad scientist began to become popular around the end of the eighteenth century, and have continued to be so ever since. The first speaker in Death's Jest-Book is Homunculus Mandrake, to whom we have several times referred, who announces that he is going to abandon folly as a profession, thereby rejecting "all sober sense" [1.1.5], and pursue wisdom, in such guises as the philosopher's stone and the ointment of invisibility. His studies do not appear to be very fruitful: perhaps this is reflected in the fact that the two lively songs, Whoever has heard of Saint Gingo and Wee, wee taylor, are both parodies of fertility. But still he does illustrate something of Blake's aphorism, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."58 The fool in Shakespeare often represents a spirit of mock logic, presenting plausible arguments and pseudo-syllogisms and paradoxes which his patrons en-

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courage him to "make good." Similarly, Mandrake explains how superstition and the sense of mystery have defined the essentially human quality of folly, and how with the advance of enlightenment, as mystery recedes, each man tends to carry his own death fool around with him, in the form of a Mephistophelian spirit of denial: O world, world! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert too wise; and now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall our grandchildren say, till Master Merriman's kingdom was broken up: now is every man his own fool, and the world's cheerless. [1.1.40-5]

Other versions of the last three words are "Fate for us all" and "the world's sign is taken down."59 Mandrake, a lively person exploring death (his continuous vitality is much insisted on) is a contrast to Ziba the necromancer, who is moving in the opposite way, from death to life, and whose crucial act is to raise the avenging spirit of the dead Wolfram. The Ziba-Mandrake contrast is repeated, on a much larger scale, by the contrast of Wolfram and the Duke. The Duke, Melveric, is a remarkable creation, very like the successful rulers of Shakespeare. He has a deep sense of political responsibility, and has the ruthlessness that goes with success in action. He controls rebellion by a skilful use of disguise and spying, and with the infallible sense of timing that is characteristic of the successful ruler. He is constantly engaged in direct action, but his engagement is at the same time a profound detachment. His is the courage of the born leader who attracts devotion from his followers because he can suggest that he has no need of it, and yet his very selfsufficiency represents something that they profoundly do need. The successful ruler's mind is always inscrutable, but the Duke gives us a hint of the kind of the strength that there is in it: It is this infinite invisible Which we must learn to know, and yet to scorn, And, from the scorn of that, regard the world As from the edge of a far star. [4.1.15-18]

We almost forget his hideous crimes and watch him sympathetically, feeling that at the end the citizens of Miinsterberg are right in preferring him to Isbrand. It is typical of such a man that he should live outside of himself, so to speak, in the present action, avoiding the reflectiveness

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that turns one to the past or the future. As he says to his son: Think of now. This Hope and Memory are wild horses, tearing The precious now to pieces. [4.2.148-50]

It is also typical of a person whose real life is in his actions that whenever he does reflect he should become the blackest of pessimists. As soon as his world is separated from him and becomes objective, it turns into hell. When he reflects, the horror of the past and the nothingness of the future come crowding in on him and annihilate the exuberant rhythm of present action: The look of the world's a lie, a face made up O'er graves and fiery depths; and nothing's true But what is horrible. [4.1.7-9]

And yet at the same time a nihilism of spirit is always with him: this is symbolized by Wolfram's haunting of him. When Wolfram first appears he reacts with great courage, saying that he refuses to believe what is in front of him and threatening to turn Wolfram into "my fool, ghost, my jest and zany" [4.1.42], in the tonality of the central death-fool theme. But he is entirely unable to avert Wolfram's appearance, partly because he is already possessed by death. The heroine Sibylla is first introduced to us as essentially a creation of the Duke's, who has raised her out of prison and given her her first glimpse of her brave new world. He talks of taking her home and bestowing her on some lover destined for her, but as soon as the destined lover turns up in the person of Wolfram, the Duke forgets his generosity and begins to hate Wolfram. The implication is that what he loves is less Sibylla than something in himself that he can make Wolfram a sacrifice to. Later, as mentioned, Sibylla is carried off to the underworld by Wolfram while the Duke turns to seek his own underworld bride, his buried wife, who, being naturally older than Sibylla, is something of a Demeter to her Proserpine.60 In his brooding over her grave the Duke reminds us a little of the old man in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale who keeps begging his mother Earth to readmit him to her body. Isbrand is the chief spokesman for the death-fool equation, and, being disguised as a fool, he is, for most of the play, closer to the human sense of the identity of wisdom and folly. He is more reflective than the Duke

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by temperament, partly because his mind, being engaged in plotting revenge, is thrown forward to the future. Like Poe's Hop-Frog, he is a jester whose disguise will make possible a revenge which will be an epiphany of death:61 as he says in one of several passages which associate the tolling of funeral bells with the bells of the fool's cap: "I shall triumph like Jupiter in my fool's cap, to fetch the Duke and his sons to Hell, and then my bells will ring merrily, and I shall jest more merrily than now: for I shall be Death the Court-fool" [2.2.143-6]. His revenge is deflected, however, by his misuse of the success of his political conspiracy against the Duke. Once in power, the cloud of his revenge anxiety lifts, and he feels in himself the same exhilaration in ruthless action that the Duke felt. Unlike the Duke, however, he tends to intellectualize it in a Nietzschean superman philosophy, dramatizing himself as a self-surpassing hero who is "tired of being no more than human" [4.4.189]: It was ever My study to find out a way to godhead, And on reflection soon I found that first I was but half created; that a power Was wanting in my soul to be its soul, And this was mine to make. Therefore I fashioned A will above my will, that plays upon it, As the first soul doth use in men and cattle. [5.1.47-54]

He speaks well and convincingly, but he has lost his sense of irony, and is betraying the essential humanity in himself which his fool's role symbolized. Hence he is falling into the attitude of mind that he hated in the Duke, though without the Duke's sense of detachment about doing a job that he neither likes nor dislikes. Isbrand and the Duke are both quixotic characters, men trying to be angels or gods, and consequently they are arbitrary rulers, pulling away from the democracy that death the leveller represents. The link between them is expressed by Isbrand when he speaks of doing with his ambition what the Duke tried to do with his wife: The tools I've used To chisel an old heap of stony laws, The abandoned sepulchre of a dead dukedom, Into the form my spirit loved and longed for;

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A Study of English Romanticism Now that I've perfected her beauteous shape, And animated it with half my ghost; Now that I lead her to our bridal bed . . . [5.1.13-19]

The exceptional person is exceptionally isolated, and may in himself be a force for exceptional good or evil: as Isbrand says to himself when plotting revenge: Art thou alone? Why, so should be Creators and destroyers. [1.1.315-16]

But of the three "brothers" (for Wolfram and the Duke are spoken of as blood brothers), only Wolfram, with his gentle and forgiving spirit, so compassionate that he even refrains from haunting the Duke until compelled to do so, achieves a genuinely human combination of detachment and engagement. The interpenetration of life and death, therefore, so central in Beddoes's imagery, is not quite the same thing as the interpenetration of good and evil. We have already referred to the significance of Byron in popularizing a new sense of moral ambiguity: the sense of the curse of genius, the isolation caused by the possession of greater powers than ordinary. In Byron this theme is treated more or less aesthetically: that is, it is seen from a distance, and we can read about the Corsair's one virtue and thousand crimes without being troubled by what the characters in The Playboy of the Western World felt to be an important distinction after they had experienced both: the distinction between "a gallous story and a dirty deed."62 This aesthetic approach to the moral complexity of the human situation is reflected in Byron's style. Byron himself was a witty, sociable, extroverted poet of great common sense and (much the same thing) relatively few anxieties, hence it was easy for him to adopt, in Don Juan, a persona of detached ironic amusement. At the same time he could project the Byronic hero, as a kind of demonic shadow of himself, into his tales and tragedies, including Childe Harold. But to have identified the two would have destroyed his sense of identity, and he never achieved or even attempted the fusion of the two moods in the grotesque as Beddoes did (except perhaps in the last canto of Don Juan, and there only on an Ingoldsby-Legends level).63 Beddoes's grotesque is thus an inseparable part of a less aesthetic and more existential approach than Byron's, an approach which naturally ensured that he would never be, like Byron, a popular poet. For Beddoes,

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we are plunged into a world which, in spite of all the violence and irony, is still a world of morally significant choices: I know the moment: 'tis a dreadful one, Which in the life of every one comes once; When for the frighted hesitating soul High heaven and luring sin with promises Bid and contend. [1.2.367-71]

This is the Duke talking himself into murdering Wolfram, and it is clear that Beddoes understands what some philosophers of resolute decision and Augenblick have not understood: that most resolute decisions are perverse and that a philosophy founded on the conception of resolute decision is off its head.64 The real resolute decision is much more likely to be a refusal to act rather than an action, like Wolfram's renunciation of revenge. This is a point that we shall find more fully developed in Shelley, from whom Beddoes partly derived it. At the moment when the Duke determines on Wolfram's death he says: Then Amen is said Unto thy time of being in this world. [1.2.307-8]

The words "being," "time," and "world" appear together at least three times in Death's Jest-Book, and there are many passages, here and elsewhere in Beddoes, where we have one or two of them, along with some synonym of the others. Being, in Beddoes, refers primarily to an eternity beyond death, a "great round Ever" [4.4.48] or ground of reality out of which both life and death emerge. What we see, the "world," we see as we see the moon, with only its lit-up half turned to us. In The Second Brother eternity is described under the figure of the ouroboros, the worldserpent whose tail of death and crown of life meet together, when the death-figure Marcello meets the life-figure Orazio: Look you, the round earth's sleeping like a serpent Who drops her dusty tail upon her crown Just here. [1.1.143-5]

Eternity, which includes both life and death, is the world of our full

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identity. To be born into an individual life and consciousness is therefore to be thrown into an unbalanced state, "excepted from eternity" [2.2.37!, as Sibylla says, and the proper function of death is to recover the balance. In a figure which goes back as far as the Presocratic philosopher Anaximander, one dies to pay the debt to nature incurred by being born, to make "amends" (Sibylla's word [1.2.185]) f°r having been an individual. Consciousness, then, is a kind of withdrawal from being, a death principle which fulfils itself by possessing death. The death speech of the heroine of the fragmentary Last Man, already mentioned, speaks of death as a kind of flight of the alone to the alone, where the individual becomes a universe in himself, a microcosm of the actual universe, and so attains a genuine sense of being at the centre of reality: And thou the sum of these, nature of all, Thou providence pervading the whole space Of measureless creation; thou vast mind All hail! I too am an eternity; I am an universe . . . 'Round and around the curvous atmosphere Of my own real existence I revolve, Serene and starry with undying love. I am, I have been, I shall be, O glory! An universe, a god, a living Ever.65 {Dies.}

It appears, then, that birth is a shifting of the centre from the universe to the individual ego. To be born is to acquire a lost soul: everybody therefore has a lost soul, and the important thing is to make sure that it gets lost. The crimes, first of the Duke, then of his son Athulf, and the hybris of Isbrand after his revolt, show that they are clinging to this lost soul, and seeking identity through it. Hence, though in one sense they die in the moment of their crimes, in another sense they are really trying to resist the surrendering act of death, trying, once again, to be gods or angels or demons in an egocentric eternity. Wolfram and Sibylla, on the other hand, understand that "It is the earth that falls away from light" [2.2.40] (elsewhere "day"), and for them death is the dragon guarding the treasure of identity. For those who achieve that identity, death is the death of death. Time is what enables being to appear as the world, and the world is

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eternity so far as we see it extended in space. But time itself is also death and illusion, the power that carries everything away into nothingness. The appearance of time in our world is symbolized in Beddoes, as it so often is in Romantic and modern poets, by a river flowing to the sea of eternity. As the world is what we see of eternity, the rest of eternity, the world of death that we cannot see and so assume to have been annihilated, is mostly the part of it that has been carried away by time. Many of Beddoes's most remarkable images are based on the sense of the liquidness of life, of the living body as a continuous stream which is never the same twice. Athulf says of Amala, for instance: but when she moves, you see, Like water from a crystal overfilled, Fresh beauty tremble out of her and lave Her fair sides to the ground. [2.3.169-72]

The river reflects the world above it, as the pool did Narcissus, and the preoccupation of life with death is symbolized by reflection and mirrors. Thus it is said of knights in armour that their "shields, like water, glassed the soul-eyed maidens" [2.3.6]. Echoes of the Biblical deluge and of the Red Sea that hungers for ghosts, referred to by Mandrake at the beginning of the play, usually linger around such passages. In one extraordinary fragment, beginning "And many voices marshalled in one hymn,"66 there appears to be an association between the vision of eternity and the Israelites moving through the sea. The contrasting images are those of mountains, towers, and rocks that stand in the sea and refuse to be dissolved: they represent the kind of criminal titanism that tries to escape from the surrender of death by recklessness and despair. Thus Athulf, after he murders his brother, feels like "a wild old wicked mountain in the sea" [4.3.383], and the Duke is told that for his murder of Wolfram: like an old, haunted mountain, Icy and hoary, shalt thou stand 'mid life.67

Similarly, the common Romantic image of the boat tossing on water is linked by Beddoes with life journeying to its ultimate fulfilment through death. Sibylla links the image of the resisting mountain to a Lohengrinlike picture of her ghost lover:

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A Study of English Romanticism Speak as at first you did; there was in the words A mystery and music, which did thaw The hard old rocky world into a flood, Whereon a swan-drawn boat seemed at my feet Rocking on its blue billows. [4.2.48-52]

The "world," of course, as already said, is the visible or spatial world which conceals a dark invisible world on the side turned away from us, the kingdom of the black sun beyond. Long before we rejoin it we are aware of the influence of the death world on us. It seeps into our lives in the form of sleep and dream, and brings a refreshment and strengthening to us in a way that suggests that it is something considerably more than a mere negation. Sibylla says after a night's sleep: Deeply have I slept. As one who doth go down unto the springs Of his existence and there bathed, I come Regenerate up into the world again. [1.2.64-7]

This takes us back to the traditional image of the underground oracle, as well as to the Kubla Khan imagery of subterranean rivers. The world of sleep and dream is thus also the world from which the poet and the prophet draw their revelations, the poet being in our day the chief transmitter of "the prophecies" which flicker up Out of the sun's grave underneath the world.68

Hence the poet is typically in the position of Wolfram, or of Samuel in the Witch of Endor story, who has kept a communication line open to this lower world.69 In another poem Beddoes thus describes a poet: the truth was restless in him, And shook his visionary fabrics down, As one who had been buried long ago And now was called up by a necromancer To answer dreadful questions.70

The voice of this buried world has the peculiarly ambivalent quality of

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the grotesque: it is at once oracular and witty, inspiring awe and yet provoking the laughter of the intelligence. Strange rumours come to us from this world, rumours of some indefinitely repeated process going on in both nature and human life, of rebirth and reincarnation, of man's present body as a seed of the tree of ghosts, of dreams as the spirits of the dead living in us. Simple and primitive societies, one character in the play suggests, are more apt to be haunted by the dead because the dead of such societies are lonely, and make their way back to a community of greater cheerfulness. As time goes on the dead become the majority—migravit ad plures was a stock phrase about one recently dead—and great cities have been formed in the dead world, so we may expect that "There will be no more haunting" [3.3.396!. In proportion as death has become populous, it has become the past of which our own knowledge is a recollection. It is the realm of the permanent achievements of mankind, which are not lost in time as they appear to be, but are simply carried away by time. Thus the world of death acquires through time a kind of moral stability which helps to balance our own lives. It is an old assumption of tragedy that time—that is, death—will discover crimes and that revenge may come through ghosts. In ordinary life conscience and remorse are evidence of the permanence of what has been done in the vanished past: of conscience Isbrand says that it "doth prattle with the voices of the dead through the speaking trumpet of the winds" [2.2.119-20]. Similarly, a man may conceal a crime from the world of the living, as the Duke did his murder of Wolfram, but such a crime makes one visible to the world of the dead, hence the tradition of murderers being haunted by their victims. Athulf, after his murder of his brother, understands how a "mortal" sin is in fact a death of the soul, killing the sinner without making any apparent change in his status: I am unsouled, dishumanized, uncreated; My passions swell and grow like brutes conceived I break, and magnify, and lose my form. And yet I shall be taken for a man, And never be discovered till I die. [4.3.379-80, 392-4]

This is the end, for Athulf, of what we have been calling angelism, the attempt to dominate one's world by a self-transcending will instead of

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admitting one's limitations, and so persisting in folly. Wolfram, who suffers but does not inflict injustice, is emancipated into the world of pure death: Isbrand, because he is vowed to conspiracy and revenge, acts as a nemesis or agent of dark unseen forces that are nevertheless on the side of a kind of rough justice in human affairs. Revolutions may also be uprisings of the same hidden force which makes for a renewed order, and are described, as is Isbrand's revenge, in the imagery of volcanoes and earthquakes, an energy pushing up from below. A question has already arisen: if death so interpenetrates with life, and if there is such variety of good and evil in life, is there any variety in death as well? Death seems too unvarying a category to be more than accidentally connected with life. It is alike the punishment of the villain and the reward of his victim, the end of revenge on Melveric and the release of Sibylla. Beddoes, who is not working out his poems within any definite structure of doctrine, religious or otherwise, does not give a very clear answer to this. But it does seem that there is some difference between death and deadness. Of Wolfram, Sibylla says (notice the three words again, with "motion" substituted for "time"): This utterance and token of his being His spirit hath let fall, and now is gone To fill up nature and complete her being. The form, that here is fallen, was the engine, Which drew a great motion of spiritual power Out of the world's own soul, and made it play In visible motion, as the lofty tower Leads down the animating fire of heaven To the world's use.71

For Wolfram, therefore, death seems to be a reintegration. But the deadness of spirit that the Duke intermittently feels is rather a feeling of being cut off: I do begin to feel As if I were a ghost among the men, As all I loved are; for their affections Hang on things new, young, and unknown to me: And that I am is but the obstinate will Of this my hostile body. [4.1.67-72]

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The play ends with the identity of life and death expressed in its most complete antithesis. Wolfram is a ghost who has unwillingly come back into life, bringing with him the love and the justice that proceed from the invisible world; the Duke is a living man who is at the same time eternally dead, and who, like the Wandering Jew, cannot find the peace of real death. To the ignorant, death is solemn, the king of terrors; for the Duke, it is a repose denied him; to Wolfram, it is the supreme joke, the sudden emergence of what we ordinarily keep repressed and yet know to be really there. It is a practical joke in bad taste, like Yorick's practical joke on the grave-digger, but it establishes the limits of what is human, and makes those who attempt the inhuman, the subhuman, or, like Isbrand, the superhuman, look like unsuccessful fools. What Beddoes contributes to Romanticism is, perhaps, the most complete and searching poetic reaction to the Romantic sense of the limitations of ordinary experience. The shadow of Kant's riddle72 falls across the whole Romantic movement. The world that we see and understand is not the noumenon, the world in itself, but only the world as phenomenon, as adapted to our categories of perception and reasoning. The inference is that real reality, so to speak, cannot be known, at least not by the subject-object relationship. The proud boast of the subjective reason, that a perfect being must exist because the mind can conceive the possibility of its existence, no longer carries much conviction. The Romantic sense of something outside ordinary experience which nevertheless completes experience, symbolized by "nature" in Wordsworth and elsewhere, must be something mysterious, because it cannot be directly apprehended. It is obvious that the Kantian distinction affords a justification for imaginative, as distinct from rational, knowledge, and for symbolism. The phenomenon, which represents a reality that it does not exhaust, is a symbol of what is really there, but it is a fixed and invariable symbol, perceived involuntarily and unalterable as a perception. Poetry creates for the imagination a flexible language of symbols, and expands our range of experience accordingly, in a way that sense and reason cannot do. On this basis, various poetic and philosophical reactions to the Kantian position are possible. For some, the noumenal world is a world of mystical identity. I know the table I write on as a phenomenon, but if I could know the table as it really is in itself I would be that table. For others, we are related to the noumenal world by our existence, and we experience noumenal reality through the engagements of our existence. For Carlyle,

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more specifically, the noumenal world is the naked world under the clothes of phenomena which both conceal it and reveal it. But Beddoes, identifying this invisible and underlying reality with death, seems, if I may put it so, to have hit a bullseye that many of his contemporaries saw but tried not to hit. He anticipates later preoccupations with the relation of being and nothingness more directly than most Romantics. When Sartre tells us that man essentially is, not what he has done, but what he is about to make of himself, his life thus moving onward to an identity which can be reached only by death,73 he is formulating the same kind of paradox as Beddoes. The feeling that the moment of death is also a crisis of identity is probably as old as human consciousness, and certainly as old as written literature. But it starts out on a new and lonelier journey with the Romantic movement, a journey with a continuous sense that, as Eliot says, the moment of death is every moment, and that absurdity is the only visible form of the meaning of life. It is Beddoes, as far as English literature is concerned, who brings us most directly into contact with the conception of the absurd in a way that permits of compassion but excludes self-pity.

Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary We have isolated one element in the Romantic revolution as the recovery by man of a good deal of what he formerly projected on God. Creative power, the desire for liberty, and the capacity to make myths and to design the structures of civilization are increasingly regarded as originating in the human mind. One would expect, then, the growth of a secular humanism in poetry, where man is seen as building a better world for himself out of his own resources. Central among these resources would be science, man's new direct knowledge of his environment, and technology, his even newer ability to apply it. We do in fact get a certain amount of such literature, mainly in France, where the social effects of the French Revolution naturally centred. But we noted that there seems to have been, since the Romantic movement at least, a persistent separation of the scientific vision of nature, the informing language of which becomes increasingly mathematical rather than verbal, from the existential myth to which the poetic vision belongs. Poetry speaks, not the language of fact or reason, but the language of concern, of hopes and fears and desires and hatreds and dreams. Poets frequently announce that they are

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about to make a functional use of contemporary science and technology and get into the modern world, but the tolerance of poetry for this kind of language seems to be limited. If any poet in English literature could have used the language and conceptions of science successfully, it would surely have been Shelley. An unusual sense of nature as subject to law and orderly process, a precision of imagery (when he wanted to be precise), and a command of abstract and philosophical language are among his obvious qualities. Furthermore, one of his earliest intuitions was that the idea of a personal God, considered as creator of both man and the natural environment, was a notion projected from, and thereby perverting, the creative power of the human mind. Man is a myth-making as well as a tool-using animal, but constant vigilance is needed to make sure that he keeps control of what he makes. For it is with myths as it is with technology: just as man invents the wheel and then talks about a wheel of fate or fortune overriding everything he does, so he creates gods and then announces that the gods have created him. He makes his own creation, in short, a power to stop himself from creating. In The Revolt of Islam some sailors, agents of a tyrant, have abducted the heroine, who, doubtless estimating their intentions correctly, breaks into a harangue which covers most of the eighth canto, in which she explains how the conception of God arose from projection: What is that Power? Some moon-struck sophist stood Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood The Form he saw and worshipped was his own, His likeness in the world's vast mirror shown, [canto 8, st. 6]

Once they understand this, she remarks pointedly, their attitudes toward a number of other things will also change: Know yourselves thus! ye shall be pure as dew, And I will be a friend and sister unto you. [canto 8, st. 18]

In any case, a poet who devotes himself, as Shelley did, not merely to mythopoeic poetry but specifically to man's recovery of his own mythmaking powers, is bound to find his mythology consolidating on the figure of Prometheus, whose name traditionally means imagination ("fore-

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thought"), and who was martyred by the gods for his friendship to man. Similarly, Prometheus's deliverance is achieved when the projected Jupiter falls back into the cave of myths whence he originated, and becomes identical with his phantasm, in accordance with Prometheus's remark to the phantasm: as thou art must be He whom thou shadowest forth. [Prometheus Unbound, 1.1.246-7]

It is not surprising that Shelley's first major effort, Queen Mob, should be in large part an essay in versified scientism, celebrating the superseding of religion by a more rational and secular attitude. Yet Queen Mob is so obviously not on the direct path of Shelley's poetic development that we have to look further than the mere immaturity of the poem itself for the reasons. A personal God, it is true, has no status in the scientific vision: he is replaced by natural law, and natural law operates most freely in the world of the dead or inanimate. In the world of time and space, then, God is dead: he was of course never alive there, but any God who can die is much better dead. But what we are then left with is the scientific vision of law, in which the human mind confronts a subhuman world. It is in the realm of the automatic and predictable that science moves with most assurance, but human beings themselves clearly belong, at least in large part, to a different realm, and we can perceive nothing externally that is, to put it crudely, any better than we are. We may gain intuitions of a superhuman process which unites us with nature, but we do not perceive any such process as a conscious subject. What we perceive, or rather infer from what we perceive, is what Queen Mab, quite logically and consistently, leads up to: a vision of "Nature's [elsewhere "Necessity's"] unchanging harmony."74 But this gives us a view of the human situation which is very like an extremely rigorous Christian view, with nature substituted for God. Nature forms a harmonious order from which man alone is excluded. Man in his present state is the scapegoat or pharmakos of nature, the only unnatural being, and nothing can help him except reconciliation with nature. Nature's gospel is nature's law, which when accepted becomes freedom as well as necessity. As with more conventional creeds, the difficulty and complexity of regeneration is got around by being transferred to an anxiety symbol which substitutes for it. The eating of meat occupies the same place in Shelley's poem that similar fetishes do in

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institutional religion. Prometheus enters the footnotes to Queen Mab, where it is said that he "represents the human race/' but where he is bound down on the stems of vegetarianism, to misquote Blake.75 His theft of fire is said to symbolize the original sin of cooking meat, which, as the myth explains, turned out to be very bad for his liver. Queen Mab is going in the direction, not of a fuller humanism, but of what Blake calls "natural religion," a faith with necessity and law substituted for the will of a personal God, which would have all the fanaticism and intolerance of its Christian predecessor without any of the loopholes for the imagination that Christianity at its worst still provided. It would be, in the imagery of Prometheus Unbound, Jupiter made omnipotent by marriage to Thetis, whose name perhaps connects with ideas of the prescribed and ordained.76 One arrives at this sort of godless religion by maintaining the supremacy of the rational, or subject-object, view of the world. God, conceived as the creator of the natural order that we look at, vanishes into Necessity as soon as we do look at it. "The necessity of atheism," the subject of Shelley's earliest metaphysical speculation, takes us only as far as an atheism of necessity. The next step for Shelley was to relegate the subject-object view to a secondary position in the mind and incorporate it into a poetic or imaginative view. Philosophically, this step is associated by Shelley with a change from materialism, or whatever Queen Mab expounded, to the subjective idealism of Berkeley.77 Necessity's unchanging harmony may be regarded as the irreducible minimum of the human condition, the sense of order and regularity which is the foundation of life. It is, in Blake's phrase, a starry floor, not a ceiling.78 For a creative consciousness to identify the limit of its development with something essentially mindless would be the most pointless of self-humiliations. The vision of law in the external world is only part of a much larger vision. This larger vision is based, not on what we see and understand, but on what we want and do not want. It has two poles, a positive pole of desire, the vision of what man wishes to become, and a negative pole of repugnance, the vision of what man wants to escape from or annihilate. The positive pole is represented in Shelley chiefly by images of incredibly swift movement through air or water, often on "cars" or vehicles equipped with the symbolic equivalent of an internal combustion engine. There is something here that we notice elsewhere in Romanticism, a change in human sensibility which takes the form of an altering of proportions. Especially in America, cities and the settled countryside

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take on an increasingly geometrical form, and we realize that the visible form of civilization is changing from a proportion related to the human body to a proportion related to the mechanical extensions of the body. In Romantic music and poetry we begin to notice an inner propulsion that has something mechanical in it—though we must be careful not to use this word, in a metaphor popularized by Romanticism itself, as a merely pejorative term. This kind of propulsion comes into Wordsworth's Idiot Boy, Peter Bell, and The Waggoner, where we hear a good deal about flying boats. As the thief of fire, Prometheus of course has a technological side, and the sense that a rapidly stepped-up conquest of space is not far off in human destiny lurks in such poems as The Witch of Atlas, to say nothing of Prometheus Unbound itself. We understand Shelley very well when he says: Whoever should behold me now, I wist, Would think I were a mighty mechanist, Bent with sublime Archimedean art To breathe a soul into the iron heart Of some machine portentous, or strange gin, Which by the force of figured spells might win Its way over the sea, and sport therein. [Letter to Maria Gisborne, 11.15-21]

However, we should expect to find most Romantic poets very cautious, if not openly hostile, in their approach to such themes. Blake, for instance, uses a good deal of mechanical and technological imagery, but he emphasizes the sinister side of it: its connection with exploitation and alienation, its development of improved ways of killing people in vast numbers, its role in reinforcing brutally repressive regimes. An awareness of the same general kind, which, if not sinister, is at least extremely ambiguous, comes into De Quincey's powerful essay The English MailCoach. The mail coach is part of a big spider web of a central intelligence, a new kind of personality which is at once human and mechanical. As that it is partly demonic, a Juggernaut with a baleful dragon-eye, bearing news of victory and of death, which nearly crushes a helpless young couple, and stirs up in the poet the central anxiety dream, the dream which repeats the original fall of man. The sense of the new technology as demonic is connected with the sense of its aggressiveness. Man allies himself with the dead and mechanical in order to attack and conquer nature, which he is still thinking

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of as objective, as set over against him. It is not set over against him, however, but is part of himself, hence he is engaging in his old projecting game of enslaving himself to what he creates. Or, as Shelley says, "man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave."79 The automotive boats and unidentified flying objects in Shelley, on the other hand, represent rather a physical and mental identity with nature, where space is receding because the human mind and its powers are expanding. The swift vehicles are symbols of desire, and are swift because human emotions are swift: as the Spirit of the Hour says of his "coursers": I desire: and their speed makes night kindle; I fear: they outstrip the Typhoon. [Prometheus Unbound, 2.4.169-70] The same feeling comes into Shelley's natural imagery as well. In The Cloud, to take a familiar example, we feel that we ourselves are riding on the cycle of nature, participating in what might better be called its changing harmony; and similarly with the loving description in Prometheus Unbound of the spirits of the elements riding up through the water in bubbles and then going back again to repeat the process. We notice that in painting, as well as in poetry, a new sense of man's relation to nature is developing. With Rembrandt, painting reflects a culture in which the subject-object relation is primary: in his pictures we are looking at an objective order. Coleridge's conception of the artist imitating nature by identifying himself with the natura naturans or living process of nature, which we referred to in the first chapter, is implicit in his remarks on the painting of Washington Allston.80 The remarks have little to do with Allston, but, considered in connection with painting, have a good deal to do with the pictorial development which began with late Turner and carried on through the Impressionists. In such painting we are still in the area of representation, even of "realism," but it is a realism that renders a sense of rhythm and movement in nature, and that demands a physical sense of participating in this rhythm from us. In some of Shelley's colour fantasies something of the pictorial feeling of late Turner is anticipated: The point of one white star is quivering still Deep in the orange light of widening morn Beyond the purple mountains: through a chasm Of wind-divided mist the darker lake

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The negative or ironic pole of the poetic vision is the sense of nature as objective and separated from the consciousness, but looked at by the consciousness in the light of imagination and desire and not of reason. Seen by the reason as an objective order, nature makes rational sense. Seen by imagination, creativity, and desire, it makes no sense at all. It presents us with an endless expanse of mindlessness: where it is alive it is cruel; where it is dead it is empty. It presents us, therefore, with the sense of the anguished and the absurd. This is the inevitable consequence, for Shelley, of dropping the projected God of nature, and is foreshadowed in the notes to Queen Mob: "But if the principle of the universe be not an organic being, the model and prototype of man, the relation between it and human beings is absolutely none."81 In Prometheus Unbound we have again what we had in Queen Mob, man as the scapegoat of nature, the only power that resists Jupiter. But Shelley has reversed his earlier notion of seeking reconciliation with Jupiter. Prometheus is now the human mind confronting the objective world with its own desire, and Jupiter is the mental block which prevents man from trying to conceive and reshape a world beyond that order. The reason that man clings to the notion of a personal God in nature as an objective counterpart of himself is that, once this deity goes, he then confronts a moral chaos, an absurdity. To be aware of the creation, as it now is, is to be aware of anguish. In the notes to Queen Mob there occurs the extraordinary phrase, "The supereminence of man is like Satan's, a supereminence of pain,"82 and this is especially true of Prometheus. Yet pain is the condition which keeps Prometheus conscious, and consciousness is the only power that can be a threat to Jupiter. If man could lose his specifically human consciousness, he would also lose his specifically human pain and misery; but it would be a poor exchange. Prometheus Unbound is based on two contrasting visions of nature. The Jupiter death vision is the objective order perceived by what is in every sense of the word a subject. The source of all error in religion is the notion

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that this external order is a "creation." What it is is our own creation in a degenerate form. Through automatic and unquestioning habit, what we repeatedly see becomes familiar, and in proportion as it becomes familiar, the counterpart of what perceives it, it becomes first separate, then indifferent, then mindless, and finally a chaos. Genuine creation, or poetry, "creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration," as Shelley says in A Defence of Poetry.83 The fact that Jupiter's real impetus is toward chaos rather than order comes out in the moment of his fall: Let hell unlock Its mounded oceans of tempestuous fire, And whelm on them into the bottomless void This desolated world, and thee, and me. [3.1.74-7]

The human society of ordinary experience is a part of the Jupiter vision: it is founded on all the things we see in nature—cruelty, repression, the domination of evil will, and above all the inertia of habit, which appears in society as custom, the unthinking acceptance of what is there because it is there. Jupiter is inertia deified, and unites a submissive attitude to nature with a submissive social attitude, in which the symbolic bogies of Shelley, the King and Priest, arise because even degenerate Nature will not tolerate a vacuum. In Shelley, as in all revolutionary Romantics, society is liberated through the agency of another aspect of nature, the aspect we have associated with the sublime in the later eighteenth century; with participation in the power that links us to nature in Wordsworth; with the myth of Esau or Ishmael, the exiled and wandering but rightful heir, in Byronic fiction; and, later, with the world of the dead in Beddoes. We have now to see what its associations are in Shelley. Prometheus Unbound is a comedy in the sense that it ends happily with the freeing of the hero and the accompanying festivities of a new human order. In comedy the hero's love for the heroine normally wins out over the sinister and ridiculous characters who try to thwart it, of which the central one is usually a father-figure. Shelley's Jupiter, like the senex of so many comedies, has his own sexual ambitions, designed to annihilate those of the hero, but he is baffled in the moment of his apparent triumph. The imagery of Prometheus Unbound is of course not that of any comedy of manners, but it has some affinities with Shakespeare's roman-

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tic comedies. Shakespearean comedy, we said, begins with a world presented as a world of ordinary experience, often a court, with repressive characteristics usually attached to it. This world collides with another world associated with sleep, dream, magic, fairies, sexual desire, and a more direct contact with a physical nature unspoiled by human perversity. I call the latter world in Shakespeare, because it is so often a forest or pastoral landscape, the "green world," a phrase occurring in both Prometheus Unbound and Endymion (Beddoes, whose diction is habitually more abstract, speaks of "the green creation" in The Bride's Tragedy) .^ The victory of the green world in the comic action indicates that desire and love are not merely impotent expressions of a "pleasure principle" feebly struggling against reality, as in Freud, but mighty powers capable of subduing reality to themselves. Two features of Shakespearean comedy are particularly relevant to Shelley. First: in the traditional schema, unfallen nature, both human and physical, possesses a harmony which the nature we know has lost. This harmony is symbolized by the music of the spheres. The spheres of the planets are, in many versions of the Ptolemaic cosmos, guided by angelic intelligences. Below the lowest planet, the moon, comes the world of the four elements. These elements, of course, have no angels, but there are, in poetry and in some speculative thought, elemental spirits, who may be controlled by magic. As an art, magic, in poetry, symbolizes the regaining of a lost rapport with the "sublunary" part of the physical world, assuming that the magic is morally benevolent. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the fairies are expressly said to be spirits of the elements, whose dissension causes bad weather. Yet they are able to intervene in the actions of human beings too, their influence being in the direction of promoting true love and evading the harsh senex-centred laws of Athens. In The Tempest an entire society is recreated by Prospero's magic into a higher order of nature, largely through the agency of elemental spirits, Ariel in particular. What began as a shipwrecked group of clowns and gangsters in which "no man was his own" [5.1.213] ends in a brave new world, a society with its original structure intact, but permeated by a spirit of reconciliation. Shakespeare, however, is (at least in The Tempest) working with the older schema in which the higher level of nature is purely human. Ariel, not being human, cannot enter such a world, and has to be left to be free in his own element. In Prometheus Unbound there are a great many spirits, and a number of them are expressly connected with the elements. But in Shelley's Romantic cosmos there is no higher

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human order of nature from which Ariel is excluded. For Shelley the liberation of man and the liberation of nature are different aspects of the same thing, and emancipated man finds himself in a world of emancipated spirits whose poetic originals are clearly Ariel and Puck. Second: the green world of Shakespeare is a Dionysian world, a world of energy and exuberance. Even in some of the tragedies there is a similar kind of world, though in tragedy it loses out to its narrower and harsher rival. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the world of Queen Mab's dreams, the passion of the lovers, and the wild energy of Juliet's speech to the night are destroyed by the daylight feud, and in Antony and Cleopatra Mark Antony's extravagant vitality is contrasted with the calculated discipline of Rome, which in a tragic situation is certain to defeat it. Shelley's use of "Queen Mab" as a title for his first long poem indicates his affinity with this theme in Shakespeare, however little use he makes of Queen Mab herself. In Prometheus Unbound athe green world is not only a world of elemental spirits, but is explicitly Dionysian: the two "fauns" who watch the spirits playing like the released Ariel are followers of Silenus, and the entire drama gives us the sense of a prodigious repressed "enthusiasm" in nature, in the literal sense of a Dionysian divine presence, which is impatiently awaiting the signal of release. In comedy, again, the absurd or tyrannical characters who block the hero's marriage are upsetting the social order which the audience sees to be the right and proper one. Consequently, the comic action leads to a restoration of that order, which may be thought of as hypothetical or as preceding the action of the play. Similarly, the victory won by Prometheus over Jupiter is a victory over the kind of religion now associated with the names of Jehovah and Jesus, and a restoration of many of the elements of pre-Christian Greek culture. For Shelley, the canon of imaginative revelation was Greek rather than Hebrew. In a draft of A Defence of Poetry he says of the century preceding the death of Socrates: "It is as if the continent of Paradise were overwhelmed and some shattered crag remained covered with asphodel and amaranth which bear a golden flower."85 The phraseology transfers to Greece the orthodox Christian beliefs about the originality of Hebrew and Biblical traditions. We can see in many German Romantics how, as soon as the Christian Creator of nature begins to fade into projection, the Greek gods leap into an almost obsessive vitality, not as gods, but as images of a human wholeness and spontaneity which has been destroyed by self-consciousness. Shelley is the closest of all English poets to this "tyranny of Greece," as it has been

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called.86 Greek religion for Shelley was more flexible and less pedantic in imposing belief; it preserved the intuitive sense of identity with natural forces; its polytheism enabled the scientific and philosophical views of the world to develop independently. The climax of Greek culture, the age of Pericles, brought with it a belief in liberty, not, like the age of the New Testament, a belief in the necessity of submission to tyranny. The prospect of the political independence of Greece from Turkey thus seemed to Shelley to be a genuine form of the crusade, and it stirred up speculations in him about the world's great age beginning anew. The Wandering Jew, who enters Queen Mob and re-enters Hellas, is a symbol for Shelley of man enduring the tyranny of God until a better era dawns. For, according to Queen Mob, the Wandering Jew was cursed out of pure malice by a Christ who was only pretending to suffer on the cross. Here we touch on the feature of Shelley's thought that so delighted Yeats, the prophecy of a new religion "antithetical" to Christianity and reverting to many features of Greek thought and culture. Shelley's version of this new culture is, to speak plainly, much less vulgar than Yeats's: it does not rest on a facile cyclicism or rationalize everything brutal and degenerate in both Greek and modern culture as part of a "tragic" or "heroic" way of life that is to be reintroduced, for Yeats, by fascism. But still there are points in common, and Yeats was doubtless right in seeing in Shelley's Prince Athanase ("immortal"), with his mother and mysterious father, his tragic sense of life, and his courageous loyalty to the destroyed pagan faith, an aesthetic and "antithetical" counterpart to Christ, the tower under the moonrise being the antithesis of the cross under the sunset. Prince Athanase's literary ancestor is, as Yeats says, the pensive Platonist of Milton, reading Greek tragedies, pondering over what spirits, whether of the elements or not, may transcend the Christian cosmos, and eventually adopting a purely aesthetic religion of organ music and stained glass windows.87 Milton, naturally, drew his penseroso figure as the creature of a mood, not as the creator of reality, but for Romanticism both penseroso and allegro narrators create the worlds they are in, instead of merely responding to them, and hence are something much more significant than mere "humours." We shall meet this point again in Keats. In the original myth Prometheus was crucified by Zeus for not revealing a secret he held: that Zeus by marriage to Thetis would beget a son greater than himself. Eventually Prometheus did reveal the secret, was released, and Thetis was married off to a mortal, Peleus, their son being Achilles, who, as a warrior, was an agent of, not a threat to, Zeus's

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tyranny. In Shelley Jupiter announces the begetting of a Son who will make him omnipotent: the scene is intended to recall the parallel announcement by God the Father in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, along with its demonic counterpart, Satan's begetting of Death on a female Sin in the second. In the Christian myth, as Shelley reads it, the Father "redeems" man, that is, completes his ascendancy over him, by sending his Son to earth as a spy in disguise: Veiling His horrible Godhead in the shape Of man. [Queen Mob, canto 7,11.164-5!

From this pair proceeds a "Spirit" who dwells with man and helps to prevent him from doing anything dangerous. If we start with the real starting point for Shelley, man on the earth, this Christian Trinitarian myth goes into reverse.88 According to the notes to Queen Mob, there is no "creative Deity," but "the hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken."89 That is, the name God may legitimately be applied to whatever it is that identifies man and nature in a participating unity. This Spirit is the "Daemon of the World" of the salvaged portion of Queen Mob, and he enters Prometheus Unbound as Demogorgon. When Demogorgon rises from his cave he is transformed from a Spirit into a risen Son of Jupiter. Evidently the Son proceeds from the Spirit, not the other way round. But Demogorgon, in Yeatsian language, adopts the "antithetical" role of an Oedipus who destroys his father, not that of a "primary" Christ who obeys him. He is the successful Lucifer, the dispossessed elder son, who takes Jupiter back to the human imagination that gave birth to him. The starting point of most Romantic imagery about the spirit of the world or nature with whom man identifies himself is the speech of the Erdgeist near the beginning of Goethe's Faust. The Attendant Spirit of Comus, however, who comes from a higher region in an earlier structure of symbolism, also echoes through this speech of a Spirit in Shelley's unfinished drama: Within the silent centre of the earth My mansion is; where I have lived insphered From the beginning, and around my sleep Have woven all the wondrous imagery Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world.90

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If life is the dream of the Earth-Spirit, the poet is the interpreter of that dream, who creates for us a version of the world which is much closer to reality than the world we see. Unity with the Earth-Spirit is the primary or existential identity of man; poetry creates a secondary identity which has, in the words of the preface to Prometheus Unbound, "some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought."91 The vision of reality which emerges from the caves of the imagination in dreams, oracles, prophecies, and poems seems to us, from the point of view of ordinary, or Jupiter-dominated, experience, a futile and hopeless shadow-world, a Hades of gibbering bloodless bats. But that, in turn, is what our world is like from its point of view. According to the allegory of the cave in Plato, it is in ordinary experience that we find ourselves staring at the flickering shadows of an objective world which is the underworld of reality. The traditional Christian virtues are faith, hope, and love: of these, faith is the primary virtue, the response to God which enables the other two to develop. Love is the greatest of the virtues, and Christian love is love in the sense of agape or caritas, man's reproduction of the love that God has for him. In Shelley hope and love retain their place, but his refusal to regard faith as a virtue leads to some uneasy triads: we have "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem" in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty [1. 37] and "Hope, Love and Power" in Prometheus Unbound. For Shelley, love is the primary virtue, and it begins in the human soul. It is therefore, as mentioned, love in the sense of eros, the love of Plato's Symposium and Dante's Vita Nuova, a human love founded on the sexual instinct. The virtues in Shelley travel in the opposite direction from Christianity: virtue begins in love and flows through hope into whatever Shelley's equivalent of faith is. Love still has for Shelley a great deal of its earlier speculative associations with attraction, an association still preserved in our word "like." "Like" is the sign of analogy, and analogy is a weakened form of the identity which is the fulfilment of love. "Love makes all things equal," which means, not that it makes everything uniform, but that it is the power of creating unity out of the disparate and divided. In Epipsychidion the union of lover and beloved identifies them into one person, and this union in its turn is the matrix of the genuine creation concealed within the chaos of ordinary experience. With the release of Prometheus this creation reappears, from "its chaos made calm by love, not fear" [Prometheus Unbound, 4.1.171] and man assumes the traditional power of

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the creator to command the chaos and "walk upon the sea" [2.5.110]. We call the poet creative because poetry is the real form of the creative word formerly projected on Christ. The language of love is the imaginative language of the poet, and the imagination is, in the words of the preface to The Cenci, "the immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion."92 The aesthetic preference of unity to multiplicity which we find in great philosophers, notably Plato, is not a merely intellectual preference, but the preference of the creation of love over the disintegration achieved by fear. There are books which explain the difference between Plato's eros and Paul's agape,93 but unfortunately there is only one Greek word for hope, elpis, which covers both the hope of St. Paul and the hope at the bottom of Pandora's box in Hesiod. The studies of eros and agape seem to have no counterpart, except by implication, in studies of elpis and elpis prime, yet the hope which proceeds from human love is clearly different from the hope which proceeds from faith in God. A hope based on human love becomes a future-directed hope for the earthly and social regeneration of all mankind. In theory, this belongs to Christian hope too, but in practice Christian hope tends to become centred on the individual's hope for his own future life in Christ, and hence to become restricted to a hope primarily for the people of God. The petition to bring the Kingdom of God on earth remains in the Lord's Prayer, but serious attention to it tends to be regarded as a somewhat pagan and secular hope, based on illusions of "perfectibility" and going too far beyond the perfectly proper hope of converting everybody to the Christian faith. Shelley's futuredirected hope for a transcendence of the human condition on earth may be illusory, but it is the same in kind as the revolutionary hope which has proved since his day to be immensely stronger than Christianity. The view taken of Christ in Prometheus Unbound is much more charitable than that in Queen Mob: in the later poem Jesus is a saintly teacher of humanity whom the mob of Jupiter not only put to death, but destroyed more effectually by annexing his teachings to the Jupiter vision. Even so, of course, this view makes the crucified Christ a type of Prometheus, in contrast to the view of Christianity in which Prometheus would be a type of Christ. What is Shelley's equivalent of faith? Clearly it is, as our first chapter has suggested, some form of gnosis. At first this gnosis is a secret, perilous, and forbidden knowledge, like that of Adam in Eden, snatched from under the nose of a jealous Jupiter, and transmitted through the

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murmuring oracular caverns of the human poetic imagination. Such knowledge, though secretly acquired, is extremely simple in content, being the message of love that comes through hope. According to the argument of Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus loves and is loved, and his hope is unbreakable, hence he is bound to triumph in time. But when he withdraws the curse on Jupiter, his knowledge and will to endure are transformed into a vision that fulfils knowledge and makes further endurance needless. This attainment of vision corresponds in Shelley to the miraculous transformation that, in Christianity, grace makes in the human will. In Paradise Lost, an epic poem of heroic action, Milton had to decide what, in Christian terms, a hero was and what an act was. All acts, according to Milton, are good; Adam's disobedience and Satan's rebellion are therefore not acts but pseudo-acts or parody-acts. A genuine act is creative or redemptive, and, as I have tried to show elsewhere [.RE, 23; M&B, 50], Christ is the hero of Paradise Lost by default, because he is the only character in it who performs a genuine act. In Shelley, Prometheus has many of the qualities of Milton's Satan, and because the heavenly god of Shelley's poem is evil Prometheus's Satanic defiance has our sympathy. But Shelley had noted in his preface that Satan's defiance of God is chiefly what keeps God in business. When Prometheus withdraws his curse, therefore, he becomes an Adam instead of a Satan, or, in Blake's terms, he moves from the bound state of Luvah to the unbound state of Albion. Prometheus is not a poet: he hears and understands what the poets are saying, but he cannot himself hear what the poet hears. Being immortal, the world of death, sleep, and dream is not a separate world for him, hence he cannot formulate a message that is conveyed only to mortals. In his bound state, he represents, not Man, but men, who discover that, in the words of A Defence of Poetry, "there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things."94 Mortal men can respond individually but not as a group, because they are too frightened to love. Shelley is never tired of quoting Tasso's remark that only God and the poet are creators, but Prometheus is closer to the universal human mind of Shelley's essay On Life, of which Shelley says that it perceives but does not create.95 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a creator, in a sense, and this story, which is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus," suggests some of the difficulties that man would get into if he simply tried to replace his projected god with himself. That is, we now perceive the world as a mechanical order,

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in the degenerate form of habit or familiarity; if we try to create our own world in the same image, we shall produce a technological monstrosity. It is not, therefore, a creative act by which Prometheus frees himself: it is rather that he establishes a situation in which the creative utterance can be finally heard in its full meaning. Prometheus desires to hear his original curse pronounced again: this would normally symbolize the beginning of a new cycle of repeated pain. He is man defiantly subjective, trapped by an objective Jupiter who has obtained his power from him. Yet he is prolonging his pain and Jupiter's power by his defiance, because he is continuing the subject-object separation, continuing to be an anguish confronting an absurdity. The withdrawing of the curse means either that he has lost hope, as Earth at first thinks, or that he has ceased to keep Jupiter in existence by making himself the other half of the Jupiter vision. The latter is true, and hence the mortal power of responding to the voice of poetry coincides with a newly courageous consciousness in which it becomes fully communicable. The typical theme of successful heroic action is the quest, the deliverance of the king's daughter from the dragon by the virtuous and punctual stranger-knight. This myth is incorporated into Christianity, where Christ kills the dragon of death and delivers his Bride, the Church. Milton had already, in Paradise Regained, presented this theme in its paradoxical form: Christ's triumph consists essentially of an act of suffering and humiliation, and the deliverer is a victim who has to be swallowed by the dragon before he can trample it underfoot. In Shelley the quest appears in the still more paradoxical form of the renounced quest. Similarly in Wagner's Ring, the quest has to be given up and the stolen ring put back where it was before man can outgrow the gods and the palace of Wotan can go up in flames. The popular Anglicized rifacimento of Wagner, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, does not have quite this theological dimension, but it uses the same renounced-quest theme. Like the definitive act of vision which is the goal of so many Eastern religions, what Prometheus does is not a doing but an arrest of what he has habitually been doing. The force of habit, which is what Prometheus's defiance has become, is a kind of inert or mechanical energy which slowly congeals the objective world into a predictable order by a predictable reaction to it. To stop the current of habit is like rolling back the waves of the Red Sea, and bringing a new world into being. In The Revolt of Islam, where the St. George and Dragon conception of revolution is very prominent, the central figures are victims who tri-

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umph only in a spiritual world, like Christian martyrs. But Prometheus triumphs by refusing to continue as a victim of a tyrant who does not have to be there. The traditional myth said that man "fell" in the past, and inherits an evil he cannot now resist. Shelley's myth says that as man put his tyrant into power, man can annul that power, and the fall can be annihilated at any time by an act of vision. Thus the equivalent of faith in Shelley is a gnosis which is an act of vision and consciousness, and which is therefore not an act in Milton's sense, nor a pseudo-act, nor a parodyact, but a withdrawal from action. It might even be called an achievement of a state of nothingness or void in which reality appears. According to St. Augustine the fall began the experience of time as we now have it.96 Similarly the annulment of the fall creates a moment of time or kairos, the Car of the Hour, in which Jupiter, the son of Cronus (identified with Chronos or time in later myth), is dethroned by Eternity, the name Demogorgon gives to himself. What we ordinarily think of as action takes place in a time which annihilates everything. In the withdrawal from action which is also an expansion of consciousness, time is transformed into what is traditionally its unfallen form: the dance or expression of energy and exuberance in life: Once the hungry Hours were hounds Which chased the day like a bleeding deer, And it limped and stumbled with many wounds Through the nightly dells of the desert year. But now, oh weave the mystic measure Of music, and dance, and shapes of light, Let the Hours, and the spirits of might and pleasure, Like the clouds and sunbeams, unite. [4.1.73-80]

If I seem to exaggerate the importance of Prometheus's recall of his curse, it is to emphasize the unity of theme in the poem. It is almost literally true to say that nothing happens in Prometheus Unbound. Man achieves a state of awareness in which he is no longer trying to revenge himself on a tyrant he has created, and so is no longer divided against himself. Up till then, messages of love and hope have been coming through poetry and dreams, and nature, to quote the very un-Shelleyan St. Paul, has been groaning and travailing in pain [Romans 8:22]. But now the central authentic voice of the imagination can be heard: Asia is

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led to the profoundest depth of the oracular world by Panthea's dream which she had forgotten, and Jupiter vanishes into the phantasm that he always really was. Prometheus Unbound is Shelley's definitive poem not only because it incorporates Shelley's central and distinctive myth, but because it has attained the plotless or actionless narrative which seems to be characteristic of the mythopoeic genre. Of Shelley's first two essays in a definitive poem, Queen Mab is carried along by its argument: it is in the eighteenth-century tradition of the didactic poem. In The Revolt of Islam there is a plot of sorts, and a great nuisance it is: we notice that whenever the imagery goes fuzzy the reason usually is that the plot has given another spasmodic lurch. Shelley could construct plot well enough when it was appropriate to the genre he was using, as it is in The Cenci. But the unity of Prometheus Unbound is the unity of a theme which exists all at once in various aspects, and where the narrative can therefore only move from the periphery into the centre and out again. We notice, in the spatial imagery of the poem, that the central point, the cave of Demogorgon, is, consistently with the general outlines of the Romantic cosmos, in depths far below ordinary experience. Except for one remarkable image of an avalanche, all the revolutionary energy in the poem rises from caves, volcanoes, the floors of lakes, and seas: even Jupiter expects a renewal of his power to come from below, and speaks of "the incarnation, which ascends" [3.1.46]. There are many passages in the poem suggesting that, like many other poets, Shelley associates the ideas of fall and deluge, and that man is now symbolically under water. The struggle between Prometheus and Jupiter is thus in part a struggle for the control of the ocean, represented on the one side by Prometheus's love for Asia, a daughter of the Oceanides, and on the other by Jupiter's marriage to Thetis the Nereid. When Prometheus is freed, Atlantis immediately reappears from the depths of the ocean. Similarly in Blake, Atlantis is the genuine or spiritual form of England's green and pleasant land, which is restored as soon as man has drained the "Sea of Time and Space"97 off the top of his mind. We have seen that the Kantian riddle of a distinction between things as known and things in themselves informs a great deal of Romantic imagery. In literature the noumenal world becomes a mysterious world hidden within or behind the world of ordinary experience—for while philosophers may be able to escape from such spatial and diagrammatic metaphors as "within" or "behind," poets never make any pretense of being able to do so. For many Romantics, especially the more conserva-

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tive ones, a world which by definition cannot be known by ordinary experience becomes sinister as soon as it is translated from the language of concept into the language of concern. At best it encourages a greater reliance on forms of consciousness which seem to evade or bypass ordinary experience. Shelley's view of this situation is less sceptical and more Platonic. There is a world "behind" the objects we see, and a world "behind" the subjects that perceive it: these hidden worlds are the same world; poetry is the voice of that world; and the vision of love, which contains and transforms all opposites, can realize it. We are closer here to the other great Romantic construct formulated by Hegel. For Shelley a universal idea is actualizing itself in the world by the containing and transforming of opposites: this idea is the idea of liberty, and liberty is a creative force in a cosmological sense, the principle of order in the chaos, or debased creation, of Jupiter's tyranny and Prometheus's torment. Apostrophizing liberty, Shelley says: But this divinest universe Was yet a chaos and a curse, For thou wert not. [Ode to Liberty, 11. 21-3]

For liberty is the actualization of the new world that the arrest of Prometheus's habitual revenge energy has brought into being. The liberating of Prometheus is, up to a point, something like a Hegelian liberation, an expanding of consciousness which destroys the antithesis of subject and object and creates a larger identity, as the "mask" falls from man and the "veil" from nature. The transcending of opposites in Shelley is expressed by the myth of the marriage with a sister-bride. The release of Prometheus also releases the Eros-figure of the Spirit of the Earth, who differs from Ariel in being a partaker of human and sexual love. His sister-bride is the snow-maiden of the moon, now ready to be thawed out and brought to life like Hermione or Pygmalion's statue. Similarly in Epipsychidion the antithesis of Death and Life is also described as "twin babes, a sister and a brother" [1. 303]. The symbol of the sister-bride has a scandalous and incestuous sound to unemancipated ears, but what it represents is the unifying power of Eros. In the state of the bound Prometheus, fear is primary, and we love only what we fear the least. Genuine love does not, like the soul in Emily Dickinson, select its own society and shut the door: wherever it exists it creates liberty, equality, and, along with fraternity, sorority. "Incest," says Shelley de-

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murely, "is like many other incorrect things a very poetical circumstance."98 For the state of the bound Prometheus the obvious complementary symbol is that of the coy, teasing, elusive femme fatale, representing an objective world that man never really possesses. Shelley understands this symbol, but he has a strong moral dislike of it. Twice it appears offstage. It is the source of Alastor's nympholepsy, and in Julian and Maddalo a discussion about what it is that prevents man from becoming free focuses on a symbol of a madman whose madness and imprisonment have resulted from a sinister female influence. The Medusa image also appears in some of the shorter lyrics. But in general the female in Shelley is an "epipsyche," or what Blake would call an emanation, the beauty that embodies the vision of love, the "Asia" or "married land" of the Biblical Beulah. In Shelley, as in Blake, the mother, especially the Mother Earth of Prometheus Unbound, usually represents a state of imperfection which has yet to be transcended. Naturally, the antithesis of earth and heaven is also transcended in the liberation of Prometheus. The three main stages in passing through this antithesis are recorded in the Ode to Heaven, a poem closely related to Prometheus Unbound. Here a first spirit speaks of Heaven as an abode Of that power which is the glass Wherein man his nature sees. [11. 21-2]

A second spirit sees this abode as an underground cave, a chrysalis to be burst through by an awakening mind, and a third spirit sees it as a transformation of what we now live in on earth. Similarly, lone remarks that a vision she sees is "not earthly,"99 but it proves to be the vision of the Spirit of the Earth, the Eros-figure released along with Prometheus. In the mystical marriage of man and nature, the green world returns; the music of the spheres is heard again; human society is suddenly full of love and equality. In the older schema a return to the unfallen world would carry with it a complete regeneration of the natural order: everything from bad weather to thorns on the rose came with the fall, and would disappear at its end. In Shelley's symbolism too we gather that the deadly nightshade is no longer poisonous and that the tyrants of the animal kingdom, such as Behemoth and Leviathan, are disappearing along with human tyrants. Here Shelley is following traditional symbolic models, such as Virgil's

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Fourth Eclogue and the Bible, where Behemoth and Leviathan are explicitly linked with Egypt and Babylon. Yet a miraculous transformation of the order of nature is clearly not as consistent with Shelley's poetic postulates as it would be with Dante's, for example, where an omnipotent will could be invoked to bring about the transformation. Much in Shelley's account of the released exuberance and inner happiness of subhuman nature, and of man's freedom in it, depends, like the corresponding themes in Wordsworth, on a distanced and aesthetic view of nature, a north-temperate-zone view, as it has been called, of a nature largely tamed by human settlement. What is being described is the attaining of an identity with the inner process of nature and a transcendence of the old subject-object separation. But the terms of the description ignore most of what seems to us the real inner process of nature, the cruelty and ruthless fight to survive which impress us so deeply in this post-Darwinian age, and revert to a new kind of contemplative objectivity. One often finds in Shelley, perhaps most explicitly in Mont Blanc, a sense that the theme of the renewal of man and nature by a union between them, which poetry attempts to communicate through emotions of serenity, sublimity, and the like, does not fit into the conceptual language of the same and the other. It is no good rejecting a tyrannical Jupiter merely to fall into a childish belief that God has really designed nature for our convenience. The question involved here, which meets us again in Keats, is central to the whole Romantic movement, and needs to be formulated with some care. Of course Shelley's main theme is the emancipation of man, to which the spirits of nature form a chorus. The suggestion is that a great deal of what we see in nature reflects our own condition: we see cruelty and ojppression because that is our own state, and if we could escape from this state we might see many of the same things as exuberance and joy. A liberated vision would show us that things shine by their own light, not by the reflection of ours. The suffering in nature is identical with the suffering of man; and similarly, the creative power of man is identical with the beauty and splendour of nature. We have spoken of the importance of occult imagery in Romanticism as symbolizing the new kind of natural knowledge that man is developing, and to this imagery Shelley's nature-spirits and the like belong. When Hamlet says to Horatio, apropos of his father's ghost, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy [1.5.166-7], he is thinking of "philosophy" as the knowledge of a

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visible objective world which may be extended or contradicted by the knowledge of an invisible but equally objective one. Occult imagery in Beddoes or Shelley, on the other hand, represents rather the boundary line between perceived and created worlds. Ghosts and such are usually interpreted in terms of the subject-object split: either they are there and objective, or not there and subjective. But in Romantic imagery they represent the kind of vision that a highly developed imagination might attain of a world of awakened human powers. This is the world of Zoroaster meeting himself in the garden, things which are partly subjective shadows "in here" and partly objective shadows "out there" becoming their unified substances. It appears therefore that in Shelley, as in Beddoes (on whom of course Shelley was a major influence), this world of realized unity with nature is also the world which we enter or can enter at death. If life is the dream of the Earth-Spirit, then, perhaps, death is the shadow of that dream rejoining its substance. The life we live, a one-dimensional progress toward death, is half of reality: the other half is the contrary movement that comes through dreams, inspiration, and poetry. Zoroaster meeting his own image thus is or symbolizes the totality that we experience as an antithesis of life and death: Death is the veil that those who live call life: They sleep, and it is lifted. [Prometheus Unbound, 3.3.113-14]

At the end of The Revolt of Islam, the hero and heroine, who are apparently being burned alive at the stake as sacrifices to superstition, are really sailing down a river in a boat toward Paradise. T.S. Eliot later developed a similar imagery of the shadow of life rejoining its substance at death out of Christian sources, more particularly Dante. Marina and Ash-Wednesday are much indebted to the passage in the Purgatorio where Dante, entering Eden, becomes as he would have been had man not fallen. Yet Eliot recognized his similarity to Shelley also on this point, and quotes the Zoroaster passage in The Cocktail Party in connection with the martyrdom of Celia.100 As soon as Prometheus's deliverance is under way, Asia, like the lovers in The Revolt of Islam, finds herself on an enchanted boat travelling in the reverse direction from ordinary experience, like the poet's upstream movement at the end of Yeats's Tower, or Eliot's Phlebas who "passed the stages of his age and youth"101 while being drowned:

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The real world of death being that of ordinary life proceeding toward death, the world which is mysterious and hidden from us is the world of immortality. In his earlier essay On a Future State, and elsewhere, Shelley rejects the conception of the survival of the individual ego after physical death. But he retains his own view of immortality, a view which is more closely related to the Phaedo than to the New Testament. His immortality is not that of individual lives, but of such human states as love and joy and desire and the perception of beauty, which are eternally a part of man's identity with the Earth-Spirit, or whatever God is. From these states human life is projected, and back to them life is withdrawn. These immortal states or moods of humanity were formerly called gods, and were perverted into different kinds of tyranny. Properly understood, it is only the states connected with hope and love and knowledge that are immortal: Venus is immortal, but Jupiter and Mars are not. To reverse the aphorism of Browning,102 there must be heaven; meanwhile there is hell. In The Sensitive Plant Shelley describes a paradisal garden under the care of a lady like Dante's Matilda: both lady and garden die in the cycle of nature, but the conclusion is: For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs, which endure No light, being themselves obscure, [pt. 3,11.134-7]

The fact that Shelley is a revolutionary thinker does not necessarily make him a spokesman of political revolution of either the popular or the nationalistic type. He shows sympathy with both, but in the vision of the bound Prometheus the French Revolution, like the coming of Christ, is an effort at freedom which failed. It was an attempt to dethrone Jupiter by a force that merely continued his tyranny, because it did not alter the mental attitude that kept Jupiter in existence. Similarly in Beddoes, the genuine nemesis of the Duke does not proceed from Isbrand's seizure of

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his ducal power, which merely subjects Isbrand to the same kind of nemesis. What liberates Prometheus is a state of consciousness, an act of vision, which enables the creative power of man to emerge. Political rebellions may be the effects of such an act, but they cannot cause it. Shelley's sympathy with the national or self-determining revolutions that followed the French Revolution has much to do with being closer to them in time, feeling that he can take their results for granted ("The Spanish Peninsula is already free," as he says in the Preface to Hellas).103 The Revolt of Islam, whose theme is professedly political, has very little in it that one can directly attach to contemporary or even predicted political events, and even the politically inflammatory poems, such as Song to the Men of England, are not attached to a suggested program of action. He does have an early manifesto of human rights, but it would not be easy to base a political or revolutionary party on it. All this is extremely obvious, but it is not always realized that a deficiency in a nonpoetical area may be, not merely irrelevant to a poet, but a positive source of strength in his poetry. When Mary Shelley remarks that "Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none,"104 the word "only" reflects the perplexity of most people confronted with apocalyptic thinking—and perhaps too the perplexity even of those engaged in it. The effort of will she speaks of, which is, like the corresponding will in Christianity, more of a renunciation of will than an exercise of it, is the supreme effort to which all mankind's history has been leading up. After it has been made, perhaps, we can say, Was this all we had to do? but before it occurs we should not underestimate its difficulty. Yet Prometheus Unbound, even so, leaves us with the feeling of something left out. The emancipation of man it portrays is purely spatial, and, so to speak, scientific. As man's mind expands into the secrets of nature in a mental consummation, we simply pass from the night of the present into the light of the future. As the spirits say in the hideous but cheerful doggerel in which most of the fourth act is written: We come from the mind Of human kind Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind, Now 'tis an ocean Of clear emotion, A heaven of serene and mighty motion. [4.1.93-8]

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But there is no temporal dimension; the dead past simply buries its dead; the oracles of tyranny fall silent like the similar oracles in Milton's Nativity Ode, and what time has annihilated remains annihilated. It is true that the motive force of Prometheus's liberation is the car of the "Spirit of the Hour," but it is not clearly explained how it gets to be the right hour, at least in the context of history. Like Dante, we scramble out into the light of day on the other side of the earth, leaving the hell of history behind us like a bad dream. History is a nightmare from which we awake, as the very Shelleyan Stephen Dedalus remarked.105 Yet the feeling that any genuine liberation would also be a harrowing of hell, a liberation of the past and of history, clearly haunted Shelley: it is central to Hellas and to the troubled and unfinished Triumph of Life. It is also central to the argument of A Defence of Poetry. Though never explicitly stated, one of the central ideas in A Defence of Poetry is that of an authentic response to poetry, reading it not merely as a product of its age, but as the prophetic voice of human imagination itself. Every great work of literature speaks with this prophetic voice under the disguise of the limitations and anxieties of its own time. Thus it is imagination mixed up with, and concealed by, a more conceptual type of thinking. The contemporary age, according to the essay of Peacock which provoked Shelley's "defence," is a "brazen age" in which the poet is a vestigial survival of an antiquated way of thinking.106 To Shelley, on the contrary, it is an age when modern thinking can finally become completely separated from poetic thinking. A good deal of modern thought, as represented by the "Paley and Malthus" referred to in the preface to Prometheus Unbound [207!, is aggressive: it attacks and defends and refutes, and its chief motivation is ultimately to rationalize arbitrary power in whatever form. There are of course liberal conceptual thinkers—Locke, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and others listed in the Defence. But even they are of limited social value compared to the great poets and to the more visionary philosophers, because they preserve the aggressive and argumentative form of thinking that can hardly, by definition, present anything except half-truths. In the Essay on Christianity Rousseau's doctrine of equality is compared with the genuine teachings of Jesus, before their perversion by Christianity, and the comparison of course is intended to be high praise for Jesus. But in The Triumph of Life Rousseau appears to have become the typical bastard poet, whose influence promoted political instead of imaginative revolution, and who consequently merely helped to prolong

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the tyranny of time. Aggressive thinking makes a great parade of "stubborn facts" and "hard and fast" distinctions, and other synonyms, to use a post-Shelleyan image, of the domineering male in erection. Poetic thinking, being mythical, does not distinguish or create antitheses: it goes on and on, linking analogy to analogy, identity to identity, and containing, without trying to refute, all opposition and objection. This means, not that it is merely facile or liquid thinking without form, but that it is the dialectic of love: it treats whatever it encounters as another form of itself. By the same token it is never abstract: abstraction is the product of a repetition of experience without fresh thought. There is an implicit historical dialectic in the argument of A Defence of Poetry. A primitive language, Shelley says, "is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem," and as history goes on, more and more is unrolled of "that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world."107 And as poetry thus develops, we begin to understand how to read it as a product of man's eternal imagination, and not of his temporary fears and superstitions. In time, poetry continues to "reanimate . . . the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past."108 Hence a renewing of human life coincides with the attaining of the power of hearing what it is that poetry is really saying. We thus arrive at conceptions corresponding to the Christian doctrine of the invasion of time, at a certain point in time, by eternity, though the point of this invasion is in the near future. When Shelley speaks of "the mediator and the redeemer, Time,"109 it is clear that he is thinking of liberty as a force that grows in time and redeems history, and is not simply a force leaping out of time like a fish out of water. There is nothing in this sense of the deliverance of history which is at all inconsistent with what we find in Prometheus Unbound. But in Hellas Shelley says, rather more clearly, that the future is the past come to life, and that when this resurrection is accomplished, past and future both disappear into an eternal present, when the tyranny of time—that is, the clock time that never ceases to be time—shall be no more. Such a conception deepens and enlarges the vision of Prometheus Unbound with another principle, expressed by Eliot as "Only through time is time conquered."110 As already suggested, this historical vision is closer to that of traditional Christianity. In the prologue to Hellas Satan is reproached by Christ (true, still a Hellenized Christ whose love is an eros) for having only a cyclical view of history, in which the future can never escape from the past. The

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repetition prophesied by the final chorus is not a vision of the same thing happening again, but of the old renewed. When Ahasuerus says The Past Now stands before thee like an Incarnation Of the To-come [11. 852-3]

he is celebrating a theme of, so to speak, discarnation, in which the Jewish hope for a coming Messiah and the Christian hope of a second coming are at one. The principle of authentic reading is particularly important in connection with the two chief poetic influences on Shelley. These were Plato and Dante, both of whom have been accused of laying up their treasures in a remote heaven too free of moth and rust to be of much concern to human life, of burying their talents in the sky. But for Shelley Plato was not a philosopher of dualism or objective idealism, creating imaginary states of tyranny and fanaticism, nor was Dante a visionary of a future and unending triumph of Jupiter. Both were for Shelley poets of Eros, celebrating a love that turned human society into a festive symposium and raised woman to a vita nuova of equal dignity with man. Shelley puts Eros into the peculiarly modern position of a revolutionary and explosive force. In this position his Eros anticipates the Eros of Freud, but Shelley has nothing of Freud's despondent resignation to the tyranny of anxiety. For Shelley Eros will destroy the world if too long repressed, and recreate it if released, and hence Shelley has envisioned, more clearly than any other poet, the apocalyptic dilemma of modern man.

Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic We have been dealing with various aspects of a central theme of the Romantic movement: a distinction between two kinds of reality. There is the reality out there, which is studied by science and the reason from the point of view of a conscious subject perceiving objects. There is also the reality that we bring into being through an act of creation, which is the special function of the arts, and which Romanticism regards as a larger structure of reality including the given reality of experience. The arts illustrate the form of the world that man is trying to create out of the world he is in. They do many other things as well, but there is a powerful

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moral force working iri them either to express an ideal, illustrating such a world positively, or to become ironic, illustrating it negatively by contrast. The ideal aspect of poetry seemed more obvious to the Romantics, just as the ironic aspect seems more obvious to us. Everybody needs a sense of reality about the world out there, but, for the Romantics, everybody also needs some kind of vision of a better world that man can create. We can use this vision as a standard by which we can judge the "real" world according to our ideals; as a model to work from when acting according to an ideal vision; and as a means of recognizing a better order of things when it is presented to us, whether in the arts or in life. The Romantic myth is the form in which the Romantic poet expresses the recovery, for man, of what he formerly ascribed to gods, heroes, or the forces of nature. When man is recognized to be a myth-making animal, mythical language is also recognized to be the language, not for what is true, but for what could be made true. Mythology, thus, with Romanticism, as we have seen, ceases to be fables about the actions of superior powers and becomes a structure of human concern. It thereby takes over some aspects of religion. This does not mean that poetry becomes a religion or a substitute for religion. It means that what was formerly a structure of belief understood rationally, through doctrinal and conceptual statement, is now, from the Romantic movement onward, increasingly understood and interpreted imaginatively, as a structure of what might and could be true. Naturally, this change from what we have called a "closed" to an "open" social use of mythology is bound to make changes in the structure of comprehension itself, chiefly in the direction of making it more flexible. In his speculations about the world as a "vale of soul-making,"111 Keats makes it clear that he thinks of his poetry as going in the direction of becoming the interpreter of a religion more tolerant and more genuinely catholic than any institutional form of religion. Traditionally, man is born with a myth of a golden world or lost paradise built into him, through his descent from Adam. From the Romantic point of view, this is an alienation myth expressing man's sense that his consciousness has made him lose his identity with nature. Man should learn to think of this pastoral myth as a vision of innocence, not an innocence forever lost under a curse, but an innocence which is present in the mind and is a potentially creative power. Such innocence can, when guided by the poetic imagination, be realized in experience,

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and can thereby assimilate experience to its own form. When man is born, the sense of identity with nature remains unborn, and the quest of the soul is to bring it to birth. The opening lines of Endymion explain to us how this Edenic myth exists in our own minds, in the form of an awareness of beauty. Such an awareness is not a mere solace in sorrow, though it is also that, but a more intensely experienced kind of reality. The elements of ordinary experience, our realization of the world out there, are consciousness and sensation, and these, at a pitch of greater mental intensity, become joy and the perception of the beautiful. In ordinary experience truth is what we see and understand: in more intense experience, where truth is created as well as recognized, truth is beauty. Whoever is saying this in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats is certainly saying it in Endymion. The poem is devoted to the theme of realizing beauty, making it true by creating it. Keats, like Shelley, thinks in triads, and in a letter he divides reality into three aspects: real things, "semireal" things "which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist," and "Nothings" which are "dignified by an ardent pursuit."112 Without the third element, nothing made something by effort, the distinctively creative aspect of experience would not be there: without the other two, creation would be a private and subjective fantasy identical with the dream. Keats was, of course, deeply interested in the relation between sleep and poetry, the dreaming and the creative operations of the mind. This is partly the reason for his attraction to Endymion as a hero, for in the myths Endymion spends most of his time asleep. A remarkable passage in the fourth book of Endymion connects the wish-fulfilment element in dreams with the ambition of the poet which drives him to realize his aims. What is real about the dream is its illusion, its absence of objectivity, and the poet, like the dreamer, strives to contain his world. But ultimately "The poet and the dreamer are distinct."113 The imagination, Keats says, is like the dream of Adam, who awoke to find his dream true.114 Art, as Plato says, is a dream for awakened minds [Sophist, 266c], and the poet's function is to make the vision of beauty the awakened and conscious opposite of a dream. The student of Endymion finds it a difficulty that Keats was so rigorous a critic of his own work, and felt so quickly that he had outgrown Endymion. If he had felt more like defending it, instead of going on to even greater things, we should at least have had more hints from him about what he was trying to do in it. As it is, there are only three of much

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significance. Endymion is, Keats says, a "huge attempt,"115 as it obviously is, and its entire action consists of "one bare circumstance,"116 presumably the process of realizing the dream of Diana with which the poem begins. He also says that he himself learned far more by plunging into the poem than he would have done by more cautious procedures. Picking up this last remark, we see that Endymion represents, among other things, Keats's absorption of the traditional structure of symbolism which he had learned chiefly from Spenser and Milton. This structure, we remember, is most easily understood, for literary purposes, as a schema of four "levels" of imagery: heaven, the innocent world, the ordinary world, and hell. In Paradise Lost the top level is heaven, the place of the presence of God; then comes the Garden of Eden, or the unfallen world generally; then the world of history and ordinary experience, described only by anticipation; and at the bottom are the kingdoms of Satan and Chaos. In The Faerie Queene there is a heaven above, referred to in a very few passages, notably the last stanza of the Mutabilitie Cantos; then a world of "Faerie," where the main action of the poem takes place; then the world of history and ordinary experience, described obliquely through allegory; and then a demonic world from which monsters and other sinister creatures emerge. In Dante's Commedia—a later influence on Keats—there is heaven, symbolized by the planetary spheres; then the Garden of Eden, along with the purgatorial upward movement toward it; then the Italy of 1300, described by allusion though not the scene of any of the action; and then hell. In all three poets, we notice, the third level, the world of ordinary experience, remains offstage, introduced through some special device like allegory or allusion. In all three, again, the second level is a pastoral world, a vision of innocence and spontaneity where the inhabitants are instinctively poets, and where the conditions of human life are simplified to the essentials. In Dante this applies primarily to the glimpse of Eden at the end of the Purgatorio rather than to the purgatorial process itself which leads up to it, but in attaining to Eden Dante recovers his own childhood innocence, not in his individual life but in his inheritance as a son of Adam. In Spenser, who is the closest of the three to Endymion, there are two features of particular interest. First, the third or ordinary world, besides being referred to in allegory, also appears symbolically as a sexual world, presided over by Venus, and represented by the satyrs, whose sexual energy is natural but not quite innocent, halfway between human love and demonic lust. Second, the world of "Faerie" is a mythical world, not

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a different place from the ordinary world, but the same world in which the moral and imaginative realization of a higher kind of experience takes place. Similarly, Dante's Eden is on the top of the mountain of purgatory, which is on the surface of the same world that we live in. Spenser's interest in the realization of the greater powers of the soul is, for most of the poem, moral rather than imaginative in its expression and imagery. In other words, Faerie in Spenser is mostly a purgatorial world, like the corresponding world in Dante. But Spenser does have one great vision in which it is the imaginative rather than the moral powers that are realized. The first book of the poem as we have it outlines the central Biblical myth of redemption, in the traditional terms of a movement from God to man through grace and the Word; the last or sixth book seems to be focused on the human counterpart of this, the legend of courtesy, where grace and .healing words appear in their human context. The poet himself, symbolized as Colin Clout, plays a part in the climactic scene in this legend on Mount Acidale. Keats's special fondness for the sixth book, the story of Calidore, is obvious enough. The action of Endymion begins in the second of four worlds, the world corresponding to Spenser's Faerie and to Dante's and Milton's Eden, where Adam had his dream. In the earlier poets this is the world man lost long ago, and can regain only through a long process of discipline. In Keats, who is adapting the traditional structure to a Romantic outlook, it is the world of the pastoral myth in which poetic creation begins, a world still present and potential. It is the state that we work from, not the place we return to: in his letters Keats calls it the "chamber of maiden thought."117 The word "maiden" indicates a youthful and presexual aspect of life, which the prominence given to Endymion's sister emphasizes. The phrase also indicates the reason for a curious feature of the poem, a feature that has put off many readers, including, to judge from his revised preface, Keats himself. We first meet the poet-hero in a state of deep melancholy, and recognize the old Courtly Love convention. This is the same state of helpless pining grief in which we first meet Romeo; fair enough. But why should a poet as vigorous as Keats, who so disliked the thought of being made "a pet lamb in a sentimental farce,"118 have created a hero so languid that his sister has to move the branches out of his way as he walks through the woods? The reason is that Endymion's world is the imprisoning, paralysing world of dream, the dream being partly about a great achievement in the future, and so accompanied by all the anxieties that go with the disloca-

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tion of time. We have said that when man is born, his vision of innocence remains unborn, and has to be brought to birth. Endymion is not literally unborn, but his achievement is, and his world has the fragility that goes with something that is only potentially alive. We may compare The Book of Thel, by the equally vigorous Blake, with its shadowy dissolving imagery, where things melt into other things without taking on definite existence, a world Thel could have escaped from by getting born, which she fails to do. Similarly, the first book of Endymion introduces us to a world in which spirits "melt away and thaw" [i.5Oi],119 as though the mind and its moods had no permanent reality: Apollo's upward fire Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre Of brightness so unsullied, that therein A melancholy spirit well might win Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine Into the winds. [1.95-100]

We may also recall the sensitive heroines of Gothic novels, already referred to. In reading romance, we often have the feeling that we are in a magical world held together by the spell of chastity or purity, which sexual experience would instantly destroy. Wonderland depends on an unawakened Alice. Usually this chastity is associated with the heroine, and the typical romance ends when the heroine approaches her first sexual communion. In our day we are so aware of the absurdity of this notion of "purity" in actual life that we overlook its significance as a literary convention. The vision of purity to us suggests rather an onanistic fantasy involving physical but not sexual contact. Byron expressed himself with his customary forthrightness on this subject in connection with Keats,120 and it was doubtless a suspicion of the same quality in Shelley that led Mark Rampion, in Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, to call Shelley a white slug.121 Rampion is a mask for D.H. Lawrence, and Lawrence had acute anxieties on such matters. In our day we can afford to be more tolerant, besides recognizing that Shelley and Keats use their conventions of purity for the express purpose of shattering them. In some versions of the four "levels" the second one is an innocent vision attainable in ordinary life, in childhood, in wish, in dream, or in romance. In this context the vision is usually temporary or illusory. This is particularly true if it remains a private and unshared vision, like

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sentimentalized childhood memories and other nostalgic pastoral themes. In Eliot's Burnt Norton the brief glimpse of the rose garden is a vision of this sort. Here the intruder into the garden is driven out because "human kind cannot bear very much reality" [11.42-3]. Endymion has been brought up in the garden world, and his sense of reality is reversed, but the impulse to get away from it is present in him too. We notice a feeling of guilt in Endymion, of a responsibility not yet assumed, which pushes him out of his world into a lower one. This feeling of guilt recurs in Thel, in Rasselas in his Abyssinian prison paradise, and in a later and very different treatment of the same myth, the chapter on the world of the unborn in Butler's Erewhon. In Blake the state of innocence is a childhood state inevitably followed by experience; in Milton the foreknowledge of Adam's sin, which the reader certainly has whether God has it or not, also conveys a sense of the inevitable destruction of Eden. Even in Dante the sacramental machinery pulls the soul out of Eden into another paradise of stars, while the seeds of other forms of life fall back into our world. Keats's pastoral world is a green world of forests and grassy clearings, innocent but still a part of the cycle of life and death, like Spenser's Faerie. In Spenser, Venus presides over this world as well as ours. Diana, by reason of her associations with virginity, the moon, and Queen Elizabeth, has in Spenser a somewhat specialized role: she appears in the Mutabilitie Cantos as the goddess of the moon, the boundary of an eternal starry kingdom separated from our world of mutability, and the symbol of the ultimate vision of heaven or "Sabaoths sight."122 Endymion, however, is traditionally the lover of Diana in her aspect as Phoebe the moongoddess, and hence in Keats Endymion's quest is for the topmost world, or what corresponds to heaven. From this world he is completely separated, to his despair, when the poem opens. Endymion's society worships Pan, but Pan, though a fertility god, is also, by virtue of his name, a "symbol of immensity" [1.299], the Dread opener of the mysterious doors Leading to universal knowledge [1.288-9]

who is associated with Christ in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender. The heaven of Endymion is therefore the place of the presence of Pan, an "Elysium" [1.372] and "eternal spring" [1.378] of final reunion and happiness. The old men of Endymion's society are on the verge of entering it,

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and it is also described in New Testament language as a world where lost lambs are found again. It is ordinarily reached by contemplation, to which Endymion proposes to devote himself at the end of the first book, but Endymion's real wish, and his destiny, is to enter it through his love for Diana (i.e., Phoebe) as the moon. He cannot approach Diana directly: the best-known story about the disasters of doing so is the story of Actaeon, who is associated with the poet by Shelley in Adonais. Nor does Endymion realize, at this stage, that it is Diana whom he loves. At the beginning of the Inferno Dante encounters three dangerous beasts: instead of facing them head-on he turns away and goes in the opposite direction, a direction which takes him through hell, purgatory, and paradise. On a small scale something parallel happens to Endymion: he is unable to go directly into the world of Pan and Phoebe above him, and has to go in the opposite direction, through the third and fourth levels of his poetic cosmos. These levels are associated respectively with earth and with water: the "visions of the earth" [2.1022] take up the second book and the adventures under the sea the third. We should expect, by analogy with the earlier epic poets, to find the earth world associated with a loss of innocence and the development of experience, more particularly sexual experience, and to find the submarine world sinister and demonic. We do find this, but there are great and essential gains in the descent: all levels are morally ambivalent, with both apocalyptic and demonic aspects. Endymion is really acquiring, through the descent, something of the "universal knowledge" [1.289] of tne Pan world above him. He has to go down in search of truth before he can go up in search of beauty and discover that they are in fact the same point. He has said of his own world that he can feel no roots in it: Where soil is men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers; but for me, There is no depth to strike in. [2.159-61]

The purpose of his quest is to strike these roots into experience. Besides, these lower worlds are also worlds of Diana, in her full extent as the great diva triformis who is the moon in heaven, the virgin huntress of the forests of earth, and the queen of the underworld. Rilke compares the poet to an angel who contains all time and space, but is blind and looks into himself, the circumference of a total imaginative vision.123 Keats, speaking of the blind Homer, also thinks of the poet as encompassing the entire

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world of the diva triformis from the moon-drawn sea to the moon: There is a triple sight in blindness keen; Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befel To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell. [To Homer, 11.12-14]

We have just referred to the rose-garden episode in Burnt Norton, and in a passage that curiously parallels it, Endymion finds a magic rose that bursts suddenly into bloom. A butterfly on the rose leads him, like Eliot's thrush, to a fountain, where the butterfly, whose name is presumably Psyche, turns into a nymph, and tells him that he must descend lower, down through the worlds of earth and water, to accomplish his quest. Both lower worlds are described as labyrinthine— winding passages, where sameness breeds Vexing conceptions of some sudden change [2.235-6]

—and the physical ups and downs of the landscape correspond roughly, though by no means invariably, to the symbolic ups and downs of the four levels. The two middle worlds of the cosmos are associated mainly with the colour green, the heavenly and submarine extremities with blue. The middle two both belong to the cycle of nature, the images of Endymion's pastoral home being more particularly related to the earlier phases of the cycle, youth, spring, and dawn. It is sexual love that makes the cycle of nature go round, and the central image of this driving force in Spenser (though in Spenser it is located in the world of Faerie above) is the place of seed, or Garden of Adonis, where Adonis sleeps and dreams through the winter and revives to life in summer. Endymion's coming at the turn of the season helps to revive Adonis (unless his arrival at that time was coincidence, which seems unlikely), and several other figures of the same type of seasonal and dying-god mythology are introduced, including a reference to Vertumnus and Pomona and a beautiful if somewhat inconclusive vision of Cybele. In A Midsummer Night's Dream there is a reference to "a fair vestal throned by the west" [2.1.158], with the customary overtones of Queen Elizabeth, Diana, and the moon. Cupid shoots an arrow at her, which falls short of her: its trajectory, symbolizing the cycle of life and death under the moon, falls on a flower and turns it purple, the red or purple flower being the emblem of the Eros-Thanatos world of the gods of sexual love and death. This symbol

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appears in the bed of "ditamy, and poppies red" [1.555] in the prelude to Endymion's vision, and a "cloudy Cupid" [1.799] with his arrows is also introduced toward the end of the first book. The rhythm of vegetable life reviving from death is picked up in the image of green plants bursting through what appears to be the floor of a temple in the second book. The visions of the earth, then, have two aspects: one a stage in the developing and maturing of Endymion's mind, the other a stage in the discovery of the conditions of a lower and more sinister world than the one he was brought up in. The positive stage is represented by Endymion's own sexual experience with the Indian maid, the story of Alpheus and Arethusa forming a chorus to it. The initiation into the world of Eros is both a fall (loss of innocence) and an advance to a greater maturity. Arethusa is a nymph of Diana, who on this level is the elusive virgin huntress, occasionally glimpsed but never possessed, and Arethusa's complaints tell us how sexual union brings about a desire for a still more complete union which it cannot satisfy; hence it is as much a frustration and an upsetting of balance as it is a satisfaction. And yet the reality of the experience as an incarnation of love is unanswerable: Endymion's possession of the Indian maid is for him what birth would have been for Blake's Thel, a new life which, although it is also a form of death, as every new life is, also gives him the roots in experience that he lacked before: Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core All other depths are shallow: essences, Once spiritual, are like muddy lees, Meant but to fertilize my earthly root. [2.904-7]

The other aspect of this journey through the earth, the discovery of a lower phase of being, follows the normal Romantic pattern. We said that the Romantic myth sees man as fallen from an identity with nature into a state of individual and subjective consciousness, identity as himself. When Endymion descends into the earth he also descends into this more subjective state, cutting off the more intimate contact with his natural environment that he possessed earlier. Such phrases as "The journey homeward to habitual self" [2.276], "The goal of consciousness" [2.283], and a reference to a loss of "freedom" [1.167] indicate the general direction of the journey, as does the imagery of jewels in the centre of the earth, like the "orbed diamond" [2.245] whose illumination proceeds

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from a hard centre. In proportion as the subjective consciousness is enclosed in itself, the object shuts itself up too and withdraws from human approach. The traditional symbol of this descent down the chain of being is metamorphosis, the stories of how female spirits (usually) fled from the passion of male gods and became enclosed in vegetable or animal forms. The poets of metamorphosis, Ovid and Apuleius, were favourites of Keats, and Endymion is intensely Ovidian, a revival not only of Spenser but of the Elizabethan Ovidian mythological poem, of which Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla are examples. Whatever Keats's knowledge of Elizabethan poetry, all these stories are incorporated into Endymion, along with the story of Alpheus and Arethusa referred to above, which haunts Milton's Lycidas and Arcades. This separation of subject and object by metamorphosis was apparently the sequel of the conflict portrayed in Hyperion, which refers to that second war Not long delay'd, that scar'd the younger Gods To hide themselves in forms of beast and bird. [bk. 2,11. 70-2]

In Apuleius the changing of Lucius into an ass is a progressive degradation against which the lovely story of Cupid and Psyche floats up in the opposite direction, a particular favourite of Keats because it is late enough to be a myth created rather than believed, as myths for a Romantic poet essentially are. In Ovid, as in later writers, the central figure symbolizing metamorphosis as degeneration is the enchantress Circe, and Circe's connection with the story of Glaucus and Scylla is the reason why she is the presiding deity of Endymion's lowest world, the hell under the sea, where we might have expected rather the diva triformis herself in her infernal aspect of Hecate. Just as the great Spenserian image of the Gardens of Adonis is at the centre of the earthly and sexual world, so the Bower of Bliss, which also has marine associations in Spenser, is at the centre of the water world. The words "bower" and "bliss" occur in lines 418 and 427 of book 3. We are introduced to it, however, at a time when the delusory feeling of bliss has vanished and nothing but the sense of frustration and impotence remains. Keats's attitude to this world is not moral, like Spenser's: it is rather, however unpoetical the word may sound, epistemological. It is the world in which the separation of the conscious subject from every-

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thing it wants and loves is at its greatest, another version of the world of the bound Prometheus. Even in the world of earth above, the love of Venus for Adonis is already much more possessive than the love of Phoebe for Endymion, much more that of a Blakean "female will" who keeps the lover bound to a cycle of possession and loss. But Glaucus turns from his loved Scylla to Circe, a Jungian "terrible mother" who puts him into a "specious heaven" [3.477] where he is a pure subjective consciousness. Like Milton's Satan after he separates himself from the community of God, Glaucus finds the new feeling of individuality exhilarating at first: To interknit One's senses with so dense a breathing stuff Might seem a work of pain; so not enough Can I admire how crystal-smooth it felt, And buoyant round my limbs. At first I dwelt Whole days and days in sheer astonishment; Forgetful utterly of self-intent. [3.380-6]

But of course it quickly becomes, as with Satan, an imprisonment which reduces him to the narrowest of all prisons, the one he carries around with him as his own subjectivity. In this state of impotence he resembles Eliot's aged fisher king or Blake's Albion sleeping on the Couch of Death in Atlantis under the sea. The "fabric crystalline" [3.628] in which Glaucus finds the dead Scylla suggests, like the "orbed diamond" [2.245] °f the previous book, a world which is visible but not approachable. Its poetic relatives include the crystal cabinet of Blake's poem in which the narrator struggles unsuccessfully to reach an "inmost Form,"124 and the selfenclosed world of the unproductive and narcissistic beautiful youth of Shakespeare's sonnets, a "liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass."125 The dead and shipwrecked lovers in the world of Circe's malignity remind us of the traditional Courtly Love convention, the cruel mistress gloating over her collection of slain lovers. Several times in Keats this nadir of human reality is presented as a world of ghosts frozen in a wintry world of death, an impotent shadowy Hades where "men sit and hear each other groan."126 Closest to the Courtly Love convention, of course, are the victims whom La Belle Dame Sans Merci has in "thrall" in a barren landscape of late autumn and withered sedge.127 There are also the "be-nightmared" and palsy-ridden creatures left behind by the es-

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caping lovers in the bitter chill of The Eve of St. Agnes, including the Bedesman who remains "aye unsought for" in spite of all his prayers [st. 42]. A similar group appears to be clustering in The Eve of St. Mark. During the illness which forcibly separated him from Fanny Brawne, Keats felt that he himself had fallen into a world which he describes as that most hateful land, Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life. [To —, 11. 31-3]

In general, the ghost or subjective shadow symbolizes this nadir world, like the ghost of Lorenzo in Isabella whose murder has isolated him from humanity. Like all hells, it is not a world of death but of life in death, where the repose of death is unattainable. Endymion's descent into the world of the "arbitrary queen of sense" [3.459] is a somewhat rarefied allegory of an attitude to life in general which is much more clearly expressed in the letters. We notice how often Keats uses the word "identity" to describe men of action, those who exhibit strong personalities, drive their wills aggressively toward a visible goal, make up their minds and know where they are going. Poets, on the other hand, show something of the apparent weakness of those who, like pregnant mothers, have to bring something else to birth. Compared with the decisive man, the poet has no identity. His mind is not a fortress: he does not exclude enough. He is a thoroughfare for thoughts, ideas, and images; his capabilities are negative; his aim is less to do things than to let things happen.128 Endymion, too, says, very late in the poem: What is this soul then? Whence Came it? It does not seem my own, and I Have no self-passion or identity. [3.475-7]

Saturn uses the word in a similar sense in Hyperion. Of course the decisive temperament may be found in creative people too: for Keats it certainly is in Byron, and there is a touch of it in the "egotistical sublime"129 of Wordsworth. The purest creative temperaments, however, notably Shakespeare, show least admixture of it. The point is that there are two kinds of identity. They might be distinguished as identity as and identity with, and they represent respectively the two poles of Endymion's cosmos, the worlds of Circe and of Phoebe.

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Both kinds begin as consciousness or self-awareness, but one develops a hostile and the other a sympathetic relation to its surroundings. The decisive and aggressive temperament identifies himself as himself: his attitude is subjective, and he confronts an objective world set over against him. He usually does not realize that to the extent that he does so he loses his freedom and becomes a puppet of circumstance, for the subject confronts everything else, and, as the scroll that Glaucus obtains in book 3 says, no one can devise a total opposition [3.692-3]. Bonaparte, says Keats, was "led on by circumstance,"130 in contrast to, for example, the Apollo of Hyperion, who says "Knowledge enormous makes a God of me" [bk. 3,1. 113]. The world of Circe is very hard on poets and lovers, but, though described in Endymion only in connection with them, it is also, in its larger context, the world of action and history. This is the reason for the passages at the openings of books 2 and 3, which express respectively a preference for the heroes and heroines of literature over those of history, and for the spirits and gods of the imagination over the more socially accepted creatures who "lord it o'er their fellow-men" [3.1]. Poets and lovers create a society precisely the opposite of that of the decisive or domineering one, by identifying themselves with what they make or love. Both kinds of identity are ways of actualizing the unborn dream that is a part of everyone's mind. In the eyes of the world, the decisive person is the one who has outgrown the dream, and the creative or loving temperament the one that is still preoccupied with it. But the popular view is entirely wrong. The decisive person has merely congealed his dream into the more obsessive dream of subjective aggressiveness. Even when his "total opposition" fails and he is caught up into the externalized machinery of the objective world, his life does not cease to be a continuous somnambulism. It is the poet who understands the contrast between the creator and the dreamer. He does not awaken from his dream into a different world: he awakens the dream into his world, and releases it from its subjective prison. This is what, on a larger scale, Endymion is doing for Glaucus, in an episode which resembles The Tempest crossed with a more primitive version of the Tempest story like the St. George myth. The arrival of Endymion from "over" the sea rejuvenates Glaucus, as his previous arrival on earth had revived Adonis, and the two begin to transform a shipwrecked society into a reintegrated one. The scroll they find informs them that they have to learn magic, like Prospero, and this magic is an art of releasing the "symbol-essences" [3.700] of nature, delivering the spir-

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its in the prisons of subject and object alike. There are also echoes of Hercules releasing Theseus in the lower world, and a good deal of imagery suggesting a version of the Theseus story in which all the previous sacrifices to Minos were delivered from the labyrinth. Echoes of the Christian Harrowing of Hell are less explicit. References to Arion in book 2 and to Amphion, who appears to be assimilated to Arion, in book 3, and images of whales and dolphins, suggest the stories of Jonah and other voyagers to the viscera of Leviathan. The dolphin, however, is traditionally the image of salvation from the water, and reminds us rather of Lycidas, who visited the bottom of the monstrous world but became a protecting genius of the shore and also a saint in heaven. Lycidas makes a remarkable reappearance in the lively little poem Staff a, one of the figures in the more Shelleyan cosmos that Keats began to develop after Endymion, in which renewed powers rise from below. During his descent Endymion had feared the total loss of his identity, and that he would suffer the traditional sparagmos fate of the god in the underworld and be torn "piece-meal" [3.263]. But instead it is the scroll that is torn up and that fertilizes the sunken world with a new life. The student of Romantic poetry should compare the image of the torn-up fertilizing scroll with the almost identical image in the speech of Ore in Blake's America, plate 8. The anabasis, or return to the upper states, has all the expected images of rebirth. We have Atlantis, the rainbow following the deluge, the reappearance of the sea-born Venus, and the description of Neptune's throne as "emerald" [3.812], which indicates a reunion of the sphere of water with that of the green earth. The hymn to Bacchus in book 4, sung by the Indian maid, balances the hymn to Pan in book i, but is a product, not simply of a state of innocence, but of a new energy that has returned to that world from experience. Endymion then takes to the air, and seems ready for his final ascent to the fire world of the gods where Phoebe is. But overtones of Icarus and Bellerophon in the imagery warn us that all is not plain flying, and Endymion receives an abrupt check. He attempts a renewed pastoral life of the "Come live with me and be my love" type with his sister and the Indian maid, attempting to consolidate his gains and stay where he is, like Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration. It seems a sensible enough solution: it is clear that the four levels of the poem's cosmos are not a Platonic ladder, as Platonism is generally understood. It would be inconsistent with everything we know of Keats to assume that we ascend from the body into a higher world of the soul, abandoning the

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sexual basis of Eros, a basis which is also the matrix of all one's love and compassion for society. The only real Phoebe, on Keats's own postulates, would be an incarnate Phoebe, identical with the Indian maid. In Eliot's Burnt Norton, the "still point of the turning world" [1. 136] is a middle point identical both with the zenith of the vision of correspondence preceding it, and the vision of death under the yew tree following it. Similarly, as truth and beauty are the same thing, the goal of the quest for beauty above and the goal of the quest for truth below would be the same point, and that point in turn identical with the worlds of Peona and the Indian maid in the middle. The trouble is that Endymion's quest cannot be completed by an act of will. That was why the Courtly Love tradition, although it demanded the most strenuous efforts from the poet-lover, still made his ultimate success depend on the grace of his lady. Hence Endymion has to wait until he is "spiritualiz'd" [4.993] by an "unlook'd for change" [4.992], at which point Phoebe, like Ligeia in Poe/31 takes over the Indian maid, and carries Endymion off to her own world. The world of this final assumption is still continuous with the physical and sexual world, but has transformed it in a metamorphosis which goes in the opposite direction from those celebrated by Ovid. The conclusion repeats an earlier theme in the fourth book. Endymion had previously found himself, just after his abortive flight, in the cave of Quietude, a cave of dreams like the Cave of Nymphs in the Odyssey from whence Ulysses returned home, a cave which also can be entered only involuntarily: Enter none Who strive therefore: on the sudden it is won. [4.531-2]

The fully awakened vision of the poet, which includes truth or knowledge as well as beauty, depends, like the dream, on something beyond the conscious will, and the unlooked-for change at the end resolves the theme of "sleep and poetry" on which so much of Endymion turns. As Keats says in the Letters: "The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this—in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all [the] horror of a bare shoulderd Creature— in the former case, our shoulders are fledge, and we go thro' the same air and space without fear."132 The reference to Milton's Satan indicates that "knowledge," the element of truth which is part of beauty, makes

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the difference between sleep and poetry, dream and vision, chaos and creation. An extraordinary number of fascinating mythical themes are touched on, explicitly and implicitly, in the fourth book of Endymion. Coming so late in the poem, they seem almost to suggest the need of a fresh start, and in fact there are signs of impatience and of a desire to begin again with the story of Apollo. Different as Endymion is from The Prelude, it is equally a poem about the growth of the poet's mind. The process of growth is presented through myth and archetype, and consequently has an impersonal and universalizing quality about it: it deals with the poet rather than, like The Prelude, with a poet. But the direction of the theme, and its personal reference to Keats, are both unmistakable: There came a dream, showing how a young man, Ere a lean bat could plump its wintery skin, Would at high Jove's empyreal footstool win An immortality, and how espouse Jove's daughter, and be reckon'd of his house. [4.376-80]

What we have now to try to determine is what the relation of Endymion is to Keats's whole poetic vision. That is, what kind of poetry results from Endymion's experience, or, thinking of him in his final role as a god, from his inspiration? The fourth book, along with the end of the third, is the part of Endymion that incorporates the pre-Romantic structure of myth, derived mainly from Spenser, into a Romantic cosmos. The nadir of this cosmos is the world normally symbolized in Keats, as in Beddoes, by ghosts or a paralysed life in death. Blake calls it a world of "spectres," which includes both the people who live egocentric and jealous lives, the strong identities of Keats's letters, and the kind of abstract and generalized views of the world that such minds produce. The word "spectre" indicates a state where neither the subject nor the object is real: the real objective world is a world in itself, hidden behind the things we see and know, and our real selves are hidden behind our subjective egos. The poet can escape from this spectral world by his power of being able to articulate the language of "symbol-essences," a language which exists only through human creation, but which expresses the identity of the real subject and the real object. In Keats, as in Shakespeare and Shelley, this poetic power is symbolized by the magician who can command the

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spirits of the elements. The next step takes us into the world of the awakened imagination, where we pass beyond the elemental spirits to become united with the gods. This last stage of Endymion's pilgrimage is illustrated by the divine figures with which Hyperion and the great odes are so largely concerned. Scylla, the beloved of Glaucus who is killed by Circe and brought to life again by this liberating magic, represents the theme of the deliverance of the bride from imprisonment in the lower world, which we meet so often in myth, from Proserpine to Beddoes's Sibylla. The theme of the failure of ascent is included in the fourth book of Endymion, as we saw, and the most famous myth of such a failure is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Keats returns to this aspect of his mythology in Lamia, a story which is pathetic rather than cautionary. But, of course, the major attempt to rewrite the anabasis of Endymion in terms of a different mythology is Hyperion, the theme of which is announced in Endymion itself. Hyperion is Miltonic in its structure as Endymion is Spenserian. The fallen Titans, however, have not, like the devils in Milton, fallen outside the earth into a hell far below it: they are at the bottom of the ladder of identity, like the sea world of Circe. They are gods of power who are now imprisoned, traditionally under volcanoes, actually in the objectivity of nature. Hyperion, still undeposed, corresponds to the Father-God of Milton who is still presiding over his court in heaven although all real authority has been transferred to the Son. Out of this chaos of impotent power emerges Apollo, a Logos-figure who is both divine and human, and has achieved the poet's awareness of identity with his world. Probably a confrontation like the Son-Father confrontation of Demogorgon and Jupiter in Shelley, though in a very different context, would have come next, a struggle for the sun rather than the ocean. The poetic universe of Hyperion is less traditional and more typically Romantic than the universe of Endymion. Keats had really two structural problems to solve for a complete Hyperion. One was the adapting of the old Miltonic up-and-down universe to a Romantic in-and-out one, where the presence of God, or what corresponds to God, is identified with the creative power in the poet's mind. The other was the adapting of the old spatial chain-of-being conception to a temporal one. For Hyperion also has a "historical" or "evolutionary" scheme, with one power succeeding another in time, which looks forward to a later phase of Romanticism, like that represented by Victor Hugo's Legende des siecles. Hyperion begins, as all good epics should, in the middle. To solve the first problem

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the poet would need to work backward to the beginning in the poet's mind, as The Fall of Hyperion attempts to do; to solve the second he would need to go on with the story, in a narrative that would have taken him at least through the "second war" of metamorphosis. It is clear from what we have said that one essential function of poetry, for Keats, is to help us move upward on Keats's version of the chain of being, toward an identity with, or communion. The poetry that brings to birth the unborn vision of beauty, we said, is the opposite in theme of the poetry of metamorphosis, or the separating of subject and object, commemorated in Ovid and Apuleius, which is based on an alienation or fall archetype. We should not read the great odes, for example, as subjective contemplations of objects, which is the exact opposite of what they were designed to be. They are rather a recovery, by poetry, of the myth formerly projected as the worship of a god or numinous presence. In Christianity this act of worship is expressed in a symbolic act of communion, in the response of faith to a revelation symbolized by a divine Word, and in the forming of a church, or community of response. The Romantic counterparts of these would be, respectively, communion, or the identity of the poet and his theme which the poem itself articulates; communication, or the reader's understanding of the poem; and community, or the forming of a society of readers, or a literary tradition. If I say "this pencil is green," I am making a statement about a sensation of my own, identifying the pencil with my own experience, that I cannot directly share with others. What makes it a statement of fact, or enables it to pass for one, is a verbal consensus: other people agree when I say it is green, though for all I know they may be seeing what I would call red. Thus communication is a by-product of communion, the verbalizing of the identity of one's inner life. Communication in its turn is the focus of community. As long as everyone agrees when I say this pencil is green, the possibility of their seeing what to me is red is one I can afford to ignore. And however trivial a statement about the colour of a pencil may be, it is obvious that the verbal consensus which makes statements of fact possible is the basis of human culture. A statement of imagination is more flexible than a statement of fact, but the same three principles are involved. (The argument from here on has a few parallels with Heidegger's essays on Holderlin, where three similar principles are described as world, language, and history.)133 The poem, then, begins in the poet's experience of communion or identity with. This seems to be a private and subjective communion in

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which only the poet is involved, and so in one context it is. But the language of poetry is not a subjective language, nor is it objective like descriptive language, even when it uses the same words. It is the magical or spellbinding language of symbol essences, the voice of the world where the mind behind the subject and the world behind the objects are united, where nature and personality are at one, as they formerly were in the sea-gods and sky-gods of ancient mythologies. We began this chapter by saying that in the Romantic period poetry becomes, not a substitute for or another form of religion, but, increasingly, the medium for understanding religion, as the sense of reality in religion slowly shifts over from the doctrinal and conceptual to the imaginative and mythical. Hence the analogies we have mentioned between Romantic poetry, as exemplified by both the theory and the practice of Keats and Shelley, and the Christian religion of their cultural milieu, go quite a long way. In religion, communion takes place within the body of a divine man who is also a liberating and creative Word, and whose home is Paradise. In these poets, the divine man is not the poet, but Man, the universal human mind of Shelley's Prometheus; the liberating Word is the voice of the imagination which speaks through poetry, and its task is to awaken the vision of the beauty of the uncreated world we have in ourselves, so that, like Adam who really was in Paradise, we awake to find the dream true. The great odes, with their heavily brocaded texture and their sense of utter absorption in meditation, are the finest poems of communion, in the Romantic context, that the Romantic movement achieved. Like the great twentieth-century poems of meditation, Eliot's Quartets, they do not deal directly with the world of ordinary experience or with the demonic world. These worlds are there by implication, but in a context where their reality becomes unreal, just as the subway passengers in Burnt Norton, though their prototypes are in contemporary London, are present only as shadows in a fantastic Hades. Whenever the demonic world appears in Keats—in the terrible clarity of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, in the tragedy of Isabella, whose basil pot is a parody of the onepointed contemplation of the odes, in Lamia—it is seen, like the foul monsters in Spenser's fairyland, from within the charmed circle of romance. One obvious characteristic of communion poetry is a tendency to synaesthetic imagery as represented by the line in Isabella, "And taste the music of that vision pale" [st. 49,1. 8]. Such imagery includes the contact senses of taste and smell and feeling along with the more conventional

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images of sight and sound. The traditional symbols of communion are eating and drinking, and in communion poems we need draughts of vintage and the bursting of Joy's grape on the palate to complete the sense of identity with. The Fall of Hyperion, though its argument leads up to a contrast between poet and dreamer, begins with a narcotic drink symbolizing the total immersion of the poet in his dream world. The display of food in The Eve of St. Agnes has not much to do with the plot, but has everything to do with the imagery and atmosphere. And just as all five senses have their place in a poetry of identity, so thought and reflection have a place equal to sensation. The famous remark, "O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!"134 may be interpreted, using Eliot's categories, as an expression either of dissociated sensibility135 (O for a life of sensations instead of thoughts) or of unified sensibility (O for a life in which thoughts have the immediacy of sensations, instead of a life in which sensations are as unsubstantial as thoughts). The latter is the only possible meaning consistent with the odes, which identify truth with beauty as well as Grecian urns with the poet and his reader. The theme of sexual fulfilment is touched very lightly, but the odes are sufficiently about love to make it clear that what they celebrate includes what Blake would call an improvement of sensual enjoyment. Unified sensibility of this sort also demands a catharsis of moods, a raising of emotions which frees one from their domination. Moods are like colours: all real experience is a blend of them, and to see life from within a single mood is a deliberately summoned up illusion, like putting on coloured spectacles. Such an illusion is an entirely valid form of poetic experience, and there is no reason why a poet should not reduce his world, if he so wishes, to a green thought in a green shade.136 Milton's L'Allegro and II Penseroso are an extraordinary tour de force of mood poetry, each projecting an entire life through one of the two major and dominating moods, the gay and the grave. The eighteenth-century librettist who arranged these poems for Handel is said to have added a third section of his own, II Moderate, depicting a properly balanced state of mind in the middle. We may perhaps take this as a symbol of everything that Keats disliked about the eighteenth century, and attacked in Sleep and Poetry. For Keats, joy and sorrow can only unite at the point of the greatest intensity of both, not in a lukewarm mediocrity halfway between them. This union is already present in the hymn to Bacchus in the fourth book of Endymion, which is enclosed in a song to sorrow, and it expands in the later work, where "Welcome Joy and welcome Sorrow" is

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a constant motif and where the identity of delight and melancholy, of joy and frustration, of escape and annihilation, of the allegro and penseroso moods everywhere, is constantly present. But while joy and sorrow are different aspects of the same thing, beauty and ugliness are not. The identification of beauty and truth means that ultimately the conception of beauty would have to embrace the ironic vision as well as the romantic one, applying as much to Swift as to Keats. But in Keats's practice, as in general usage, the vision of beauty is a vision of loveliness, of the attractive world, the unborn Paradise. We noticed that the sinister and tragic in Keats are seen within the conventions of romance, which means that they are often seen as incomplete forms of the vision of beauty. Lamia, for instance, as previously suggested, is in some respects almost a Eurydice figure: perhaps if Lycius had not made two mistakes, one of listening to a Platonist who preferred thoughts to sensations, the other of letting in the public too soon, he might have gone all the way from Circe's world to Phoebe's, taking Lamia with him. The poetry of Keats as we have it is set against the world of experience, as something which is in that world but not of it. We see this particularly in Keats's style. The odes in particular depend on magic spells and charms, on the marking off of special holy places and the building of private temples in the mind, on escape from noise and vulgarity, on a watchword of favete Hnguis [keep a religious silencel and on an intensely hieratic rather than a demotic consciousness. The style of such poetry has to be a rhetorical tour de force, kept up to a uniform level. Either we surrender to its spell or we leave the poem alone, and even if we do surrender to it, the tiniest variation in the mood would disturb us. Such a style was not Keats's own ideal: his ideal was that of a completely flexible style, a style with the dramatic versatility of Shakespeare's. The hieratic or uniform style of Hyperion is associated by Keats, not strictly with Milton, but with Milton's influence on him. The revisions in The Fall of Hyperion, so far as style and diction are concerned, seem to have as their general aim the moving away from the homogeneity of Hyperion toward a more relaxed tone, one which suggests a story being told, as well as less striving for the invariably impressive rhetoric of deity. Keats associates this more flexible style not only with Shakespeare but with Chatterton, to whom he dedicated Endymion. Evidently he felt that the archaism of Chatterton could be the basis of a more concrete and specific style, capable of the familiar as well as the impressive, than the archaism of Milton with its more Latin bias. What we may feel to be the

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uncertainties of taste in Endymion, such as the clanging rhymes, are also part of an attempt to develop a style without levels, which can encompass the sublime and the familiar at once. The same ambition drove Keats later in his career into what have seemed to some of his readers very inappropriate experiments, such as the meandering shaggy-dog narrative of The Cap and Bells. His well-known advice to Shelley to "load every rift . . . with ore"137 came at a time when he himself, stylistically speaking, had made several experiments with a much looser and more Shelleyan—even, in The Cap and Bells, Byronic—texture. The state of identity with is not merely a creative state; it is also a moral state corresponding to the older state of innocence which traditionally has been associated with the child. The sense that the child in particular responds to his surroundings to the point of identifying with them is central to Blake's Songs of Innocence and to Wordsworth, and is still there in Whitman's There Was a Child Went Forth. In Keats too there is a delightfully childlike quality in such expressions of identity as this from his letters: "if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existince and pick about the Gravel."138 Such a state is innocent in the sense that sympathy, compassion, the ability to feel and participate in the moods of others, are natural by-products of it. The deep introversion of childhood remains at the heart of every vision of innocence, however, that does not expand into and incorporate a vision of experience. The poet is still in Endymion's second world, still identifying himself with his own creations, still trying to break out of the circle of Narcissus. We are not speaking of Keats here, but of a danger in this situation that Keats himself recognized. Keats leaves us in no doubt that he wanted to develop further in the direction of a poetry of concern, a poetry that would incorporate the ironic vision and the state of experience and would meet Moneta's demand to recognize the reality of misery as well as the reality of beauty. For there is also a poetry of identity from, a detaching vision of an absurd or anguished world, and Keats, no less than Shelley, was aware of the revolutionary social impact of poetry and of its role in helping to realize liberty: there ever rolls A vast idea before me, and I glean Therefrom my liberty; thence too I've seen The end and aim of Poesy. [Sleep and Poetry, 11. 290-30--3}]

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Like Shelley, too, he thought of the poet's creation, which ultimately is a renewed human society, as greater than the creation, in the sense of an objective world which is largely a projection of our own cowardice or laziness. At any rate he speaks of the universe as containing "materials to form greater things . . . [than] our Creator himself made,"139 his meaning here being clearly more serious than his tone. In the few years he had, Keats constructed the two inner parts of his temple: the outer court of a poetry of experience had yet to come. The inference seems to be that Keats was a minor poet who would have become a major one if he had had a few more years of life and health. This seems very reasonable, except that every reader of Keats knows that it is wrong, and that his existing work has to be discussed in very different terms. Keats, unlike Shelley, has no specific philosophical or religious affinities, but the ideas that come tumbling out of his letters are all the more endlessly suggestive. We have stressed the significance of the fact that we cannot read the great odes, in particular, as subjective contemplations of objects. The mind that contemplates, the poet with his negative capability, is the focus of a universal human mind, like Wordsworth's "motion and a spirit"140 with which the poet identifies himself. What is contemplated is a deity, or, like the Grecian urn, an emblem of a divine or paradisal existence. But the divine existence is not a substantial god, or rather, for Keats, goddess: the goddess is created by the poetic imagination, the agent of the creative human mind, which according to the Romantic myth is the real divine presence involved. We move into a sphere of being where the difference between art and nature, between the creature and the object, has ceased to exist. The music of the spheres and the poetry of man are the same thing, as Mnemosyne implies when she says to Apollo: Thou hast dream' d of me; and awaking up Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side, Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast Unwearied ear of the whole universe Listen'd in pain and pleasure at the birth Of such new tuneful wonder. [Hyperion, bk. 3,11. 62-7]

Keats could get little help here either from a Christian monotheism or a Greek polytheism. For analogies to the kind of assumptions underlying his poetry we have to turn to Oriental religions, and when Keats in his

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letters says that "any one grand and spiritual passage serves [man] as a starting post towards all 'the two-and-thirty Pallaces/"141 the Oriental sound of the last phrase is significant. There are types of lyrics in Chinese and Japanese literatures which seem to be doing something deceptively simple, merely observing or recording a scene in nature. There is a famous Japanese haiku, for example, which says in effect, in seventeen syllables, only "Frog; pool; splash." But such poems do not really present the seeing of objects by subjects: the poet's mind surrounds and contains what he describes, and as his mind, according to the principles of most of the philosophies and religions contemporary with such poetry, is united to a universal mind in which all things are, he is presenting a scene of nature in its proper context, where it is both what the poet creates and what is really there. The traditional term for the appearance of a divine presence in human life is "epiphany," a term used in Christianity for certain appearances of Christ, in particular to the Magi. Joyce uses the word as a critical term in Stephen Hero, and appears to have adopted it because of his full agreement with the Romantic tendency to associate all manifestations of divinity with the creative spirit of man. But Joyce seems to have thought of the basis of the epiphany, in its literary context, as an actual event, brought into contact with the creative imagination, but untouched by it, so that it preserves the sense of something contained by the imagination and yet actual in its own terms. As Stevens says, one is more apt to confide in what has no concealed creator.142 Wordsworth was the great pioneer, almost the discoverer, of epiphany in this sense, as something observed but not essentially altered by the imagination, which yet has a crucial significance for that imagination. Such poems as Simon Lee are based on epiphanies in Joyce's usual sense of actual (or, at least, readily credible) incidents, and The Prelude is in the same sense an epiphanic sequence, a series of incidents in the poet's life which by their arrangement take the form of an imaginative quest. The more recent cults of "found objects" in the visual arts, of "happenings" in the dramatic ones, and of chance progressions in music, testify to the continued vitality of the association between the random and the oracular. Joyce and Wordsworth are mainly concerned with the kind of poetry of experience that Keats did not develop. Keats's odes are epiphanic in a narrower and more traditional sense. They are not concerned with objects or experiences found at random, but with icons or presences which have been at once invoked and evoked by a magical spell, and held as a

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focus of meditation. The contrast in itself is obvious but has important implications. Another striking and powerful idea that peeps out of the letters and a few phrases in the poetry is also Oriental in most of its developments— an idea of interpenetration. "Eve[r]y point of thought is the center of an intellectual world/' Keats says.143 Every soul is at once the centre and the circumference of the universe, hence the society the poet is trying to help form is an interpenetrating society, with the macrocosm present in each microcosm: "They interassimulate," as he says in an inspired portmanteau word.144 In such a world no one could be objective to anyone else. "Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbour, and thus by every germ of Spirit sucking the Sap from mould ethereal every human might become great, and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Furse and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees."145 For such a society the outer court of experience would not need to exist, and even poetry would recover its original power of silence, retreating from communication to pure communion and becoming the "spirit ditties of no tone."146 The home of such poetry could only be in a renewed or regenerate Nature, of the kind indicated by the Zen master who speaks of the beauty of cherry trees when a disciple asks him how to attain Buddhahood, or by Wordsworth when he finds "the types and symbols of Eternity"147 in an ordinary traveller's journey, or by Shelley in his enigmatic symbolism about a nature restored to health with the liberation of man. In such a nature everything would be epiphanic, with the world present in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.148 Shelley also uses the word "interpenetrate" in The Defence of Poetry^9 in a way which indicates that the conception is in his thought too, but it seems even more central to Keats, and better illustrated by Keats's practice. This seems strange at first, for Keats is not an apocalyptic seer in the way that Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth at times, and many Oriental poets are. He is closer to Eliot in stressing the effort of meditation, and the discipline necessary to quiet the soul and the restlessness of an activistic conscience. "The Soul," he says, "is a world of itself and has enough to do in its own home."150 Keats is a poet of the temenos, the marked-off holy place, the magic circle of The Eve of St. Agnes with the lovers inside and hostility and bitter cold outside. His paradise is not a timeless and spaceless Eden, but a Castle of Alma surrounded by malignant ghosts. Keats's three great pre-Romantic predecessors had all looked at the

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paradisal vision in the context of the fall: for them it was something man has lost, and cannot regain through his own efforts. His efforts are essential, but they are moral efforts: man cannot create or recreate paradise, though God may put him back into it after the moral quest has been completed. Dante's Eden is explicitly on top of the mountain of purgatory, but Spenser's Faerie and Milton's "Paradise within thee, happier far,"151 also, we saw, belong to a Purgatorio rather than a Paradiso. Similarly, Keats speaks in his Epistle to Reynolds of the imagination being lost in a "Purgatory blind" [1. 80], and the vale of soul-making spoken of in the letters is also a purgatorial conception. The moral earnestness of Keats drew him closer to these predecessors than to any direct transcendence of experience. The kind of nature mysticism we have just associated with Wordsworth, Shelley, and Zen Buddhism seems to be talking about a nature which, like the myth of Paradise itself, is more of a picture of nature than existential nature, something to be contemplated but not lived in. It may be true as far as it goes, but if we compare it with the ferocity and horror that nature, including human nature, actually exhibits, once we enter into its processes, our "natural piety" would soon make Dr. Pangloss look like a realist by comparison.152 In the soulmaking passage Keats says: "But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility—the nature of the world will not admit of it—the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer."153 In the Epistle to Reynolds, just mentioned, he goes on to speak of "an eternal fierce destruction" as the essence of his vision of nature [1. 97!. The traditional solution of the problem of attaining an innocent vision in the midst of a ferocious nature is, of course, that the real end of the innocent vision is not in this life at all, but in what Keats calls this life's "spiritual repetition"154 in another world. The soul, Keats says, achieves its identity through the interaction of three principles, a mind or intelligence, a "heart," and the "World or Elemental space."155 It is this last in particular that is the purgatorial element. The interpenetrating world, just described, is clearly a world without space, and once the soul's identity has been achieved, the "World or Elemental space" would disappear. In the world of immortality, Keats says, "there will be no space,"156 and nothing left of what Blake calls the cloven fiction of subjects and objects. This brings us to the great vision which is at the heart of Endymion, the upper world that Endymion finally attains, described in a passage

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which, as we know from a letter to his publisher Taylor/57 Keats regarded as crucial: Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Our ready minds to fellowship divine, A fellowship with essence; till we shine, Full alchemiz'd, and free of space. Behold The clear religion of heaven! [1.777-81]

In its context, this spaceless world is, by definition, the world of a future life, as distinct from the present life where world and space are the same thing. It is also the lost paradise or innocent vision of a previous life: we notice how the word "forlorn," with its overtones of something glimpsed but out of reach, echoes in the Ode to a Nightingale. Similarly, the vision of being without becoming suggested by the Grecian urn is the kind of paradox that we are forced to use in searching for some analogy in language to describe a higher kind of existence. At the same time, Keats's conception of poetry as the voice of an interpenetrating world is Romantic in the sense that it regards human creative power as the only thing which gives us any clue to what another dimension of life may be like. Eliot, more distrustful of what the Romantic movement brought, tells us that it is the function of art to bring us to a state of serenity and then to leave us, "As Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a region where that guide can avail us no farther."158 Keats sees in poetry a power that can bring us into an interpenetrating world in which the word "farther" ceases to mean anything. Perhaps his intuition is not only profounder and saner than Eliot's, but is one more relevant to a civilization like ours. The Romantic movement began, in English literature, with the sense that the individual subject was no longer a self-explanatory unit of experience. Philosophers and theologians had always known this, as a matter of theory, but now it became a question of practical life as well. For Wordsworth, the individual subject found its identity in a larger unity gained through an imaginative contact with a "nature" standing outside and apart from human society. Wordsworth regarded his account of this sense of larger identity as consistent with its more traditional religious formulations, but in traditional religious terms his own expression of it was vague and loose, as it had to be and as it should have been. Coleridge was more belligerently Christian in insisting that the primary imagination was an existence repeating the infinite "I am" of God/59 and in

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feeling that every argument he advanced on the point was one in the eye for atheism, scepticism, and "psilanthropism."160 In Burke we see, much more clearly than in Coleridge, that this new sense of identity does have a real enemy. Burke identifies the enemy with the Jacobinism of the French Revolution. Burke's view of the French Revolution itself, however, is not very rewarding: what is important is his prophetic vision of the kind of society that we now call totalitarian, where the sense of identity is restricted to society, where the sense of the continuity of tradition is annihilated, and where the general will of society is unconditioned by any reference to a goal beyond the immediate objects of those in power. The Romantic poets, especially Keats, preserve the feeling that at the heart of the best and fullest life is something antisocial, or more accurately something beyond society which is still essential to human identity. It is not important what we call this, or rather, it is important that different people should call it different things. Today, technology has created for us a society in which each man is made aware of an entire world of experience, interpenetrating with the awareness of all his neighbours. Human nature being what it is, its first response to this situation is to create out of it a hell of unparalleled hysteria. We can no longer live in the relatively comfortable and quiet hell of The Waste Land, where "each man fixed his eyes before his feet" [1. 65!, but are plunged into the whirlwind of the mob itself, where there is no rest and no escape. When we search for the inner resources that the sane mind can draw on in trying to deal with a demonic interpenetrating world, poetry takes on a new importance, especially the poetry that seems most directly opposed to it. Thus the Romantic vision of Keats itself acquires, in the course of time, the militant and crusading quality of a poetry of experience. This is merely a special case of the general principle that no poetry of high intensity covers a part only of the imaginative world: it covers its entire range, by implication at least. We saw how the impetus of Keats's imagination was carrying him in the direction of a poetry of concern and compassion, of songs of experience in which the connection of sleep, with its wish-fulfilment dreams, and poetry had finally been broken off. But in the course of time his written poetry becomes also, for us, what his unwritten poetry would have been. When the poet has done all he can in communion and communication, the responsibility for forming the third element of literature, the community of response, rests on us. In the Bhagavadgita Arjuna, fighting his kinsmen on a battlefield, wanted to

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escape from the fight to a world of greater reality. His charioteer, the god Krishna in disguise, convinced him that there was nowhere to go, and after that, Arjuna saw on the battlefield the epiphany of the universe in the body of Krishna. The song of the nightingale, the "cold Pastoral" of the Grecian urn [1.45], the magic casements in the castle of the soul that open to the warm love rising from the perilous seas seem to us, at first, images of a poetry of refuge, a dream of a lost paradise. That is a possible but shallow response: the disciplined response understands that these poems are visions on and of the battlefield itself, not the subjective fantasies of retreat. Only a community which has disciplined itself to respond can even hear the voice of Keats's whispering democracy, the voice of a society which includes both nature and humanity, a being solidly rooted in a ground of being, and uniting death to life.

11 John Keats 1968

From Encyclopedia Americana, 16 (1968 and subsequent editions): 328-31. Frye's piece is followed by a lengthy bibliography of editions and critical and biographical studies.

KEATS (kets), John, English poet: born London, England, October 31, 1795; died Rome, Italy, February 23,1821. He was born at the Swan and Hoop livery stable, Finsbury Pavement, and baptized at St. Botolph's Church, Bishopsgate, on December 18, 1795, where in the baptismal register the date of his birth is given as above. His father Thomas Keats, who kept the livery stable, had married Frances Jennings, the daughter of his former employer, a fairly well-to-do businessman. John was the eldest of four children surviving infancy: George was born in 1797, Thomas in 1799, and Frances (Fanny) in 1803. In 1804 his father died as a result of being thrown from a horse on the night of April 15/16. The mother was remarried in June to a William Rawlings, but this marriage was evidently a mistake, and the family moved to the home of her mother, Mrs. Jennings, in Edmonton. John had been sent in 1803 to a school at Enfield, two miles away, where he remained until 1811, and where the son of the headmaster, Charles Cowden Clarke, became a close friend. The poet's mother died in 1810, and as a result of a will drawn up by Mrs. Jennings (who died herself in 1814), two guardians for the Keats children were appointed of whom one, Richard Abbey, a tea merchant, seems to have assumed full responsibility. At school Keats is said by a schoolmate to have been chiefly interested in fighting the other boys, although he won book prizes and is said to have completed by 1811 a prose translation of the Aeneid, now lost. He

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was not a prodigy, but his earliest extant poem, Imitation of Spenser, may date from 1812, and indicates the early impact of one of his major poetic influences. In 1811, on leaving school, he was apprenticed to a surgeon, Thomas Hammond, and although he speaks later of having had a quarrel with Hammond, he went on with his medical studies, interning in two London hospitals, Guy's and St. Thomas's. He was entered at Guy's in October 1815, was appointed dresser to a hospital surgeon named Lucas on March 3, 1816, and passed an examination at Apothecaries' Hall in July 1816, obtaining his license to practise. It was not until he had come of age, at the end of 1816, that he announced to his guardian his intention of abandoning medicine for poetry. Meanwhile Keats had been forming a circle of literary friends in London, of whom two were of particular importance to him at this time: the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon and the poet and critic Leigh Hunt. In the controversy then raging over the Elgin marbles, Haydon was largely responsible for having them purchased and their authenticity accepted, and it was through Haydon that Keats first made contact with Greek plastic art that had so profound an effect on his poetry. Leigh Hunt and his magazine, the Examiner, formed the centre of a London coterie which was liberal in politics and Romantic in literature and was called by the opposing Tory periodical Blackwood's Magazine the "Cockney School." Hunt had been imprisoned as a result of an alleged libel on the prince regent, and his release from imprisonment in February 1815 was celebrated by Keats in a sonnet. Hunt is referred to several times in Keats's early poems as "Libertas." Of critics, Keats most admired the radical William Hazlitt, who later became a personal friend: through Hunt, Keats met the even more revolutionary Shelley. On May 5,1816, Keats's first published poem, a sonnet, O Solitude, appeared in the Examiner, and the finest of his early poems, the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, written in October, appeared in the same periodical on December i. By the end of 1816, Keats had written enough to fill the volume of Poems which was published by Charles and James Oilier on March 3,1817. There is little in the 1817 volume of major importance, but the book announced a new poet of great promise and fresh insight and clearly defined his sympathies. After a dedication to Leigh Hunt, it opened with a sketch of the theme of the myth of Endymion which had already begun to haunt Keats, a poem beginning "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill." There followed an abortive tale of chivalry, Calidore (the name of the chief knight in the sixth book of Spenser's Faerie Queene), then some juvenile

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verses, then three poems in the form of "epistles" in which he discusses his poetic ambitions, then a group of sonnets, including the three mentioned above, and finally the remarkable Sleep and Poetry, with its blast of invective against the Classical or Augustan tradition in English poetry. For all its polemical vigour, and in spite of some friendly reviews (by friends of Keats, it is true, including Hunt), the book attracted little attention. Most of 1817 Keats spent very quietly writing his long mythological poem Endymion. This poem was begun at Carisbrooke, on the Isle of Wight, late in April, and in its opening lines states that the poet, thus beginning it in spring, hopes to complete it in the autumn. After visits to Margate and Canterbury, Keats settled with his two brothers George and Tom at Well Walk, Hampstead. In September he went to Oxford to visit his friend Benjamin Bailey, where he completed the third book of the poem. It was to Bailey that he wrote his famous letter on the imagination (November 22, 1817), containing the phrase, "O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!"1 Endymion was finished in late November at Burford Bridge in Surrey, and in December Keats was back in Hampstead, enjoying the company of Haydon and Hunt and attending the theatre. He wrote a series of articles on some theatrical productions by the famous actor Edmund Kean, which appeared in a paper called The Champion. It was at this time that Keats first met William Wordsworth, and Haydon in his autobiography has left a lively account of an "Immortal Dinner" given in his studio on December 28, 1817, at which Keats, Wordsworth, and a very intoxicated Charles Lamb were present.2 Keats's deep admiration for Wordsworth's poetry did not extend to his personality, and he speaks of Wordsworth's genius as "the egotistical sublime."3 On the other hand, "a very pretty piece of paganism"4 was Wordsworth's only comment when Keats read him the great Hymn to Pan in the first book of Endymion, With Endymion finished, Keats was able, while revising and recopying it, to turn his attention to other work. In a drear-nighted December commemorates the December of 1817, and the fine but unluckily prophetic sonnet, When I have fears that I may cease to be, belongs to January of 1818. On February 4, at an evening at Leigh Hunt's, Hunt, Keats, and Shelley vied with one another in composing sonnets on the Nile, of which Hunt's is the best.5 It was also in February that Keats began the first of his later major poems, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, a story from Boccaccio's Decameron retold in ottava rima stanzas. This poem, never a favourite with Keats

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himself, was probably completed in April. From March to early May, Keats was in Devonshire, at Teignmouth, grumbling humorously in letters at the inhabitants and the incessant rain, correcting the proofs of Endymion, and writing to his new publisher, John Taylor of Taylor and Hessey, one of his most discerning and generous friends. Endymion was published in April 1818, with a preface by Keats concerned mainly with pointing out its faults. In June his brother George married Georgiana Wylie, to whom Keats had already addressed some affectionate poems, and the couple determined to emigrate to America, eventually settling in Louisville, Kentucky. Keats meanwhile had planned a walking trip through northern England and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown (later Charles Armitage Brown), "to make a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue—that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expence."6 The tour began on June 25, 1818, after leaving George and Georgiana at Liverpool. The pair went first through the lake country, Keats attempting unsuccessfully to call on Wordsworth at Rydal, then entered Scotland, visiting various Burns shrines. Ireland proved on a brief visit too expensive to live in, and they returned to Scotland, seeing Ailsa Craig, the Staff a caves, and Ben Nevis. In late July, on the Island of Mull, physical fatigue, rain, exposure, and rough diet gave Keats a violent cold, which became so serious that a doctor in Inverness advised immediate return to London. Keats returned to London by boat in August 1818 and found his brother Tom, who had been ill for months, fatally stricken with consumption. In August too a noisily abusive review of Endymion appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, one of a series of lampoons on the "Cockney School." The article (anonymous, as the custom then was, but written by John Gibson Lockhart, later the biographer of Scott) dwelt much on "Johnny" Keats as an overambitious apothecary's apprentice, and recommended that he return to his pills and plasters. Another review appearing in September in the Quarterly Review, also anonymous, by John Wilson Croker, was scarcely less violent, if less personally so. Such writing, especially the Blackwood's article, was inspired by political rivalry and personal intrigue more than by any real critical standards, however mistaken, but nevertheless these reviews (along with a third in the British Critic, if possible the most offensive of the three) succeeded in doing a great deal of the harm that they were designed to do, both to Keats's sales and to his reputation.7

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By September Keats had plunged into another mythological poem, Hyperion, dealing with the theme of the defeat of the Titans by the Olympian gods and cast in the convention of Miltonic epic, as Endymion had been in that of Spenserian romance and allegory. On December i, 1818, Tom Keats died, and the poet moved to Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead, to live with Brown. He said in a letter that his concern for his family kept all thoughts of other love out of his mind;8 but now Tom was dead, George was in America, and his sister Fanny, to whom he was devoted and wrote many delightful letters, was at school and kept from him by her well-meaning but small-souled guardian Abbey, who greatly disapproved of Keats's mode of life. By December we find references in the letters to a Miss Fanny Brawne, who was obviously interesting him much more than he pretended she was. The date of his engagement to her is uncertain, the traditional date, Christmas Day of 1818, being much too early; it was probably after she and her mother moved in next door at Wentworth Place, near the beginning of April. In January of 1819 Keats began, while staying in the cathedral town of Chichester, what became, as the result of a painstaking revision not completed until September, the flawless masterpiece The Eve of St. Agnes. The tantalizing fragment The Eve of St. Mark followed in February, referred to, and later copied out, in the wonderful journal letters written by the poet to George and Georgiana in Kentucky. March was an unproductive month, but in April, when he finished what we have of Hyperion, Keats wrote the ode To Psyche, the first (and according to T.S. Eliot the best)9 of the great odes, as well as the haunting ballad that has inspired a whole literature in itself, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The lovely sonnet Bright Star, which was written on a blank page in a volume of Shakespeare during the journey to Italy and is often regarded as Keats's last poetic effort, may also belong to this time; a recent critic suggests October of 1818 for its first version. In May 1819 Keats reached the peak of his creative powers with the Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, and (perhaps in early June) the Ode on Indolence. The first two appeared in a periodical called Annals of the Fine Arts in July 1819 and January 1820 respectively. Meanwhile Keats's financial situation was becoming serious. His poetry had of course brought him no money, and he had been living on advances from Abbey on his grandmother's legacy. An impulsive Chancery suit brought by an aunt to decide the apportioning of an unallotted sum of money seems to have immobilized the poet's resources. The

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details are not clear: Abbey may have invented difficulties, though his actual dishonesty seems unlikely. Haydon had been pressing hard for a loan which Keats finally made, but certainly could not afford. Keats was compelled to begin borrowing money from Brown and to try to turn his pen to more profitable use. In July 1819 he began a five-act tragedy, Otho the Great, in collaboration with Brown, who dictated the plot while Keats versified it. The friends hoped to make money out of this play by offering it to Kean, and Keats was much disappointed when Kean left in September for an American tour. Otho the Great is not a very interesting piece except in the fifth act, when Keats assumed more control of the action, and it has probably never been produced on the stage. Another dramatic venture, King Stephen, never got beyond four admirably vigorous scenes. In November Keats was writing the unfinished potboiler known as The Cap and Bells, an allusive satire told as a fairy tale, in a vein of synthetic whimsy profoundly uncongenial to him. Fortunately Keats devoted his evenings and other spare time to work more in his own idiom. Lamia, a sinister tale of a serpent-maiden based on a passage in one of his favourite books, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,w was begun in July when Keats was living in the village of Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, and completed in September. On September 19, 1819, at Winchester, in a final magnificent flareup of his genius, he wrote To Autumn. He was then faced with the problem of what to do with Hyperion. A letter of September 21 announced that he had given up the poem, finding that its strongly Miltonic diction was making it increasingly an imitative tour deforce.^ However, he attempted to recast it as The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. In this form the poem begins with a prelude which puts the events of the original poem into a vision shown to the poet by the goddess Moneta, and then goes on with a revised version of Hyperion, the changes being almost invariably for the worse, as far as line 217. It was natural that some critics should take The Fall of Hyperion to be the earlier of the two versions, but this view has been thoroughly examined and is no longer accepted. Brief as Keats's life was, his productive career, which for all practical purposes ended with the ode To Autumn, was still briefer. Ever since the Scottish tour he had suffered recurrent attacks of sore throat; he had nursed Tom through his fatal illness; he had had a year of creative activity unmatched in the history of English poetry, and it is not surprising that the winter of 1819-1820 found him greatly lowered in vitality. In January 1820 he was listless and moody, and a brief return of George

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from America to collect his share of the family legacy did little for his spirits and nothing for his purse. On February 3 came an attack of bloodspitting which Keats, with his medical training, recognized for what it was. "I know the colour of that blood," he said to Brown: "it is arterial blood—I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop of blood is my death-warrant—I must die."12 In March he was ordered by his doctor to give up all work, and in a few months a poet of bounding health and energy had become a passive invalid. His greatest misery was caused by the hopelessness of his love for Fanny Brawne. Though some of Keats's friends disliked her, there is no reasonable doubt of her devotion to him, but she had health and he had not; she engaged in social activities he could not share in, and his letters and poems to her often show a desperately possessive jealousy. With the good services of his publishers and the barrister Richard Woodhouse, a most competent editor, transcriber, and critic, who from the beginning had recognized Keats as the greatest genius since Milton, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems was published in the beginning of July. The "other poems" included Hyperion and the great odes to the Nightingale, the Grecian Urn, Melancholy, Psyche, and Autumn. La Belle Dame Sans Merci was not included: it was first published in the Indicator, another magazine of Leigh Hunt's, on May 20, over the gloomy pseudonym of "Caviare" (echoing Hamlet's "caviare to the general" [Hamlet, 2.2.436-7!). The 1820 volume, as it is usually called, had a considerably better critical reception than Endymion, but Keats was past caring, in spite of a rally in health which deceived his doctor. Hemorrhages set in again on June 22, and he moved restlessly about, taking shelter with Leigh Hunt and then with Fanny Brawne and her mother. As it seemed obvious that another winter in England would be a death sentence, plans were made to get the ailing poet away. Offers of help came from various quarters, including a very generous one from a total stranger, a Scotsman named John Aitken. Shelley invited Keats to his home in Pisa, an invitation which Keats, who never warmed up to Shelley, put aside, in the letter which contains the famous phrase, "[Y]ou might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore."13 Keats sailed for Italy on September 18, 1820, in the company of the painter Joseph Severn, a friend of long standing, enduring a rough voyage, quarantine, and a badly equipped ship, and arriving in Naples on October 21. Keats took a dislike to what he considered an atmosphere of tyranny in Naples, and in November

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they pushed on to Rome, where a kindly resident English doctor, James Clark (later Sir James), did what he could for him. On November 30 Keats wrote his last letter, to Brown, ending: "I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow."14 He lingered a few weeks after a relapse on December 10, devotedly nursed by Severn in the face of great difficulties. He was now resigned to death, speaking of his continuing life as "posthumous,"15 and after a month's final illness he died in Severn's arms at 11 P.M. on February 23 (by Roman time February 24, the date on his tombstone), 1821. On February 26 he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near the pyramid tomb of Gaius Cestius, where Shelley, drowned the next year with a copy of Keats's 1820 volume in his pocket, was also buried. The tombstone bears his own epitaph, adapted from Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Shelley's elegy on Keats's death, Adonais, was written in June 1821, and published at Pisa on July 13. Noble and eloquent a poem as it is, it unfortunately helped to popularize the absurd notion that Keats had died of chagrin at his bad reviews. Keats's posthumous fame rose slowly but steadily. The major turning point was the publication of Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, edited by Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), in 1848. The biography drew upon the personal recollections of most of Keats's more intimate friends, and the edition brought to public knowledge a great many new poems as well as a large body of letters (excluding, however, those to Fanny Keats and Fanny Brawne, published later in the century). The influence of Keats on Victorian poetry, especially on Tennyson and the later pre-Raphaelite group, could hardly have been much greater, and he suffered far less than any of his contemporaries from the anti-Romantic reaction which reached its height during the 19205. At present his reputation stands where it has stood for nearly a century, higher than that of any English poet since Wordsworth. Keats was short of stature, just over five feet, but was broad shouldered and well proportioned. Contemporaries speak of brilliant eyes and (in contrast to Shelley) a well-modulated voice, and Severn's pictures and a life mask made by Haydon show his wide sensitive mouth and strong chin and nose. As long as he had his health he was vigorous and agile, with a temper made explosive by strong passions rather than irritability. He was a good boxer, and Cowden Clarke speaks of his fighting for an hour and eventually thrashing a lout "big enough to have eaten him,"16 whom he had caught tormenting a kitten. All his friends

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agree with the impression given by his letters of candour, loyalty, a genius for friendship, and a natural sweetness of disposition. He appears to less advantage as a lover than as a brother or friend, though the horror of such Victorian critics as Matthew Arnold and Coventry Patmore at the Fanny Brawne letters is difficult to understand today.17 The attractiveness of Keats's personality has done much to make him a favourite as well as a classic, and the remark made in a letter by his publisher John Taylor, written in 1818—"if you knew him, you would also feel that strange personal Interest in all that concerns him"18—is equally true today. In more than one sense he is a poet who can never grow old, and for most of his readers the line from The Tempest, "Nothing of him that doth fade" [1.2.400], would be more appropriate for his tombstone than the one he chose.

12

Kathleen Hazel Coburn 13 June 1978

Citation for an honorary degree from the University of Toronto, from the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 6, file o. Coburn was a long-time colleague of Frye's in the Department of English at Victoria College. She had become general editor of Coleridge's Collected Works, and exemplified a type of scholarship that was at the opposite pole from Frye's, involving meticulous documentation and textual work.1 Frye refers in the text to her anthology of Coleridge's writings, Inquiring Spirit (1951, reviewed in no. 6, above), and also to two of her public lectures: the 1979 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, published as Experience into Thought: Perspectives in the Coleridge Notebooks (1979), and the 1973 Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Newcastle, published as The Self-Conscious Imagination (1974). Mr. Chancellor: In a forthcoming CBC documentary on the Massey family, Hart Massey is quoted as saying, "My mind was formed by Victoria College." I think Miss Coburn's mind was also formed, if not by Victoria College, at least at it, because hers is one of those proud generations in which this university possessed two powerful mind-forming agencies, the autonomous college and the structured Honour Course. Having squandered these, the university can no longer form the minds of its arts students on such a scale, though it may occasionally catch one and train it. Miss Coburn knows very well how fortunate she has been, and has said so in her charming autobiography, In Pursuit of Coleridge, which I warmly commend to your attention. She entered the Philosophy and English Honour Course, where her chief mentors were G.S. Brett in philosophy and Pelham Edgar in English. For Edgar the sun rose and set on the great

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English Romantics, and for Brett the keystone of the history of philosophy was Kant; hence, for a lively and imaginative student mind exposed to such influences, a special interest in Coleridge was a natural enough development. She went on to Oxford, and, by a series of accidents which were clearly not really accidents, she gained access to the fifty-odd notebooks of Coleridge in possession of the Coleridge family, and later discovered the lost manuscript of Coleridge's Philosophical Lectures, an edition of which was her first publication. I was a student at Oxford myself at the time, and remember something of the consternation caused by the news of her taking so commanding a place in Coleridge studies.2 Besides being young and unknown, she was, after all, a woman, and in those days some Oxford professors would still walk into a classroom half full of women and begin their lecture with the word "gentlemen." Then again, she was a colonial, and the illiteracy of colonials was a favourite topic of Oxonian senior common rooms. What those who did not know her missed was what everyone who did know her recognized at once: the quiet authority which conveyed that, of the dozens of academics panting to edit the Coleridge notebooks, or at any rate sit on them to keep others from doing it, this was the one who could, who should, and who would. She made the courageous but obviously right decision to get the whole editorial strategy clear in her mind before publishing the first volumes, which delayed their publication but made them permanent when they did appear. Annotation was simpler in principle, because for annotating Coleridge only one requirement is needed, namely omniscience. Largely through her efforts, scholarly interest in Coleridge expanded to the point at which a collected edition of his works became a practical possibility, and Miss Coburn, of course, became general editor of this colossal enterprise. In shorter compass, there are two anthologies of Coleridge and two volumes of public lectures, one the brilliant series of Alexander Lectures given on this campus last fall. She has also edited the letters of Sara Hutchinson and has a most comprehensive knowledge of the whole Romantic period, but her centre of gravity has always been Coleridge, and she has done more than anyone else to make us realize that, even in a period of such incredible vitality, Coleridge is the one who comes nearest to Goethe in the range and versatility of his mental powers. The study of the humanities without the possession of humanity is a mockery, and I refer you to her own writings for a sense of the personality behind all this industry, erudition, and organizing skill. It comes out

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in her attitude to Coleridge himself, to whose greatness as a genius she is appreciative without idolatry, to whose weaknesses as a man she is compassionate without condescension. Her capacity for friendship has attracted the loyalty and devotion of a great variety of people, from the Indians of her beloved Georgian Bay to the normally quarrelsome breed of specialized scholars. Her cultural and imaginative roots go very deeply into Ontario soil: coming herself from a North Irish family, she has watched the transformation of the province by later waves of immigration, and has studied the pattern in her striking novel The Grandmothers. Her Nonconformist conscience kept her in a teaching position at Victoria long after she could have escaped from such duties, and, during the war, made her a defender of the civil rights of the victims of wartime hysteria. Her quality of balanced sanity has, I think, been well if unconsciously characterized by Coleridge himself, in one of those blockbusting sentences of his which I have somewhat abridged: For myself . . . in the performance of my public duties as Editor . . . I shall always deem myself acting most judiciously when I employ those feelings, which the Supreme Wisdom has interwoven with my existence, in the enforcement of those truths and duties . . . which the same Wisdom ordained to be the characteristic of our nature, and the end and object of our being.3 Mr. Chancellor, in the name of the Governing Council I ask you to confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Miss Kathleen Coburn.

13

How It Was Winter 1982

From Studies in Romanticism, 21 (Winter 1982): 571. The piece, headed "Northrop Frye" and concluding "University of Toronto," appeared in the twenty-first anniversary issue of Studies in Romanticism. It was part of a special section entitled "How It Was," in which a number of critics interested in Romanticism were asked "to remind us what the study seemed like before." Critics responding included David Perkins, who credited Anatomy of Criticism for part of the growth of Romantic studies, and Carl Woodring, who mentioned the importance of Frye''s transfer of Blake from the eighteenth century to the Romantic division in the MLA.

When I was a very green student in the graduate school here, sometime around 1935 or 1936, we had a Graduate English Club, and I remember a very bright paper on Shelley, full of such remarks as the word "unpremeditated" in the Skylark poem being more suggestive of a typewriter than a bird. It was quite a bright paper, as I say, but I had read Eliot's early essays by that time, and suddenly in the middle of it I realized that I was watching a bandwagon going by. Incredible as it sounds, it had never occurred to me before that the study of English literature could be just as full of vogues and fashions as anything else. So I decided to develop an interest in the Romantics (I was already interested in Blake) as much out of perversity as anything else. That is, I was damned if I was going to start rushing this way and that in obedience to a trend. The seed of doubt in the importance of value judgments generally was also deeply implanted in me at this point.

14

In the Earth, or in the Air? 17 January 1986

From Times Literary Supplement, 17 January 1986,51-2. Review of Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Guildford: Columbia University Press, 1984). Typescripts are in NFF, 1991, box 40, file 5.

Paul de Man's last book is, like its predecessors Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading, a collection of essays concerned with practical and explicatory criticism in the Romantic and post-Romantic periods. Considered as a single volume, it is a better book than de Man himself suggests. He speaks in his preface of having written a series of essays, each one coherent in itself, but not carrying over from one to the next or working out what he calls a parataxis, a linear sequence that accumulates as it goes on and presents the reader with a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Perhaps this is true, but as his is simply not this kind of book, the fact need not be a deficiency. What is interesting is that the assumption in Blindness and Insight that such books were theoretically very dubious no longer seems to be an assumption. What we have is a set of variations on a protean theme, the theme being an antithetical dialectic—symbol and allegory, image and emblem, anthropomorphism and figuration, aesthetics and violence—which exists in every area of Romanticism, but never really becomes anything more than an antithesis, either in the Romantic period or in ours. The sixteenth-century Anabaptist Hans Denck remarked that "Whoever leaves an antithesis without resolving it lacks the ground of truth."1 Brave words, but they are the words of a theologian who must put all things under his feet. It is a tribute to de Man's integrity that, writing in a century that has failed to resolve any of its most formidable antitheses, he leaves things that way.

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Critical theory is popular enough by now to have generated its own kind of gossip literature, and in it de Man is often characterized as a having a magisterial style, a "rhetoric of authority," as though, being at the centre of the Yale school of critics, one of his intentions was to suggest that all was well with God and man at Yale. Evidently, in a field where so few people really know what they are talking about, it is somewhat bad form to suggest that one does, even implicitly in the style. But in his practical criticism, at least, de Man has acquired his authoritative style in the legitimate way. Blindness and Insight, for example, has an essay on obscurity in modern poetry, where he picks up some facile twaddle on the subject telling its readers that Mallarme abandoned representation for arid allegory, and then shows, by a superb explication of the Tombeau de Verlaine, that Mallarme never did anything of the kind. In the present book, one essay tackles the very difficult and elusive passage on Rousseau in Holderlin's Der Rhein, with just a little more care and patience than the next critic, and extracts from it the historical significance that Holderlin saw in Rousseau, and that we, by implication, all ought to see in Rousseau. The rhetoric of Romanticism, according to de Man, began with the arguments over "allegory" and "symbol" in late eighteenth-century Germany. He discusses this in the essay in Blindness and Insight, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," which is really an essential addition to the present book. What emerged from the discussion was not a coherent definition of either term, but the growing realization that Western culture had up to that point been dominated by distinctive ideologies, which formed the "allegories" enclosing it. All dominant ideologies are structures of authority, and, unless they are merely tyrannies enforced by terror, they are aesthetic structures as well. Romanticism was primarily the realization that in human society a conflict of ideologies was inescapable, as every thesis or proposition contains, in fact has already expressed, its own opposite. The resulting conflicts take many forms. Politically, attitudes range from an extreme conservatism that invokes the revival of some earlier type of authoritative ideology to an extreme radicalism that regards conflict as an end in itself. Culturally, one extreme tries to invent a new aesthetic order, as even Yeats does to a considerable degree, and the other tries to get rid of the aesthetic orders altogether and live directly in nature without a cultural and verbal envelope sheltering us from it. In our day the sense of ideological deadlock has produced a general sense of ironic lassitude among critics, except for those who try to break out of

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it by seizing one ideology, generally one with Marxist affinities, and demanding commitment and engagement for it. Perhaps the most directly accessible of these conflicts is the one discussed in the last essay in de Man's book. Here we begin with a quotation from Schiller referring to the dance as the model image for civilized society, a disciplined movement where freedom and obligation, individual and social needs, have ceased to become antitheses. There follows a fascinating discussion of the dialogues in Kleist's Marionettentheater, where Kleist applies a similar model to the puppet theatre, on the ground that such a model could only be illustrated by puppets or gods, creatures of no consciousness or of total consciousness. When the model is applied to human beings, it becomes clear that the aesthetic element is inseparable, not merely from the political authority of which it forms a part, but from violence, even terror. In short, aesthetics put into practice becomes a method of education, and, de Man says, "aesthetic education by no means fails; it succeeds all too well, to the point of hiding the violence that makes it possible" [289]. It doesn't always hide it: the references to "grace" in passages quoted from Kleist remind us of that pathetic figure Castiglione, explaining how essential grace was to the ideal courtier who would service his prince, yet writing against a background of Machiavelli's political vision, the campaigns of Julius II, the French invasion, and the sack of Rome. We may think too of the line "Where you must move in measure, like a dancer," in Little Gidding [1. 146], and then of the context in which that line occurs. A slightly more complex form of conflict appears in the opening essay, "Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image," where first of all we have passages quoted from the three authors who seem to de Man to be crucial in defining the emergence of the Romantic sensibility, Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Holderlin. All three passages describe a landscape connected mainly with mountain peaks and sunrise, in which "nature" seems to be divided into the familiar environment in which man dwells and an alienating objective otherness symbolized by the upper air. The familiar earth-centred and earth-bound nature is a natura naturans recalling a kind of earthly paradise where, in a phrase from Holderlin's Brot und Wein that seems to have a unique resonance for de Man, words would grow as naturally as flowers. The emergence of the higher level, de Man says, represents "a fundamentally new kind of relationship between nature and consciousness" [14]. There is certainly something in it that is new, especially the amount said about it, but I think the essay

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misses its own main point. The physical location of this place of the new relation is the old heaven, which in pre-Romantic ideology was both the place of the presence of God and the metaphor for that presence, the lower heaven or the sky. De Man notes the religious colouring of the language in all three poets he quotes, but not the curious parody (it really amounts to that) of the older vision of natura naturata, the structure or system of nature that traditionally forms a second word of God. A very deep-seated dilemma for the poet appears here. As long as it continues to use words, literature can never be as purely abstract an art as painting or music. Nouns and verbs still have to name things and actions, and if a poet feels that his world is divided between an earth where words grow like flowers and some kind of ionosphere where there are no phenomena any more, what kind of words can he use for the latter? He can stare at this world with fear, reverence, or dislike; he can talk about its emotional effect on him; but he can't incorporate it into his poetry without using clay-born imagery. The only alternative is an occasional tour de force, such as Mallarme achieves in speaking of the terrifying and haunting "azur" in the poem [L'Azur] that so bewildered his contemporaries. De Man denies that Mallarme's "azur" really belongs to this nonphenomenal conception of nature, because he is anxious to keep Mallarme among the earth-based poets. But when no poet can get off the ground and sustain himself in the "azur" anyway, I doubt if this objection means much. In another essay de Man starts off with a remark of Nietzsche's that truth is metaphor, metonymy, and anthropomorphism, and then analyses two sonnets of Baudelaire that are clearly intended to form a contrast, the famous Correspondances and Obsession. The first tells us that nature communicates infinite mysteries; the second tells us that nature communicates nothing at all with any human relevance. Nobody who thinks of this kind of thing as a "contradiction" ought to be reading poetry: de Man sees the contrast, which is what it is, as the same contrast as the one between nature as man's home and nature as the alienating otherness just mentioned. We notice that de Man does not take the word "apocalypse" seriously (in striking contrast to, for instance, Meyer Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism), as describing a form of imaginative comprehension, although it appeared in the quotation from Wordsworth in the opening essay. Apocalypse is revelation, and to reveal is to be at a distance, communicating, but suggesting an infinite possession—from which the revelation

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comes. Correspondances is an apocalyptic poem in this sense, though not one of a Christian type, as Christianity never thought of revelation as coming through nature in this way. An apocalypse may be an "illusion," whatever such a word may mean in literature, but it is hard to understand many aspects of Romanticism without taking the illusion into account. Yet apocalypse always included, or was never far from, a sense of total disruption of the habits of sense experience, a vision of total removal of meaning in which the sun was turned into darkness and the moon into blood. Again, the underlying structure of a history of ideas, and a series of imaginative deconstructions of those ideas, seems to be missing from de Man's argument. And without it one is hesitant to believe that the sense of nature as a gouffre du neant (combining two titles from Baudelaire) is really a "fundamentally new" relation between the objective and the conscious worlds.2 Another variation of the central issue appears in a somewhat simpler form in an essay on Yeats that takes up about a third of the book. This essay, "Image and Emblem in Yeats," is early, and evidently formed part of a doctoral dissertation. Yeats's early poetry, according to this essay, used an emblematic type of image to suggest a verbally and mythologically self-enclosed world. An example of such an image is the seashell, the natural object that suggests by its echoing, not the objective world, but the created one that grows out of the poet himself. Similarly swans and peacocks have more to do with aristocratic beauty and disciplined movement than with birds. The conventional view of Yeats, de Man says, is that from about Responsibilities (1914) on he began to use more "natural" imagery and so gave signs of rooting himself in the "real world." The thesis of de Man's essay seems to be that the problem of the emblematic image kept haunting Yeats to the end of his life: so it did, but I wish he had said so without incorporating so many perverse readings of Yeats. The essay deals very little with the two Byzantium poems, but when the narrator of Sailing to Byzantium announced that once he was safely in the "artifice of eternity" he would not take his new form from "any natural thing," Sturge Moore protested that his "artificial" images were just as "natural," if in a different way, as those evoking the world left behind.3 True—the seashell also, for example, is both a natural thing and an artefact—but we get different emphases in imagery all the same. It seems to me, using de Man's terms, that the chestnut tree at the end of Among School Children is a natural "image" and that the leaf-and-fire tree

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with Attis's image on it at the beginning of Vacillation is an emblematic tree. The function of the first is to resolve the antitheses of Plato and Aristotle, nuns and mothers, transfiguration and rebirth, soul and body, votive candles and children, holy presences and self-born mockers, that the earlier part of the poem sets out. Along with the dancer, this tree represents a permanent integration or unity of being that we can neither attain nor leave alone. The tree is there, but not conscious; the dancer is conscious, but cannot go on dancing indefinitely. The function of the Vacillation tree, in contrast, with its mythical (Mabinogion) ancestry, is to announce the theme of the conflict of heroism and sanctity that the narrator, in common with the rest of the human race, who are all part of Attis's image, "vacillates" between. But de Man insists that the two trees are the same, and that the leaf, blossom, and bole of the chestnut correspond to the lushness, the fire, and the Attis image of the second. He also maintains that Yeats was absorbed by the beauty of Byzantine culture to the point of repudiating the Platonic sense of an incarnate Eros in his later work. The fact that practically all Yeats's poetry and his explicit statements on the subject say the exact opposite is evidently just resistance or defensiveness. But surely Yeats is par excellence the poet who realized that no one can do without either images or emblems and still be a poet: he repudiates the way of the saint, not for being what it is, but because it destroys the poetic impulse by renouncing even emblematic images: Byzantine art itself is not anti-erotic or supererotic: it is a later development of the union of the erotic and the mathematical which, according to The Statues, was planned by Pythagoras as well as practised by Phidias. What is true, I think, and what gives the essay cogency in spite of its dubious readings, is that, for example, the chestnut tree, as a natural image, resonates against the emblematic tree of Vacillation and its counterparts elsewhere. For Yeats there are two worlds, out of many, that particularly concern the poet. The poet's workshop is the "preposterous pig of a world" we see about us, and the "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" that we see within us.4 But there is also an emblematic world of beauty and dignity that can be invoked, and it gives meaning to what the poet struggles with in roping his pig. The result is the aesthetic-violence interaction described so clearly in the Kleist essay. In Sailing to Byzantium there is a distant vision of unflawed beauty and order; in Byzantium, the view of the process behind this construction, there is a kind of alchemical blast furnace burning up the blood and filth of human life.

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The earlier Blindness and Insight was a much more theoretical book, concerned mainly with such critics as Poulet, Derrida, Binswanger, Blanchot, and Lukacs. Some readers felt that it was also a rather negative book, setting out all the things that words can't and shouldn't be expected to do, and giving the effect of a ceaseless driving around a strange city in a tangle of one-way streets and unmarked dead ends. I don't feel this: I feel that it is concerned to show that the conflict of ideologies in Romanticism I spoke of springs from a sense that the old subject-object paradigm of experience did not work any more, at any rate in anything approximating literature. The reader is not a simple subject: the text he is reading is not a simple object. We may postulate a verbal world intermediate between subject and object, but that creates a fresh set of difficulties: one may easily treat a verbal structure as though it were a natural object, as the "formalists" do when they make a cult of organic wholeness. Poems are organic wholes for the same reasons that pills are round: not because roundness is their essence, but because that shape favours assimilation. The word "blindness" suggests the fable of the six blind men and the elephant. Some critics seize on the prophetic element in Romanticism, others on the impersonality or transcendence of the subject, others on the redemptive potential in literature in leading us to God or Marx. All these are "rhetorics of blindness," in the sense that the elephant does have a trunk and a tail besides being an elephant, and the fact that he is perceived to have these things constitutes an insight. But who can show us the real and the whole beast? Most Romantic-centred critics have one figure that they use as a Virgilian guide through its contradictory mazes; and for de Man that figure is Rousseau. He says, basing the statement on Holderlin but clearly endorsing most of it himself, that "it is Rousseau's turning away from sense perception towards the 'sentiment of existence' that he [Holderlin] sees as the crucial moment in the development of Western thought" [38]. And later, "Rousseau represents a turning point in the history of Western consciousness because he was the first to attempt a way out of this impasse" [40]. That is, the impasse created by the subject-object duality in which the objective is the master. The second half of Allegories of Reading concentrates entirely on Rousseau, and in Blindness and Insight the crucial essay is concerned with Derrida's deconstruction of Rousseau's essay on the origins of writing— a very carefully selected text from Derrida's point of view. Assuming

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that the central aim of deconstruction is to reveal the assumptions, more particularly the unconscious assumptions, underlying what a writer is saying through his choice of metaphors and images, Rousseau, according to de Man, does not need any such deconstruction, because he knows from the first that he is creating a fiction and not asserting objective truth. In other words, every work of Rousseau is best deconstructed by reading his other works. If I were explaining this situation in my own words, I should say that an ideology expresses secondary and derivative human concerns, and that what ideologies are derived from is mythology, which expresses the primary desires of existence, along with the anxieties attached to their frustration. The real object of deconstruction, then, is to reveal the mythological basis under the ideology, and the writers least in need of such analysis are the great reshapers of myth, of whom Rousseau is obviously one. I doubt that this is really so far removed from de Man's view, whatever his visceral reaction to the word "myth" would have been. I introduce the point because ideology is always nostalgic for the past or expectant of the future, or both, whereas mythology transposes everything into a present directly confronting the reader. Hence the immense importance, for understanding Rousseau's historical function, of the passage in the fifth walk of the Reveries, where he speaks of the superlative happiness gained by a self-recollecting consciousness dwelling purely in the present, with no chains binding it to future or past.5 De Man understands the importance of this passage for Holderlin's view of Rousseau: he even understands its importance in itself, but some lurking secularized sense of original sin seems to prevent him from coming to grips with it. Another poem that uses Rousseau as a Virgilian guide is Shelley's Triumph of Life, on which there is also an essay in The Rhetoric of Romanticism. I have space only to point to the virtuosity of the explication in this essay. De Man may be "right" or "wrong" about the poem—an unfinished poem is too boggy a ground textually to fight over—but he follows the metaphors and figures of the poem with an intensity that is utterly "right" in itself. He shows us how the narrative of a ^oo-line poem can contain more surprising twists of plot, more cliff-hanging suspense, more sudden alternation of vision and concealment, than a thousand pages of commonplace romantic adventures. In the course of the essay de Man remarks that the death of the poet, which prevented him from finishing the poem, is an integral part of the imagery. Whatever one does with this observation, it gives additional poignancy to the fact, certainly regrettable enough in itself, that there will be no more essays from Paul de Man.

On the Nineteenth Century

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15

Review of Patience and The Silver Box March 1932

Review of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience and John Galsworthy's The Silver Box, from the "Monocle" section of Ada Victoriana, 56, no. 5 (March 1932): 32-4. This article and the next were written during f rye's undergraduate years for the student literary magazine of Victoria College. During the 1931-32 academic year, Frye's third, he and Mary Morton were "Monocle editors," in charge of the section that reviewed college activities and productions. The Music Club's annual productions of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta were an important part of student life. They were directed by Thomas ("Tommy") James Crawford (1877-1955), distinguished composer, choral director, and organist at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, who conducted the Music Club at Victoria from 1927 to 1942.

Patience

This year the Music Club have selected an opera from the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire which in many ways is a sharp contrast to the one of the preceding year. Whereas the plot of The Gondoliers1 was a mere skeleton framework on which Sullivan hung a long string of fluent and graceful melodies, Patience, on the contrary, is primarily a biting satire on the more precious of the fin de siecle esoteric cults and its music is almost incidental. The result was that the Music Club, in emphasizing, perhaps overemphasizing, the purely musical aspect of the work, assimilated the comparatively simple choruses and solos quite thoroughly and made them essential, while the satire of the piece was slurred over into the burlesque. This was no doubt more or less inevitable in view of the fact that the follies it attacks are largely obsolete, but if it was inevitable, then

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the choice of the piece was not a wise one. That seemed to be the general impression. I should like to quote with approval the words of one of the principals: "The closer the Music Club keeps to the Pirates of Penzance sort of thing, the better off they will be." In spite of this initial difficulty, and in spite too of their very obvious lack of depth of insight into the music, the Club put on a capable and entertaining performance. Easily the best work was done by Bessie Mountain as Lady Jane—probably the most difficult part as well. Her truly superb piece of restrained clowning was not only the highlight of the performance, but toned down almost to the vanishing point the glaring weakness of Gilbertian comedy—the theory that it is uproariously funny to make fun of an old woman. Aubrey Smith as Bunthorne was fairly effective, but in him the regrettable tendency spoken of above to overburlesque the performance found its clearest expression. Space precludes detailed mention of other principals, all of whom sang well and carried off their parts admirably. The best acting, among those who had a chance to act, was probably done by Bessie Mountain, Ray McKnight, and Roy Wood. The main attractiveness of the performance was in the performers themselves rather than in the work they did. The freshness, enthusiasm, spontaneity, and wholesomeness of the stage atmosphere, combined with a technique sufficiently good not to be in itself positively jarring or annoying, disarms criticism and results in the Club getting far better write-ups than they deserve. It is easy enough for anyone with a pair of ears to say sarcastic things about inaccurate singing, sloppy diction, badly balanced group work, unexpected modulations, and obvious nervousness, but in the last analysis no one can resist the kids in the Music Club. Their faults aid rather than hinder this, which accounts for the patronizing way in which the Toronto papers criticize them. I think, therefore, that Mr. Crawford would have been quite justified in giving to, say, Patience and Saphir the parts they had whether they could have sung them acceptably or not. I should like to recommend that the Music Club repertoire be confined to Gilbert and Sullivan. Light and catchy music is essential to keep up the interest, and these operas are greatly preferable to the long and involved works of German composers or Ethel Smyth, which are far too difficult for the organization. American light opera is often, as with De Koven, at best a feeble imitation of their work, or else lacks the breezy and diatonic straightforwardness which appeals so strongly to the musi-

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cally uninitiated and makes of the great Mid-Victorian team such an excellent drawing card.2 The Silver Box In the days when the career of the writer of this article was more closely bound up with the Dramatic Society than it is now,3 the choice of the play for last year was greeted by a Hart House director with, "Why in hell will you pick an English play?" The answer is, of course, that it is quite impossible to pick anything else. A big play, which articulates the year's efforts of a Dramatic Society, must be of sufficiently high standard to be worth trying and at the same time suitable to the occasion. Ignore the first rule, and you may put on a cheap American farce, which, when amusing, is as far as that country goes dramatically; ignore the second, and you may put on a grim and awful tragedy of the school of Strindberg or Ibsen, or a classic play by anybody since Euripides, or even (in a spirit of frenzied enthusiasm and intellectual jingoism) a Canadian drama. Observe these rules, and you are brought face to face with contemporary British productions of high standard—Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy, Milne in part, and the rest. This is worth pointing out for the benefit of those who feel slightly irritated by the English accents provided by the Society. They are necessary evils. So I think Galsworthy's Silver Box an excellent choice of play, though by no means the best choice. The theme is one admirably adapted to the tone of the college—the people in it are alive, natural, and sincerely human, and the play has a background of solid reality which is well worth getting into. The earnest, moralizing tone makes it more and not less suitable as a Victoria College production. As for the actual performance, there is really not much to say about it except that it was quite good. There was a curtain-raiser—Houghton's Fancy Free. An amusing little sketch which depends for its effect chiefly on its swift movement, this piece, put on by four people, lagged rather badly the first night, but was considerably improved the second time. A similar improvement was impossible in the case of The Silver Box. The genius who thought up the idea of double-casting this play would not be well advised to patent it. This iniquitous system greatly weakened both performances, as the "first night" of an amateur show is a very different thing from the professional variety, and The Silver Box had two first nights. It is true that double the number of people became interested

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in the Society, and perhaps it facilitated the sale of tickets, but the major production calls for the best players and for them only—players, moreover, who can work as a unit and have a coherent conception of the piece, which those who were present on both nights would miss. The first performance was easily better than the second, the stars in it being Hal Vaughan, Muriel Code, R.W. Christie, and Olive Smith. All the parts were quite acceptably filled. Hal Vaughan was on both nights, and not only turned in a good performance of his own, but in some unaccountable way took the edge off the very obvious immaturity of the production. Muriel Code probably gave the best consistent piece of acting of the two nights. The play was, on the whole, a decided success. It is far better than anything else we have ever seen the Society do; perhaps even better than we ever expected to see it do. The unfortunate organization seems to be on the right track at last.

16

Review of H.M.S. Pinafore April 1933

Review of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. From the "Monocle" section of Ada Victoriana, 57 (April 1933): 34-5. Frye was at this time in his last year and the editor of Ada.

As the departmental contributor detailed to turn the monocle toward this event has been prevented from doing so by illness, the undersigned assumes that duty. Now the undersigned, not having the Ada pass, saw it on Saturday night, which, he was given later for the peace of his mind to understand, was the night in which the performers let off some steam by in a measure parodying their own performance. He went to bed dreaming a strange and terrible nightmare of wildly spinning automobile tyres and lifebelts, of girls in sailor suits conducting the overture with relentlessly flailing arms, of a furious medley of clanging bells, hammered pipes, and alarm clocks reinforcing a trio sung pitilessly six several separate times, the most energetic singer rescued from exhaustion not so much by a bell as by an entire mechanical symphony: all working up to a glorious finale in which half the principals collapsed in impotent laughter and the other half, backed up by the chorus, immediately and by common consent went simultaneously off-key. It was all very splendid, but it was also rather confusing. The undersigned had in fact gone home in a sort of reverent daze, and it was some time before he could view the performance itself impartially through its nebulous wrapping of original and extraneous (no, it was spontaneous, the choristers said) humour; some time before he was entirely reconciled to sanity and the first person. But here, in the calm hush and cloister-quiet of Gate House,1 the

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artistic conscience of the Music Club rises to defend itself, and I listen with the respectful attention it deserves. If there ever was a time when Pinafore could be well done, it argues, that time has long since passed. Considered as a whole the farce is clumsy and ill-conceived, besides being unendurably hackneyed, and it simply cannot be sustained on its own momentum. No human power can prevent that unspeakable finale from dragging painfully and dismally to a limping and inept close. All the standard actors of the Music Club are good for lots of entertainment, says the conscience, but they could do nothing with their parts; they had to kick them off the stage and substitute themselves. The cast of characters in Pinafore are all stuffed shirts and artificially bulged chemises, O critic, but those who took their places are wholesome happy youngsters who are all friends of yours, and you for one know that the fairy changelings are infinitely more attractive. This sounded plausible, and I began to review the principals in accordance with this idea. Bessie Mountain as Lady Jane I had acclaimed last year for doing that very thing. But she was helpless in Buttercup's iron grip; she did all she could, in fact she did all there was to be done, but the part was too badly written for her to do much. Aubrey Smith was more fortunate in having a role large enough to replace the effete stock figure of Sir Joseph Porter by the stocky but by no means effete figure of Aubrey Smith, and to say that the audience appreciated the substitution would be putting it mildly. Jean Welford knew that she was Jean Welford, beautiful, graceful, and an exquisite singer, and she has as little interest as her audience in the anemic and fatuous mid-Victorian bore Gilbert meant her to represent. But Betty Oram, who as a singer and stage figure is perhaps the Club's most valuable asset, could do nothing but stand around and help the chorus. Dick Jolliffe, if somewhat immature as yet, gave the chorus a rich carpet of bass to walk on, but the biggest thrill of his performance was his low D which Sullivan had not thought of. Murray Babe's part was large enough for him to fill it comfortably and Johnny Copp's high fluent tenor quite adequate for anything he had to sing. The one figure who seemed to grow naturally out of his part was John Bates as Dick Deadeye. Hence, if John was the best performer on the stage, as he indubitably was, it should not be forgotten that he was the only one who had a part he could do anything with. For the rest, including the chorus, some impetus stronger than that supplied by the opera itself was necessary. The more I think of Pinafore, the more I see the necessity for extraneous

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(pardon me, spontaneous) humour. I respect the Music Club for their sincere and genuine effort to act Pinafore off the stage. Taken in small doses, of course, the opera, though still easily the worst of the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire, is not so bad as all this. Some of Gilbert's work is brilliant and clever; there is much excellent satire on the blackguardism which Victoria is trying to fight at the present time, and many of the songs, notably the one beginning "An Englishman is a soaring soul," are delightful. The music, though less distinguished, is catchy and pleasing enough at times, and Sir Joseph Porter's part-song is in Sullivan's best vein of parody. A cross-section almost anywhere in Pinafore would probably yield something fairly amusing. But what I am talking about is the organic unity of the opera, the sense of form that makes it go across with a swing and gives to the characters vitality and interest. From this point of view—and it is the one by which the work must, finally as well as initially, be judged—Pinafore is an unqualified flop. The Music Club as it stands has very little right to its name. One of the members of the executive-elect has asked my opinion concerning the organization, on the side, of a glee club after the manner of the Hart House and WUA [Women's Undergraduate Association] songsters, but yielding a more systematic training. This is a reform long overdue. A great musician visiting Toronto would no doubt be delighted at the large amount of good music played and listened to here, but if he were further informed that there was only one "Music Club" on the campus and that it spent all its energy in the production of one Gilbert and Sullivan light opera a year he might get a rude shock. I am not opposed to the annual production, if one at all worth four months' work is chosen, because there is a colour and glamour, an excitement and wholesome fun about the big performance which it would be a pity to take away. But its value as a training in or appreciation of music is negligible. The college has matured a good deal in its attitude to music and an awakening of intelligent and critical interest in the most magnificent of all arts is obvious. It is incumbent upon a "Music Club," therefore, to aid this interest and meet its challenge.

17

lolanthe December 1935

Article on Gilbert and Sullivan's lolanthe, from Acta Victoriana, 60 (December 1935): 26. Frye was now enrolled at Emmanuel College and teaching at Victoria College; at this time professors and alumni as well as undergraduates contributed to Acta.

The Music Club goes back this year to Gilbert and Sullivan, which is a big relief. The peculiar combination required for light opera seems to be tart, acrid, witty satire in the libretto and graceful, fluent, good-humoured music. This is the relation between the bitter and neglected Gilbert and the Sullivan who was the darling of Queen Victoria's court; as it is to some extent, on another plane, the relation of Beaumarchais and Mozart. Without satire the light opera is apt to become insipid, as the last two productions of the Music Club undoubtedly did. There is no doubt the Music Club can do lolanthe; they have done it before, and they have done more difficult things. The same thing happens every year: there will be uneasy intonation in the chorus, discordant squawks at decent intervals from the principals, and probably the usual irresponsible horseplay on the last night; but there will also be an enormous good time had by all, performers and audience. No other activity quite provides the thrill and excitement of the annual opera. That, I think, is the essential function of the Music Club, so that those who feel that a Music Club should train students in music as a Dramatic Society trains them in drama and a Debating Society in debating are doubtless arguing from a false analogy.

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Review of lolanthe April 1936

Review of Gilbert and Sullivan's lolanthe, from Acta Victoriana, 60 (April 1936): 34-5.

Mr. Crawford knows well enough by this time how to manoeuvre his rather restless marionettes, and the general effect of lolanthe was, as usual, that of a very good show. It was probably as well managed as anything the Music Club has done: I do not remember having ever seen a performance by this organization with so few major errors in it. On the part of the chorus this competence was carried out on a rather mezzanine level, and was achieved somewhat at the expense of spontaneity. Whether it was the larger auditorium, or inhibitions resulting from a satire on a venerable institution, or a general feeling of cuteness inspired by the atmosphere of a rococo fairyland, I am unable to say; but I seemed perpetually conscious of large reserves of enthusiasm that were not going over the footlights. The opening chorus of fairies was sweet but not strong enough really to grip the attention; the chorus of peers, on which the whole first act turns, was rather grumbling and monotonous; and the two finales were uneven. The words, as a result, were muzzy and confused, a good third of them being stillborn. The principals, however, were well chosen. Charlie Jolliffe as the Lord Chancellor was perhaps the best clown I have ever seen in the Music Club; his control over his voice at all times was remarkable, his acting and stage appearance excellent. The celebrated "When you're lying awake" song might have been more than twice as intelligible had it been half as fast, but it was nonetheless convincingly funny. As a general principle, however, I hardly think the Music Club well advised to take

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more than one encore for each song, as the usual practice is for the actors to hit the first encore with everything they possess and make the others an anticlimax. Gord Turner, though a little heavy in the part of Strephon— two-thirds mortal, shall we say—had a clear, forceful voice and got all of his lines across; Evelyn David as lolanthe struggled bravely with a colourless part; Pat Lundy as Phyllis left little to be desired in both her singing and her stage presence. Dick Jolliffe and Marg Da vies, with their impressive resonant voices and their commanding and awe-inspiring appearances, provided a punch that a good deal of the performance lacked, and the clarity of their utterances rescued much of the dialogue from a chaos of whispers and sibilants; their singing was occasionally marred by poor intonation, but no one could feel uneasy when they were on the stage. Arthur Steed and Fred Ongley filled their roles well, to the great advantage of the play: it is precisely this type of part which is apt to be slurred over in an amateur performance. Their quartet in the second act with the Sentry and Phyllis provided, I think, the best singing of the evening. Of the sets, the first was neutral, the second excellent. And may I protest that a recitative, which looks easy, is really quite difficult to sing properly. This was perhaps the most neglected feature of the singing, and as a result the scenes depending for their effect on its proper handling, such as the summoning of lolanthe in the first act, sounded rather sloppy. I think that this level of performance, depending for its effect on the enthusiasm of the actors rather than on anything resembling professional competence, is one that the Music Club would do well to stay on. If it gets any worse, the audience will complain; if it gets any better, the faculty will complain. As it is, the Music Club can go on indefinitely without worrying anybody but Mr. Crawford.

19

Review of Bradbrook's Ibsen the Norwegian 27 August 1947

Review of M.C. Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian: A Revaluation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946). From Canadian Forum, 27 (August 1947): 120. Ibsen badly needs a "revaluation," for he has been somewhat neglected of late in comparison with such contemporaries as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, not obviously greater writers. The neglect is all the more copious in view of the current rage for Kierkegaard, who deeply influenced Ibsen, and who is now so fashionable among the sort of people he spent his life denouncing. Miss Bradbrook thinks that Ibsen was unfortunate in being launched outside Norway by readers who cared little for poetry and a great deal for "advanced" ideas. Hence a few manipulated experiments like Ghosts got far too much attention, and when the advanced ideas dated, so did Ibsen. She has tried to achieve a better perspective by treating Ibsen as a symbolic poet whose imagination was essentially conditioned by the language and environment of his own country. She complains that the existing English translations of Ibsen, though faithful, are insensitive, especially where the original is in verse. Her study is, if somewhat slight, very readable, and she gives many useful hints about the references in the plays which demand a knowledge of Norway.

20

James, Le Fanu, and Morris April 1948

Review of Henry James, What Maisie Knew; Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly: Stories, with an introduction by V.S. Pritchett; and William Morris, On Art and Socialism: Essays and Lectures, selected and with an introduction by Holbrook Jackson, all published in the Chiltern Library series (London: John Lehmann, 194.7)- From Canadian Forum, 28 (April 1948): 22. Now that publishing has become big business, the legitimate book is in danger of being crowded out by erotic bestsellers, and the serious reader finds it more and more difficult to buy the kind of book he wants to see on his shelves. Good new books are rare enough at any time, but they will always appear somehow or other: it is the keeping of good old books in print that is important. A certain number of publishing houses, like Random House in its Modern Library, have gone in for selling the classics, but that does not help—it rather hinders—other classics which happen not to be on the curricula of enough universities. The inaccessibility of the sort of charming and mellowed book that one reads for pleasure rather than instruction constitutes a bad enough problem here and an absurd one in England, where the small ration of paper has almost ruined the reprint trade. Most of what paper there is goes into new books, and it is probably harder to buy Shakespeare in England right now than Sir Oswald Mosley's new book on the futility of democracy.1 One is therefore all the more grateful for and appreciative of the Chiltern Library, published by John Lehmann, which so far contains twelve excellently chosen titles, including the three listed above, two other novels of Henry James, and two of Mrs. Gaskell, along with her famous life of Charlotte Bronte.

21

An Important Influence July 1948

Review of Andrew Jackson Mathews, La Wallonie, 1886-1892: The Symbolist Movement in Belgium (Morningside Heights, N.Y.: King's Crown Press, 1947). From Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 72 (July 1948): 231. La Wallonie was a little Belgian magazine which featured such writers as Andre Gide, Stuart Merrill, Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, Valery, and Henri De Regnier, along with many others whose careers and work are discussed by the author. It was thus connected most closely, as these names show, with the symbolist movement, yet its social influence was enough to revive and give official sanction to the word "Wallonia" as a name for the French-speaking section of Belgium. Its importance is therefore twofold. It is one of the struggling "little reviews" which formed the backbone of the late nineteenth-century French poetry, possibly one of the richest outcroppings of lyrical genius in history. It is also a document of the literary regionalism which helped to make poets more sensitive to their immediate surroundings and to develop an enthusiasm for writing • in smaller centres. Thus it illustrates the two requirements of healthy poetry which are superficially inconsistent with each other: that it should be completely international, and that it should be the product of an intimate contact between the poet and his environment.

22

Joan Evans's John Ruskin March 1955

Review of Joan Evans's John Ruskin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954). From Canadian Forum, 34 (March 1955): 285. Miss Evans's book forms an excellent introduction to Ruskin for the general reader. It is less aimless than Quennell, less ponderous than Leon, and, though also much less incisive than Wilenski, more up to date: a great deal of biographical source material has come to light since Wilenski's book appeared in 1933.1 Ruskin's diaries, which Miss Evans is helping to edit, form part of this material, though they seem unlikely, to judge by her quotations from them, to alter our conception of Ruskin to any startling degree. Certainly the structure of her book is conventional enough. In general outline it follows Ruskin's own autobiography, Praeterita, and summarizes briefly the themes of his major works in chronological order. Few people require more charity and patience from a biographer than Ruskin. "A tragedy without a villain" is Miss Evans's excellent phrase for his life [422]. Going through it, from childhood, a mixture of coddling and stupid severity that gave him a parental fixation all his life, through the squalor of his unconsummated marriage and annulment, through the deeper squalor of the dreadful Rose La Touche business, through all the low comedy of Winnington school, the St. George's Guild, and the Whistler libel suit,2 into the final misery of madness that lasted for at least a quarter of his life, one finds pathetically few moments of the dignity and nobility that most of us feel ought to be the normal insulation of greatness. And then through it all is the constant downpour of words— thirty-nine huge closely printed volumes of them, much of it wonderful

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stuff certainly, but full of roller-coaster rhetoric and bushel baskets of some of the most stupefying blither ever run off a linotype. There are two groups of Ruskin scholars: those who think of him as an important art critic who became obsessed with a quixotic desire to reform the world, and those who think of him as a well-to-do amateur who got fed up with feeding the English bourgeoisie with moralized culture and began to tell them a few facts about their society. Miss Evans belongs, somewhat dogmatically, to the former group. But both groups have to agree that Ruskin wrote much that was opinionated, wrong-headed, arrogant, emotionally stampeded, and crassly ignorant even in their chosen field of interest. Miss Evans keeps her temper very well, in spite of a number of flatfooted moral judgments. Such adverbs as "wisely" and "rightly" define actions that she approves of, and "whimsy," "fancy," and a number of psychological terms define the vagaries of Ruskin's later style. Carlyle admired Ethics of the Dust; Miss Evans does not, and remarks sternly, "such kindness when it is disguised as the criticism of an equal can do nothing but harm" [286].3 She accepts the Wilenski view, which seems well established, that Ruskin was a manic-depressive, but sometimes she reads humorous passages from his letters (which contain much of Ruskin's best prose) in an unnecessarily clinical light. Nor does she come up with anything very positive in the way of an estimate of Ruskin. She thinks of him as a kind of senile lyricist: "what his critics fail to recognize is that his feelings were not roused by the emotions of a mature man but were attuned to the music of youth" [413!. But I do not know why she says, "Ruskin was in the strictest sense of the word an aesthete: a man for whom the act of perception was the highest exercise of the mind and soul" [412], when her whole book proves that he practically never made an aesthetic judgment that was not under the shadow of a moral anxiety. I wish some student of Ruskin would take his later works on myth and science, with all their allusiveness, digression, cranky absurdities, and sometimes actual free association, more seriously. The thing that seems to me to hold Ruskin together is iconography: the sense of a vast system of design and occult correspondences manifesting itself in art and revealed by nature, which inspires alike his interest in architecture and in crystals, in the Bible and in clouds, in Greek myths and in brotherhoods of devout gardeners. Miss Evans feels that once he loses his "spontaneous sense of Beauty" he "can only set his course by the winds of passion and the waves of resentment" [249]. This perhaps underestimates his

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sense of direction, which is not toward the interpretation of art but toward the discovery of the principles on which it imitates nature, and which would end ultimately in a kind of personal conquest of art. Miss Evans quotes his remark to Lord Conway at the very end of his sane life: "I have come to the conclusion that it is not Art that I loved but Nature: in fact I believe I have hated Art!" [402]. This terrible flash of self-revelation might well become the basis of someone's study of Ruskin.

23

Emily Dickinson

1962

From FI, 193-217. Originally published in Major Writers of America, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 2:2-46, where it was followed by a brief bibliography and a selection of Dickinson's poetry and prose edited by Frye. A note in FI points out that the essay "of course could not possibly have been written without the editorial and biographical work of Thomas H. Johnson in particular" (265).

I

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the Connecticut River Valley, in 1830. She died in the house she was born in, and her travels out of the region consisted of one trip to Washington and Philadelphia and two or three to Boston and Cambridge. Amherst had recently acquired, largely through the energy of her grandfather, an academy, which she attended, and a college. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a leading citizen of the town, a lawyer, active and successful in state politics, and treasurer of the college. Such a town illustrated, more effectively than any Oneida or Brook Farm, the Utopian pattern in nineteenth-century American society. It was a little world in itself, so well balanced economically as to be nearly self-sufficient, with a provincial but intense religious and intellectual culture, the latter growing as the college grew. Throughout her life Emily Dickinson was able to say what she had said at sixteen: "I don't know anything more about affairs in the world, than if I was in a trance" [Li6]/ and her ability to shut all distractions out of her life owed much to the social coherence of her surroundings.

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There was a strong family feeling among the Dickinsons, and neither Emily nor her younger sister Lavinia married or left home. The older brother, Austin, went to Harvard Law School, where Emily pelted him with affectionate letters telling him how much he was missed, then returned to Amherst to practise law. Gossip said that the father's possessiveness kept his daughters beside him ministering to his domestic comforts, but this may not be true. The image of awful integrity he inspired, which made his daughter say at his death, "His Heart was pure and terrible, and I think no other like it exists" [1,418], may have grown on her gradually, as her youthful remarks in letters to Austin sound normally bratty. Thus: "Father and mother sit in state in the sitting-room perusing such papers, only, as they are well assured, have nothing carnal in them" [L63]. Her mother she was never close to until later years. Austin's wife, Susan Gilbert, was another person whom Emily Dickinson seems always to have loved passionately, in spite of a good deal of tension and occasional open ruptures. To Sue, across the fence, Emily sent nearly three hundred poems, besides messages, epigrams, gifts, and other symbols of affection. At seventeen, Emily left the Amherst Academy and went to Mount Holyoke College, or Seminary, as it was then called, a few miles away in South Hadley. The discipline there was strict but humane, and she seems to have enjoyed herself in spite of the religious instruction, but her father withdrew her after a year. Emily thus had, for a poet, relatively little formal education. It is unlikely that she read any language except her own. She knew the Bible (involuntarily), she knew Shakespeare, she knew the Classical myths, and she took a good deal of interest in contemporary women writers, especially Elizabeth Browning, George Eliot, and the Brontes. The Bronte references in earlier letters are to Charlotte, but "gigantic Emily Bronte" [1,742] haunts the later ones. Dickens and Robert Browning appear in her rare literary allusions; there are one or two echoes of Tennyson; and, of the more serious American writers, she knew Emerson and something of Thoreau and Hawthorne. Her main literary instructors, however, were her dictionary and her hymnbook. She has a large vocabulary for a poet so limited in subject matter, and most of her stanzas, as has often been pointed out, are the ordinary hymn stanzas, the eight-six-eight-six "common metre" and the six-six-eight-six "short metre" being especially frequent. Creative people often seem to need certain types of love or friendship

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that make manifest for them the human relations or conflicts with which their work is concerned. A poet of Shakespeare's day could hardly set up in business without a "mistress" to whom he vowed eternal devotion, though this mistress might have little if any part to play in his actual life, and very seldom had anything to do with his marriage. Emily Dickinson seemed to need in her life an older man to act as her "preceptor" or "master," to use her own terms, who could keep her in touch with qualities she did not profess to have: intellectual consistency, sociability, knowledge of the world, firm and settled convictions. Benjamin F. Newton, a lawyer who had articled with her father, was apparently her first "preceptor." Her letters to him have not been preserved, but he seems to have awakened her literary tastes, expanded her cultural horizons, and perhaps given her a more liberal idea of her religion—at any rate she refers to him as a "friend who taught me Immortality" [L,26i]. He died in 1853, before Emily had started to write poetry in earnest. Then came Charles Wadsworth, a Presbyterian clergyman whom Emily may have heard on her trip to Philadelphia, and who, for all his married and middle-aged respectability, seems to have been the one great love of the poet's life. It is unlikely that the kind of love she offered him would have interfered with his marriage or social position, but some pathetic drafts of letters addressed to a "Master," if they were intended for Wadsworth, indicate something of the tumult of her feelings. In 1862 Wadsworth accepted a call to a church in San Francisco, a removal which seems to have been a profound shock to the poet, for reasons we can only guess at—again the correspondence has not survived. The name of the church he went to—Calvary—became the centre of a drama of loss and renunciation in which the poet becomes "Empress of Calvary" [iO72],2 and the bride of an invisible marriage followed immediately by separation instead of union. But Wadsworth, whatever her feeling for him, could hardly have had more than a perfunctory interest in the poetry that was now becoming the central activity of her life. In her early years she seems to have written little except letters and the occasional valentine, of which two most elaborate and ingenious efforts have been preserved. In the later 18505 she began writing poetry consistently, binding her completed poems up into packets, and sometimes sending copies to Sue or enclosing them in letters to other correspondents. In addition to her fair copies, there are many worksheet drafts scribbled on anything within reach—once on the

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back of an invitation to a "candy pulling" sent her twenty-six years earlier. Her impetus to write seems to have come on her in a flood, as the poems written or copied out in the year 1862 alone average one a day. With Wadsworth gone, another "preceptor" was urgently needed, this time a literary critic. Having liked an article by Thomas Wentworth Higginson she had read in the Atlantic Monthly, Emily sent the author a letter, enclosing her card and four poems, and asking if in his opinion her poetry was "alive" and "breathed" [L26o]. Higginson had been a Unitarian clergyman but had resigned his pastorate to devote himself to writing, and was then on the point of organizing a Negro regiment to fight in the Civil War (hence his later title of Colonel Higginson). Higginson was an influential critic, and as such a natural target for amateur poets pretending that they wanted his frank opinion of their work when what they really wanted was advice on how to get published. He saw at once that Emily Dickinson was more serious business than this. She said explicitly that she wanted her work criticized by the literary standards that he knew about, and he was bound to be misled by that. But he realized, perhaps more quickly than she did, that she did not want specific criticisms of her poems, which she had no intention of altering for anyone's views. Nor was she interested in publication, as she made clear. All she wanted was contact with a sympathetic reader of informed taste and knowledge of the world of thought and action. Higginson had the sense to be flattered by her confidence, and seems to have responded with unfailing courtesy to her gentle but persistent nudgings to write her. She may have been exaggerating when she told him that he had saved her life, but she was not underestimating the service he did her, nor should we. At the same time, she was never in love with Higginson, and her attitude toward him was one of devotion tempered by an ironic detachment. After 1862, the poet became increasingly a recluse, dressing in white, apparently with reference to her inner "Calvary" drama of renunciation. For the last decade of her life she did not leave her house and refused to see any strangers, her experience bounded by her house and garden, her social life completely absorbed in the brief letters she constantly sent to friends and neighbours, which sometimes contained poems and often accompanied small gifts of flowers or fruit. She expected her friends to be cultivated and tolerant people, and most of them were, prizing her enigmatic notes and respecting her privacy. There was no mistaking the

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good will and affection in her letters, however oblique in expression. One feels something Oriental in her manner of existence: the seclusion, the need for a "preceptor," the use of brief poems as a form of social communication, would have seemed normal enough in the high cultures of the Far East, however unusual in her own. And even her culture was one in which the telephone had not yet destroyed the traditional balance between the spoken and the written word. Of her friends, some were well-known writers in their day, apart from Higginson. She was much attached to Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, one of the liveliest of the New England local papers, and representing a type of highly articulate journalism now practically extinct. Helen Hunt Jackson, born in Amherst in the same year as Emily Dickinson and a childhood playmate, came back into her life in later years. Mrs. Jackson was also a disciple of Higginson, and was the author of the Indian romance Ramona and the Saxe Holm stories. Whatever this may mean to the contemporary reader, it meant in her day that she was at the top of the literary tree. Another novel, Mercy Philbrick's Choice, and a short story, seem to have made some use of Emily Dickinson's smothered love affair for copy. She told Emily that she was a great poet and was defrauding her public by not publishing, and finally, after strenuous efforts, got one poem, Success is counted sweetest, into a collection of anonymous verse called A Masque of Poets, many readers taking it to be Emerson's. In the last decade of Emily Dickinson's life her father's friend Judge Otis P. Lord became a widower, and his friendship with the poet quickly ripened into love. Though, as usual, the letters themselves have disappeared, we do have a few drafts of letters to him among her papers which put the fact beyond doubt. After living as she had, the adjustment needed for marriage would have been formidable, probably impossible. But she was deeply in love, which indicates that her retired life was the choice of her temperament, not a dedication. She was not a nun manquee, even if she does call herself a "Wayward Nun" [722]. Conscious human perception is, we are told, highly selective, and very efficient about excluding whatever threatens its balance. "Strong" people and men of action are those for whom such perception functions predictably: they are made strong by habit, by continually meeting the expected response. Creative abilities normally go with more delicate and mysterious nuances of awareness, hence they are often accompanied by some kind of

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physical or psychic weakness. Emily Dickinson's perceptions were so immediate that they absorbed her whole energy, or as she says, "The mere sense of living is joy enough" [L342a]: To be alive—is Power— Existence—in itself— Without a further function— [677]

But she realized that there was danger as well as ecstasy in so sensitive a response. "Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life," she says, "the calmest of us would be Lunatics!" [^492]. To reverse a well-known phrase from Lewis Carroll, it took all the staying in the same place she could do to keep running.3 The intensity of her ordinary consciousness left her with few reserves to spend on a social life. In a life so retired it was inevitable that the main events should be the deaths of friends, and Emily Dickinson became a prolific writer of notes of condolence. Her father, her mother, Sue's little boy Gilbert (struck down by typhoid fever at the age of eight), Bowles, Wadsworth, Lord, Helen Jackson, all died in the last few years of her life. As early as 1883 she had a nervous collapse, and observed, "The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me" [L8731. Two years later a more serious illness began. In the second week of May, 1886, she wrote to her cousins Louisa and Fanny Norcross: Little Cousins, Called back. Emily. [LiO46]

A few days later she was dead. A life in which such things as the death of her dog or an unexpected call by Wadsworth are prominent incidents is not simply a quiet life but a carefully obliterated one. There are poets—and they include Shakespeare—who seem to have pursued a policy of keeping their lives away from their readers. Human nature being what it is, it is precisely such poets who are most eagerly read for biographical allusions. We shall find Emily Dickinson most rewarding if we look in her poems for what her imagination has created, not for what event may have suggested it. When, under the spell of Ik Marvel's Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), a favourite book of hers, she writes:

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Many cross the Rhine In this cup of mine. Sip old Frankfort air From my brown Cigar [123] it would be a literal-minded reader who would infer that she had actually taken up cigar-smoking, yet this would be no more far-fetched than many other biographical inferences. A poet is entitled to speak in many voices, male, female, or childlike, to express many different moods and to develop an experience in reading or life into an imaginative form that has no resemblance whatever to the original experience. Just as she made the whole of her conception of nature out of the bees and bobolinks and roses of her garden, so she constructed her drama of life, death, and immortality, of love and renunciation, ecstasy and suffering, out of tiny incidents in her life. But to read biographical allegory where we ought to be reading poetry is precisely the kind of vulgarity that made her dread publication and describe it as a foul thing. Higginson's comment on her Wild Nights! that "the malignant" might "read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there,"4 indicates that glib speculations about the sexual feelings of virgins are much older than the popularizing of Freud. But whenever they are made they are incompetent as literary criticism. It would be hard to name another poet in the history of the English language with so little interest in social or political events. The Civil War seemed to her "oblique," outside her orbit, and her only really peevish letter describes her reaction to a woman who told her that she ought to use her gifts for the good of humanity. There are one or two patriotic poems, but they show no freshness of insight. "My Business is Circumference," she told Higginson [L268]. She concerned herself only with what she felt she could surround. It is characteristic of lyrical poetry to turn its back on the reader: the lyrical poet regularly pretends to be addressing his mistress or friend or God, or else he is soliloquizing or apostrophizing something in nature. But lyrical poetry also tends to create its own highly selected and intimate audience, like the sonnets and love poems of Shakespeare's day that circulated in manuscript among friends long before they reached print. For Emily Dickinson poetry was a form of private correspondence: "This is my letter to the World" [441], is what she says of her poetry, and she describes the Gospel as "The Savior's . . . Letter he wrote to all mankind" [Liocu]. Such a correspond-

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ence forms what, for Emily Dickinson, was the only genuine kind of human community, the small body of friends united in love and understanding. "Please to need me," as she wrote to Bowles [L3OO]. By a flower—By a letter— By a nimble love— If I weld the Rivet faster— Final fast—above— Never mind my breathless Anvil! Never mind Repose! Never mind the sooty faces Tugging at the Forge! [109] II

At her death Emily Dickinson was the author of seven published poems, all anonymous, some issued without her authorization, six of them at least in what she would have considered garbled versions, altered by editors to make them more conventional. Her friends knew that she wrote poetry, but nobody, not even her sister Lavinia who had lived with her all her life, had any notion that she had written close to eighteen hundred poems. She left instructions to Lavinia that her "papers" were to be destroyed, as was customary at that time, but no instructions were given about the piled-up packets of verse that Lavinia, to her astonishment, discovered in her sister's room. Lavinia took the packets to Sue, with a demand that they be transcribed and published immediately, meeting all complaints about the length and difficulty of the task with, "But they are Emily's poems!"5 Sue proved to be indolent, and perhaps jealous, and after a long wait Lavinia took them to Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of an Amherst professor of astronomy, an attractive and highly accomplished young woman, who knew Emily, so to speak, by ear, having played the piano in the Dickinson house while the poet sat invisibly in the dark hall outside and commented on the music. Higginson's help was enlisted. At first he felt that it would be a mistake to publish Emily Dickinson, perhaps thinking of an appeal she had made to him to talk Helen Jackson out of publishing Success. But he gradually became, first interested, then fascinated, by what he found, and helped publicize her by writing articles about her. The two editors,

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Mrs. Todd and Higginson, produced Poems by Emily Dickinson in 1890, where a selection of her poems was distributed in various categories labelled "Life," "Love," "Nature," and the like, with titles for individual poems supplied by Higginson. A second and a third selection appeared in 1891 and 1896, respectively. Although Mrs. Todd's original transcripts were accurate, the poems were systematically smoothed out in punctuation, metre, grammar, and rhymes. Higginson took the lead in this at first, but as he went on he began to realize that the poet's liberties were not those of carelessness or incompetence. When the second selection was being prepared, he wrote to Mrs. Todd, "Let us alter as little as possible, now that the public ear is opened,"6 including his own ear; but by that time Mrs. Todd had caught the improving fever. Mrs. Todd also went through the laborious task of collecting and publishing two volumes of Emily Dickinson's letters, where she had to engage in a long tactful struggle with the owners, and prevented a good many of them from being irreparably lost. Through no fault of hers, some of them, notably those to the Norcross sisters, survive only in mutilated versions. Some highly unedifying family squabbles stopped further publication. Sue had been alienated by the giving of the manuscripts to Mrs. Todd; then Lavinia, for reasons too complicated to go into here, turned against Mrs. Todd after Austin Dickinson's death and brought suit to recover a strip of land willed to Mrs. Todd by Austin. Nothing further was done until the next generation grew up, in the form of Sue's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, and Mrs. Todd's daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, who produced a series of editions of both poems and letters between 1914 and 1950. Finally, the bulk of the manuscripts came into the possession of Harvard. With Thomas H. Johnson's definitive edition of the poems (1955) and letters (1958), Emily Dickinson achieved publication on her own uncompromising terms. When Mrs. Todd's volumes appeared, there were, despite her editorial efforts, some hostile reviews and some complaints about the poet's lack of "technique," by which was meant smooth rhymes and metres. The complaints came mainly from such minor poets as Andrew Lang in England and Thomas Bailey Aldrich in America, who naturally ascribed the greatest importance and difficulty to the only poetic quality they themselves had. Against this, we may set the fact that the first volume alone went through sixteen editions in eight years, and was constantly reprinted thereafter. Mrs. Todd gave dozens of lectures on the poet, and could have given far more. It is inconceivable that the first volume of an

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unknown poet today could achieve such a success, unless fortified by pornography. Somebody wanted Emily Dickinson's poetry, and we cannot avoid the inference that in the 18903 she was a genuinely popular poet who found her own public in spite of what the highbrows said. When she reappeared in the 19205, her reputation was curiously reversed. Then the highbrows took her up, hailed her as a precursor of whatever happened to be fashionable at the time, such as imagism or free verse or metaphysical poetry, and emphasized everything in her work that was unconventional, difficult, or quaint. Both conceptions have some truth in them. The good popular poet is usually one who does well what a great many have tried to do with less success. For the thousands of people, most of them women, who make verse out of a limited range of imaginative experience in life, love, nature, and religion, who live without fame and without much knowledge of literature beyond their schoolbooks, Emily Dickinson is the literary spokesman. She is popular too in her conceptual use of language, for popular expression tends to the proverbial, and the unsophisticated poet is usually one who tries to put prose statements into verse. The Sibyl of Amherst is no Lorelei: she has no Keatsian faery lands forlorn or Tennysonian low-lying Claribels; she does not charm and she seldom sings. Mrs. Todd often spoke of encountering poems in Emily Dickinson that took her breath away, but what surprises in her work is almost always some kind of direct statement, sharpened into wit or epigram. When she describes a hummingbird as "A Route of Evanescence" [1463], or says of the bluebird, Her conscientious Voice will soar unmoved Above ostensible Vicissitude, [1395]

she is using what medieval poets called "aureate diction," big soft bumbling abstract words that absorb images into categories and ideas. She does not—like, for example, D.H. Lawrence—try to get inside the bird's skin and identify herself with it; she identifies the bird with the human consciousness in herself. Many of her poems start out by making some kind of definition of an abstract noun: Presentiment—is that long Shadow—on the Lawn— [764] Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue— [745]

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Publication—is the Auction Of the Mind of Man— [709] and most of her best-loved poems are in one of the oldest and most primitive forms of poetry, the riddle or oblique description of some object. In A route of evanescence there is no explicit mention of a hummingbird, because the poem tries to catch the essence of the feeling of the bird without mentioning it. Similarly with the snow in It sifts from leaden sieves, and with the railway train in I like to see it lap the miles. Such popular features in her work have their own difficulties, and there are others inherent in her peculiar style. She has for the most part no punctuation, except a point represented in the Johnson edition by a dash, which, as the editor points out, is really a rhythmical beat, and is of little use in unravelling the syntax. She also shows a curious preference for an indirect subjunctive form of expression that appears in such phrases as "Beauty be not caused" [516], and she has what seems a most unreasonable dislike of adding the s to the third person singular of verbs. The effect of such sidelong grammar is twofold: it increases the sense of epigrammatic wit, and it makes her poetry sound oracular, as though the explicit statements of which her poetry is so largely made up were coming to us shrouded in mystery. As she says: Tell all the Truth but tell it slantSuccess in Circuit lies. [1129] The result is not invariably success: sometimes we may agree with enthusiasm: How powerful the Stimulus Of an Hermetic Mind— [711] at other times we can only say, with the captain in Pinafore confronted with a similar type of gnomic utterance, "I don't see at what you're driving, mystic lady": Endanger it, and the Demand Of tickets for a sigh Amazes the Humility Of Credibility—

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Every age has its conventional notions of what poetry ought to be like, and the conventional notions of Emily Dickinson's day were that poetry should be close to prose in its grammar and syntax, and that its vocabulary should be more refined than that of ordinary speech. Thus Robert Louis Stevenson was outraged by the word "hatter" in a poem of Whitman's, and asserted that using such a word was not "literary tact."7 Emily Dickinson deliberately flouts both conventions. Her beat punctuation and offbeat syntax go with an abrupt and colloquial diction. The tang of her local speech comes out in such spellings as "Febuary" and "boquet," in such locutions as "it don't" and "it is him," and in such words as "heft" for "weight." Speaking of heaven, she writes: Yet certain am I of the spot As if the Checks were given— [1052] meaning railway checks, the guarantee the conductor gives that one is proceeding to the right destination. Her editors altered this to "chart," which was a more conventionally poetic word, being slightly antique. Emily Dickinson could easily have provided such a word herself, but preferred to form her diction at a humorously twisted angle to the conventional expectations of the reader. There is little in Emily Dickinson, then, of the feeling that a writer must come to terms with conventional language at all costs. When she meets an inadequacy in the English language she simply walks through it, as a child might do. If the dictionary does not provide an abstract noun for "giant," the poet will coin "gianture" [641]; if the ordinary "diminution" does not give her enough sense of movement, she will substitute "diminuet" [1615]. Similarly the fact that there is no singular form for "grass" or "hay" does not stop her from speaking of "every Grass" [1037],or from writing, to Higginson's horror, The Grass so little has to do I wish I were a Hay— [354]

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A similar teasing of the conventional reader's ear comes out in her slanting rhymes, which often have the effect of disappointing or letting down one's sense of an expected sound. At the same time even a conventional reader can see that her commonplace stanza forms could hardly achieve any variety of nuance without some irregularities. This is particularly true of the sinewy rhythm that syncopates against her rigid hymnbook metres and keeps them so far out of reach of monotony or doggerel: Those not live yet Who doubt to live again— "Again" is of a twice But this—is one— The Ship beneath the Draw Aground—is he? Death—so—the Hyphen of the Sea— Deep is the Schedule Of the Disk to be— Costumeless Consciousness— That is he— [1454]

In sophisticated poetry close attention is paid to the sounds of words: vowels and consonants are carefully balanced for assonance and variety, and we feel, when such poetry is successful, that we have the inevitably right words in their inevitably right order. In popular poetry there is a clearly marked rhythm and the words chosen to fill it up give approximately the intended meaning, but there is no sense of any mot juste or uniquely appropriate word. In the ballad, for example, we may have a great number of verbal variants of the same poem. Here again Emily Dickinson's practice is the popular, not the sophisticated one. For a great many of her poems she has provided alternative words, phrases, even whole lines, as though the rhythm, like a figured bass in music, allowed the editor or reader to establish his own text. Thus in the last line of one poem, "To meet so enabled a Man" [1207], we have "religious," "accomplished," "discerning," "accoutred," "established," and "conclusive" all suggested as alternates for "enabled."8 Another poem ends, And Kinsmen as divulgeless As throngs of Down— [1445]

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with "Kindred as responsive," "Clans of Down," "And Pageants as impassive / As Porcelain"—or, presumably, any combination of these— as possible variants.9 It is rather more disconcerting to find "New" suggested as an alternate for "Old" in a poem ending with a reference to "Our Old Neighbor—God" [623].10 What we find in Emily Dickinson's poetry, then, is a diffused vitality in rhythm and the free play of a lively and exhilarating mind, crackling with wit and sharp perception. These were clearly the qualities that she herself knew were there and especially prized. She asked Higginson simply whether her verse was "alive." As a poet, she is popular in the sense of being able, like Burns or Kipling or the early Wordsworth, to introduce poetry to readers who have had no previous experience of it. She has, on the other hand, a withdrawn consciousness and an intense intellectual energy that makes her almost esoteric, certainly often difficult. In any case she seems, after her early valentines, to have reached her mature style almost in a single bound. It is otherwise with her prose, no doubt because we have so much more of it from her early years. Her schoolgirl letters, with their engaging mixture of child's prattle and adolescent's self-consciousness, show a Lamb-like gift for fantasy and a detached and humorous shrewdness. She speaks of other girls who "are perfect models of propriety," and remarks, "[T]here 'most always are a few, whom the teachers look up to and regard as their satellites" [L6]— which is sharp observation for a fourteen-year-old. After her writing of poetry begins, her prose rhythm moves very close to verse. The first letter to Higginson is really a free-verse poem; some of her earlier poems were originally written as prose, and she often falls into her favourite metrical rhythms, as in the opening of a letter to Bowles: "I am so far from Land—To offer you the cup—it might some Sabbath come my turn—Of wine how solemn—full!" 1X247], which is a short metre stanza. Her later letters show a remarkable command of the techniques of discontinuous prose: they were most carefully composed, and the appearance of random jottings is highly deceptive. Continuous or expository prose assumes an equality between writer and reader: the writer is putting all he has in front of us. Discontinuous prose, with gaps in the sense that only intuition can cross, assumes an aloofness on the writer's part, a sense of reserves of connection that we must make special efforts to reach. The aphoristic style of her later letters is, if slightly more frequent in Continental literatures, extremely rare in England or America, yet she seems to have developed it without models or influences.

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Her Grace is all she has— And that, so least displays— One Art to recognize, must be, Another Art, to praise. [810] III

The most cursory glance at Emily Dickinson will reveal that she is a deeply religious poet, preoccupied, to the verge of obsession, with the themes of death and of immortality—the latter being, as she called it, the "Flood subject" [1.319]. Even in her use of the Bible, her most frequent references are to the passages in Corinthians and Revelation usually read at funeral services; and Paul's remark, that we now see in a riddle, translated as "through a glass darkly" [i Corinthians 13:12], is echoed in her recurrent use of the words "Riddle" and "Disc": Further than Guess can gallop Further than Riddle ride— Oh for a Disc to the Distance Between Ourselves and the Dead! [949]

Yet another glance at her letters will also show that in her evangelical surroundings she steadily resisted all revivals, all spiritual exhortations, all the solicitous and charitable heat that, at home, at school, and at church, was steadily turned on the uncommitted. Like Huckleberry Finn, whom she resembles in more ways than one, Emily Dickinson had a great respect for orthodox religion and morality, did not question the sincerity of those who practised it, and even turned to it for help. But she never felt that the path of social conformity and assent to doctrine was her path. Her resistance gave her no feeling of superiority: even her schoolgirl letters are full of a wistful regret that she could not feel what her friends all asserted that they felt. As she recalled later: "When a Child and fleeing from Sacrament I could hear the Clergyman saying 'All who loved the Lord Jesus Christ—were asked to remain—.' My flight kept time to the Words" 1X412]. She belonged in the congregation but not in the Chuch. Her elders referred her to the Bible: she read the Bible and took an immediate dislike to the deity that she calls "Burglar! Banker—Father!" [49]—that is, the legal providential God who seems to ratify everything

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that is meaningless and cruel in life. She remarked to Higginson that her family were all religious except her, "and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their 'Father'" [L26i]. She read with distaste the stories of Elisha and the bears ("I believe the love of God may be taught not to seem like bears") [L230], of the sacrifice of Isaac, of the drowning of the world in a divine tantrum and the corresponding threat to burn it later: No vacillating God Created this Abode To put it out; [1599]

of Adam who was asserted to be alone responsible for his fall: Of Heaven above the firmest proof We fundamental know Except for it's marauding Hand It had been Heaven below. [1205]

The whole "punishing" aspect of religious doctrine struck her as "a doubtful solace finding tart response in the lower Mind," and she asks, "Why should we censure Othello, when the Criterion Lover says, Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me'?" [Lioi6]. That is, why blame Othello for being jealous when God tells us that he is himself? She concluded that "I do not respect 'doctrines'" [Lzoo], and added, with a touch of snobbery, "I wish the 'faith of the fathers' didn't wear brogans, and carry blue umbrellas" [1,213]. In short, she took no care to distinguish the Father of Christianity from the cloud-whiskered scarecrow that Blake called Nobodaddy and Bernard Shaw an old man in the sky looking like the headmaster of an inferior public school. The Son of God for her was also caught in this Father's legal machinery. "When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him" [1,932]. She has a poem in which she compares the doctrine of the revelation of the Father in the Son to the courtship of Miles Standish [357], and another in which she speaks with contempt of the "some day we'll understand" rationalizings of suffering: I shall know why—when Time is over— And I have ceased to wonder why—

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Christ will explain each separate anguish In the fair schoolroom of the sky— [193]

At other times, she seems to accept Jesus as everything that Christianity says he is. Thus: "That the Divine has been human is at first an unheeded solace, but it shelters without our consent" [1,523]. It seems clear that her relation to the Nonconformist faith in which she was brought up was itself nonconformist, and that it would have violated her conscience ever to have made either a final acceptance or a final rejection of that faith. Her method, the reverse of Tennyson's in In Memoriam, was to prove where she could not believe. She did not want to repudiate her faith but to struggle with it. She was fascinated by the story of the "bewildered Gymnast" [59] Jacob, wrestling with and finally defeating an angel who— according to a literal reading of the text which the poet promptly adopted—turned out to be God, and to this story she reverts more than once in her letters. When she compares the Bible unfavourably with Orpheus, whose sermon captivated and did not condemn [1545]; when she speaks of Cupid as an authentic deity [1305, 562] and asks if God is Love's adversary [1,792], she is saying that there is another kind of religious experience that counterbalances, but does not necessarily contradict, the legal and doctrinal Christianity which she had been taught. As she says with a calculated ambivalence: "'We thank thee Oh Father' for these strange Minds, that enamor us against thee" 1X472]. This other kind of religious experience is a state of heightened consciousness often called "Transport" and associated with the word "Circumference," when the poet feels directly in communion with nature and in a state of "identity"—another frequent term—with it. Nature is then surrounded by the circumference of human consciousness, and such a world is Paradise, the Biblical Eden, a nature with a human shape and meaning, a garden for man. "Home is the definition of God" 1X355], and home is what is inside the circumference of one's being. In this state the mind feels immortal: "To include, is to be touchless, for Ourself cannot cease" [1,292]. It also enters into a condition of unity or oneness which is partly what the word "identity" means. "One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!" [1,207]. Similarly the poet can speak, without any violation of grammar, of a "Myriad Daisy" (compare Wordsworth's "Tree, of many, one"),11 and, with Emerson, of the single Man who is all men:

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On the Nineteenth Century What News will do when every Man Shall comprehend as one And not in all the Universe A thing to tell remain? [1319]

Such an experience is based, not on the compelling argument, but on the infinitely suggestive image, or "emblem" as she calls it. "Emblem is immeasurable" [1,819], she says, and speaks of human beings as the "trembling Emblems" [1,522] of love. The language of emblems is as rational as the language of doctrine, but its logic is the poetic logic of metaphor, not the abstract logic of syllogism. Circumference in its turn is the "Bride of Awe" [1620], and "Awe" is her most frequent name for the God that is reached by this experience. The human circumference is surrounded by a greater consciousness, to which the poet is related as bride to bridegroom, as sea to moon, as daisy to sun, as brook to ocean—all recurring images. Sometimes the poet uses the word "peninsula" to describe an individual consciousness projecting into experience and attached to an invisible mainland. Invisible, because "No man saw awe" [1733], any more than we can see our own backbones. Awe is a lover, incarnate in the bee who loves the rose and the harebell, and a divine lover for whom a feminine poet may make the response of a bacchante or of a vestal virgin with equal appropriateness. Thus Emily Dickinson may say both Circumference thou Bride of Awe Possessing thou shalt be Possessed by every hallowed Knight That dares to covet thee [1620]

and (where "their" means the world of her bodily impulses) To their apartment deep No ribaldry may creep Untumbled this abode By any man but God— [1701]

Awe is not a dogmatic God, and is tolerant enough to satisfy not only the poet's Christian longings but the paganism that makes her feel that there ought to be a god for every mood of the soul and every department of nature:

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If "All is possible with" him As he besides concedes He will refund us finally Our confiscated Gods— [1260]

In fact he may even be female, a sheltering mother. "I always ran Home to Awe when a child . . . He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none" [1.405]. In Christian terms, this divine Awe, as she well understood, is the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, symbolized in the Bible by two of her favourite images, the bird and the wind, the giver of life to nature and of inspiration to humanity, the creative force that makes the poet's verses "breathe," and the "Conscious Ear" [733! that imagination hears with. The conventional Biblical image for the Holy Spirit is the dove, and the poet, picturing herself as Noah sailing the flood of experience, associates the dove who brought him news of land with the fact that the name of another well-known navigator, Christopher Columbus, also means dove: Thrice to the floating casement The Patriarch's bird returned, Courage! My brave Columba! There may yet be Landl [48]

To this person of God, Emily Dickinson continually turned when other things in Christianity puzzled her imagination or were rejected by her reason. She seems to associate him with the power which "stands in the Bible between the Kingdom and the Glory, because it is wilder than either of them" [1.583]. In the detached comment on the Atonement which she superimposes on the famous proverb, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,"12 the "Wind" is the power that escapes from the breakdown of doctrinal machinery: How ruthless are the gentle— How cruel are the kind— God broke his contract to his Lamb To qualify the Wind— [1439]

In a congratulatory message on the occasion of a wedding, the divine power of making one flesh out of two bodies is associated, not with the

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Father or the Son, but with the wind that bloweth where it listeth: The Clock strikes one that just struck two— Some schism in the Sum— A Vagabond from Genesis Has wrecked the Pendulum— [1569]

The confusion with a female principle, as when she says that "the Little Boy in the Trinity had no Grandmama, only a Holy Ghost" 1X979], is at least as old as the apocryphal Gospels, where Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit as his mother.13 When she says, "The Bible dealt with the Centre, not with the Circumference" [1.950], she means apparently that the Bible considers man in his ordinary state of isolation, separated from God by a gulf that only God can cross. Such a God is thought of as coming from the outside; but while God is known "By his intrusion" [1462], his movement in the human soul is to be compared rather to the tides moving in the sea. "They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse" 1X551]. If so, it takes a recluse to find him, and to discover him as the inmost secret of consciousness. The first fact of Emily Dickinson's experience, then, was that whatever the Bible may mean by Paradise or Eden, the world of lost innocence and happiness symbolized by the unfallen Adam and Eve, it is something that is already given in experience. It is attainable; the poet has attained it; it is not, therefore, a "superhuman site" 1X391], nor could it survive the extinction of the human mind. Earth is heaven, whether heaven is heaven or not: the supernatural is only the natural disclosed: the charms of the heaven in the bush are superseded by the heaven in the hand—to paraphrase almost at random. To her the essence of the Gospel was the proclamation of the paradisal vision in such passages as "consider the lilies" [Matthew 6:28]. But the Bible also speaks of regaining this Paradise and living in it eternally after death. If so, then the experience of Paradise in life is identical with the experience of eternity. The people we ordinarily call mystics are the people for whom this is true. Eternity to them is not endless time, but a real present, a "now" which absorbs all possible hereafters. Emily Dickinson also often speaks with the mystics of death as a rejoining of heaven, of "Forever" as "composed of Mows" [624], of an eternal state of consciousness symbolized by a continuous summer and noon, of a coming "Aurora," a dawn that will have no night. But in her background there were two powerful

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antimystical tendencies at work. One was the rationalism of her generation; the other was the Puritanism in which she had been reared, with its insistence that the divine will was inscrutable, that it made sense only to itself, not to man, and that no human experience could transcend the limits of fallen humanity. For Emily Dickinson, therefore, the identity between the experience of circumference she had had and the postmortal eternity taught in the Bible remained a matter of "inference." It could be held by faith or hope but not by direct knowledge. This "inference" became the central issue in her struggle with her faith, a fact which she expresses most poignantly when she says: "Consciousness is the only home of which we now know. That sunny adverb had been enough, were it not foreclosed" 1X591]. Paradoxically, the experience of unity with God and nature also produces a sense of division, or "bisection" as the poet often calls it, in the mind. Part of oneself is certainly mortal; part may not be, though even it must also go through death. In a poem beginning "Conscious am I in my Chamber" [679] she speaks of the indwelling Spirit as the immortal part of herself; sometimes the distinction is between the poet herself and her soul; sometimes, and more commonly, it is between the soul and the mind or consciousness. "[W]e know that the mind of the Heart must live" [1,503], she says, and a letter to her seems like immortality because "it is the mind alone without corporeal friend" [1,330]. She also speaks of the body as a "trinket" which is worn but not owned [1,438], and in one striking poem the soul is attended by a "single Hound" [822] which is its own identity. But she never seemed to accept the Platonic view that the soul is immortal by nature. If the first fact of her experience is a vision of earth as heaven, the second fact is that this vision is "evanescent," comes and goes unpredictably, and, so far as experience itself goes, ceases entirely at death. It is significant, therefore, that Emily Dickinson should so often symbolize her vision as a temporary and abnormal state of drunkenness: Inebriate of Air—am I— And Debauchee of Dew— Reeling—thro endless summer days— From inns of Molten Blue— [214]

The liquor responsible for this state is usually called rum, or some synonym like "Domingo," "Manzanilla," or "Jamaica." When it is the

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more traditional wine, the word "sacrament," as in the poem Exhilaration—is within, is seldom far away, for such imaginative drunkenness is a genuine communion. Still, it can lead to hangovers, "With a to-morrow knocking" [1679], and, whatever it is or means, it goes and is replaced by ordinary experience. Ordinary experience is the sacramental or ecstatic experience turned inside out. Here the mind is not a circumference at all, but a centre, and the only circumference is an indifferent and unresponsive Nature— "Nature—in Her monstrous House" [400]. We may still realize that such "Vastness—is but the Shadow of the Brain which casts it" [1,735], but in this state the brain cannot cast any other shadow. Where the mind is a centre and nature the circumference, there is no place for any divinity: that has vanished somewhere beyond the sky or beyond life. This is the state of "Those Evenings of the Brain" [419], in which the body, so far from being a circumference incorporating its experience, is a "magic Prison" [1601], sealed against all intimations of immortality: The Rumor's Gate was shut so tight Before my Mind was sown, Not even a Prognostic's Push Could make a Dent thereon— [1576]

Like Blake, with whom she has been compared ever since Higginson's preface to the 1890 volume, Emily Dickinson shows us two contrary states of the human soul, a vision of innocence and a vision of "experience," or ordinary life. One is a vision of "Presence," the other of "Place"; in one the primary fact of life is partnership, in the other it is parting. Thus she may say, depending on the context, both "Were Departure Separation, there would be neither Nature nor Art, for there would be no World"1* and Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. [1732]

But she has nothing of Blake's social vision, and the state that he associates with child labour, Negro slavery, prostitution, and war she associates only with loneliness. Her two states are often associated with summer and winter, or, less frequently, with day and night. Often, especially in poems addressed to Sue, she speaks of a "Summer—Sister—Seraph!" [18] who inhabits the

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paradisal world, in contrast to herself as a "dark sister/' a "Druid" [44! spirit of winter, frost, and the north, waiting for the birds to come back, like Noah's dove, to tell her of a sunnier world beyond. Hence the times of year that have the greatest significance for her are the equinoxes, the March when the birds return and the white dress of winter breaks into colour, and the moment in late summer when the invisible presence of autumn enters the year and makes "a Druidic Difference" [1068] in nature. The association of this latter period with the moment at which human life faces death makes it particularly the point at which the two lines of her imagination converge: God made a little Gentian— It tried—to be a Rose— And failed—and all the Summer laughed— But just before the Snows There rose a Purple Creature— That ravished all the Hill— And Summer hid her Forehead— And Mockery—was still— The Frosts were her condition— The Tyrian would not come Until the North—invoke it— Creator—Shall I—bloom? [442]

Emily Dickinson is an impressionist in the sense that she tends to organize her visual experience by colour rather than outline, and purple, the colour of mourning and of triumph, is the central symbol for her of the junction between life and death. Various synonyms of it such as "Iodine," "Amethyst," and the "Tyrian" above run through her writings. At times the poet speaks of the paradisal vision as being, not only a "stimulant" given in cases of despair or stupor, but a light by which all the rest of life can be lived, as providing a final answer to the question raised by its passing: Why Bliss so scantily disburse— Why Paradise defer— Why Floods be served to Us—in Bowls— I speculate no more— [756]

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At other times, in such poems as those beginning "Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven?" [248! and "If I'm lost—now" [256] she laments over a lost vision that hints at a still greater loss. Such sudden changes of mood would be inconsistent if she were arguing a thesis, but, being a poet, what she is doing is expressing a variety of possible imaginative reactions to a central unsolved riddle. The fact that her vision is transient sharpens the intensity of her relation to it, for In Insecurity to lie Is joy's insuring quality. [1434]

Two recurring words in her poems are "suspense" and "expanse." The former refers to the shadow that falls between an experience and the realization that it has happened, the shadow that adumbrates death; the latter to the possession of the spiritual body which, for us, brings vision but not peace. "These sudden intimacies with Immortality, are expanse— not Peace—as Lightning at our feet, instills a foreign Landscape" [L64i]. She deals mainly with the virtues of faith, hope, and love, but her life had shown her that love, which normally tends to union, may incorporate a great deal of its opposite, which is renunciation. Similarly with faith and hope: "Faith is Doubt" 1X912], she says, and hope is the thinnest crust of ice over despair: Could Hope inspect her Basis Her Craft were done— Has a fictitious Charter Or it has none— [1283]

Like the Puritans before her, who refused to believe that their own righteousness would necessarily impress God into recognizing them, Emily Dickinson refused to believe that her own vision of Paradise guaranteed the existence of Paradise, even though she had nothing else to go on. And—Puritan to the last—she even faced the possibility that the Spirit of life within her might turn out to be Death, hence the ambiguous tone of such poems as Doubt Me! My Dim Companion! and Struck, was I, nor yet by Lightning. She told Sue that if Jesus did not recognize her at the last day, "there is a darker spirit will not disown it's child" 1X173]. She means death, not the devil, though her pose recalls the demonic figures in Hawthorne. There are many poems about the physical experience of

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dying, some tranquil, some agonizing, some dealing with death by execution, by warfare, by drowning—in at least two poems the poet is an Andromeda swallowed by a sea monster. The region of death to be entered, or traversed, is usually a sea, sometimes a forest, or a "Maelstrom—in the Sky" [721], or simply "a wild Night and a new Road" [1,332], and in I never told the buried gold, it is an underworld guarded by a dragon. The world of death is not one that we have to die to explore: it is there all the time, the end and final cause of the vision of the centre, just as Awe is the end and final cause of the vision of circumference. "I suppose there are depths in every Consciousness," she says, "from which we cannot rescue ourselves—to which none can go with us—which represent to us Mortally—the Adventure of Death" [1.555]. Some of her psychological poems take us into this buried jungle of the mind. There are a few about ghosts, where the two aspects of the self are treated in the vein of Henry James's The Jolly Corner. But Emily Dickinson's sharp inquiring mind has little in common with the ectoplasmic, and these poems impress us as made rather than born. A more genuine fear comes out at the end of this: Remembrance has a Rear and Front— Tis something like a House— It has a Garret also For Refuse and the Mouse. Besides the deepest Cellar That ever Mason laid— Look to it by its Fathoms Ourselves be not pursued— [1182]

This is as near to hell as she ever brings us, as the original version of the last two lines indicates: Leave me not ever there alone Oh thou Almighty God!1?

Yet even such a hell as this has a place and a function. Its presence is in an odd way the basis of vision itself, for "the unknown is the largest need of the intellect" [1471], and "could we see all we hope—there would be

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madness near" [1,388]. Emily Dickinson has a poem about Enoch and Elijah, the two Biblical prophets who were taken directly to heaven, but the figure she identifies herself with is Moses, standing on the mountain top with the wilderness of death on one side and the Promised Land on the other, able to see his Paradise if not to enter it: Such are the inlets of the mind— His outlets—would you see Ascend with me the Table Land Of immortality— [1421]

Many, perhaps most, of Emily Dickinson's readers will simply take their favourite poems from her and leave the rest, with little curiosity about the larger structure of her imagination. For many, too, the whole bent of her mind will seem irresponsible or morbid. It is perhaps as well that this should be so. "It is essential to the sanity of mankind," the poet remarks, "that each one should think the other crazy."16 There are more serious reasons: a certain perversity, an instinct for looking in the opposite direction from the rest of society, is frequent among creative minds. When the United States was beginning to develop an entrepreneur capitalism on a scale unprecedented in history, Thoreau retired to Walden to discover the meaning of the word "property," and found that it meant only what was proper or essential to unfettered human life. When the Civil War was beginning to force on America the troubled vision of its revolutionary destiny, Emily Dickinson retired to her garden to remain, like Wordsworth's skylark, within the kindred points of heaven and home. She will always have readers who will know what she means when she says, "Each of us gives or takes heaven in corporeal person, for each of us has the skill of life" [L388]. More restless minds will not relax from taking thought for the morrow to spend much time with her. But even some of them may still admire the energy and humour with which she fought her angel until she had forced out of him the crippling blessing of genius.

24

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1964

From StS, 241-56. Originally published in Literary Views: Critical and Historical Essays, ed. Caroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 145-58. Reprinted with some alterations in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, Presented to A.S.P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and Frank W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 304-19. A typescript is in NFF, 1988, box i,file u. I

The aspect of Victorian literature represented by such names as Carlyle, Mill, Newman, and Arnold seems to me one of the seminal developments in English culture, ranking with Shakespeare and Milton, if not in literary merit, at least in many other kinds of importance. This is mainly because of the extraordinary fertility and suggestiveness of the educational theories it was so largely concerned with. I therefore speak of the problem of spiritual authority, because all educational theory seems to me to be essentially an application of that problem. The source of actual or "temporal" authority in society is seldom hard to locate. It is always in the near vicinity of whatever one pays one's taxes to. As long as it can be believed that might is right, and that the taxcollecting power is not to be questioned, there is no separate problem of spiritual authority. But the thesis that might is right, even when as carefully rationalized as it is in Hobbes, has seldom been regarded as much more than an irresponsible paradox. There has almost certainly never been a period in history when the taxpayer did not try to cheat the publican, and even the desire to cheat raises the question of what kinds

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of authority may be thought of as overriding the actual one. For selfinterest also has a separate authority. Spiritual authority is usually connected, of course, with religion, God being normally thought of as a sovereign spirit. Our cultural tradition has inherited from the Old Testament a conception of the will of God which may often be in the sharpest possible opposition to the will of man, especially an Egyptian or Babylonian or Philistine will. But if a religion can find an accredited human representative, the two kinds of authority again tend to merge. The medieval theory of the Pope's right to temporal power and the post-Renaissance conception of the divine right of kings are examples of an effort to make the spiritual order a guarantee of the stability of the temporal one. As far as the normal workings of the human mind can go, the will of God differs in degree but not in kind from the will of man, and the metaphors applied to it, such as the metaphor of divine "sovereignty," are drawn from the more primitive forms of human society. When Greek philosophers began to frame ethical conceptions of justice and righteousness, they ran into similar problems. Their traditional gods, as they appear in Homer, still had all the arbitrary and whimsical quality of a human aristocracy, and submitting to a human conqueror would not be psychologically very different from praying to Poseidon the irascible earth-shaker. In Christianity the human product of spiritual authority is supposed to be charity, but Christian charity has usually been, down to quite recent times, supported by temporal power, and it may be significant that the word "charity" itself has come to mean chiefly a form of voluntary taxation. Ordinary social consciousness usually begins in a sense of antithesis between what the ego wants and what society will allow it to have. Hence temporal authority comes to the individual first of all in the form of an external compulsion. In this stage freedom is identified with the ego's side of this antithesis. But education, and more particularly education of the reason, introduces us to a form of necessity or compulsion which is not opposed to freedom but seems to be rather another aspect of it. To assent to the truth of a geometrical demonstration is psychologically a contrast to assenting to the will of a social superior. Hence reason can do what faith, hope, and even love by themselves cannot do: present us with the model or pattern of an authority which appeals to the mind rather than to the body, which compels but does not enforce. Such authority confers dignity on the person who accepts it, and such dignity

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has no context of hierarchy: there is nobody at whose expense the dignity is achieved. The nineteenth-century social and political writers in Great Britain had inherited from Milton a conception of spiritual authority of this sort, and a singularly lucid and powerful one. For Milton the source of spiritual authority was a revelation from God, more particularly the revelation of the gospel which had spiritualized the law, and delivered those under the gospel from the sense of external constraint. St. Paul tells us that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, and those under the gospel should do as they like, because what they like to do is the will of God, not the illusory pseudo-acts suggested by passion or selfishness. For Milton, again, the accredited human agent of spiritual authority is the church in the sense of the society of individuals who are under the gospel, among whom the one who has authority is the apostle or saint, which according to Milton is what the New Testament means by an episcope or overseer.1 Such authority clearly has no relevance to magistrates or penal codes. Revelation from God accommodates itself to man primarily in the form of reason. Reason manifests itself in the decisive acts of a free life ("reason is but choosing," Milton says in Areopagitica, annexing Aristotle's conception of proairesis to the Christian logos),2 and as revelation is the opposite of mystery, there is no conflict between spiritual authority and reason. A revelation from an infinite mind may transcend the reason of a finite one, but does not contradict or humiliate it. Human society, as Milton saw it, is conditioned by the inertia of original sin to seek the habitual and customary, to do things because they have been done before, to make an idol of tradition. The impact of revelation, coming through reason, is always subversive and revolutionary: it is bound to shake up the somnambulism of habit and confront it with the eternal opposition of God and fallen man. Such reason is also liberty, which man does not naturally want, but which God wants him to have. Purely social changes are, at best, gradual adjustments: genuine liberty is sudden and apocalyptic: In state many things at first are crude and hard to digest, which only time and deliberation can supple and concoct. But in religion, wherein is no immaturity, nothing out of season, it goes far otherwise. The door of grace turns upon smooth hinges, wide opening to send out, but soon shutting to recall the precious offers of mercy to a nation.3

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Temporal authority, however essential, is also provisional, the result of the permanent emergency in human affairs caused by the fall. It can never be accepted as an end in itself: the reason why it is there is stated in scripture, and all nonscriptural ways of trying to justify it are suspect. There is no inherent authority, in other words, in tradition or custom or precedent, on which temporal authority may rest as a basis. Hence no church which bases its claim to authority on tradition can be a genuine embodiment of revelation. Milton's regicide pamphlet, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, is a work of extraordinary originality of thought, outlining an early theory of contract and being one of the earliest efforts to try to give some functional place to revolution in history. But even this involves an appeal to precedent, and Milton embarks on an appeal to precedent with the greatest unwillingness: "But because it is the vulgar folly of men to desert their own reason, and shutting their eyes, to think they see best with other men's, I shall show, by such examples as ought to have most weight with us, what has been done in this case heretofore."4 We have, then, in Milton, a spiritual authority with its roots in revelation and manifesting itself largely in reason, and a temporal authority which is to be acknowledged and obeyed in its own sphere, but should not be rationalized by arguments drawn from precedent or custom. Temporal authority is primarily something that is there, whether we like it or not. If we don't like it, we turn to a conception of spiritual authority and subordinate the temporal power to it as far as possible, if only in our own minds. If we do like it or want to defend it, on the other hand, we tend to see in tradition, custom, habit, in short the process by which temporal authority came to be, some kind of inherent right. We may note in passing that if social revolution is not, for Milton, organically related to precedents, it is not organically related to the future either. The rebellions of the Jews against their overlords, as recorded in the Old Testament, had varying degrees of success, but none were permanently successful. Hence the significance of such a rebellion is typological, manifesting the power of the true God for and at the moment. The extent to which Milton was able to reconcile himself with the failure of the revolution of his own day is perhaps indicated in Samson Agonistes, where the temporary victory of Samson in destroying the Philistine temple has this kind of significance. In the eighteenth century the conception of the natural society in Bolingbroke and Rousseau brought a new kind of revolutionary dialectic

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into social argument. Rousseau thought of man in his context as a child of nature, and not, as Milton did, in his context as a child of God whose original state was civilized. It was reason and nature that were associated in his thought, not reason and revelation, and the original free and equal society of man was not something intended for man by God which man irrevocably lost, but something man still has the power to recapture. Rousseau's thought resembles Milton's only in associating reason and revolution, and in thinking of'reason as essentially the vision in the light of which the free act is performed. It is with the counter-revolutionary thought that developed in Britain in opposition to Rousseau, particularly in Burke, that the problem of spiritual authority in the nineteenth century begins. For Burke, in almost direct contrast to Milton, the first justification for temporal authority consists in the fact that it is there: the right underlying its might, therefore, is the process of tradition and precedent that has brought it into being. The social contract of any society "is collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast."5 Any developed society is found to consist of various classes, and the tendency of each class is to promote its own interest by acting "merely by their will."6 This creates tyranny, whether exerted by the king (who is historically a class in himself), by the nobility, or, as in France, by the "people," which means one class or group of people. The source of spiritual authority for Burke, therefore, is to be found, not so much in tradition as such, as in a kind of telos, a sense of belonging to a social organism whose health is preserved by maintaining a balance of power among the different organs. The health of the social structure is the end of all social action from any class, and the standard by which such action should be judged. Revolutionary action, which sets free an automatic and unconditioned will, is to society what the cancerous growth of tissue is in the individual. A social organism of this kind is the only genuine form of natural society, for nature is to be thought of as an order that preserves constancy in change by a process of continuous repair: "Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete."7 Two factors in Burke's thought are particularly relevant here. In Milton, the current of liberty, so to speak, normally flows in a deductive direction, from revelation to reason, and from reason to social action. For Burke, liberty can only be preserved by the inductive, empirical, even ad hoc procedures of the political action that operates on the basis of what is

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there: prudence is the greatest of political virtues, and prejudice the only valuable form of deductive thinking. It is the revolutionary action leading to tyranny which is deductive, like the "metaphysical" French Revolution which had begun with a set of major premises about the abstract rights of man, and had then attempted "a decomposition of the whole civil and political mass, for the purpose of originating a new civil order out of the first elements of society."8 Hence reason, given its full deductive and speculative head, is not an emancipating but a destructive and

ultimately enslaving power in politics. Spiritual authority, at least, is

something to which we owe loyalty, and loyalty is not primarily rational; hence society is held together by profounder forces than the reason can express or reach. In the second place, most temporal authority is vested in the ascendant class: this class is faced with a strong revolutionary bid for power coming from further down in society: the maintenance of the health of the social organism, which means the maintenance of spiritual authority, is therefore bound up with preserving the existing rights and privileges of the ascendant class. "We must suppose (society) to be in that state of habitual social discipline in which the wiser, the more expert, and the more opulent conduct, and by conducting enlighten and protect, the weaker, the less knowing, and the less provided with the goods of fortune."9 Burke goes on to say that "the state of civil society which necessarily generates this aristocracy is a state of Nature"10—i.e., once again, the genuine form of natural society. The ascendant class includes the church, as for Burke the church is a continuous social institution, and its spiritual authority is inconceivable without that continuity. Hence Burke

says, in what from our present point of view is a key statement of his thought: Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.11

The ascendant class, therefore, and more particularly the aristocracy, comes to represent an ideal authority, expressed in the term "gentleman," at the point in history at which its effective temporal authority had begun to decline (though, of course, its privileges and much of its pres-

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tige remained for another century). The social function of the aristocracy has always included the art of putting on a show, of dramatizing a way of life. It is natural that America, with no hereditary aristocracy as such, should have invented an ad hoc aristocracy out of its entertainers, who attract much the same kind of identification that royal figures do in British countries. In the thought of Carlyle, who has no interest in spiritual authority distinct from temporal authority, and wants only to identify the two, the reactivating of aristocracy naturally occupies a central place. For Carlyle the "holiness" or radiance of the indwelling divinity in man, which is perceptible in the hero, is the source of an undifferentiated authority which is spiritual and temporal at once. Yet even Carlyle distinguished the de jure authority of the aristocracy from the de facto authority of captains of industry and self-made heroes of the Napoleon and Cromwell category. The basis of the distinction seems to be that as de facto or temporal authority is essentially active, so de jure or spiritual authority has something about it associated with the contemplative. In his chapter on symbolism in Sartor Resartus Carlyle sees the heroic personality as an "intrinsic" symbol (i.e., one that has value in itself, as distinct from the flag or the cross which are extrinsic and have value only as indicators).12 As a symbol, the hero is the focus of a community, and the de jure figure seems to be the most vivid one. Crowds gather to see the Queen in order to see their own unity as a society reflected in her. Here again there is a link between the recognition of spiritual authority and the dramatic function of an ascendant class. Samuel Butler also associates spiritual authority with the aristocracy, in a more speculative and paradoxical way. He is, of course, particularly fascinated by the working of the evolutionary process in human society, and his conception of education, traditional as it is in itself, reflects this interest. He points out in Life and Habit that no skill is learned thoroughly until it passes through consciousness into the unconscious.13 It follows that the most profoundly educated people are those who have been born to wealth, leisure, and privilege, and have never been troubled by a conscious idea, which includes a good many of the aristocracy. Thus in The Way of All Flesh the hero, Ernest Pontifex, at that time engaged in social work in East London, meets an old classmate named Towneley who is large, handsome, simple-minded, well-to-do, and altogether admirable. Ernest asks Towneley effusively if he doesn't love the poor: Towneley says no, and gets away as quickly as possible. It could hardly be a briefer encounter, but it is an epiphany for Ernest: spiritual authority

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has spoken, as unmistakably as it spoke from the burning bush. Ernest considers this situation carefully, and finally decides: I see it all now. The people like Towneley are the only ones who know anything that is worth knowing, and like that of course I can never be. But to make Towneleys possible there must be hewers of wood and drawers of water—men in fact through whom conscious knowledge must pass before it can reach those who can apply it gracefully and instinctively like the Towneleys can.14

We are reminded of the respect paid in Erewhon to those who are handsome, healthy, and rich, and how Erewhon considers it a crime to be ill or unfortunate. In Huxley's terms, society's sympathies are with nature, rather than with ethics, even though society itself is an ethical creation. Yet Ernest's solution is still a trifle immature, and Erewhon brings us a little closer to Butler's real view of spiritual authority. Most of the Erewhonians, according to Butler, are unthinking, instinctive conservatives, whose values are determined entirely by habit and prejudice: worshippers, as he says, of the goddess Ydgrun. But there is also in Erewhon a small group of "high Ydgrunites," whom Butler describes as the best people he met in Erewhon. Of them he says: "They were gentlemen in the full sense of the word; and what has one not said in saying this?"15 The high Ydgrunite would be somebody like Montaigne, presumably: able to live in and with society, able to see not only the power but the real significance of convention and prejudice, yet remaining intellectually detached from them. Such gentlemen are not only the natural aristocracy but the genuine apostles of society, correcting instinct by reason and reason by instinct, and never allowing the two to make that fatal alliance which is the mark of all bigots, whether reactionary or revolutionary. The problem of spiritual authority, we see, has as its crucial point the problem of defining the community of such an authority. The writers we have been quoting, all of whom are deeply conservative, associate this community with the ideal aristocracy which the term "gentleman" conveys. For a revolutionary thinker, such as William Morris, spiritual authority would be isolated from society, confined to the small conspiratorial group of those who repudiate its values and are shut out from its benefits. It is perhaps worth noting that Morris's revolutionary ideal, as outlined in the future Utopia depicted in News from Nowhere, is the

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assimilating of the conception of a natural aristocracy to the whole of society. In News from Nowhere everybody has the creative versatility and the sprezzatura that are the marks of the ideally educated courtier in Castiglione, except that, of course, there is no court and no prince, and no one to serve except one another. They are at once producers and consumers, and as consumers they have the sharply limited and defined quality of a privileged class. "We have now found out what we want," says one of them, "so we make no more than we want."16 This applies even to the production of human beings: the population has become stabilized, apparently, because people are no longer rutting out of nervous instability, as they do in societies based on exploitation. The curiously childlike quality of Morris's ideal citizens is also significant, for, of course, the real natural aristocracy in all ages, the society of those who are genuinely entitled to leisure and privilege and consuming the goods produced for them by others, are the children. II

We have just traced a parabola from the counter-revolutionary polemic of the later Burke to the revolutionary polemic of Morris. The former places spiritual authority in the middle of the ascendant class, or at least its centre of gravity is to be found there, and the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs ends in contemptuous ridicule of John Ball, "that reverend patriarch of sedition,"17 who could not find the conception of "gentleman" in the original producing society when Adam delved and Eve span. Morris, in contrast, places spiritual authority for his own time in the small alienated group who are possessed by the ambition of realizing the dream of John Ball. For Morris the Peasants' Revolt was the one brief moment when something like a proletariat appears in British history. In the thought of John Stuart Mill the problem of spiritual authority is located in a much less simplified view of society. For Mill, Burke's continuum of habit and prejudice is the way in which the majority of people live. Being a majority, they are not confined to a single class, and the progress of democracy involves making their will the source of temporal authority. As in Burke and Butler, their motivation is instinctive and empirical. Over against them are the smaller group of the liberal opposition, a much more highly individualized group, of whom Mill says that they initiate all wise and noble things. Mill, somewhat unexpectedly, resembles Hegel in seeing the political

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opposition of Conservative and Liberal as the symbol of an ideal or intellectual opposition of conservative and liberal attitudes. As the liberal opposition is intellectually always a minority, it has the peculiar problem of getting enough mass support to be effective in a democratic election. Some of Mill's devices, such as a plurality of votes for the educated, are sufficiently desperate to indicate that this is a matter of some difficulty. To grasp the nature of the ideal opposition we have to grasp two principles. First, the majority is always right, for the majority is the source of temporal authority. Second, the majority is always wrong, for it is not the source of spiritual authority. The latter is to be found in the intellectual opposition, for "almost all the greatest men who ever lived have formed part of such an Opposition."18 Authority in its two forms, therefore, rests on a paradoxical and illogical tension between majority rule and minority right. The minority are not a class but an elite, and no social epithet like "gentleman" will apply to them. In practice most of them may be gentlemen, but that is not why they belong there. The gentleman behaves according to a social convention, and for Mill the toleration of unconventional or eccentric behaviour is the mark of a mature society. What holds this elite together is something intellectual, though it is certainly not intellectual agreement. To put the question in another way, what gives a minority a right? Criminals are a minority, but clearly have no right to be criminals. In the essay On Liberty the right appears to be the ability to contribute something to the area of free thought and discussion, of what for Mill is the real parliament of man, the ideological debate that is close to being the source of spiritual authority because it supplies the vision for temporal power. To permit freedom of thought is to direct freedom of action, as unrestricted speculation is the best check so far discovered on premature, spasmodic, or panic-stricken action. Here again we run into a Hegelian element in Mill's thought: no idea contributed to this social debate has any real effectiveness unless it contains its own opposite: unless, therefore, the possibility of refuting it is also present. Mill draws our attention to the peculiar importance of Rousseau in challenging the validity of the structure of society itself. Burke's counter-revolutionary argument was based on a completely inductive conception of political action; Mill's argument attempts to associate his liberal opposition with a more deductive point of view. He remarks, for example, that "the non-existence of an acknowledged first

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principle has made ethics not so much a guide as a consecration of men's actual sentiments."19 The Utilitarian philosophy held his loyalty because it provided a major premise for majority behaviour. That people will seek what they consider pleasure and avoid what they consider pain is individually probable and statistically certain. But this purely descriptive principle supplies no standard or value, no way even of distinguishing reality from illusion in the conception of pleasure. In Milton, who in Areopagitica presents a similar conception of truth as something arrived at dynamically through the conflict of opinion, the major premises come from scripture. Milton never conceived the possibility of a free society trying to find truth without the aid of scripture. In Mill there is no clear source of the premises of debate of this kind, no set of standards and assumptions that can be taken as given. The absence of such a source may be one reason for his curious attraction toward the most uncongenial types of political dogmatists, including Carlyle and Comte (it would take us too far afield to apply this principle to Harriet Taylor),20 as though he felt that they held some missing piece he was looking for. In Newman, on the other hand, the source of spiritual authority is the church catholic: his great strength as a nineteenth-century thinker lay in his unvarying acceptance of that view. At no time in his adult life was Newman ever anything that a Protestant would call a Protestant: his problem was only to decide whether the Anglican or the Roman communion was the genuinely catholic one. He takes our present argument a step further by finding the road to spiritual authority through education. Education for him is partly social, and retains the social aim of producing the "gentleman" which we met in Burke and Butler. Even its intellectual characteristic, a disinterested or liberal quality in it which is "its own end,"21 has an analogy with the social ideal which is detachable from the necessity of earning a living. On its intellectual side, liberal education is essentially a discipline of reason, as in Milton, and, as in Mill, it seems to have something to do with a "master view of things,"22 a deductive or synoptic sense of intellectual form which gets one's head above the habit of living: The principle of real dignity in Knowledge, its worth, its desirableness, considered irrespectively of its results, is this germ within it of a scientific or a philosophical process. This is how it comes to be an end in itself; this is why it admits of being called Liberal.23

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But the university turns out to be a function of the church, and the education it gives confronts the student with a dilemma: he must either attach himself along with his education to the church or keep his education as a private possession. Recurrently we have come to this crucial point of having to define the community of spiritual authority. The individual can readily be seen to be capable of understanding more than society in general, and hence of possessing standards and values, with an authority superior in kind if not in power. But the conception "gentleman," however interpreted, defines the superior individual rather than the superior group, even granted that one may recognize the individual as one of a group. For Newman only the church provides this community, and of the gentlemen who cannot commit themselves to it he says: "When they do wrong, they feel, not contrition, of which God is the object, but remorse, and a sense of degradation They are victims of an intense self-contemplation."24 In Newman's view of the church there is no place, as there would have to be in Protestant thought, including Milton's, for a dialogue between scripture and church. The church for Newman is the definitive teacher of doctrine, hence it encloses scripture, and operates on ordinary society very much as the British constitution does in Burke. For Burke the conflict of classes and their interests, in a free society, is settled by a legal compromise which preserves the rights of both parties, and these compromises then form a series of precedents diffusing freedom through society, as the quarrels of king and barons produced Magna Carta and the quarrels of king and Parliament the Bill of Rights. Newman sees church doctrine as developing in a somewhat similar way, being evolved out of the crises of history, defining a dogma here, marking off a heresy there, in an endless pilgrimage toward the City of God. Thus spiritual authority in Newman is, as in Milton, a revelation, but a revelation that has no place for metamorphosis, for the revolutionary and apocalyptic transformation of society. In Arnold, the conception "culture" is the basis from which we have to start. In using the phrase spiritual authority to describe a pervasive problem of nineteenth-century thought, I have been putting unfamiliar conceptions into the minds of some of my writers. For Mill, the problem is not exactly one of spiritual authority, and for Butler, it is not exactly a problem of authority. But Arnold is quite explicit about the authoritative nature of culture:

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If we look at the world outside us we find a disquieting absence of sure authority. We discover that only in right reason can we get a source of sure authority; and culture brings us towards right reason.25

The traditional elements of gentleman and liberal education are both involved in Arnold's culture, but Arnold clears up a point about the social location of spiritual authority that has been confusing us thus far. We noticed that the more conservative a writer is, the more inclined he is to locate spiritual authority in the middle of actual society, in the place of greatest prestige and prominence. The more radical he is, the more inclined he is to locate it in an opposition, an alien or even excluded group. Something in Arnold—possibly the Romantic poet in him—realizes that the centre is the place of greatest isolation. The argument of Culture and Anarchy is to the effect that what is of greatest cultural value, such as a university or the established church, is central to society and demands to be placed at the centre, in the position of Carlyle's intrinsic symbol. Society itself presents a conflict of class interests, and culture for Arnold operates like law in Burke or doctrine in Newman, as a harmonizing principle creating a new kind of order out of this conflict. Those who support it have to begin by isolating themselves from class conflict, which means isolating themselves from the present structure of society: "[W]ithin each of these classes there are a certain number of aliens, if we may so call them, —persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection."26 Culture represents an evaluation—the best that has been thought and said— and the conception of "best" is bound up with permanence. Class conflict deals with temporary issues, and its arguments are rationalizations based on a temporary situation. Temporal power is based on the ascendancy of one class—here we come back to Milton's conception of temporal power as an interim power. The class qua class is always anticultural: the aristocracy, considered purely as a class, are only barbarians, the middle class only Philistines, the lower class only a populace. Hence it would be the wildest paradox to think of creating a new society through the dictatorship of one class. It is culture that is the genuinely revolutionary force in society, for culture "seeks to do away with classes,"27 and tends to create out of actual society an ideal order of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Culture for Arnold is a whole of which the church forms part, but as culture is not, like church, the name of a specific commu-

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nity, the problem of defining the community of spiritual authority is still with us. The question of the origin of spiritual authority, and of whether that origin is purely human, partly human, or wholly superhuman has come up at various times in this inquiry. Anyone working out this question in Christian terms, whether Catholic or Protestant, would be likely to say that its origin is out of human reach, though the fact that Christ is at once God, Man, and Logos guarantees the validity of human reason as a means of receiving it, at least up to a point. For Burke and Butler, in different ways, spiritual authority, or whatever is homologous with it, comes to us as a process of nature, a datum or something given, which we may modify but must first of all accept. We have seen that spiritual authority begins in the recognition of truth, and truth usually has about it some quality of the objective, something presented to us. But for a liberal thinker, such as Mill, there can hardly be any real spiritual authority apart from what man himself creates. A revolutionary thinker would go a step farther and see in truth itself a human creation which, as man continues to create it, he may also recreate. Marx's second thesis on Feuerbach makes this quite clear: The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking.28

Arnold's "culture" unites these qualities of the datum and the continuous creation, being a human construct which, so far as it is rooted in the past, possesses an objective authority. This authority, we should note, is not exclusively intellectual, for "many things are not seen in their true nature and as they really are, unless they are seen as beautiful,"29 and the imagination as well as the reason may recognize a monument of its own magnificence. Wherever we turn in nineteenth-century thought we meet some version of a "drunken boat" construct, where the values of humanity, intelligence, or cultural and social tradition keep tossing precariously in a sort of Noah's ark on top of a menacing and potentially destructive force. This is the relation of the world as idea to the world as will in Schopenhauer, of ethics to evolution in Darwin and Huxley, of the ascendant class to the proletariat in Marx, and, later, of ego to libido and id in Freud. There are also many variants of a "saving remnant" theory,

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ranging from Coleridge's "clerisy" to various pleas for a new kind of monastic movement (one thinks of the symbolic function of the idealized monastery in the argument of Carlyle's Past and Present). Of other metaphors of spiritual authority, two are conspicuous. One is the metaphor of the human body, whose seat of intelligence and authority ought to be somewhere on top, as it is in the individual body. The other is the thermostat or feedback metaphor which has organized so much social thinking in the last two centuries. In a sense the search for spiritual authority is really the search for a "governor" in the mechanical sense, something that distributes the rhythm of a mechanism without being involved in the mechanism itself. This figure appears in Huxley's Evolution and Ethics: "To this extent the general cosmic process begins to be checked by a rudimentary ethical process, which is, strictly speaking, part of the former, just as the 'governor' in a steam-engine is part of the mechanism of the engine."30 The problem dealt with in this paper could, of course, be extended over a far wider area of nineteenth-century thought than I am here able to cover. So far as I know, the twentieth century has not added much to the question, which may be one reason why the political axioms and assumptions of the twentieth century are still rooted in the nineteenth. It seems to me, however, appropriate to consider whether the university may not have a peculiarly close relationship to the question. In particular, the university seems to me to come closer than any other human institution to defining the community of spiritual authority. Newman's view that the university is a function of the church, with theology occupying a central role as the queen of sciences, does not seem to be borne out by the development of universities in the last century. I have no doubt that religion indicates where the ultimate source of spiritual authority is, nor that the churches have an essential function as custodians and interpreters of its tradition. But in the present-day shape of society, so dominated by science and technology, they clearly have only a partial and peripheral role in embodying the spiritual authority of that society. Arnold comes nearest to seeing the universities in this light, but universities in his day, and more particularly as he conceived them, made it necessary for him to distinguish them from "culture." A century later we seem to be living our lives on two levels. One is the level of ordinary society, which is in so constant a state of revolution and metamorphosis that it cannot be accepted as the real form of human society at all, but only as the transient appearance of real society. Real society itself can

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only be the world revealed to us through the study of the arts and sciences, the total body of human achievement out of which the forces come that change ordinary society so rapidly. Of this world the universities are the social embodiment, and they represent what seems to me today the only visible direction in which our higher loyalties and obligations can go.

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From StS, 218-40. Originally published in Experience in the Novel, English Institute Essays, 1967, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 49-81.

Dickens presents special problems to any critic who approaches him in the context of a "Victorian novelist." In general, the serious Victorian fiction writers are realistic and the less serious ones are romancers. We expect George Eliot or Trollope to give us a solid and well-rounded realization of the social life, attitudes, and intellectual issues of their time; we expect Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton, because they are more "romantic," to give us the same kind of thing in a more flighty and dilettantish way; from the cheaper brands, Marie Corelli or Ouida, we expect nothing but the standard romance formulas. This alignment of the serious and the realistic, the commercial and the romantic, where realism has a moral dignity that romance lacks, intensified after Dickens's death, survived through the first half of the twentieth century, and still lingers vestigially. But in such an alignment Dickens is hard to place. What he writes, if I may use my own terminology for once, are not realistic novels but fairy tales in the low mimetic displacement. Hence there has grown up an assumption that, if we are to take Dickens seriously, we must emphasize the lifelikeness of his characters or the shrewdness of his social observation; if we emphasize his violently unplausible plots and his playing up of popular sentiment, we are emphasizing only his concessions to an undeveloped public taste. This was a contemporary view of him, expressed very lucidly by Trollope in The Warden* and it is still a natural one to take.

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A refinement of the same view sees the real story in Dickens's novels as a rather simple set of movements within a large group of characters. To this a mechanical plot seems to have been attached like an outboard motor to a rowboat, just to get things moving faster and more noisily. Thus our main interest, in reading Little Dorrit, is in the straightforward and quite touching story of Clennam's love for the heroine, of their separation through her suddenly acquired wealth, and of their eventual reunion through her loss of it. Along with this goes a preposterous melodrama about forged wills, identical twins, a mother who is not a mother, skulking foreigners, and dark mysteries of death and birth which seems almost detachable from the central story. Similarly, we finish Our Mutual Friend with a clear memory of a vast panoramic pageant of Victorian society, from the nouveau-riche Veneerings to Hexham living on the refuse of the Thames. But the creaky Griselda plot, in which John Harmon pretends to be dead in order to test the stability of his future wife, is something that we can hardly take in even when reading the book, much less remember afterwards. Some works of fiction present a clearly designed or projected plot, where each episode seems to us to be logically the sequel to the previous episode. In others we feel that the episode that comes next does so only because the author has decided that it will come next. In stories with a projected plot we explain the episode from its context in the plot; in stories lacking such a plot, we are often thrown back on some other explanation, often one that originates in the author's wish to tell us something besides the story. This last is particularly true of thematic sequences like the "Dream Play" of Strindberg, where the succession of episodes is not like that of a projected plot, nor particularly like a dream either, but has to be accounted for in different terms. In Dickens we often notice that when he is most actively pursuing his plot he is careless, to the verge of being contemptuous, of the inner logic of the story. In Little Dorrit, the mysterious rumblings and creakings in the Clennam house, referred to at intervals throughout, mean that it is about to fall down. What this in turn means is that Dickens is going to push it over at a moment when the villain is inside and the hero outside. Similarly, Clennam, after a good deal of detective work, manages to discover where Miss Wade is living on the Continent. She did not expect him to ferret out her address, nor had she anything to say to him when he arrived; but, just in case he did come, she had written out the story of her life and had kept it in a drawer ready to hand to him. The outrage on

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probability seems almost deliberate, as does the burning up of Krook in Bleak House by spontaneous combustion as soon as the author is through with him, despite Dickens's protests about the authenticity of his device. Dickens's daughter, Mrs. Pellegrini, remarked shrewdly that there was no reason to suppose that The Mystery of Edwin Drood would have been any more of an impeccable plot structure than the novels that Dickens had already completed. But, because it is unfinished, the plot has been the main focus of critical attention in that story, usually on the assumption that this once Dickens was working with a plot which was not, like a fictional Briareus, equipped with a hundred arms of coincidence. T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Dickens and Wilkie Collins, remarks on the "spurious fatality" of Collins's detective-story plots.2 This is no place to raise the question of why the sense of fatality in The Moonstone should be more spurious than in The Family Reunion, but we notice in Dickens how strong the impulse is to reject a logicality inherent in the story in favour of impressing on the reader an impatient sense of absolutism: of saying, in short, la fatalite, c'est moi. This disregard of plausibility is worth noticing, because everyone realizes that Dickens is a great genius of the absurd in his characterization, and it is possible that his plots are also absurd in the same sense, not from incompetence or bad taste, but from a genuinely creative instinct. If so, they are likely to be more relevant to the entire conception of the novel than is generally thought. I proceed to explore a little the sources of absurdity in Dickens, to see if that will lead us to a clearer idea of his total structure. The structure that Dickens uses for his novels is the New Comedy structure, which has come down to us from Plautus and Terence through Ben Jonson, an author we know Dickens admired, and Moliere. The main action is a collision of two societies which we may call for convenience the obstructing and the congenial society. The congenial society is usually centred on the love of hero and heroine, the obstructing society on the characters, often parental, who try to thwart this love. For most of the action the thwarting characters are in the ascendant, but towards the end a twist in the plot reverses the situation and the congenial society dominates the happy ending. A frequent form of plot reversal was the discovery that one of the central characters, usually the heroine, was of better social origin than previously thought. This theme of mysterious parentage is greatly expanded in the late Greek romances, which closely resemble some of the plots of Menander. Here an infant of noble birth may be stolen or exposed and brought up by humble foster parents, being re-

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stored to his original status at the end. In drama such a theme involves expounding a complicated antecedent action, and however skilfully done not all audiences have the patience to follow the unravelling, as Ben Jonson discovered to his cost at the opening of his New Inn. But in narrative forms, of course, it can have room to expand. Shakespeare gets away with it in The Winter's Tale by adopting a narrative-paced form of drama, where sixteen years are encompassed by the action. Dickens is, throughout his career, very conventional in his handling of the New Comedy plot structure. All the stock devices, listed in Greek times as laws, oaths, compacts, witnesses, and ordeals,3 can be found in him. Oliver Twist and Edwin Drood are full of oaths, vows, councils of war, and conspiracies, on both benevolent and sinister sides. Witnesses include eavesdroppers like the Newman Noggs of Nicholas Nickleby or Morfin the cello player in Dombey and Son. Ordeals are of various kinds: near-fatal illnesses are common, and we may compare the way that information is extracted from Rob the Grinder by Mrs. Brown in Dombey and Son with the maltreating of the tricky slave in Menander and Plautus. Many thrillers (perhaps a majority) use a stock episode of having the hero entrapped by the villain, who instead of killing him at once imparts an essential piece of information about the plot to him, after which the hero escapes, gaining his wisdom at the price of an ordeal of facing death. This type of episode occurs in Great Expectations in the encounter with Orlick. Every novel of Dickens is a comedy (N.B.: such words as "comedy" are not essence words but context words; hence this means: "for every novel of Dickens the obvious context is comedy"). The death of a central character does not make a story tragic, any more than a similar device does in The King and I or The Yeomen of the Guard. Sydney Carton is a man without a social function who achieves that function by sacrificing himself for the congenial society; Little Nell's death is so emotionally luxurious that it provides a kind of muted festivity for the conclusion, or what Finnegans Wake calls a "funferall."4 The emphasis at the end of a comedy is sometimes thrown, not on the forming of a new society around the marriage of hero and heroine, but on the maturing or enlightening of the hero, a process which may detach him from marriage or full participation in the congenial group. We find this type of conclusion in Shaw's Candida: Dickens's contribution to it is Great Expectations. Again, there is usually a mystery in Dickens's stories, and this mystery is nearly always

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the traditional mystery of birth, in sharp contrast to the mystery of death on which the modern whodunit is based. In Dickens, when a character is murdered, we usually see it done, and if not the suspense is still perfunctory. A detective appears in Bleak House to investigate the murder of Tulkinghorn, but his task is easy: Lady Dedlock keeps a French maid, and French maids, being foreign, are emotionally unpredictable and morally insensitive. The problem is much less interesting than the problem of Lady Dedlock's guilty secret, which involves a birth. Unless Edwin Drood was very unlike Dickens's other heroes, the mystery about him is much more likely to have been a mystery of how he got into the world than of how he disappeared from it. The emergence of the congenial society at the conclusion of the story is presented in the traditional New Comedy terms of festivity. It usually holds several marriages; it dispenses money if it has money, and it dispenses a good deal of food. Such features have remained unchanged in the New Comedy tradition since Greek times. Dickens's predilection for feasting scenes needs no labouring: it may be significant that his last written words are "falls to with an appetite."5 This feature accounts for his relentless plugging of Christmas, always for him the central symbol of the congenial family feast. The famous sentimentality of Dickens is largely confined to demonstrations of family affection, and is particularly evident in certain set scenes that immediately precede the denouement, where the affection of brother and sister, of father and daughter, or more rarely of mother and son, is the main theme. Examples are the housekeeping of Tom and Ruth Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit, the dinner of Kit and his mother in The Old Curiosity Shop, the meetings of Bella Wilfer with her father in Our Mutual Friend. Such relationships, though occasionally described as marriages, are "innocent" in the technical Victorian sense of not involving sexual intercourse, and if they seem to post-Freudian readers to be emotionally somewhat overcharged, it is because they contribute to, and anticipate, the final triumph of Eros at the end of the story. The disregard of plausibility, already mentioned, is another traditional feature, being part of the violent manipulation of the story in the direction of a happy ending. Those who object to such endings on the grounds of probability are often put in the position of questioning the ways of divine providence, which uses the author as its agent for vindicating virtue and baffling vice. Most of the people who move across the pages of Dickens are neither

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realistic portraits, like the characters of Trollope, nor "caricatures," so far as that term implies only a slightly different approach to realistic portraiture. They are humours, like the characters in Ben Jonson, who formulated the principle that humours were the appropriate characters for a New Comedy plot. The humour is a character identified with a characteristic, like the miser, the hypochondriac, the braggart, the parasite, or the pedant. He is obsessed by whatever it is that makes him a humour, and the sense of our superiority to an obsessed person, someone bound to an invariable ritual habit, is, according to Bergson, one of the chief sources of laughter.6 But it is not because he is incidentally funny that the humour is important in New Comedy: he is important because his obsession is the feature that creates the conditions of the action, and the opposition of the two societies. In The Silent Woman, everything depends on Morose's hatred of noise; covetousness and gullibility set everything going in Volpone and The Alchemist respectively. Thus it is only the obstructing society which is "humorous," in the Jonsonian sense, as a society. In Dickens we find humours on both sides of the social conflict, genial, generous, and lovable humours as well as absurd or sinister ones. But the humours in the congenial society merely diversify it with amiable and harmless eccentricities; the humours of the obstructing society help to build up that society, with all its false standards and values. Most of the standard types of humour are conspicuous in Dickens, and could be illustrated from Bleak House alone: the miser in Smallweed; the hypocrite in Chadband; the parasite in Skimpole and Turveydrop; the pedant in Mrs. Jellyby. The braggart soldier is not much favoured: Major Bagstock in Dombey and Son is more of a parasite. Agreeably to the conditions of Victorian life, the braggart soldier is replaced by a braggart merchant or politician. An example, treated in a thoroughly traditional manner, is Bounderby in Hard Times. Another Victorian commonplace of the braggart-soldier family, the duffer sportsman, whose pretensions are far beyond his performance, is represented by Winkle in The Pickwick Papers. There are, however, two Winkles in The Pickwick Papers, the duffer sportsman and the pleasant young man who breaks down family opposition on both sides to acquire a pleasant young woman. The duality reflects the curious and instructive way that The Pickwick Papers came into being. The original scheme proposed to Dickens was a comedy of humours in its most primitive and superficial form: a situation comedy in which various stock types, including an incautious amorist (Tupman),

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a melancholy poet (Snodgrass), and a pedant (Pickwick), as well as Winkle, get into one farcical predicament after another. This form is frequent in stories for children, and was represented in my childhood by now obsolete types of comic strip and silent movie comedies. It must have left some descendants in television, but my impression is that contemporary children are deficient in this vitamin. But although traces of the original scheme persist throughout The Pickwick Papers, it quickly turns inside out into a regular New Comedy story, which leads up in the regular way to a recognition scene and a reversal of direction in the plot at its most serious point, in the debtors' prison. The pedant becomes a man of principle, and the humour of pedantry is transferred to the law which entraps him. Thus the comedy of humours takes root in society, as Dickens sees society, instead of merely extending from one incident to another. The simplest form of humour is the tagged humour, who is associated with the repetition of a set phrase. Thus we have Mrs. Micawber, whose tag is that she will never desert Mr. Micawber, and Major Bagnet in Bleak House, who admires his wife but asserts that he never tells her so because "discipline must be maintained."7 We notice that our sense of superiority to such characters is edged with antagonism: when the repeated trait is intended to be endearing we are more likely to find it irritating, as E.M. Forster does Mrs. Micawber's.8 Jarndyce with his "east wind"9 tag and Esther Summerson's constant bewilderment that other people should find her charming do not stick in our minds in the way that Chadband and Mrs. Jellyby do. The humour is, almost by definition, a bore, and the technical skill in handling him consists in seeing that we get just enough but not too much of him. The more unpleasant he is, the easier this problem is to solve. Repetition which is excessive even by Dickensian standards, like the emphasis on Carker's teeth in Dombey and Son, is appropriate for a villain, as its effect is to dehumanize and cut off sympathy. We cannot feel much concern over the fate of a character who is presented to us mainly as a set of teeth, like Berenice in Poe [Berenice]. The "lifelikeness" of a humour depends on two things: on the fact that we are all very largely creatures of ritual habit, and on the strength of a perverse tendency in most of us to live up to our own caricatures. Pecksniff may be a humbug, but that can hardly be the whole of our feeling about him when he begins to sound like a member of my own profession attempting to extract a discussion from a group of clammedup freshmen:

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"The name of those fabulous animals (pagan, I regret to say) who used to sing in the water, has quite escaped me." Mr. George Chuzzlewit suggested "Swans." "No," said Mr. Pecksniff. "Not swans. Very like swans, too. Thank you." The nephew with the outline of a countenance, speaking for the first and last time on that occasion, propounded "Oysters." "No," said Mr. Pecksniff, with his own peculiar urbanity, "nor oysters. But by no means unlike oysters: a very excellent idea; thank you, my dear sir, very much. Wait! Sirens. Dear me! sirens, of course."10

Humours are, at least dramatically, "good" if they are on the side of the congenial society, "bad" or ridiculous if on the side of the obstructing one. Thus the humour comedy has an easy and natural connection with the morality play. We notice this in the allegorical names that Dickens often gives some of his minor characters, like the "Pyke" and "Pluck" who are the satellites of Sir Mulberry Hawk in Nicholas Nickleby, or the "Bar," "Bishop," and "Physician" who turn up at Merdle's dinners in Little Dorrit. We notice it also in Dickens's tendency to arrange his humours in moral pairs, whether both are in the same novel or not. As just indicated, we have a "good" major in Bleak House and a "bad" one with a very similar name in Dombey and Son; we have a villainous Jew in Oliver Twist and a saintly Jew in Our Mutual Friend, and so on. Within Dombey and Son itself the "bad" major is paired against a "good" navy man, Captain Cuttle. If characters change sides, there may be a metamorphosis of character, which is not difficult in the humour technique, because it simply means putting on a different mask. Thus the generous Boffin pretends to be a miser for a while; Scrooge goes through the reverse process; Mercy Pecksniff changes roles from the feather-head to the faithful ill-used wife, and so on. Many humours are really chorus characters, who cannot do anything in the plot unless they step out of their roles: an example is Lord Frederick Verisopht in Nicholas Nickleby, who has to harden up a good deal to make his tragic end appropriate. The commonest form of this metamorphosis, and the most traditional one, is the release of the humour from his obsession at the end of the story: through the experience gained in the story, he is able to break through his besetting fault. At the end of Martin Chuzzlewit there is a whole series of these changes: the hero escapes from his selfishness, Mark Tapley from his compulsion to search for difficult situations in order to "come out strong/'11 and Tom Pinch from an innocence that Dickens recognizes to

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be more obsessive than genuine innocence, and which we should now think of as a streak of masochism. The rhetoric of the tagged humour consists mainly of variations of the stock identifying phrase or phrases. Some humours acquire a personal rhetorical rhythm of a strongly associative kind, which because it is associative gives the effect of being obsessive. The disjointed phrases of Jingle and the asyntactic babble of Mrs. Nickleby and Flora Pinching are perhaps the most consistently successful examples. Closer to the single identifying phrase are Uriah Heep's insistence on his '"umble"12 qualities, which reminds us a little of lago's "honest" tag, and the repetitions that betray the hypocrisy of Casby, the squeezing landlord in Little Dorrit. Others develop parodies of standard types of oratory, like Chadband with his parsonical beggar's whine or Micawber with his Parliamentary flourishes. More significant, for a reason that will meet us in a moment, is the humour of stock response, that is, the humour whose obsession it is to insist that what he or she has been conditioned to think proper and acceptable is in fact reality. This attitude gives us the Bouvard-et-Pecuchet type of humour, whose mind is confined within a dictionary of accepted ideas.13 Such humours, it is obvious, readily expand into cultural allegories, representatives of the kind of anxiety that caricatures an age. Thus our stereotypes about "Victorian prudery" are represented by Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend and Mrs. General (the prunes-and-prisms woman) in Little Dorrit. Martin Chuzzlewit finds that America is full of such humours: American shysters are no better and no worse than their British counterparts, but there is a more theoretical element in their lying, and bluster about their enlightened political institutions is much more used as a cover for swindling. In America, in other words, the complacent Podsnap and the rascally Lammle are more likely to be associated in the same person. The implication, which Dickens is not slow to press, is that American life is more vulnerable than British life to character assassination, personal attacks, charges of being un-American, and mob violence. A humour of this stock-response type is comic on Freudian principles: he often says what more cautious people would not say, but show by their actions that they believe. Thus Bumble's remarks about "them wicious paupers"14 are funny, not as typical of a Victorian beadle, but as revealing the hatred and contempt for the poor that official charity attempts to disguise. Sometimes a humour's obsessed behaviour and repetitive speech sug-

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gest a puppet or mechanical doll, whose response is invariable whatever the stimulus. We may feel with some of these characters that the mechanical quality is simply the result of Dickens's not having worked hard enough on them, but occasionally we realize that Dickens himself is encouraging us to see them as inanimate objects. Wemmick the postbox in Great Expectations, Pancks the "tug" in Little Dorrit, and several characters who are figuratively and to some extent literally wooden, like Silas Wegg, are examples. The Captain Cuttle of Dombey and Son, in particular, impresses us as an animated version of the Wooden Midshipman over the shop he so often inhabits. In The Old Curiosity Shop, after we have been introduced to Quilp, Little Nell and her grandfather set out on their travels and see a Punch and Judy show. It occurs to us that Quilp, who is described as a grotesque puppet, who lies, cheats, beats his wife, gets into fistfights, drinks like a salamander, and comes to a sticky end in a bog, is Punch, brought to life as a character. Wyndham Lewis, in an essay on Joyce (another admirer of Ben Jonson), notes the Dickensian ancestry of Bloom's interior monologue in the speech of Jingle.15 He might have noted a similar connection between Flora Pinching's unpunctuated harangues in Little Dorrit and the reverie of Molly Bloom. Lewis in his turn developed, mainly out of Bergson, a theory of satire as a vision of human behaviour in mechanical terms/6 where his main predecessor, if not one he recognized, was Dickens. We notice also the reappearance of the Punch figure in the centre of The Human Age. We noted that, while there are humours on both sides of the social conflict in Dickens, it is only the obstructing society which is humorous as a society. This takes us back to the feature I mentioned at the beginning which distinguishes Dickens from his major contemporaries in fiction. In most of the best Victorian novels, apart from Dickens, the society described is organized by its institutions: the church, the government, the professions, the rural squirearchy, business, and the trade unions. It is a highly structured society, and the characters function from within those structures. But in Dickens we get a much more freewheeling and anarchistic social outlook. For him the structures of society, as structures, belong almost entirely to the absurd, obsessed, sinister aspect of it, the aspect that is overcome or evaded by the comic action. The comic action itself moves toward the regrouping of society around the only social unit that Dickens really regards as genuine, the family. In other Victorian novelists characters are regrouped within their social structures; in Dickens the comic action leads to a sense of having broken down

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or through those structures. Naturally there are limits to this: the same social functions have to continue; but the sense that social institutions have to reverse their relationship to human beings before society really becomes congenial is very strong. The law, for instance, as represented by the Chancery suit in Bleak House and the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, is a kind of social vampire, sucking out family secrets or draining off money through endless shifts and evasions. It is explicitly said in both novels that the legal establishment is not designed to be an instrument of society, but to be a self-perpetuating social parasite. Education, again, is usually presented in Dickens as a racket, a brutal and malignant racket with Squeers and Creakle, a force-feeding racket in the "fact" school of Hard Times and the Classical cram school of Dr. Blimber in Dombey and Son. Dickens's view of the liberalizing quality of the Victorian Classical training is perhaps symbolized in the grotesque scenes of Silas Wegg stumbling through Gibbon's Decline and Fall to the admiration of the illiterate Boffins: an unskillful performance which nobody understands. As for religion, even the respectable churches have little to do except marry the hero and heroine, and the spokesmen of the chapel, Chadband and Stiggins, are the same type of greasy lout as their ancestor in Ben Jonson, Zeal-of-theLand Busy. Politics, from the Eatanswill election in Pickwick to the Parliamentary career of Veneering in Our Mutual Friend, is a farce, only tolerable when an amusing one. Industry is equally repulsive whether its spokesman is Bounderby or the labour organizer Slackbridge. The amassing of a fortune in the City, by Dombey, Ralph Nickleby, or Merdle in Little Dorrit, is an extension of miserliness: it is closely associated with usury; the debtors' prison is clearly the inseparable other side of it, and it usually blows up a bubble of credit speculation with no secured assets, ending in an appalling financial crash and endless misery. Martin Chuzzlezuit carefully balances the swindling of American real-estate speculators with the precisely similar activities of Montague's Anglo-Bengalee Company in London. In several of the novels there are two obstructing societies, one a social establishment and the other a criminal anti-establishment. When this occurs there is little if anything morally to choose between them. We find the Artful Dodger no worse than the respectable Bumble in his beadle's uniform, and Pip discovers a human companionship with the hunted convict on the marshes that the Wopsles and Pumblechooks of his Christmas dinner exclude him from. It is perhaps in Little Dorrit that we get the most complete view of the

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obstructing society, a society which is shown to be a self-imprisoning society, locking itself in to the invariable responses of its own compulsions. At the beginning we are introduced to various types of prison: the Marseilles prison with Blandois, the quarantine prison with the discontented Tattycoram and her Lesbian familiar Miss Wade, the prisonhouse of the paralysed Mrs. Clennam, and finally the Marshalsea. As the story goes on these external prisons give place to internal ones. With the Circumlocution Office the prison image modulates to a maze or labyrinth, a very frequent sinister image in Dickens, and gradually a unified vision of the obstructing society takes shape. This society is symbolized by the Barnacles, who, as their name indicates, represent a social parasitism inherent in the aristocracy, and operating through the political and legal establishment. They are a family, but not a genuine family: their loyalties are class or tribal loyalties cutting across the real structure of society. One of their members, Mrs. Gowan, even goes so far as to speak of marriage as "accidental,"17 and stresses the primary necessity of defending the position of her class, or rather of her private myth about her class. The fact that her son becomes the husband of the only child of the Meagles family gives a most ambiguous twist to the happy ending of the novel. We may compare the disaster wrought by Steerforth in David Copperfield, whose mother is similarly obsessed with making her son into a symbol of class arrogance. We begin to understand how consistent the pitiful pretence of aristocracy that old Dorrit tries to maintain, first in the prison, then in prosperity, is with the general scheme of the story. Miss Wade's autobiography, headed "The History of a Self-Tormentor,"18 however arbitrarily introduced into the story, has a genuine symbolic relevance to it, and one of the most sharply observed passages in the novel is the moment of self-awareness when Fanny Dorrit realizes that her own selfishness is implacably driving her into an endless, pointless, pleasureless game of one-upmanship with Mrs. Merdle. Similarly in Great Expectations the "gentleman's" world which entraps Pip is symbolized by the decaying prison-house where all the clocks have been stopped at the moment of Miss Havisham's humiliation, the rest of her life consisting only of brooding on that moment. The obstructing society in Dickens has two main characteristics: it is parasitic and it is pedantic. It is parasitic in the sense of setting up false values and loyalties which destroy the freedom of all those who accept them, as well as tyrannizing over many of those who do not. Dickens's implicit social vision is also radical, to an extent he hardly realized

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himself, in dividing society between workers and idlers, and in seeing in much of the leisure class a social sanctioning of parasitism. As for its pedantry, it is traditional in New Comedy to set up a pragmatic standard, based on experience, as a norm, and contrast it with the theoretical approaches to life typical of humours who cannot escape from their reflex responses. Like Blake, like every writer with any genuine radicalism in him, Dickens finds the really dangerous social evils in those which have achieved some acceptance by being rationalized. Already in Oliver Twist the word "experience" stands as a contrast to the words "experimental" and "philosophical," which are invariably pejorative. This contrast comes into Bumble's famous "the law is a ass" speech.19 In Hard Times the pedantry of the obstructing society is associated with a utilitarian philosophy and an infantile trust in facts, statistics, and all impersonal and generalized forms of knowledge. We may wonder why Dickens denounces this philosophy so earnestly and caricatures it so crudely, instead of letting its absurdities speak for themselves. But it is clear that Hard Times, of all Dickens's stories, comes nearest to being what in our day is sometimes called the dystopia, the book which, like Brave New World or 1984, shows us the nightmare world that results from certain perverse tendencies inherent in society getting free play. The most effective dystopias are likely to be those in which the author isolates certain features in his society that most directly threaten his own social function as a writer. Dickens sees in the cult of facts and statistics a threat, not to the realistic novelist, and not only to a life based on concrete and personal relations, but to the unfettered imagination, the mind that can respond to fairy tales and fantasy and understand their relevance to reality. The insistence on the importance of fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and similar genres in education often meets us in Dickens, and implies that Dickens's fairy-tale plots are regarded by Dickens himself as an essential part of his novels. The action of a comedy moves toward an identity which is usually a social identity. In Dickens the family, or a group analogous to a family, is the key to social identity. Hence his recognition scenes are usually genealogical, concerned with discovering unknown fathers and mothers or articulating the correct family relationships. There are often three sets of parental figures attached to a central character, with several doubles of each. First are the actual parents. These are often dead before the story begins, like the fathers of Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield, or stagger on weakly for a few pages, like David Copperfield's mother, or

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are mysterious and emerge at the end, sometimes as bare names unrelated to the story, like Oliver Twist's father or the parents of Little Nell. The father of Sissy Jupe in Hard Times deserts her without ever appearing in the novel; the first things we see in Great Expectations are the tombstones of Pip's parents. Pip himself is brought up by a sister who is twenty years older and (as we learn on practically the last page of the book) has the same name as his mother. Next come the parental figures of the obstructing society, generally cruel or foolish, and often descended from the harsh step-parents of folk tale. Murdstone and his sister, Pip's sister, the pseudo-mothers of Esther Summerson and Clennam, belong to this group. One very frequent device which combines these two types of relationship is that of the preternaturally loving and hard-working daughter who is the sole support of a weak or foolish father. We have, among others, Little Dorrit, Little Nell, whose grandfather is a compulsive gambler, Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend with her drunken "child," Madeline Bray in Nicholas Nickleby, and, in a different way, Florence Dombey. Naturally the marriage of such a heroine, following on the death of the parent, transfers her to the more congenial society. Finally we have the parental or avuncular figures of the congenial society itself, those who take on a protective relation to the central characters as the story approaches its conclusion. Brownlow in Oliver Twist, who adopts the hero, Jarndyce in Bleak House, Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations, the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, the Boffins in Our Mutual Friend, are examples. Abel Magwitch, besides being the ultimate father of Pip, is also the actual father of Estella, which makes Estella in a sense Pip's sister: this was doubtless one reason why Dickens so resisted the conventional ending of marriage for these two. The more realistic developments of New Comedy tend to eliminate this genealogical apparatus. When one of the girls in Les Precieuses ridicules announces that being so interesting a girl she is quite sure that her real parents are much more interesting people than the ones she appears to have [sc. 5], we do not take her very seriously. But Dickens is always ready to cooperate with the lonely child's fantasies about lost congenial parents, and this marks his affinity with the romantic side of the tradition, the side related to Classical romance. I have used the word "anarchistic" in connection with Dickens's view of society, but it is clear that, so far as his comic structure leads to any sort of vision of a social ideal, that ideal would have to be an intensely paternalistic society, an expanded family. We get a somewhat naive

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glimpse of this with the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, giving a party where the faithful servitors are brought in at the end for a drink of champagne, expressing undying loyalty and enthusiasm for the patronizing social arrangements. The reader gets the uneasy feeling that he is listening to the commercial. When in Little Dorrit Tattycoram runs away from the suffocating geniality of the Meagles family she has to be brought back repentant, though she may well have had much more of the reader's sympathy than Dickens intended her to have. Even the Dedlock menage in Bleak House, hopeless social anachronism as Dickens clearly recognizes it to be, is still close enough to a family to gather a fair amount of the society of the novel around it at the end. In contrast, social parasites often assume the role of a false father. Examples include the Marquis in A Tale of Two Cities whose assassin is technically guilty of parricide, Sir Joseph Bowley, the Urizenic friend and father of the poor in The Chimes, and the elder Chester in Barnaby Rudge. In New Comedy the obstructing humours absorb most of the character interest: the heroes and heroines are seldom individualized. Such characters as Bonario in Volpone or Valere in Tartuffe are only pleasant young men. In Dickens, too, the heroes and heroines resemble humours only in the fact that their responses are predictable, but they are predictable in terms of a norm, and they seldom if ever appear in the ridiculous or selfbinding role of the humour. Such characters, who encourage the reader to identify with them, and who might be called norm-figures, could not exist in serious twentieth-century fiction, which belongs to the ironic mode, and sees all its characters as affected in some degree by hampering social forces. But they have some validity in nineteenth-century low mimetic conventions, which present only what is conventionally presentable, and whose heroes and heroines may therefore logically be models of presentability. Comedy usually depicts the triumph of the young over the old, but Dickens is unusual among comic writers in that so many of his heroes and heroines are children, or are described in ways that associate them with childhood. Nobody has- described more vividly than Dickens the reactions of a sensitive child in a Brobdingnagian world dominated by noisome and blundering adults. And because nearly all these children are predestined to belong to the congenial society, they can only be hurt, not corrupted, by the obstructing society. The one striking exception is Pip, whose detachment from the false standards of the obstructing group forms the main theme of Great Expectations. But David Copperfield is

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only superficially affected by his environment, and Oliver Twist escapes from the activities of the Fagin gang as miraculously as Marina does from the brothel in Shakespeare's Pericles. Usually this predestined childfigure is a girl. Many of the heroines, even when grown women, are described as "little" or are compared to fairies. A frequent central theme in Dickens is the theme of Alice in Wonderland: the descent of the invulnerable girl-child into a grotesque world. In the preface to The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens speaks of his interest in the beauty-and-beast archetype, of the girl-child surrounded by monsters, some of them amiable like Kit, others sinister like Quilp. Little Nell descends to this grotesque world and then rejoins the angels; the other heroines marry into the congenial society. The girl-child among grotesques recurs in Florence Dombey's protection by Captain Cuttle, in Little Dorrit's mothering of Maggie, and in many similar scenes. Sometimes an amiable grotesque, Toots or Kit or Smike or Chivery, will attach himself to such a girl-figure, not good enough to marry her but protesting eternal devotion nonetheless, a kind of late farcical vestige of the Courtly Love convention. Nobody turns up in The Old Curiosity Shop good enough to marry Little Nell, which is doubtless one reason why she dies. We may also notice the role of the old curiosity shop itself: it plays little part in the story, but is a kind of threshold symbol of the entrance into the grotesque world, like the rabbithole and mirror in the Alice books. Its counterparts appear in the Wooden Midshipman shop in Dombey and Son, the Peggotty cottage in David Copperfield, the bone-shop of Venus in Our Mutual Friend, and elsewhere. Many of the traditional features of romantic New Comedy reached their highest point of development in nineteenth-century Britain, making it the obvious time and place for a great genius in that form to emerge. One of these, already glanced at, is the domination of narrative genres, along with a moribund drama. Dickens had many dramatic interests, but his genius was for serial romance and not for the stage. Another is the Victorian assumption of moral standards shared between author and reader. This feature makes for melodrama, where the reader emotionally participates in the moral conflict of hero and villain, or of virtue and temptation. The rigidity, or assumed rigidity, of Victorian sexual mores is a great help to a nineteenth-century plot, as it enables an author, not only to make a Wagnerian noise about a woman's extramarital escapade, but to make the most frenzied activity on her part plausible as an effort to conceal the results of it. But the relation of melodrama to the foreground action is far more important than this.

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A realistic writer in the New Comedy tradition tends to work out his action on one plane: young and old, hero and humour, struggle for power within the same social group. The more romantic the writer, the more he tends to set over against his humorous world another kind of world, with which the romantic side of his story is associated. In a paper written twenty years ago, I spoke of the action of romantic Shakespearean comedy as divided between a foreground world of humours and a background "green world," associated with magic, sleep and dreams, and enchanted forests or houses, from which the comic resolution comes.20 Dickens has no green world, except for a glint or two here and there (e.g., the pastoral retreats in which Smike and Little Nell end their days, Jenny Wren's paradisal dreams, the "beanstalk" abode of Tartar in Edwin Drood, and the like), but he does have his own way of dividing his action. I have spoken of the nineteenth-century emphasis on the presentable, on the world of public appearance to which the nineteenth-century novelist is almost entirely confined. Behind this world lies a vast secret world, the world of privacy, where there is little or no communication. For Dickens this world is associated mainly with dreams, memories, and death. He describes it very eloquently at the opening of the third "Quarter" of The Chimes, and again in the first paragraph of the third chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, besides referring frequently to it throughout his work. Few can read Dickens without catching the infection of his intense curiosity about the life that lies in the dark houses behind the lights of his loved and hated London. We recognize it even at second hand: when Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood opens on a night of private dreams we can see an unmistakably Dickensian influence. For most of the ironic fiction of the twentieth century, this secret world is essentially the bedroom and bathroom world of ordinary privacy, as well as the world of sexual drives, perversions, repressions, and infantile fixations that not only complements the public world but conditions one's behaviour in it at every point. Characters in twentieth-century fiction have no privacy: there is no distinction between dressing-room and stage. Dickens is by no means unaware of the importance of this aspect of the hidden world, but it is of little use to him as a novelist, and he shows no restiveness about being obliged to exclude it. This is because he is not primarily an ironic writer, like Joyce or Flaubert. What he is really curious about is a hidden world of romantic interest, not a world even more squalid and commonplace than the visible one. His detective interest in hidden life is comparable to other aspects of Victorian culture: one thinks of the pre-Raphaelite paintings where we are challenged to guess what kind of story is being

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told by the picture and its enigmatic title, or of all the poems of Browning that appeal to us to deduce the reality hidden behind what is presented. In following the main action of a Dickens novel we are frequently aware of a second form of experience being held up to it like a mirror. Sometimes this is explicitly the world of the stage. The kind of entertainment afforded by the Vincent Crummies troop in Nicholas Nickleby parallels the uninhibited melodrama of the main story: the dance of the savage and the Infant Phenomenon, in particular, mirrors the Dickensian theme of the girl-child in the monster-world. In Hard Times, where the relation is one of contrast, a circus company symbolizes an approach to experience that Gradgrind has missed out on. The Punch and Judy show in The Old Curiosity Shop, one of several popular dramatic entertainments in that book, has been mentioned, and in Great Expectations Pip, haunted by the ghost of a father, goes to see Mr. Wopsle in Hamlet. Then again, Dickens makes considerable use of the curious convention in New Comedy of the doubled character, who is often literally a twin. In The Comedy of Errors the foreground Ephesus and the background Syracuse, in Twelfth Night the melancholy courts of Orsino and Olivia, are brought into alignment by twins. Similarly, the foreground action of Little Dorrit is related to the background action partly through the concealed twin brother of Flintwinch. In A Tale of Two Cities, where the twin theme is at its most complicated, the resemblance of Darnay and Carton brings the two cities themselves into alignment. In Dombey and Son the purse-proud world of Dombey and the other social world that it tries to ignore are aligned by the parallel, explicitly alluded to, between Edith Dombey and Alice Brown. There are many other forms of doubling, both of characters and of action, that I have no space here to examine. The role of Orlick in Great Expectations, as a kind of demonic double of Pip, is an example. The basis for such a dividing of the action might be generalized as follows. There is a hidden and private world of dream and death, out of which all the energy of human life comes. The primary manifestation of this world, in experience, is in acts of destructive violence and passion. It is the source of war, cruelty, arrogance, lust, and grinding the faces of the poor. It produces the haughty lady with her guilty secret, like Lady Dedlock or Edith Dombey or Mrs. Clennam, the lynching mobs that hunt Bill Sikes to death or proclaim the charity of the Protestant religion in Barnaby Rudge, the flogging schoolmasters and the hanging judges. It also produces the courage to fight against these things, and the instinctive virtue that repudiates them. In short, the hidden world expresses

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itself most directly in melodramatic action and rhetoric. It is not so much better or worse than the ordinary world of experience, as a world in which good and evil appear as much stronger and less disguised forces. We may protest that its moods are exaggerated, its actions unlikely, its rhetoric stilted and unconvincing. But if it were not there nothing else in Dickens would be there. We notice that the mainspring of melodramatic action is, like that of humorous action, mainly obsession. We notice, too, that Dickens's hair-raising descriptions, like that of Marseilles at the opening of Little Dorrit with its repetition of "stare,"21 are based on the same kind of associative rhetoric as the speech of the humours. From this point of view we can look at the foreground action of the humours in a new light. Humours are, so to speak, petrified by-products of the kind of energy that melodrama expresses more directly. Even the most contemptible humours, the miserly Fledgeby or the hypocritical Heep, are exuberantly miserly and hypocritical: their vices express an energy that possesses them because they cannot possess it. The world they operate in, so far as it is a peaceable and law-abiding world, is a world of very imperfectly suppressed violence. They never escape from the shadow of a power which is at once Eros and Thanatos, and are bound to a passion that is never satisfied by its rationalized objects, but is ultimately self-destructive. In the earlier novels the emotional focus of this self-destroying passion is usually a miser, or a person in some way obsessed with money, like Ralph Nickleby, Dombey, Little Nell's grandfather, or Jonas Chuzzlewit. The folk-tale association of money and excrement, which points to the psychological origin of miserliness, appears in the "Golden Dustman" theme of Our Mutual Friend, and is perhaps echoed in the names Murdstone and Merdle. In the later novels a more explicitly erotic drive gives us the victim-villain figures of Bradley Headstone and Jasper Drood. Food and animals are other images that Dickens often uses in sexual contexts, especially when a miser aspires to a heroine. Arthur Gride in Nicholas Nickleby speaks of Madeline Bray as a tasty morsel, and Uriah Heep is compared to a whole zoo of unpleasant animals: the effect is to give an Andromeda pattern to the heroine's situation, and suggest a demonic ferocity behind the domestic foreground. The same principle of construction causes the stock-response humours like Podsnap or Gradgrind to take on a peculiar importance. They represent the fact that an entire society can become mechanized like a humour, or fossilized into its institutions. This could happen to Victorian England, according to Hard Times, if it takes the gospel of facts

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and statistics too literally, and did happen to prerevolutionary France, as described in A Tale of Two Cities, dying of what Dickens calls "the leprosy of unreality,"22 and awaiting the melodramatic deluge of the Revolution. The obstructing humours cannot escape from the ritual habits that they have set up to deal with this disconcerting energy that has turned them into mechanical puppets. The heroes and heroines, however, along with some of the more amiable humours, have the power to plunge into the hidden world of dreams and death, and, though narrowly escaping death in the process, gain from it a renewed life and energy. Sometimes this plunge into the hidden world is symbolized by a distant voyage. The incredible Australia that makes a magistrate out of Wilkins Micawber also enables the hunted convict Magwitch to become an ambiguous but ultimately genuine fairy godfather. Walter Gay in Dombey and Son returns from the West Indies, remarkably silent, long after he has been given up for dead, and the reader follows Martin Chuzzlewit into a place, ironically called Eden, where he is confidently expected to die and nearly does die, but where he goes through a metamorphosis of character that fits him for the comic conclusion. Other characters, including Dick Swiveller, Pip, and Esther Summerson, go into a delirious illness with the same result. Our Mutual Friend has a complex pattern of resurrection imagery connected with dredging the Thames, reviving from drowning, finding treasure buried in dust heaps, and the like; a similar pattern of digging up the dead in A Tale of Two Cities extends from the stately Dr. Manette to the grotesque Jerry Cruncher. We notice, too, that the sinister society is often introduced in a kind of wavering light between sleep and waking: the appearance of the faces of Fagin and Monks at Oliver Twist's window and the alleged dreams of Affery Flintwinch in Little Dorrit are examples. The most uninhibited treatment of this plunge into the world of death and dreams occurs, as we should expect, in the Christmas Books, where Scrooge and Trotty Veck see in vision a tragic version of their own lives, and one which includes their own deaths, then wake up to renewed festivity. It seems clear that the hidden world, though most of its more direct expressions are destructive and terrible, contains within itself an irresistible power of renewing life. The hidden world is thus, once again in literature, the world of an invincible Eros, the power strong enough to force a happy ending on the story in defiance of all probability, pushing all the obstructing humours out of the way, or killing them if they will not get out of the way, getting the attractive young people disentangled from their brothers and sisters

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and headed for the right beds. It dissolves all hardening social institutions and reconstitutes society on its sexual basis of the family, the shadowy old fathers and mothers being replaced by new and livelier successors. When a sympathetic character dies, a strongly religious projection of this power often appears: the "Judgment" expected shortly by Miss Flite in Bleak House, for instance, stands in apocalyptic contrast to the Chancery Court. Dickens's Eros world is, above all, a designing and manipulating power. The obstructing humour can do only what his humour makes him do, and toward the end of the story he becomes the helpless pawn of a chess game in which black can never ultimately win. The victorious hidden world is not the world of nature in the Rousseauistic context of that word. The people who talk about this kind of nature in Dickens are such people as Mrs. Merdle in Little Dorrit, Mrs. Chick in Dombey and Son, and Wackford Squeers—not an encouraging lot. Like most romancers, Dickens gives a prominent place to the fool or "natural"—Smike, Mr. Dick, Barnaby Rudge—whose instincts make up for retarded intelligence. But such people are privileged: elsewhere nature and social education, or human experience, are always associated. To say that Dora Copperfield is an unspoiled child of nature is also to say that she is a spoiled child. Dickens's nature is a human nature which is the same kind of thing as the power that creates art, a designing and shaping power. This is also true of Shakespeare's green world, but Dickens's Eros world is not the conserving force that the green world is, which revitalizes a society without altering its structure. At the end of a Shakespeare comedy there is usually a figure of authority, like Prospero or the various dukes, who represents this social conservation. We have nothing in Dickens to correspond to such figures: the nearest to them are the empty Santa Claus masks of the Cheerybles, Boffin, and the reformed Scrooge. For all its domestic and sentimental Victorian setting, there is a revolutionary and subversive, almost a nihilistic, quality in Dickens's melodrama that is post-Romantic, has inherited the experience of the French Revolution, and looks forward to the world of Freud, Marx, and the existential thriller. I used the word "absurd" earlier about Dickens's melodramatic plots, suggesting that they were creatively and not incompetently absurd. In our day the word "absurd" usually refers to the absence of purpose of meaning in life and experience, the so-called metaphysical absurd. But for literary criticism the formulating of the theory of the absurd should not be left entirely to disillusioned theologians. In literature it is design,

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the forming and shaping power, that is absurd. Real life does not start or stop; it never ties up loose ends; it never manifests meaning or purpose except by blind accident; it is never comic or tragic, ironic or romantic, or anything else that has a shape. Whatever gives form and pattern to fiction, whatever technical skill keeps us turning the pages to get to the end, is absurd, and contradicts our sense of reality. The great Victorian realists subordinate their story-telling skill to their representational skill. Theirs is a dignified, leisurely vehicle that gives us time to look at the scenery. They have formed our stock responses to fiction, so that even when travelling at the much higher speed of drama, romance, or epic we still keep trying to focus our eyes on the incidental and transient. Most of us feel that there is something else in Dickens, something elemental, yet unconnected with either realistic clarity or philosophical profundity. What it is connected with is a kind of story that fully gratifies the hope expressed, according to Lewis Carroll, by the original of Alice, that "there will be nonsense in it."23 The silliest character in Nicholas Nickleby is the hero's mother, a romancer who keeps dreaming of impossible happy endings for her children. But the story itself follows her specifications and not those of the sensible people. The obstructing humours in Dickens are absurd because they have overdesigned their lives. But the kind of design that they parody is produced by another kind of energy, and one which insists, absurdly and yet irresistibly, that what is must never take final precedence over what ought to be.

26

The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 1982

From Studies in Romanticism, 21, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 303-18. Reprinted in MM, 322-39. Three typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 48, file 4, and NFF, 1991, box 39, file 3.

I

There is no one in English literature who raises more fascinating and complex questions connected with the relation of art to society than William Morris. Part of the complexity, of course, comes from his bewildering versatility. In the intervals of running a business, designing furniture and wallpaper patterns, studying medieval recipes for dyeing textiles, setting up a press for printing fine editions, and agitating both for socialism and for stopping the "restoring" of medieval buildings, he produced a great mass of poetry and fiction, enough in its sheer range and bulk to have made half a dozen quite respectable reputations. Many people would not consider him a major poet or story-teller or translator, but even they would have to admit that he was a major figure, in literature as in many other areas. The difficulties in understanding Morris are not in his writing as such but in his motives for writing what and as he did. His total work may be divided into five main divisions, which overlap a good deal but are still in a roughly chronological order. First, the early poetry, including The Defence of Guinevere, and the early stories, appearing mainly in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, where he attained an intensity and vividness of emotion not often equalled in his later work. Second, the period of verse romance, including Jason, the collection of tales in The Earthly Paradise,

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and the remarkable masque Love is Enough. Third, his epic and romance translations, which include the Volsunga Saga, the Aeneid, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and various Northern and Old French romances, an activity that spread over all his later life. Fourth, essays and lectures on socialism, more particularly on its relation to the place of the so-called "lesser arts" in society. Fifth, a period of long prose romance and fantasy: The Wood beyond the World, The Well at the World's End, The Story of the Glittering Plain, The Sundering Flood, and others. There is also a genre in this period which combines romance with his political vision: News from Nowhere, probably his best-known book, The Dream of John Ball, The King's Lesson, and the narrative poem Pilgrims of Hope. All this work has had a very mixed reception. In Mackail's biography of Morris there is, for all his imagination and sympathy, a tendency to dismiss the whole socialist side of Morris as a perversion of his talents, a typical example of a creative person becoming ensnared in the siren's toils of a political movement he never understood. For the final romances Mackail has a very limited admiration: one would have expected, for example, some mention of The Sundering Flood, if only because it was Morris's last work. Those of Morris's contemporaries who better understood and shared his political sympathies had even less use for the prose romances. Bernard Shaw spoke of them as the resuscitation of Don Quixote's library.1 A hasty reader of some criticism on Morris might easily get an impression of a dithering kook, too overcome by his own restless versatility to focus his mind properly in any one direction. With the hindsight of another century, we may perhaps still say that Morris's political sympathies were naive, but we can hardly say that they were peripheral, or showed any unawareness of where history was going in his time. History has vindicated his interest in Marxism, not by showing that any of it was right—certainly anything in it connected with predicting the future has turned out to be rather grotesquely wrong—but by showing that it was profoundly relevant to the concerns of England in the i88os. And yet, what of these dreamy romances, with their archaic language, hazy characterization, and meandering plots? Are they at least not a retreat from Morris's extroverted world of business and design and political activity into some kind of childhood fixation: the eight-year-old dressed in a toy suit of armour whom Mackail speaks of,2 and whom so many of Morris's critics invoke? Here again the cycles of history have qualified our certainties. Marxism was a minority movement in England in Morris's day, but it has expanded now to the point where Morris's interest in it shows a good

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deal of prescience. Similarly, the late romances fell stillborn from his press and were destined apparently to remain so indefinitely. But within the last quarter-century or so there has been a quite unexpected development in the area often (and very inaccurately) called "science fiction." Some of the best-selling works in this area are Frank Herbert's Dune trilogy, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy, Zelazny's Amber trilogy, Asimov's Foundation trilogy. The frequency of the trilogy form is doubtless due to the sensational success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and these works are routinely compared to Tolkien in the blurbs, although Eddison's trilogy of Memison books was in the field earlier than Tolkien. Morris wrote no romance that was formally a trilogy, but some of them are long enough to have been arranged in that form. In any case the genre itself seems clearly to have begun with Morris, apart from the fact that Morris was at least one significant influence on Tolkien. What is noticeable about the contemporary books is that they are romances that deliberately revert from science fiction hardware, however much of it they incidentally incorporate, back to hand-to-hand duelling with the equivalents of swords, back to plots and intrigues of a kind that would hardly be out of place in a Jacobean drama. The political situations are regularly drawn from models of the past: corrupt empires holding on to power but being threatened by revolts, younger sons of aristocratic families forging reputations for themselves through heroic achievements like destroying monsters. Bernard Shaw's comment is not far off the mark, either for Morris himself or for his successors. Works in this genre are historical romances in which both the history and the geography have been invented, and the settings are as arbitrary as those indicated in Morris's "world's end" titles. In this same so-called science fiction area are other romances that are retellings of traditional tales and myths, like the Mabinogion stories in Evangeline Walton, which remind us of Morris's other interest in collecting and retelling so many of the great stories of the past. Once again Morris has proved to be profoundly prescient, whatever our opinion of the books themselves. Many commentators on Morris assume that his preoccupation with romance and his socialist interests formed a schizophrenic contradiction in his mind. But when both have turned out to be so central in our own cultural environment we cannot help wondering about this assumption, even if we draw the inference that our world is schizophrenic too. Morris himself has left very few comments on his late romances, beyond a letter to a paper explaining that a review of his Wood beyond the World was mistaken in thinking that the story was an allegory of capital

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and labour.3 Doubtless it was, but before archetypal criticism many pseudo-issues clustered around the word "allegory," and the fact that an allegorical reading of a story may be forced and unconvincing does not mean that it has no external relations at all. Certainly the twentiethcentury romances mentioned above are not intended simply as "escape" reading, but have connections, however oblique, with other twentiethcentury preoccupations. Similarly there are political overtones in the struggle of a free state against a slave state in the early story Gertha's Lovers, and these recur in the late romance The Roots of the Mountains. Another early 'story, Svend and his Brethren, tells of the hero Svend, who leads an exodus out of a war-crazed community to more peaceful surroundings along with his six brothers, who represent the arts and crafts of a civilized society. A similar theme recurs in the very late Sundering Flood, where there is a battle in which the hero is supported by the apprentices of the "lesser crafts." Morris abandoned his one attempt at a novel with a contemporary setting, remarking that he would never try such a thing again "unless the world turns topsides under some day."4 Yet he also remarked of Swinburne's Tristram ofLyonesse that it was founded on literature, not on nature, which is not good enough in these days when "the issue between art, that is, the godlike part of man, and mere bestiality, is so momentous."5 The reflection that a poet ought not to turn to past literature for inspiration when culture is locked in a St. George-and-dragon social struggle is precisely the one that might be—and was—applied to Morris himself. We are forced to conclude that there was a quite clear connection in Morris's mind between romance and the state of society, and that that connection was the reverse of the usual one. As for the verse romances, we can understand their comparative eclipse if we approach them negatively and by contrast with another Victorian poet who is Morris's direct antithesis in almost every respect, Gerard Manley Hopkins. In one of his sketches for a unified critical theory, Hopkins says that the mind has two kinds of energy, a transitional kind, where one thought or sensation follows another, and an "abiding" kind, which he says may be called contemplation.6 There seems to me at least an analogy, and perhaps a real connection, between this distinction and several others that Hopkins makes. There is the distinction between "overthought," the superficial meaning conveyed by the syntax, and "underthought," the deeper meaning conveyed by the imagery and metaphors, which in some Shakespeare plays, for example, may be telling us

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something quite different from the syntactical sense. There is also the better-known distinction between "running" rhythm and the more syncopated "sprung" rhythm, with its greater variety of stresses and beats against the established metre.7 There is the distinction between the "Parnassian" level of writing which any genuine poet may achieve by habit and practice, and the totally unpredictable flashes that occasionally sweep across it.8 The general pattern is that of a middle level, and something else that may be called metaphorically either above and higher, or below and deeper. It is clear that Morris devoted himself to a "Parnassian" level of writing, as in The Earthly Paradise, where the writing is invariably competent but seldom startling or haunting. He also devotes himself to the "transitional" kind of mental energy that emphasizes movement and continuity. He is lost without some kind of story to tell, and is the least contemplative of poets: the level of meaning is fairly uniform, and the kind of romances read in 77 Penseroso, "Where more is meant than meets the ear" [1.120], are on the whole not his kind, even though we may find many phrases with a surprisingly complex resonance. Again, he sticks closely to the "running" forms of metre and rhyme and stanza that English imported from French and Italian sources, and (apart from his translation of Beowulf) he shows little interest in the native accentual and alliterative rhythms that Hopkins explored so powerfully. In terms of the value judgments that half a century ago were practically unquestioned, all this suggests that Morris is the worst example in English literature of what Eliot meant by the dissociation of sensibility. But even these value judgments are no more immortal than any others, and it may be significant that the greater part of critical theory today gives its main attention to narrative and "transitional" poetic techniques. Without trying to create a new set of value judgments, it might be rewarding to inquire into Morris's motives for his obviously deliberate choice of what seems, or has seemed, the more commonplace path. II

If we look at News from Nowhere, the most accessible of Morris's books, we can see at once how completely Morris has recreated the future of his country in his own personal image. Himself a tireless producer of so much practical and manual work, without a lazy bone in his body, he shows us an England where everyone, from earliest childhood on, is

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incessantly working, and where the most serious social problem is a shortage of things to do. The nineteenth-century visitor inquires about the system of educating children, and is told that there isn't any: children quickly pick up the skills of carpentering and cooking and thatching and shopkeeping. Asked about the cultivating of the mind, his informant says, "we don't encourage early bookishness,"9 but that children also pick up languages easily enough, and some of them even read books. Disregarding the deliberately polemical tone, we can see that what Morris is talking about is what he calls, in his lecture on "The Lesser Arts" (1877: the earliest of his important lectures on art and society), "the art of unconscious intelligence."10 He wants to build on such an art, in the future, a new art of conscious intelligence; but the practical education of young children in his Utopia is the foundation of an activity on which all Morris's social values depend. Morris was strongly influenced, as he says, by Carlyle and Ruskin, and was converted to socialism by reading Mill's hostile discussion of it. His reading of Marx and other socialists came much later. Naturally Morris had no use for the reactionary drift of Carlyle's thought or his hero cult, but one feature of that thought strongly attracted him. Carlyle generally talks about work in the abstract rather than the condition of the worker, and sometimes gives the impression that any sort of work is good for the moral fibre. But in Sartor Resartus he makes it fairly clear that drudgery, that is, servile, exploited, and alienated work, is not what he means by work. Drudgery in this sense is an aspect of a society of which the other aspect is "Dandyism," where some people do nothing at all, and where other people are consequently forced into excessive work in order to support them.11 Ruskin carried this principle much further in Morris's direction in Stones of Venice. Here, especially in the section called "The Nature of Gothic," he found that the ugliness of much of Victorian civilization was an aesthetic fact pointing to a moral principle. Mass production means machine production, which in Ruskin's day meant turning human beings into machines, and obliterating everything creative or pleasurable from their work. He gives as an example men who sit in a factory all day chopping glass rods into beads, "their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy."12 Such pseudo-work illustrates two interrelated social facts: that the process of mechanizing human labour is a form of penal servitude, and that its product is therefore bound to be both ugly and unnecessary. Ruskin, like Carlyle, did not follow up the

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revolutionary implications of this principle, but he comes close to supplying Morris with what Marxist literature hardly would have supplied him: a definition of work as creative act. Ruskin's documentation was aesthetic, drawing mainly from the history of architecture, painting, and sculpture; but he seldom made a purely disinterested aesthetic judgment, as he was so constantly aware of the social and moral principles involved. Morris took over Ruskin's method and reversed it. He began with purely aesthetic judgments about the hideousness of most Victorian industrial products, and in attempting to replace at least some of them with better designed work he saw increasingly the social, then the moral, and finally the political significance of what he was doing. This is perhaps one reason why, with all his devotion to medieval craftsmanship, he so seldom expressed any interest in, or even awareness of, the religious aspect of medieval culture, which is not on the direct line from aesthetic reaction to political conviction. His social interest in the Middle Ages focuses on John Ball and the Peasants' Revolt, the only time in English history, perhaps, when something like a proletariat appeared in the foreground of events. Morris regarded his "lesser" or "minor" arts, the arts of design, essentially as aspects of architecture: never a practising architect himself, he nevertheless felt that architecture was the context for them all. Architecture in its turn cannot be separated from its own larger social context in, say, town planning, and so, eventually, of social planning as a whole. It is this sense of social context that links Morris to such later developments as the Bauhaus movement in Germany, and at the same time separates him from what Mackail calls the multiplying of "amateur incompetency,"13 the handicraft art that produces individually designed objects in a social vacuum, or what may be called the ashtray syndrome. But by the time we have expanded the social context of the "minor arts" of design into social planning, we have also, perhaps, begun to develop a certain distrust for the word "planning," which seems to suggest a small group of know-it-alls imposing their views on the rest of society. Morris asks rather, "what signs are there of collective skill, the skill of the school, which nurses moderate talent and sets genius free?" It is this collective skill that the vision of News from Nowhere is based on. The inhabitants of that world are careful about preserving the monuments of the past, but are not superstitious about them. If they did have to destroy one it would not be an act of vandalism, because they would be capable of rebuilding with an equal sense of authority.

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The real context of social planning, then, is a society in which work has been defined as creative act, and thereby becomes the energy by which an intelligent being expresses his intelligence. Work in this sense cannot be separated from leisure, and can exist only in a society in which there is no longer a "leisure class" with another class of exploited workers supporting them, but in which the working class is the leisure class, and vice versa. Such a society would reconstitute the word "manufacture" by bringing it back to its original meaning of something made by a braindirected hand. The natural emotional response to producing anything attractive by one's own hands is pleasure, and what Morris emphasizes more than anything else is the continuous happiness of the people in his Utopia. If we say of News from Nowhere, "but this system would never work," we are expressing the kind of panic that Morris was attempting to counteract. A society is not a "system": human beings have no business trying to identify their community with a machine of any kind. And of course "it" would never work: it is only people who work. Morris often says that he is not opposed to machinery as such (though the inhabitants of his future England seem to get along with astonishingly little of it), but that the purpose of machinery is to absorb slavery. When exploitation and alienation are removed from people their natural energies are set free. The real question Morris is asking is rather, "I have given you a picture of a happy and healthy community: do you like the picture? If not, what's wrong with it, as a picture?" On that basis, objections to it would soon start taking the form of expressions of distrust in human freedom itself. Morris's examples of unconscious intelligence, in "The Lesser Arts," are the Palaeolithic artefacts that were beginning to be discovered in his day. Such an unconscious intelligence, as he clearly recognized, is very close to consciousness. Similarly, we admire, for example, Shaker furniture, but if the Shakers themselves had applied the kind of self-conscious aesthetic canons to their work that we do, they could probably not have produced it at all. It would be a surprising inference that the people who produced such work were less intelligent than the people who collect it: the Shaker craftsmen merely possessed a kind of intelligence that did not get in the way of their "unconscious" skill. Morris's poetry, in particular, is similarly an attempt to let an acquired skill flow through the consciousness without being disturbed by that consciousness. Morris says that anyone should be able to compose poetry while his mind is partly on

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something else, such as weaving or dyeing. It is clear that there is an analogy in his mind between the kind of hierarchy that separates the "major" from the "minor" arts and the social hierarchy that puts a leisure, or do-nothing, class on top of an exploited working class. His determination to treat poetry as though it were a "minor" or "useful" art has a political reference: he wants to see the major arts democratized, made the possession of everyone like the arts of design. Though usually classed as a late Romantic, Morris has nothing of the Romantic elitism that regards the creative person or "genius" as a special form of humanity, almost a biological mutation of it. There are several reasons why Morris thinks that the art of design could become the focus of revolutionary social developments. For one thing, people are often willing to put up with badly designed furniture, textiles, and ceramics because they are "merely material" things that ought not to take up the time and energy we devote to the "higher" aspects of life. This phony idealism is an exact counterpart of a class structure in which the ascendant class withdraws from work. On the contrary, being dissatisfied with our "merely material" surroundings soon leads to a vivid perception, not merely of the shoddiness and ugliness of the designs presented to us, but of the social conditions that find shoddiness and ugliness cheaper to produce and easier to sell. If we find the attack on the cultivating of the mind in News from Nowhere rather hard to take, it is worth remembering that society enforces compulsory education of the young because it wants docile and obedient citizens. One must read to obey the traffic signals; one must learn arithmetic to make out one's income tax. If we assume that the mind is naturally active, education becomes that activity of the mind and not an externally imposed and alien structure standing for what some anonymous authority wants us to do. Ill

Morris's original associates in his socialist activities were Anarchists, and the journal Commonweal, which he edited, was an Anarchist publication. After he left that position and broke with most of the group, he remarked in a letter that his experience had taught him that "Anarchism is impossible."14 That sounds like a shift to a more orthodox Marxist position: it has even been suggested that he may have been in closer touch with Engels, who had inherited Marx's manuscripts, than is generally thought. But

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Morris was all his life a pure anarchist, with a lowercase "a." His News from Nowhere was written partly as a protest against Bellamy's socialist Utopia Looking Backward, a vision of Boston in the year 2000 where everyone is drafted to serve in an "industrial army," and where recreation consists largely of listening to government propaganda over the "telephone," or what we now call the radio.15 Communist movements since Morris's time have followed Bellamy and not Morris, and have also followed the course that Morris most hated: economic centralization, concentrating on mass production and distribution, setting up a rigid chain of command throughout the whole of society. Even the curious Janus-faced attitude to violence that gives anarchism both a terrorist side and a peaceful side recurs in Morris: he says he has a religious hatred of war and violence, yet News from Nowhere predicts the rise of the counterideology of fascism much more clearly than most socialist writing of his day did. What the later Morris was, perhaps, was that very rare bird, a Marxist uncorrupted by Leninism. Marx thought of Communism as a natural evolution out of capitalism: when capitalism had reached a certain stage of deadlock through its inherent contradictions, a guided revolutionary movement could shift the control of production from a few exploiters to the workers. This evolutionary development did not occur: Communism was established in an essentially pre-industrial country, and became simply the adversary of capitalism, not its successor. What attracted Morris to Marx were such things as the comments on the impoverishing of the rural by the urban parts of society in the Manifesto, the vision of capitalism as a dehumanizing relationship, in contrast to earlier social connections which, though still based on exploitation, were at least personal ones, and, above all, the anarchist ultimate goal that Marx envisioned, when all states have withered away and imposed controls are no longer needed. And so, the informant of the narrator in News from Nowhere says, "we discourage centralisation all we can."16 Not only has the British empire vanished in Morris's ideal world, but England itself has broken down into small local units and local councils. The House of Parliament has been turned from a verbal dungheap into a literal one, and in its place has come a decentralizing of control that the most extreme Jeffersonian might consider chimerical. It was later than his remark about the impossibility of Anarchism that Morris said, "it will be necessary for the unit of administration to be small enough for every citizen to feel himself re-

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sponsible for its details."17 He also says that the goal of state socialism is one that sickens him. When he goes on to say that "variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition/'18 we realize that Morris is talking about something quite different from what left-wing movements of his time—and since—have been primarily concerned with. That concern has been, of course, with political control and economic development, both of which are normally centralizing movements. Most of the effective social entities today are the huge continental powers which, whether capitalist or socialist in organization, keep expanding from that basis through various forms of political and economic imperialism. Morris is interested in cultural development, and cultural tendencies seem to go in the reverse direction. The more mature a culture is, the more it tends to circumscribe itself in smaller units. If we wish to study "American literature," for example, and discover what the creative literary imagination tells us about America, we find that "American literature" is mainly an aggregate of Mississippi authors, New England authors, middle-Western authors, California authors, expatriate authors, and so on over the whole area. Canadian literature has followed the same tendency more recently, and even the much smaller area of Great Britain shows us a Hardy confined to "Wessex," a Lawrence from the Midland region, a Dylan Thomas from south Wales, and the like. When the reading population of Great Britain was so much smaller, before Wordsworth's time, English literature was essentially a London literature, but with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the great Midland cities the picture quickly changed. We have Shelley remarking, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, that a great cultural advance would result from breaking England up into many smaller units like those of Renaissance Italy.19 It was abundantly clear in Morris's day that cultural developments had to be distinguished from political and economic ones if the total social picture were to be a healthy one. To attach culture to the centralizing movements of politics and economics produces a cultural totalitarianism, an empty, pompous, officially certified pseudo-art. To attach a political or economic movement to a decentralizing cultural one produces a kind of neo-fascist separatism. Nothing could be more remote from anything Morris wanted than totalitarianism or fascism, and it is understandable that so many political and economic questions are simply waved away in News from Nowhere. The book in fact often reads as though it were being deliberately confined to the cultural aspect of social vision.

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To the laissez-faire capitalism that emphasized liberty to the point of forgetting about equality, and the state socialism that emphasized equality to the point of forgetting about liberty, Morris opposed the third and very neglected revolutionary element of fraternity. If Matthew Arnold is right, liberty is the specifically middle-class contribution to the classless society of genuine culture that Arnold envisaged, and equality the specifically working-class one. It should follow that it is the aristocracy that dramatizes for society as a whole the conception of fraternity, and perhaps this is one reason why there are so many stories about heroic warriors linked in some kind of chivalric brotherhood in Morris's romances. The curiously childlike quality of the people in News from Nowhere, who sometimes seem to be living in a gigantic kindergarten, is not inconsistent with this, because the genuine aristocracy or privileged class of every society are the children. But in Victorian times the aristocracy is too unfunctional to be invoked. With his usual insouciance in such matters, Morris dismisses the whole "class-conscious" compulsiveness of revolution with the remark, "what we of the middle classes have to do, if we can, is to show by our lives what is the proper type of a useful citizen, the type into which all classes should melt at last."20 Not many leftwingers in Morris's day would have foreseen that the bourgeoisie would eventually become the standard of maturity for Communist societies. Even fraternity, of course, can become socially oppressive, and in the background of News from Nowhere there looms the spectre of interminable picnics and similar forms of extroverted cheer, in a society where the more contemplative aspects of leisure are so disregarded. As in so many Utopias, the inhabitants are so preoccupied with reciting the litany of benefits that their system gives them as to have, quite simply, no time to think. Towards the end of the story, however, Morris shows his awareness of this, and shows too that this society of young people who have torn themselves loose from the fetters of history have still to face the question of historical continuity. The heroine remarks to the narrator that she wonders whether they are really right in paying so little attention to their past history: an old fallacy might seem to the uninstructed a glittering novelty. She goes on to say that while she would not force anything on her children, she would hope to impress on them an essential part of herself, "that part which was not mere moods, created by the matters and events round about me."21 One gets a strong impression that the next generation of this exuberant society might see the children back in school.

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IV

The negative side of Morris's attitude appears in occasional melancholy remarks to the effect that perhaps in the immediate revolutionary future the arts may have to go underground or disappear for a time. The question raised here by implication is a very searching one, and I know of no statement by Morris indicating that he fully understood it himself, but some attempt to understand it seems essential to understanding Morris. We said that culture seems to develop spatially in the opposite direction from political and economic movements. The latter centralize and the former decentralize. The process is obscured by two factors: one is the constant itch by expanding empires to kidnap their cultures and force them into a kind of advertising for themselves. The other is the fact that cultural products have to be marketed, and to that extent follow the rhythms of economics. The curiously anomalous economic position of Morris himself, whose patrons certainly did not come from a quarter of society sympathetic to his social views, is too obvious to need more than a mention. But apart from the complications of the spatial contrast between culture and economy, is there a corresponding contrast in their movement in time? It is clear that political and economic movements follow the ordinary rhythm of clock time, moving toward the future and away from the past. When a country has gone through a revolutionary experience, many aspects of its past are neglected or suppressed. The arts it formerly produced are often regarded as the debris of exploitation. And yet tourists and visitors to the country may keep asking to see these arts, not out of reactionary fervour, but simply because any cultural product that is genuine in its own terms retains a quality of social innocence, whatever the conditions pervading its original environment. On the other hand, even without a revolutionary experience, there is a cycle of taste that keeps burying the cultural products of the past, especially the more recent past. It is normal for the culture of every age to look grotesquely out of date and old-fashioned to its immediate successor: as time goes on, the old-hat gradually turns into the "quaint," and eventually the quaint acquires the dignity of the "primitive," and comes back into fashion. Thus at the end of the Middle Ages the two movements of Renaissance and Reformation, in very different ways, reacted against medieval culture in favour of cultural developments much earlier in time: the Augustan

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age and the age of primitive Christianity. The Renaissance movement in particular consolidated a view of history that is perhaps at its clearest in Gibbon. The Augustan age was the highest cultural pinnacle of European civilization, and was the golden age of Latin. It was succeeded by the silver age of Nero, and then, as monkishness and barbarism increased, it reached a nadir during the "dark" ages until the Renaissance rediscovered the essential facts about human civilization. Gibbon presents us with a typically humanist vision of history, a U-shaped movement going through the decline and fall of Rome and the subsequent rise of rational values to his own time. Obviously a good deal of confidence about his own time was incorporated into this view. The nineteenth century produced many people who did not like most of its culture, and Gibbon's view of history is exactly reversed by Ruskin, who in Stones of Venice plotted a chart of history that rises from the "servile" art of the pre-Gothic to its culmination in the decorated phase of Gothic, then declines into overelaboration until we reach the Renaissance, which Ruskin explicitly calls a "fall."22 After that everything gets worse until Ruskin's own time, when the painting of Turner and the preRaphaelites suggest some upturn. Ruskin provides an almost mathematical proof of the superiority of the middle phase of Gothic architecture to every other form of human building. This thesis was taken up by various Catholic apologists, such as Belloc and Chesterton, who applied it to other aspects of medieval life. Morris, however, like Ezra Pound later, was a disciple of Ruskin who adopted the view that medieval culture preserved an integrity steadily corrupted later by what Pound calls "usura"23 and sloppy workmanship produced by illegitimate social demands, but ignored the religious dimension of the argument. What we notice about all these conflicting phases of taste is that in cultural movements there seems to be a strong tendency to move backwards in time, to seek out a congenial period in the past, very frequently the distant past. Thus while political and economic movements go forward into the future, which in the twentieth century means carrying an increasing amount of technological baggage with them, cultural movements tend to rediscover neglected or forgotten earlier times in our tradition. The admiration for medieval culture which Morris shares with many others of his time and later seems to have some unconscious connection with the view of Western civilization developed by Vico in the eighteenth century and expanded by Spengler in the twentieth. For Spengler,

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history takes the form of a series of "cultures" which behave like organisms, starting in a "spring" of heroic aristocracy, organized priesthood, and a peasantry bound to the land. Thence it develops towards a "summer" of city-states like those of the Renaissance, then an "autumn" when, as in the eighteenth century, the potentialities of the culture are exhausted, then a "winter" of annihilation wars, dictatorships, technology in place of the creative arts, and rootless masses of people crowding into huge and bloated cities. This has been the shape of Western culture: it was preceded by a Classical one which had its spring in the time of Homer, its summer and autumn in the city-states of Greece, and its winter with Macedonian and Roman imperialism. Morris betrays no awareness of any such view of history, but News from Nowhere does present a somewhat childlike society with a strong temperamental affinity for the medieval, as though a future and a past childhood spoke to each other. There is an implied contrast with, say, the senile second childhood of the complex gadgetry of the 1851 Exhibition. In such romances as The House of the Wolfings, again, there seems to be something of a contrast in Morris's mind between a young and healthy, if barbaric, civilization, and an older and crueller one in his account of the struggle between a northern tribe and the Romans. In our day every society must go through some kind of revolutionary upheaval because of the technological changes taking place over the world. The revolutions do not all have to be Marxist or anarchist, and even if they were there would still be many different varieties of them; but the revolutionary element is built into contemporary society everywhere. A technological revolution makes the world more uniform: one cannot take off in a jet plane and expect a radically different way of life in the place where the plane lands. The uniformity in its turn is enforced by the new class that comes to power with the social change, because they invariably discover that their own prerogatives are bound up with resistance to any further change. What was defined by Julien Benda, much later than Morris, as the trahison des clercs may be seen from this point of view as the nervous itch on the part of intellectuals to try to help turn the wheel of history into the future, to prove to themselves and others that they are of some historical use after all. But when the wheel of history turns it is precisely they who seem most expendable. This process is dramatized, for example, in Plato, who concentrates on the figure of Socrates, martyred for being a gadfly in the Athens of his time. But then, being after all a revolutionary thinker,

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Plato goes on to the Laws, which preaches the absolute control by society of its teachers, a vision of society where Socrates does not appear and where he certainly could not function. It is dramatized too in the development of early Christianity, when the generation of martyrs is succeeded by a generation of persecutors. It is dramatized also, in different ways, in the careers of Milton, of Victor Hugo, of Gorky, and countless others. It looks as though it were the distinctive social function of the creative mind to move in the opposite direction from the politico-economic one. This means that he may have to face the charge of being a reactionary, but cultural developments in time, as in space, seem to go in opposition to the political and economic currents. The creative tendency is toward the prerevolutionary, back to a time when, so to speak, Socrates and Jesus are still alive, when ideas are still disturbing and unpredictable and when society is less vainglorious about the solidity of its structure and the permanence of its historical situation. Morris's "medievalism" has precisely this quality about it of moving backward from the present to a vantage point at which the real future can be more clearly seen. I have noticed from my study of the Bible how these backward-moving pastoral myths seem to be the other side of a genuinely prophetic vision, looking beyond the captivities of Egypt and Babylon to a recovery of long lost innocence. The fact that innocence may not have been lost but simply never possessed does not impair the validity of the vision, in fact it strengthens it. Thus what seems the self-pitying nostalgia of the "Apology" to The Earthly Paradise, where "the idle singer of an empty day" calls himself a "dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,"24 can also be read in another light. Perhaps the singer is idle only because the day is empty. The reference cannot be a self-identifying one, "idle" being the last epithet that anyone, even Morris himself, could apply to the author of The Earthly Paradise. It is rather an expression of something in nineteenthcentury culture that has become helpless and powerless, something now crooked which perhaps only a dreamer of dreams can set straight. Yeats, with his usual readiness to take off in helicopters that Morris is not sure have been invented yet, remarks in his essay in The Celtic Twilight called "Enchanted Woods": They {the fairies of the Irish countryside} live out their passionate lives not far off, as I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep

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our natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among blue hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but Foreshadowings mingled with the images Of man's misdeeds in greater days than these, as the old men thought in The Earthly Paradise when they were in good spirits?25

The quotation is from the epilogue to the story of Acrisius, the Classical tale told for the month of April.26 Morris does not think in categories like living after death in fairyland, and the total scheme set up in The Earthly Paradise, though a deeply haunting one, has a different reference. The "Wanderers" of the Prologue are old men, half from the Mediterranean and the other half from the North, who after their wanderings, in the course of which they have been welcomed as kings and worshipped as gods, have met together on a lonely island to interchange their traditional stories. Nothing happens except that they tell them. Yet these impotent old men are clearly being identified with the stories they tell; and the stories themselves, it seems to me, are conceived as latent powers, imaginative projections of life that humanity at present can see no use for, and yet are the sources of all the styles of living, past, present, and future, that it has set up. They are myths that form a mythology, and a mythology is the world man builds as distinct from the world that surrounds him, so far as the former world can be presented in words. In his curious mania, as it sometimes seems, for telling and translating all the world's great stories he can get his hands on, Morris seems to be collecting the swords and spears of traditional heroism, of chivalry and romance and warfare and magic and mystery, so that they can be beaten into the plowshares and pruning-hooks of a new world where man has made his peace with himself and with nature.

27

The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifal 27 October 1982

Address to the Toronto Wagner Society. From Carleton Germanic Papers, 12 (1984): 37-49. Reprinted in MM, 340-55. Clean typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 48, files i and 4, and NFF, 1991, box 39, file 5. In NFF, 1988, box 50, file 3, is Frye's offprint, containing two substantive corrections here adopted. The events and characters of the opera referred to in Frye's piece are as follows. Titurel had founded a castle to guard the sacred Grail and lance. His son Amfortas, present king of the Grail knights, lost the sacred spear to the evil magician Klingsor when seduced by Kundry, who as a result of laughing at Christ's crucifixion is condemned to a double life as seductress and penitent. Amfortas now languishes with a wound that can be cured only by a "blameless fool made wise by pity." In act i Parsifal, a child of nature, arrives at the castle and witnesses Amfortas's pain as he celebrates the Eucharist. He is questioned to little avail by the steward Gurnemanz, who finds foolishness but little pity. Act 2 takes place at Klingsor's castle. Parsifal arrives, fails to be tempted by the flower maidens, and in resisting Kundry's attempts to seduce him understands Amfortas's anguish. Catching the Grail spear that Klingsor throws to destroy him, he brings Klingsor's realm crashing down. In act 3, after many wanderings, Parsifal returns to the now demoralized Grail castle with a new maturity and on Good Friday becomes its king. He baptizes Kundry and heals Amfortas by touching his wound with the Spear, and the community unites.

On the subject of Wagner I have to speak as a pure outsider. I am interested in Wagner as a creative figure with an immense cultural influence, but I have never been to Bayreuth: I have seen very few Wagner operas, and the whole spectacular side of Wagner, the spears that freeze over the heads of the virtuous, the swans and doves and

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dragons and other ambulatory fauna, has always been of minor interest to me. In fact I have reservations about the genre itself. I once saw a work of Monteverdi in which the singers performed offstage while the action on the stage—an episode from Tasso—was mimed, and I have never quite lost the feeling that that was the direction in which opera should have developed. Considering the time and place of my youth, it was inevitable that there should be a long interval between my first music lessons and my first opera (which was Lohengrin). Hence my early musical experiences crystallized around the great keyboard composers, who produced the music I feel I really possess. Then I went through a period, during the Second World War, when I loathed Wagner's music to the point of physical nausea. That meant, of course, that I was accepting the Nazi identification with Wagner, and such paranoid elements in Wagner's character as his anti-Semitism seemed to me at that time very central. So I can understand even Nietzsche's hysteria on the subject of Wagner in general and of Parsifal in particular,1 although the source of my own hysteria was anti-Nazi and not anti-Christian. I learned from this negative experience not to trust value judgments too much, even when they come from the pit of the stomach, which is where the sixteenth-century alchemist van Helmont located the soul. Nevertheless it is sometimes an advantage to have come to such a controversial figure as Wagner the hard way, so that the stock prejudices against him have already been made conscious. One of the most extraordinary features of Wagner's mind, which is familiar but still needs emphasizing, is the way in which all his mythological themes seemed to be present to him at once, aspects of a single colossal vision that he turned to one at a time. If the operas were all alike this would not be remarkable: it is their individuality that makes it so. We remember that Lohengrin was Parsifal's son, that the central and obvious source for the Parsifal story was the Parzival of the medieval poet Wolfram von Eschenbach,2 who appears in his own right as a character in Tannhauser, and that Wagner had originally thought of introducing Parsifal as a minor character into the later part of Tristan. So we are not surprised to find that he had been reading Wolfram and pondering an opera on his hero quite early in his career, around 1845. But by the time he was able to give his full time and energy to the subject he was aware that it would probably be his last opera, and in a letter to King Ludwig, after making his regulation plea that this time he must have

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complete freedom, he adds that, like William Tell, if his arrow fails he has no other to send after it.3 A touch of genuine pathos here is given by the fact that "Parsifal" was Wagner's private name for King Ludwig, and that Wagner was dead within a few months of Parsifal's first performance. The story of Parsifal comes from one of the Grail romances. There are so many Grail romances, and they interlock in such curious ways, that one feels at first that there must have been some archetypal poem which contained all the essential Grail themes, of which the poet we happen to be reading has picked up only bits and pieces. But we soon realize that criticism needs another conception when dealing with legends like this, something closer to "total tradition" than to "lost first poem." A great myth like that of the Grail means everything essential that it has ever been made to mean in the history of its development, and the complete story is the one that emerges gradually in the course of time, which in English literature takes us down through Malory to Tennyson, Swinburne, Charles Williams, and many others still to come. Wagner will always be slightly peripheral to the total Grail story, I think, because in Parsifal, as in Tristan, he obliterates the Arthurian context of the cycle. To adapt a phrase of Vinaver about Malory, he has no Camelot to balance his Corbenic (Malory's name for the Grail castle), and so we have no contrasting base of social operations and no roots in a specific body of legend. The Ring is solidly entrenched in the Siegfried story, but a Grail story without an Arthurian court is as disembodied as an Odyssey without Ithaca. A work of art derives its identity from its context within the art, including the context of its tradition, and anything that has to be called a Buhneniveihfestspiel clearly has problems with identity.4 I am not speaking of anything that Wagner should have done and did not do: I am trying to indicate the context of what he did. Parsifal belongs to a genre of drama that I have elsewhere called the auto (taking the word from Calderon):5 a musical and spectacular drama that is neither tragic nor comic, but presents an audience with a central myth in its cultural tradition, like the Biblical plays of the Middle Ages. The latter were associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi, and the symbol of communion so prominent in Parsifal is appropriate to its tradition. For most of us the Holy Grail is a part of a Christian legend. It was, according to tradition, the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, when he identified the wine in it with his own blood. It was later used to catch the actual blood and water that flowed from his side when it was pierced, on

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the cross, with a lance of a Roman soldier, traditionally named Longinus. Bleeding lance, or spear, and chalice of divine blood thus form together an unauthorized but very haunting pair of Christian symbols. When Wagner read Wolfram, he was, according to his letters to Mathilde Wesendonk, disappointed in him,6 and seems to have got more, at least at first, from Wolfram's main source Chretien de Troyes and from the poets who continued Chretien's unfinished story.7 One reason, it seems clear, was that Wolfram has no notion of a Christian context for his imagery. Wolfram's Parzival comes to the castle of the Grail, and sees borne in procession there a number of mysterious objects. They include a bleeding lance, but it is not said to be the lance of Longinus; they include a Grail, but the Grail in Wolfram is not a chalice: it is apparently a stone, though a stone with miraculous healing powers, able to raise the phoenix from its ashes. The manuscripts, which clearly reflect confusion in the minds of their scribes, usually call it lapsit exillis. If lapsit is a scribal error for lapis, then it could be lapis exilis, slender stone, whatever that means, or lapis elixir, the philosopher's stone of alchemy, or lapis exilii or exsulis, stone of exile, which suggests a meteorite fallen from the sky. The conception of the Grail as the chalice of the passion of Christ is associated with another cycle of stories connected with Joseph of Arimathea, who is said to have brought the Grail to Glastonbury in England. As we push further into the stories, there seem to be hints of Celtic and pre-Christian sources, where lance and grail were sexual and fertility symbols, emblematical of love and war, as Yeats would say. Sometimes the Grail is not a cup but a flat dish, a platter or salver, which seems to be the original meaning of the word "grail." Sometimes a sword replaces the spear or lance, and in the Welsh version of the Percival story, Peredur, there is a procession bearing a bleeding lance and a severed head. As lance and grail became more fixed in the Christian legend, the alternative images, the sword, the dish, the severed head, began to cluster around the passion of John the Baptist, whose birth is traditionally at the summer solstice, at the opposite end of the calendar from the birth of Christ. The John the Baptist parallels, whatever their actual importance, were emphasized by the Grail scholar Karl Simrock, who was one of Wagner's sources. Nineteenth-century poets tended to be more interested in the John the Baptist passion than in that of Christ, because the women connected with it, traditionally named Salome and Herodias, could be so easily assimilated to their cherished theme of the femme fatale. We notice that "Herodias" is one of the names that Klinesor

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applies to Kundry. Herodias also appears in nineteenth-century fiction as the name of a female counterpart of the Wandering Jew: this is clearly one of the roles associated with Kundry, who says that she laughed at the passion of Christ, and has been looking for the release of death ever since. Other commentators have connected the four main images of the two legends, lance, chalice, sword, dish, with the four suits of the Tarot pack of cards, but Wagner does not follow them, though a number of other writers did so, notably Yeats. In any case the Christian associations of the imagery seem to go back to fertility images, cauldrons of plenty and the like, which are older than Christianity. We may compare the growth of the story best known to us as that of St. George and the dragon, which also evolved from a preChristian into a Christian legend. Here a young knight comes over the sea to a waste land ruled by an aged and impotent king, whose land is laid waste by a dragon. He kills the dragon, rescues and marries the king's daughter (who has just been chosen by lot to be fed to the dragon), and becomes the new king. The overtones of a nature myth where winter, sterility, age, and death give place to their opposites is clear enough. But the same story becomes absorbed into Christian symbolism, where Christ, the new or second Adam, kills the dragon of death and hell, rescues his bride the church, and redeems the old and impotent king who is the first Adam. The close relationship of this myth to that of the Grail story needs no labouring. An enthusiastic Wagnerian, Jessie Weston, who also translated Wolfram's Parzival into English verse, was an Arthurian scholar whose book, From Ritual to Romance, attempted, on a basis of Frazer and similar writers of his generation, to trace the Grail stories back to a pre-Christian mythology. Her book was a definite and acknowledged influence on Eliot's Waste Land, but The Waste Land, while it uses a good deal of Frazerian and pre-Christian imagery, is again a Christian poem, in which an aged and impotent king seems to be identified both with Wolfram's "Fisher King" and with the first Adam. There are several Wagnerian echoes in Eliot's poem, though the only one linked to Parsifal [1. 202] is a quotation of the last line of Verlaine's sonnet on Parsifal, which refers to the boys' choir singing in the dome ("coupole") at the end of act i, and prophesying the coming of a compassionate fool. Eliot puts this, as we should expect, in a grimly ironic context. Verlaine treats Parsifal as simply Christian in its imagery, but Wagner also gives us a powerful sense, especially in the Good Friday music of the

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third act, of an immemorial revival of nature pushing its way through winter to spring. He has not eliminated the pre-Christian fertility and nature-myth basis of the story, nor has he tried to do so. The Christian setting of the opera, therefore, needs to be approached with some caution. Anfortas in Wolfram is wounded in the testicles, which makes him a quite explicit symbol of sterility, and brings him closer to Attis and other dying fertility gods than to Christ. Wagner's Amfortas is wounded in the side like Christ, and by the same spear or lance, though, unlike Christ, he acquires his wound as a result of sin and weakness, and can only be healed by the same spear. Parsifal is the agent of Amfortas's redemption, but he is not a duplicate of Christ, even though Kundry does seem to address him once as though he were. For one thing, as Wagner remarked, Parsifal is a tenor, which in our musical tradition will not do for Christ.8 He is a figure of a post-Christian legend, much more in the position of, say, the Knight of Holiness identified with St. George in the first book of Spenser's Faerie Queene, a human figure anxious to follow Christ in his dragon-killing quest, but subject to human limitations and frailties on the way. Redemption must come to the redeemer, as the text says. Parsifal, it is emphasized, is primarily a reiner Tor, a pure fool, a phrase which makes no sense when applied to Christ. What sense does it make when applied to Parsifal? We can get two clues to this, one from the greatest fool in literature, the Fool in King Lear, the other from Wolfram. The Fool in King Lear does not lack intelligence: while he is on the stage he is generally the shrewdest person there. But he is a "natural": he cannot help telling the truth, and is tolerated as an entertainer because, as Freud explained centuries later, the sudden and disconcerting emergence of the truth is the basis of most wit and humour. In Shakespeare, as in every poet of his day, there are two levels of nature, the higher nature that God originally created for man and the lower nature that man entered with his fall, the level of nature that Edmund accepts when he says, "Thou, Nature, art my goddess" [1.2.1-2]. The Fool is a survival from the higher nature of truth and loyalty, who can exist in a lower world only through the very limited privileges that a licensed fool has. Goneril, we note, does not believe that the Fool is really a fool, because he is a "natural" on a level of nature that she does not know exists. Parsifal is not born with the ability to see things as clearly as the Fool does, but he has the same instinctive sympathy with Amfortas that the Fool has with Lear, a sympathy symbolized by his feeling the same pain that Amfortas feels. Such sympathy is a quality of

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innocence, and enables Parsifal to destroy the illusions of Klingsor, as innocence and illusion cannot ultimately inhabit the same world. In Wolfram Parzival comes, by accident, to the castle of the Grail, meets the keeper of the Grail there, called also the Fisher King, who is impotent and suffering, and sees the great procession with the bleeding lance and the holy stone. The latter, it appears, can cure everything except what ails the Fisher King. Parzival, whose father had died in his infancy, has been taught by his mother and by an old knight named Gornemans to behave respectfully when with strangers, and above all not to ask too many questions. So he watches the mysterious procession without comment or inquiry, or expressing the curiosity he feels. The next day he discovers that his silence was not only a grave discourtesy but something like a mortal sin. If he had asked the question the king's agony would have ended, and the waste land been transformed into a garden. As he did not, he is reviled and cursed as the geatest disaster that ever came to the land. At first this sounds like one of those irrational situations that occur in romance simply because they occur, included by Wolfram because it was in his source. The question of why it was in his source, even if we could answer it, would take us too far from Wagner. Almost always, in romance as elsewhere, the hero succeeds by doing what his elders have told him to do, minding his manners, and keeping his mouth shut. A male-centred literature has tended to associate curiosity with the disasters caused by the inherent weakness of females. Yet Parzival's situation is a most eerily suggestive one nonetheless. Perhaps this is partly because we have all had dreams in which we accepted mysterious and portentous imagery without question, and may have felt on waking that if we had only been sufficiently conscious to ask ourselves about the meaning of what we saw, we might have made a major breakthrough to another dimension of experience altogether. We have mentioned Eliot, and we may remember how as early as Prufrock Eliot is haunted by the theme of "some overwhelming question" [1. 10], which he associates with the return of Lazarus from the dead. In Wolfram, Parzival eventually gets back to the Grail castle near the end of the story and asks the healing question, which appears to be something like, "Dear uncle, why do you have this terrible pain in the testicles?" Even Wagner quailed before the prospect of putting this into recitativo, although he had, as we saw, already moved the area of pain to a more respectable address. In Chretien de Troyes the question is rather

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"Whom does the Grail serve?" a much more profound question, but a superfluous one for Wagner, for whom the Grail obviously serves the knights of the Grail. Wagner has redistributed the traditional themes of his sources in a most ingenious way. The theme of sexual impotence is transferred to Klingsor, who has castrated himself in order to achieve purity through an act of self-will. Klingsor therefore really is the life-denying spirit that Nietzsche thought he saw in the whole opera. The equivalent of Parzival's failure to ask the crucial question comes when Gurnemanz decides that, prophecy or no prophecy, Parsifal is nothing but a fool. This happens at the end of the first act, in symmetrical contrast to Parsifal's succession to Amfortas as leader of the Grail knights at the end of the third. It is a rejection by a father figure, more or less: at least Gurnemanz has previously addressed Parsifal as "my son." In the second act Parsifal descends into a world of illusion which Wagner obviously associated, as we should do, with Parsifal's own unconscious. Naturally he meets in that world the ghost of his mother Herzeleide, whom he has, unknown to himself, violated, that is, killed, as he has broken her heart by leaving her. Herzeleide is personated by Kundry, the one female figure of the opera, who represents all the ambivalence of traditional Christianity to female figures. In the Bible the symbolic maleness of God seems to represent the fact that nature, which is usually female in mythology, is morally alien to man and keeps him imprisoned in an endless round of death and rebirth. The flower maidens Parsifal meets are spirits of nature: they are not evil, but they are creatures of a morally irresponsible and nonhuman world. The redeeming God has to be male, but man, who is to be redeemed, is in that context symbolically woman, the forgiven harlot who appears in Old Testament prophecy and as the Magdalen figure of the Gospels. Kundry is neither wholly a siren of nature nor a Magdalen, but is torn between the two, an Ariel who desperately longs to be a Caliban, the servant of a human society, but cannot live in that world either. In Klingsor's world she feels that Parsifal could be her saviour if she could get into sexual contact with him, and Parsifal has to explain to her that she cannot be redeemed by her own desire. In the Grail world she becomes, in the third act, a forgiven and released Magdalen figure. Wagner is said to have been annoyed by those who pointed to the Kundry-Magdalen parallels, but he could hardly have put her through the routine of washing Parsifal's feet and wiping them with her hair without feeling that there was an echo in the room somewhere.

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We have been speaking of Christian redemption in Parsifal, but Wagner had also been developing an interest in Buddhism, running parallel to his interest in Christianity though not, as he saw it, inconsistent with it. This had come largely from his reading of Schopenhauer, and before he wrote Parsifal Wagner had meditated dramas on both Jesus and Buddha. In Buddhism the great enemy is illusion, and illusion is caused by the ego-centred nature of our perception. Here again we have two levels of nature, though metaphorically the better one is usually thought of as deeper rather than higher. In this context Parsifal's confrontation with the memory of his mother represents the deepest hold that the habitenergy of his ego still has on him, and the only way to break from it is through compassion, the sudden sense of identity with Amfortas that cuts him loose from Kundry. Buddhism also puts a high valuation on the stillness and the calmness of mind that comes from emptying it of selfconscious thoughts, and the "pure fool" aspect of Parsifal, which sometimes leaves him unable to articulate the simplest sentence, is connected with that. In the Ring cycle the disturbances set in motion by Alberich's theft of the gold cause a crisis among the gods. The gods, or at least Wo tan, find that they have become an establishment, and get caught up in all the casuistry and false decisions of an establishment mentality. At the end of Gotterdammerung the gods have had it, and the new reign of man is prophesied. There were contemporary and later German writers, some of them insane, who were or tried to be polytheists with a genuine belief in the old gods, Classical or Nordic. But Wagner was not one of them, and no other conclusion for the Ring was conceivable except a humanistic one. What kind of man would genuinely deserve to succeed the gods? This, I think, is the question that Parsifal is mainly concerned with. Parsifal assumes that the coming of Christ, symbolized by the Grail, has been essential to the answer, so the question takes the form of what the model of human action is that Christianity provides. The answer is still complex, but its principle is that true human action is antiheroic, not in the sense of lacking courage, but in regarding patience and endurance as still greater virtues. In the Ring all the heroic quests are essentially ways of feeding the gods, keeping them supplied with the youth and energy essential to their supremacy. The Valkyries, the choosers of those slain in battle, symbolize this conception of the heroic life as a continuous sacrifice by man to nourish the gods. In Parsifal the Grail does the feeding, because the essential sacrifice, of God for man, which is what keeps man

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alive, has already taken place, and reversed the direction of the cult of heroic warfare. The theme of the renunciation of a heroic quest, which runs all through Parsifal, had already appeared in the Ring, because the whole titanic struggle started by Alberich's theft can only end when the stolen gold is put back where it was. The effectiveness of this theme for romance was demonstrated in the next century by the sensational success of Tolkien, who retells the story of a ring that must not be won but lost, the Nibelung story interpenetrated with the spirit of redeeming simplicity in Parsifal, symbolized by his "hobbits." Parsifal is much more explicitly the drama of a renounced quest, to the point of being something of an anti-drama. This is because the central theme of the spiritual growth of Parsifal himself is so closely connected with the theme of temptation. When Milton wanted to show the nature of genuine Christian heroism in Paradise Regained, he chose the theme of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness by Satan. That meant an epic of four books in which Satan thinks up one enticing illusion after another, while Christ merely stands in the centre and rejects them. An epic based on the central episode of Buddha's life, his enlightenment under the Bo tree, rejecting one after another of the illusions of Mara, would not be very different. In this kind of theme the dramatic situation is the reverse of the moral one: our sympathies are dramatically with Satan, with Mara, with Klingsor, because they do the dramatic work. To make heroes of Jesus and Buddha and Parsifal because they refuse to do it makes moral sense, but a dramatic paradox. One feels that while there is a lot going on in Parsifal, what is not going on, to any great extent, is the kind of dramatic action that would be needed (at least up to Wagner's time) to keep a purely verbal play on the stage. And yet in all major drama a neutralizing balancing power, which the Greeks called nemesis in its tragic aspect, can be seen at work. In Shakespeare's romances, while the surface action moves towards the marriage of young and happy people, the major action is a setting right of something wrong in the past. The theme of The Tempest looks as though it were going to be Prospero's revenge on his enemies by his power of magic. But Prospero renounces both his revenge and his magic, and regains his dukedom, as W.H. Auden makes him say, at the moment when he no longer wants it.9 The "rarer action," as Prospero calls it [5.1.27], is a neutralizing of the expected revenge action. Wagner remarked that the Grail was the spiritualized version of the Nibelung hoard. But Parsifal

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does not acquire the Grail by a dragon-killing quest: he merely gets his head clear of the kind of illusion that such dragons represent, and the Grail thereby acquires him. Going by the text alone, the characters of Parsifal do seem to be a lifedenying lot, crippled or half dead, and resembling characters in a play of Beckett more closely than they do those in any earlier work of Wagner's. Amfortas is in mortal agony, longing for death, until almost the last moment of the drama; Titurel speaks from a tomb in the first act and is buried in the third; Kundry, who practically has to be dug out of the ground at the beginning of the third act, also longs for the death she finally gets; Gurnemanz seems old and tired even at the beginning, and proportionately more so at the end. Parsifal himself makes his entrance as a stupid oaf shooting a swan, an oafs idea of fun, and then proves to be unable even to answer any questions, much less ask them. He finally, as we saw, becomes such an encumbrance to what action there is that Gurnemanz pushes him irritably off the stage. Whatever one thinks of the phrase "music of the future" applied to Wagner, Parsifal at least is the drama of the future, pointing the way to the kind of dramatic struggle with, and within, stagnation that we have later in Strindberg, Chekhov, Beckett, and Sartre. All through Wagner's work runs the theme of the comitatus, the brotherhood united by some form of distinctive heroism or skill—even the Meistersinger make up such a group. But the knights of the Grail move toward exhaustion in the third act, where much of the dominant music is very like a funeral march. In the course of the action Gurnemanz remarks that in the world of the Grail castle time has given place to space. I don't know what this means altogether, but certainly the atmosphere is one of suspended time, like the life-in-death of the Ancient Mariner, or the world between incarnations in a Japanese Noh play. Another parallel would be Ezekiel's vision of a valley of dry bones, transformed into "an exceeding great army" [Ezekiel 37:10] by a power that Christian readers of Ezekiel would identify with the Resurrection, the ultimate transforming power that immediately follows Good Friday. It seems to me significant, however, that Wagner kept the traditional Good Friday as the setting for his third act, instead of changing it to Easter Sunday. For the main action of the opera is less a resurrection than a harrowing of hell. There are, as always, two levels of hell. The deeper level, the world of the self-castrated Klingsor in which Kundry is unable to die, is the real hell: it will always be there as long as man insists on

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living in egocentric illusion, but it is still illusion, and is unredeemable. Above it is the limbo of the moribund Grail knights: this world can be redeemed, and its inhabitants set free. What the verbal action of Parsifal really dramatizes, I think, is not primarily anything Christian or Buddhist or pagan, but Schopenhauer's two worlds of will and idea. The world of will, for Schopenhauer, is a subhuman and submoral world, out of which we have come, and which involves far more suffering than happiness for conscious beings. The flower maidens are relatively well adjusted to such a world, because they have very little consciousness and next to no memory. A conscious being in this world can only do evil, whether willingly like Klingsor or unwillingly like Kundry, but in either case possessed by desire without fulfilment, the spear without the Grail. Amfortas is in a conscious, sensitive, peaceful world of representation or idea, but suffers horribly because he is still caught in the toils of the desiring world as will: he has the Grail without the spear. If Klingsor were to acquire the Grail, the world of conscious moral values would be flooded over by the will and would disappear: if the Grail knights were to regain the spear, they would acquire the creative power which is desire with fulfilment. One reason why Schopenhauer is so central to Parsifal is that, in speaking of music as the primary language of the will, he provided a genuine social and intelligible human context for music.10 Most philosophers who talk about music, such as Plato, are of no use to a practical composer. The libretto of Parsifall was very hard on Nietzsche, who had talked of a Superman to surpass present mankind, a new master of morality to replace the old slave moralities of Buddhism and Christianity, and of a gospel affirming life in place of the life-denying programs of the great religions. I suspect that the elements derived from Schopenhauer infuriated him even more than the Christian ones, as Schopenhauer was probably another Oedipal father whom Nietzsche wanted to kill. But it should be kept in mind, in reading Nietzsche's shrieking abuse of the ideology of Parsifal, that Nietzsche had heard none of the music of the opera except the overture, and he talks very differently about that—in a private letter, it is true.11 We may concede to Nietzsche that Parsifal is a story of a group of sick and dying puppets, although they are awaiting a colossal transfiguring power that will hurl them into a new life. If we ask what kind of dramatic device could conceivably represent such a power, we have, for Wagner, an immediate and obvious answer: the music. Parsifall being a very late work, it is not a "number" opera, with de-

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tached arias like Senta's ballad in The Flying Dutchman or Wolfram's song to the evening star in Tannhauser. Some Wagner criticism gives the impression that Wagner wrote a libretto, then composed a number of leitmotifs, each one with an allegorical relationship to some character or image in the story, then mixed these up in a musical pastiche where they appear at appropriate moments. How anything resembling a structure could emerge from such a procedure is an unanswered question. The opposite extreme is represented by Lorenz's four-volume study attempting to demonstrate, not simply that the music has a structure, but that the musical structure in fact is the structure of the opera.12 This tends to suggest that Wagner's music dramas are simply overgrown symphonies with vocal obbligato. But even the longest symphony has to have some basis in symphonic form, and the structural principles of Wagner's music seem to be quite different from those of symphonic form. This statement, however, is less true of Parsifal than of any other Wagner opera. Parsifal begins and ends in the same key (A-flat major), and the second act also begins and ends in the same key (B minor). We may call this pure accident, but accidents in Wagner are seldom if ever pure. It looks as though tonality has a function for this opera which is unusual for operas in general, even for Wagner's. All through the work, again, there is a contrast of diatonic and chromatic textures. The diatonic ones are associated with the Grail and the ideals and virtues it inspires. The chromatic passages predominate in the world of Klingsor in the second act, and are also associated with the agony of Amfortas and with the more screaming and scampering aspects of Kundry. The overture presents the three main Grail themes: we may follow tradition, for the most part, and associate them respectively with the Christian virtues of love, hope, and faith. We begin with what is called the "Love Feast" motif, an eerie, plaintive, isolated melody followed by arpeggios on the chord of A-flat. We are not, of course, in the world of preconscious innocence represented by the open E-flat chords at the beginning of Rheingold: the function of these arpeggios is to establish the underlying rhythm of the very syncopated first theme. The second theme is a well-known liturgical cadence called the "Dresden Amen," which would have been familiar to many in Wagner's audience. A third theme, with four descending notes prominent in it, follows and provides a rhythmical contrast to the gentle and wavering opening. A quite sudden modulation of this theme from A-flat to D major was associated by Wagner, apparently, with the spreading of the Grail faith throughout the

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world. The opening theme recurs, wistful and elusive as ever, and the overture ends on a dominant seventh of almost intolerable insistence, lingering even in the first recitatives after the curtain rises. All three themes are strongly diatonic, and seem to set the pattern for three modes of feeling. The "Love Feast" theme, in spite of its gentle subsidence at its close, is mainly a rising melody with a dotted rhythm in its rise that recurs, in different forms, through various moods of aspiration and yearning, including even the central theme of the Good Friday music. All three acts of Parsifal begin with a summons to wake up, the second and third being both addressed, for different reasons, to the harassed Kundry, and Klingsor has a demonic parody of rising rhythm associated with him as the curtain goes up on the second act. The "Dresden Amen" is one of a group of themes that seem to express a mood of waiting, with calmness and patience, for some kind of deliverance from the prison paradise of the Grail world. The most important of these themes of hope, as we might call them, is the hymn that prophesies the coming of the compassionate fool. The more vigorous theme called "Faith" reminds us that the Grail knighthood is still a band of heroes, even though their heroism has outgrown the fighting stage, and it is linked with the marching rhythm of the procession in the first act, which moves with a somewhat plodding stateliness towards the unveiling of the Grail. The march in the third act, where the burial of Titurel is involved, has a slightly different rhythm, closer, as said, to a funeral march, in contrast to the more spirited martial theme that accompanies the entrances of Parsifal. In the chromatic tumult of Klingsor's world in the second act we hear two themes in particular associated with temptation and illusion. One is the waltzing rhythm of the flower maidens' chatter, the other the pastoral six-eight (later nine-eight) rhythm of Kundry's account to Parsifal of his childhood with his mother. Both have curious recalls of the formulas of popular nineteenth-century music: they are equal in attractiveness and technical skill to anything else in the opera, but manage to suggest something a bit bogus, or at least commonplace, at the same time. The opening of the third act, depicting the exhaustion and low morale of the Grail knights and Parsifal's inability to find them, wanders uncertainly around the key of B-flat minor: so uncertainly that one critic has suggested that the real tonic chord is a diminished seventh rather than the chord of B-flat minor. Wagner is never atonal, and when he seems to move away from tonality it generally means that chaos is coming again.

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The third act then alternates between hope and fear, rising to a dissonant climax when the knights insist that the suffering Amf ortas, who is at the end of his endurance, uncover the Grail once more, and we wonder if a demonic parody of the sacrifice of Christ is about to be enacted on this Good Friday. However, Parsifal is present this time with his healing spear, and the opera ends with the motif of "Faith" having it all its own way, in a limpidly diatonic conclusion. Even an amateur with no training in musical analysis, like myself, could follow the evolving, intertwining, metamorphosing play of the various themes throughout the opera for a long time; but we do not have a long time (changed to space, like the Grail world, in the context of an essay), and I wish to make one point only about the music. The verbal framework of Parsifal, we suggested, was derived from Schopenhauer's construct of the world as will and as idea, or representation of the world in a conscious mind. This construct, though it has a popular reputation for pessimism, is nevertheless one within which the redemptive efforts of Christianity and Buddhism become at least intelligible. But the music expands from here into a much larger vision of humanity led by its own inner nature to rise toward some infinite power which is both itself and the opposite of itself, an effort neither quixotic nor hopeless because the infinite power has already descended to meet it. I hear this perhaps most clearly at the moment of Parsifal's prayer before the spear, but its overtones and resonances are on every page of the opera, and make me wonder whether music, which defines nothing and expresses everything, may not be the primary language of the spirit, and not merely, as Schopenhauer said, of the suffering and enduring will.

28

Some Reflections on Life and Habit 17 February 1988

From Some Reflections on Life and Habit (Lethbridge: University ofLethbridge Press, 1988). Originally the F.E.L. Priestly lecture, 17 February 1988. Reprinted in Northrop Frye Newsletter, i, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 1-9, and in MM, 141-54. Two typescripts are in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 8.

I

It is a great privilege to be giving a lecture in honour of my old friend and colleague Professor Priestley. That should go without saying, which is the phrase we use when we mean that it is very important to say it. When the invitation came to me, I was reading Samuel Butler, the nineteenthcentury satirist, and Life and Habit is the title of the book of his that I happened to be reading. But the fact that it got into the title of this lecture was not pure accident. Another book of Samuel Butler's, the Utopian satire Erewhon, was featured at Toronto in a course in nineteenth-century prose, an excellent course while it lasted. For many years the course was taught by Professor Priestley at University College and by me at Victoria College. My successor in teaching it at Victoria was Professor John Robson, the first Priestley lecturer. I think it was also taught at St. Michael's College by the late Marshall McLuhan: in any case there are several echoes from Butler in McLuhan's books. But while a lecture devoted entirely to Samuel Butler might be appropriate for the scholar I want to honour, it might be less so for a public occasion. I have therefore attempted a compromise, starting with Butler and working outward to more contemporary concerns. I was reading Life and Habit for two reasons. One, its first hundred

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pages or so are a brilliant and witty piece of writing, and if the entire book were on that level it would be one of my favourite books. Two, those hundred pages are essentially a theory of education, which naturally concerns me as a teacher. Butler's theory was not new, but the formulation and context of it were new in his day. The context was Butler's intense interest in Darwinian evolution: he was a contemporary of Darwin, and realized that the issue raised in the Origin of Species in 1859 was the central scientific issue of his time. Darwin's account of the evolutionary process, in which variations are thrown out by a species at random until one proves to have better survival value for its environment and becomes the channel for a new development, fascinated Butler but dissatisfied him too. He felt that the degree of precision and skill shown by even the simplest organisms, along with their immense variety, pointed to a directing will within them. The title of another book of his, Luck or Cunning? indicates his attitude. Here he was reverting to an earlier view, proposed by the botanist Lamarck in France and by Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, in England. Biologists oppose this view on the ground that it appears to depend on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and that there is no evidence, or not enough evidence, for this. As Butler went on, he became increasingly hostile to Darwin, and more and more insistent on introducing elements of will, design, and purpose into evolution. The consensus of biologists was that the Darwinian explanation described the process, the how of evolution, and that that was the whole business of biological science. The other elements, they said, belonged to speculative philosophy or theology, and could not be experimentally studied. So Butler fell out of fashion, and became known as an amateur who blundered into a scientific controversy on the wrong side without really knowing what he was talking about. His reputation was further affected by the fact that his chief disciple was Bernard Shaw, whose doctrine of "creative evolution" in my opinion rather vulgarizes Butler's views. This is particularly true of his interminably gabby play, or series of plays, called Back to Methusaleh, in which the human race evolves from Adam and Eve to a whirlpool of pure thought in something like twenty hours. More recently, there was the attempt of the pseudoscientific politician Lysenko, in Stalin's Russia, to set up Russian biology on a Lamarckian basis, which proved an abysmal failure. Well, as it happens, I am rather interested in people who are out of fashion, because they often indicate the limitations of the age that considers them so. If I knew more biology, or more accurately, if I knew some

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biology, I should not be surprised if many of Butler's speculations, such as his identifying of heredity with memory, were eventually to come back on centre stage. In short, I doubt that the luck-or-cunning issue is entirely closed. But it is clear that many aspects of that controversy have been put out of date by new discoveries about the DNA molecule and the transmission of genetic codes, and many of the things that Butler says should now be read as remarkably prophetic insights into these developments. He speaks, for example, of the embryo's ability "to compress tedious and complicated histories into a very narrow compass, remembering no single performance in particular."1 Butler's word "habit" recalls the medieval Latin habitus, an educational term meaning the accomplishment of a skill. In the Middle Ages a person who could read Latin was said to have the habitus of Latin. Habitus in its turn was the Latin equivalent of the Greek word hexis, which in Aristotle means something like stabilization, the way in which a thing continues to preserve the quality that makes it what it is. In Butler "habit" refers to the learning process in which a skill moves from the conscious into the unconscious. When we begin to learn a language, we consciously pay attention to every new word, to the grammatical rules of syntax and inflection, to the nuances of pronunciation and accent. When we can speak a language fluently, this attention to detail disappears from consciousness, but it is obviously still there. A first-rate pianist may play thousands of notes in a few minutes, attending to every rest, dynamic shading, and predominance of one voice over another. He does not consciously attend to each of these details, but there must have been a time when he did. The principle involved is that complete learning is unconscious learning. When consciousness is brought into play, it means doubt, hesitation, and imperfect knowledge. It also sets up interference patterns against the smoothness and perfection of unconscious learning, once the latter has been attained. Anything like conscious choice or free will disappears with the advance of learning, and if we are playing the piano and still exercising free will about whether we shall play the right or the wrong notes, we are not playing very well. So Butler's "unconscious" is a form of distilled intelligence, or intelligence moving so fast that we can no longer perceive its details. The pianist cannot consciously remember all the notes he played, but there is a data bank inside him which is vastly more efficient than his conscious memory. In Butler's view the unconscious memory is part of our biological inheritance, but because we are conscious there can still be conflicts

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within it, a whole Parliament of ancestral voices where some dominate and others are repressed. Long before Freud, Butler realized that the unconscious could speak, and that when it spoke it defined the speaker much more clearly than his conscious speech did. He quoted a famous evangelical preacher named Spurgeon as praying publicly that God would change England's rulers "as soon as possible," and pointed out that those last four words showed that while Spurgeon's consciousness may have been evangelical, his unconscious was clearly atheistic.2 But such anomalies are a feature of conscious uncertainties. The learning skill is perfect when we have reached the stabilization, the habitus or hexis, where no such conflicts remain. On this principle the best-educated would be those who do not even know that they are educated. To Butler, as a nineteenth-century middle-class Englishman, the principle that unconscious knowledge is perfected knowledge meant that the best-educated people in England in his day were the aristocracy. They had been accustomed to rank and privilege from birth, not counting centuries of heredity before that, and could live a privileged life with a spontaneity and ease that was the despairing envy of any jumped-up businessman or politician who tried to imitate them by voluntary effort. If the noble lord happened to be as stupid as the pheasants he shot, that showed that he was even better educated: he had nothing of the uncertainty and hesitation that goes with the investigating of new things. It is clear that in this argument there are two levels of education involved. One is the education we acquire through our evolutionary heredity: we display most of this within a few hours of birth, but its afterglow remains all through our lives in our social and personal relations. The other is the specifically human education we develop from the fact that we are conscious beings. A little girl with a skipping rope would be a model of the first stage of education; a wise man telling us to take no thought for the morrow and to consider the lilies as an example of living would represent the fulfilment of the second stage. One of Butler's most celebrated remarks is that a hen is simply an egg's way of making another egg.3 Why should this statement seem so paradoxical to us, when the reverse statement, that an egg is what a hen makes, seems so self-evident? Butler explains that the development of an egg into a hen is a matter of growth through repetition of previous growths. Every detail of this development can be, and has been, studied by embryologists. But when a hen makes an egg she cackles, and we are very impressed by noise, which we always associate with some kind of

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meaning. Also, we see an egg where there was no egg before, and that gratifies our impatience to get something tangible without having to wait too long for it. So when the Bible begins by saying that everything started with a revolutionary act of God in suddenly making the world out of nothing, we feel that that is the proper and inevitable way to begin the story of nature. In Genesis the cackle and egg are perhaps below the dignity of Holy Writ, although there are eggs in Hindu and Greek creation myths. But even in Genesis there is a spoken utterance and what seems like a brooding bird. However, God's ways are not our ways, and human creation is much more a matter of eggs trying to be hens in the hope of producing future eggs. The real paradox in Butler comes from the fact that words are instruments of the conscious mind: they mean exploration, discovery, experiment, and consequently imperfect knowledge. The unconscious knowledge he is talking about is wordless. We do not feel complete confidence in the skill of a craftsman until he can no longer say how he does what he does. When we turn from human beings to plants and animals, this paradox increases enormously. A snail builds its shell and a warbler its nest with an unerring precision, exactly as though they knew what they were doing. Why, then, do we deny the term "know" to them? A good deal of Butler's wit comes from his applying terms of knowledge and consciousness to organisms that simply behave with the appearance of knowledge and consciousness. He says, for example, that the lichen could not grow on the rock unless it thought it could, and could not think it could unless it could, yet it does very well for itself in spite of arguing in a circle.4 An organism- struggles to achieve some kind of equilibrium with its environment, and so develops some patented skills to enable it to keep on absorbing nutriment and reproducing its kind. In a human being this is largely accomplished within a few days after birth. Butler says that a baby a day old sucks, which involves a profound practical knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics; it digests; it oxygenizes its blood millions of years before oxygen was discovered; it sees and it hears—all most difficult and complicated operations, involving a similar knowledge of optics and acoustics. Before that, it was an embryo constructing eyes and limbs and performing other fantastically complex feats of engineering.5 If we say "nature" does this, we are using a superfluous metaphor: there is no such thing as nature, no mother-goddess who does things for

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us. The metaphor means that behind what the embryo does is a long evolutionary process through which it has learned how it does it. Why, says Butler, should we say of a man that he has never amounted to anything? He got himself born, and that is about ninety-seven percent of everything he can ever hope to do.6 Society confirms this view of unconscious knowledge: we admire healthy, handsome, and fortunate people; athletes get far more news coverage than specialists in semiotics; people with conventional views, or people able to get along with conventions, are the sensible, the nice people, the people it is comfortable to be with. We also cherish an intense if sometimes grudging admiration for billionaires and dictators, because we spring from an environment in which the predators are the aristocracy. One of Butler's inferences, that there must have been a time when there was something like intelligence and a learning process in the organism, takes him into biological speculations where it is hard to follow him and where at present we do not need to follow him. It is the analogy with human education that I am concerned with here. II

We sometimes say of a student when he has got whatever degree he is pursuing that he has "completed his education." But of course we know that this is only a way of talking, and a rather loose way at that: no human being can ever finish an education as long as he has any sort of brain to process his experience with. It is only such organisms as the lichen on the rocks and the medusa jellyfish who have finished their education, and even they might be caught short by a change in the environment. Humanity, alone of all organisms, has elected to transform its environment instead of simply adapting to it, and so only human beings have a lifelong commitment to experiment, trial and error, uncertainty, and all the other burdens of continuing knowledge. Does this mean that we are still evolving, and if so, toward what? In my view this question is not simply unanswerable but can be profoundly misleading. In the first place, the fact that we are adapting the environment to ourselves instead of ourselves to the environment has totally changed the rules of the game, so perhaps the word "evolution," in its traditional sense, no longer means anything as far as our own future is concerned. This does not prevent us from using a lot of conceptions of change and development that we call evolution, even though the word is

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only a metaphor for most of them, and very probably for all of them. In Butler's day the German philosopher Nietzsche preached the gospel of the evolving of man into a "superman," who sounds like a remarkably unpleasant human being, however admirable as a god. Then there was the doctrine of progress, a doctrine much older than Darwin. Some people who wanted to believe in progress thought that evolution had furnished a scientific proof of it. But of course evolution is a principle in biology, and cannot be directly applied to human history except as an analogy. Whether we believe in progress depends entirely on what factors we select as evidence for it. Thus the processes known in some areas as pollution and in others as development, such as destroying a community by building a highway through the middle of it, are often rationalized by some such phrase as "you can't stop progress." "Progress" here is clearly an idol of some sort, and in totalitarian states, where thousands of people can be shot or starved to get a more efficient system of agriculture or industry in the future, we get some notion of how horrible such idolatry can be. Whatever ideals we may frame, in education or anywhere else, will take time to reach, and so will relate to the future, but a real future has to be built on what is available at present. To sacrifice the present, which exists, to a future which does not exist, and certainly will never exist in any presently recognizable form, is as perverse a notion as any in history. In my student days, during the Depression, it was widely believed that capitalism would evolve into socialism, with or without a revolution, socialism being assumed to be both more efficient and morally superior. A secondary assumption was that evolution never made a mistake, but always tended towards improvement. On the other side was the movement sometimes called social Darwinism, which was really a rationalizing of imperialism, taking on the white man's burden in Africa and south Asia. It asserted that there were developed and primitive societies, and that the developed ones were following the evolutionary laws of a competitive nature in enslaving or exterminating the primitive ones. "Developed" in this context meant that their military technology was deadlier. In our day there has been an invasion of teachers of yoga, Zen, kundalini, and other techniques of meditation, which often carry ideologies of evolution along with them, promising developments of consciousness that will usher in a new phase of human existence. Nobody can object to the teaching of these techniques, but the evolutionary metaphors seem, once again, to be merely analogies.

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Our present mood in regard to education, however, is past-centred rather than future-centred, and is more inclined to ask, Are we doing as well as we used to do? This is mainly a reaction to elementary and high school educators who do not understand why we should transform our environment by reading Shakespeare when we can so easily adapt to it by reading Stephen King. I was recently looking through a book that has been on the bestseller list for a long time, and which propounds the thesis that students have been cheated out of their education, socially and morally as well as intellectually.7 I thought, in reading it: somebody writes this book every ten years; I have lived through four or five cycles of similar protests, and have in fact contributed to some of them. (On this last point I think I am speaking for Professor Priestley also.) Such books are often, like this book, warmly received and are accompanied by a feeling that something should be done. Nothing ever is done, so there must be something that the protest has failed to reach. Two points occur to me in this connection. One is that there is seldom any recommendation for action in this field except to prod the educational bureaucracy. And a bureaucracy, as Mr. Gorbachev is undoubtedly discovering, cannot be improved by prodding: it can only be left alone and when possible bypassed. The other is that what the public picks up from such books is what literary critics call a pastoral myth. There was a simpler time, the myth runs, when things were a lot better, so let's get back to them. But just as the future does not yet exist, so the past has ceased to exist, and an idealized past never did exist. I distrust all "back to basics" slogans because I distrust all movements that begin with "back to." It is more profitable, perhaps, to inquire into the reasons for the dissatisfaction with what our education has achieved, and this takes us "back to" Butler. Here the phrase "back to" is in its right context, as it refers to something in the past that can still be brought into the present. The author of the book I refer to was clearly still smouldering from the anti-intellectual movement among students twenty years ago in the late 19603. I remember this period very well: it was a time when, although practically all students merely wanted to keep on doing what they should have been doing, there was a small group caught up in an adversarial trend that I think was almost entirely created by the news media. I notice that the news media are sniffing around this period again, perhaps in some hope of reviving it in a new generation. The minority I speak of were students who felt that they were revolting against middle-class

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values, and didn't realize how clearly they were expressing them. Much of their alleged activism consisted of dodging everything academic that looked difficult and repetitious. There were complaints about learning by rote, "regurgitating" lecture notes, plodding through memorization, and the like. They wanted every lecture to be an exciting existential event; they organized "teach-ins" with imported speakers who were usually left-wing political leaders giving one of their standard harangues; and they greatly resented the suggestion that these activities were entertainment and not education. Student representation, for them, did not mean sitting on committees but organizing sit-ins and demonstrations and disrupting meetings. Some of them were very agile in working out rationalizations for all this, and I am far from denying the good faith of the many idealistic students who believed passionately in what they were doing, and had no idea how or by whom they were being manipulated. But the movement was essentially one more outbreak of American anti-intellectualism, and it was discouraging to find it in the very place where it ought least to be. Butler's theory of education follows the normal pattern in being based on the traditional emphasis on habit and practice. If we take pianoplaying as a typical educational activity, it requires endless patient repetition until conscious learning is finally digested into unconscious skill. The unconscious cannot be hurried or forced or consciously invaded; some learn more easily and quickly than others, but everyone learns in essentially the same way. Obviously, a good deal of this sounds like the emphasis on discipline and routine which in the past has given so penal a quality to education, reinforced as it so often was by savage beatings and the like. If the "unrest" of the '6os had been a reaction against this, it would have been quite normal; but, while there had to be a good deal of pretence that such elements still existed, they had in fact disappeared at least fifty years earlier. Of course a dull or plodding teacher can envisage only a dull educational process, and can make education a dreary enough operation. I have had teachers myself who took a squalid pleasure in making drillsergeant noises about the moral benefits of plugging and slugging as ends in themselves. That was in the '205 of this century, and of course such teachers didn't realize that they were speaking for the capitalist work ethic and setting up the automatism of the Ford assembly plant as the model for it. Neither did I: I felt only that they were talking about their own mental processes and not about mine, and it was some time

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before I realized that the emphasis on routine was only the flip side of something very different. Notice that we speak of "playing" the piano, just as we speak about playing tennis or chess, and just as we call dramas, even the most terrible tragedies, "plays." In ordinary speech we distinguish work and play, work being energy expended for a further end in view, play being energy expended for its own sake. Doing any kind of playing well, whether on the stage or at a piano or chessboard, takes an immense amount of work, but when the work has its end in play we can see the point in it much more clearly. Nothing gives greater pleasure than spontaneous activity, but the spontaneous comes at the end of a long discipline of practice. It never comes early except when it is something we have inherited as part of our previous evolutionary development—something our ancestors have practised before us. Education, then, is a movement toward the spontaneous, not a movement away from it. We speak of liberal education, which means essentially that something in us is getting liberated or set free. When we practise the piano, we are setting ourselves free to play the piano. The half-educated may follow rules or dodge around rules; it is only the thoroughly educated who can take liberties with rules. If we want to write, it is nothing very wonderful if we can produce acceptable or even remarkable poetry in early years: poetry at that age ought to be a natural secretion, like a pearl in an oyster. It is the writers that keep on writing who matter in the history of literature; and what their incessant practice aims at is a steadily purer and more direct simplicity. The simple, which is the opposite of the commonplace, is normally one of the last secrets of art to be mastered. We often feel, ploughing through the gobbledygook and bumble of political speeches and the like, Why can't they say what they mean? Often, of course, they have excellent reasons for concealing what they mean, but the real answer is usually that lucidity is difficult. We may even be impressed by the kind of polysyllabic blather that merely throws words at the ideas instead of expressing them; we may feel that anything so hard to read must have been even harder to think out. But eventually we realize that it is very easy to write this way: in fact it is the normal way to write when we are not thinking about what we are doing. It is the same with a kind of scholarly writing that we in the academic world are reluctantly familiar with, and which infallibly indicates a lack of understanding of one's material.

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III

It should be clear from what we have said that two kinds of memory are involved in education, and that their roles are often confused. There is Butler's unconscious memory, a continuing of the evolutionary process we hooked into at the beginning of our lives, which is fostered by habit and practice, and there is conscious memory, the recall of an event in the past into the present. Conscious memory is certainly essential, as we soon realize if we talk to someone who has lost it. It supplies the continuity without which no learning is possible, hence the strong emphasis on the use of the conscious memory in education. But conscious memory is primarily an adjunct to unconscious memory, a means of getting hold of it and supplying the energy of the conscious will for continuing it. Practice or habit memory means the control of time, not the mere awareness of it. Only when conscious memory is treated as an end in itself does education become a treadmill of repetition. Certainly there have been societies that approached education in this way, handing on traditions from the past without change, and demanding from the student only the acceptance of them through rote learning and repetition, no criticism or recreation of them being tolerated. There can be nothing here of the progressive developing of a skill or the setting free of undeveloped abilities, only of stagnation. The contrast between this and real education is not unlike the contrast between superstition and faith. The root meaning of superstition is vestigial survival. When we keep on doing something without understanding why we are doing it, but have only a vague feeling that something awful will happen if we stop doing it, we are in a state of superstition. Superstition of this kind is frozen ideology, a pathological social condition that obstructs the developments in the arts and sciences, and so frustrates the central aim of education. Its usual cause is a fear that something in these developments will conflict with something else thought to be beyond the scope of argument. Evolution itself, as we all know, had to contend with superstitions attached to false readings of the Biblical creation myths. The wise man who wrote the book in the Bible called Ecclesiastes made two remarks that are very important for the theory of education. One is "there is nothing new under the sun" [1.9], the other "to everything there is a season" [3.1]. He was speaking of two areas of the learning process, knowledge and experience. Knowledge may be new to us or to the entire human race, but new knowledge is not yet knowledge:

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we do not know anything until we have recognized it, that is, placed it in a context of what we already know, rearranging the familiar until the unfamiliar is fitted into it. It follows that we cannot know the unique as such. When we come to the phrase "to everything there is a season" and its corollary, "there is a time for all things," we are in the realm of experience, where everything is new and unique. The function of knowledge is to set free the capacity to experience. The repetition and constant practice that underlies the acquiring of a skill, then, is, or certainly ought to be, a process of continuous discovery: the knowledge is not new, but the experience of getting it is. Knowledge that tries to do without experience becomes paranoid; experience that tries to do without knowledge becomes schizophrenic. The anti-intellectual trend which is so deeply rooted in American life is linked to a tendency in American education to emphasize experience at the expense of knowledge. I say American because the same tendencies have extended to Canada, perhaps as much here in the West as further east. The tendency is often associated with the name of John Dewey, although it seems hardly fair to blame him for all the imbecilities of his disciples. But certainly such slogans as "learning by doing" can do a great deal of damage when they ignore the fact that thinking is also a doing, and one as totally dependent on habit and practice as any other skill. There is a semantic difficulty here: we often speak, with Thurber's Walter Mitty, of daydreaming or woolgathering as thinking, and when we repeat prejudices acquired from our friends or the morning paper we often imagine that we are thinking for ourselves. But thinking, again, is like piano-playing: how well we do it depends primarily on how much of it we have progressively and systematically done already, and at all times the content of thinking is knowledge. The age of hysteria in the '6os I spoke of developed the emphasis on experience over knowledge to great lengths. Drug cults, for example, were pursued as novel modes of experience, although they totally failed to link up with any genuine knowledge or creativity. Today the pendulum has swung the other way, and political leaders at least are required to have as narrow and conventional a background of experience as possible. Unfortunately, a lack of knowledge seems to be as highly prized as ever. Samuel Butler was a humanist trying to relate, as a humanist should, what he observed in his reading to the quality of human life, actual or potential. His satire Ereivhon depicts a society that has destroyed all its machinery. They had been persuaded to do this by a writer who told

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them that machines were not simply becoming more efficient, but were actually evolving as a new species, and evolving far too fast. They were, he said, just on the point of overcoming the last obstacle in the way of their taking over and enslaving humanity. That obstacle was their inability to reproduce their own kind, but they were now beginning to use human beings for that, as flowers use bees. So unless we destroy our machines we shall have no future except to become their genital organs.8 Today we are faced with machines of a complexity that Butler himself, to say nothing of his imaginary pamphleteer, never dreamed of. Butler was writing satire, and knew that to say that machines are evolving was a false analogy. (The satire was directed against Darwin, because Butler believed that it would not be a false analogy on strictly Darwinian premises.) Nevertheless, technological developments have certainly dragged us through several major social revolutions in this century, and many more are awaiting us. Hence they still illustrate the central question that Butler's view of education raises: the question whether we are to keep on transforming our natural environment for genuine human ends, or mechanically go on exploiting both it and one another until we arrive at total chaos, a cultural black hole from which no light can any longer emerge. So the need is greater than it ever was for humanist writers and scholars to keep fighting in the front line of the constant struggle of humanity to stay in control of its own lives and habits.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Details of the ogdoad and the Great Doodle are set out by Michael Dolzani in his introduction to TEN and in "The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye's Notebooks," in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 19-38. 2 The Secular Scripture is included in vol. 18 of the Collected Works, The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991, ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). 3 See "The Book of the Dead," 28, and LS, xvi. 4 "Novels and History and Northrop Frye," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24 (1990-91), 227. In his 1955 Diary, NF notes that "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility" was commissioned by Earl Wasserman of Johns Hopkins University as "a key paper revising all our ideas about that period," i.e., 1750-1800 (see D, 610). 5 In the introduction to FI—the book in which "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility" and the Byron and Dickinson essays included here were first collected—NF explains the focus of the volume in terms that are a barely coded reversal of the priorities Eliot sets out in For Lancelot Andrewes: "a tradition in which the major and prevailing tendencies are Romantic, revolutionary, and Protestant" (i). 6 "Response," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24 (1990-91): 246. 7 See "Response," 244. 8 "Northrop Frye as a Cultural Theorist," in Rereading Frye, 119. 9 For a full treatment of this subject, which the present essay to some extent qualifies, see my "Frye and Romanticism," in Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye's Criticism, ed. Robert D. Denham and Thomas Willard (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 57-74.

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Notes to pages xxvi-4

10 See Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); and Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). 11 Here I am employing the terms of the "Classical versus Romantic" debate that were established in the early criticism of T.S. Eliot, and were still being used to play off the two schools of poetry in the 19405 and 19505. They are not the terms that any critic would use today and NF himself exposes their limitations in "The Drunken Boat" (76). 12 See "Response," 249. 13 The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 142,150. 14 In "The Relations between Poetry and Painting," in The Necessary Angel, 175. 15 See also Notebook 19, where NF says that alongside the "political ambivalence of revolution and reaction" displayed in Romanticism there is "the ambivalence of the creator's position, as being a prophet and medium of a message, or as being the place of a pure aesthetic experience, with authority deriving from that" (TEN, 29). 16 See Harold Bloom, "The Internalization of Quest Romance," Yale Review, 58 (1969): 526-36. 17 Although NF was less certain of this in private. In a set of notes composed in 1972 called "Work in Progress" he writes: "Then there's the difficulty about the post-Romantic wheel, trying to see whether it's really different or whether my nagging feeling is right that the earlier carries on out of habit for much if not most of the period" (see TEN, 341). 18 The course is referred to frequently by NF in the Diaries, and is identified in the introduction as English 4k, "Nineteenth-Century Thought" (D, xxvii). 19 See "Northrop Frye," in Imre Salusinszky, Critisicm in Society (New York: Methuen, 1987), 41. 20 Blake, Annotations to Reynolds, p. 157, £656. 21 For a full discussion of the relation between NF's criticism and mnemotechnics, see Imre Salusinszky, "Frye and the Art of Memory", in Rereading Frye, 39-54. For the letter to Frank Kermode, dated 11 October 1967, see NFF, 1988, box 14, file k5. 22 See "Charles Dickens," in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 1:454-504, esp. p. 501. i. The Young Boswell 1 The Ghost, in The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 97 (bk. 2,1. 653). 2 E.g., in his A Vision, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1937), 73.

Notes to pages 5-11

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3 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 309. 4 Nicomachean Ethics, 4.7.14-15. 5 See "Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson," in The Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. Lady Trevelyan (London: Longmans, 1866), 5:498-538. 2. Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility 1 See "On Writing the History of English Criticism, 1650-1800," University of Toronto Quarterly, 22 (July 1953): 376-91. [NF] 2 In "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924), Woolf discusses the way that "Edwardian" writers like Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells would treat the character of Mrs. Brown (an old woman seen in a railway carriage) and contrasts this with writers such as herself, Joyce, and Lawrence. See The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 94-119. 3 "Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2 vols. in i (London: Dent, 1976), 1:427. 4 An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot, \. 182. 5 The Dunciad, bk. i, 1. 32. 6 Thomas Chatterton, Mynstrelles Song, in Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1:210. 7 William Collins, Ode to Evening, 11. 7-8, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longmans, 1969), 463. 8 Robert Fergusson, The Farmer's Ingle, in The Works of Robert Fergusson, ed. Alexander Grosart (New York: AMS Press, 1973), 61. 9 William Blake, The Clod and the Pebble, in Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 211; The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 19. Future references to Blake are given in the form K2ii/Ei9 for convenience of reference to these two standard sources. 10 "In Pope, I cannot read a line, / But with a sigh, I wish it mine: / When he can in one couplet fix / More sense than I can do in six": see Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, in Selected Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Kyle Cathie, 1992), 161 (11. 47-50). 11 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2:443. 12 See Norman Maclean, "From Action to Image," in Critics and Criticism [: Essays in Method], ed. R.S. Crane ([Chicago: University of Chicago Press,] 1952), 408-60. [NF]

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Notes to pages 11-24

13 See Edgar Allan Foe's essay "The Poetic Principle." 14 From Arthur Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant to Paul Demery: "Le Poete se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonne dereglement de tons les sens" ["The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses"], Oeuvres Completes, ed. Rolland de Reneville (Paris: Galimard, 1954), 270; cf. also p. 268. 15 Jubilate Agno, in Christopher Smart: Selected Poems, ed. Karina Williamson et al. (London: Penguin, 1990), 53. 16 Johnson says that Gray "seems in his rapture to confound the images of 'spreading sound' and 'running water.'" However, Johnson is talking about The Progress of Poesy, not The Bard. See "Gray," in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birbeck Hill (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), 3:436. 17 Rimbaud, Letter to Georges Izambard, Oeuvres Completes, 268. 3. Nature Methodized 1 "The Readie and Easy Way to Establish a Commonwealth," in The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-32), 1:149. 2 "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy," in Selected Prose of John Dry den, ed. Earl Miner (New York: Random House, 1969), 81. 3 John Wilson Croker (1780-1857) was a Tory politician who wrote a famously savage review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review in 1818. 4 Dobree accurately quotes Charles Gildon (1665-1734), from his Complete Art of Poetry (1718); Gildon's idea of rules in poetry is expressed by John Dennis (1657-1734) in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701). 5 The Spectator, no. 29 (3 April 1711). 6 Isaac Newton, Opticks, 2nd ed., Queries 28 and 31. 7 Marjorie Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). The poet who spoke of Newton and the Muse was Richard Glover (1712-85) in his On Sir Isaac Newton (1728), in The Poetical Works of Richard Glover, ed. Thomas Park (London: John Sharpe, 1806), 2:137-51. 8 This is a quotation from The Creation (1712) by Sir Richard Blackmore (ca. 1650-1729), a writer of copious epics, satires, and religious poems. 9 George Borrow, Lavengro, ed. W.I. Knapp (London: John Murray, 1907), 195 (chap. 31). 10 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (New York: New American Library, 1960), 300 (pt. 4, chap. 10). 4. Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility i The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore Howard Banks (New Haven: Archon Books, 1969), 77 (11.191-2).

Notes to pages 25-30

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2 In canto 63 of bk. 2, Beattie refers to "Those forms of bright perfection, which the bard . . . consecrates to never-dying fame." A footnote explains these as "General ideas of excellence, the immediate archetypes of sublime imitation, both in painting and in poetry." See The Poetical Works of James Beattie (London: Bell & Daldy, 1870), 59. 3 See Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux, The Art of Poetry (1680-83), 11. 373-428. 4 The Poems and Fables of John Dry den, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 839 (11. 87-9). 5 The phrase occurs in An Ode ("Shall I begin with Ah, or Oh?"). Originally attributed to William Cowper, it is now known to be by his friend Robert Lloyd. 6 Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West, in Poems of Gray, Collins and Coldsmith, 67. 7 The reference is to Oliver Goldsmith's essay "Account of the Augustan Age in England," published in The Bee in 1759, which defined the era of Congreve, Addison, and their contemporaries as "Augustan." 8 See "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," essay no. 2 in the present volume. 9 This line begins its public career, already as an example of scientific pseudopoetry, in chap. 18 of Biographia Literaria, which is undoubtedly NF's source. See Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. Donald A. Stauffer (New York: Random House, 1951), 311. The line is from a poem called Beneficial Effects of Inoculation, by William Lipscomb (1754-1842). 10 Stephen Duck, On Mites, in Poems on Several Occasions, 1736 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1973), 160. 11 Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick, at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane, 174.7, in The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 109 (11. 53-4). 12 Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 63 (11. 485-7). 13 See "Dryden," in Lives of the English Poets, 1:469. See also Horace, Epistles, 1.4.9. 14 Essay on Criticism, 11. 370-1. 15 Joseph Warton's chief work was his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (2 vols., 1756 and 1782). Though an admirer of Pope he criticized the Classical tendencies of eighteenth-century poetry and longed for a revival of imagination and passion. 16 Although the immediate association here is with F.R. Leavis's book The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis did not invent the phrase; hence the reference applies to all evaluative critics. 17 The Spectator, no. 413 (24 June 1712). 18 The reference is to the fundamental tenet of Bishop Berkeley's subjective idealism: "Esse est percipi or percipere" (The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop [London: Thomas Nelson, 1953], 1:53).

360

Notes to pages 30-45

19 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902). The book argued, against the social Darwinists, that those who support each other are more likely to survive than the competitive. 20 The full title of the 1714 edition of Mandeville's work was The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. 21 Robert Browning's Parleying with Bernard de Mandeville, in Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887). 22 Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 199. 23 Borrow, Lavengro, 195 (chap. 31). 24 Borrow, Lavengro, 423 (chap. 77). 25 Robert Bage, The Fair Syrian (New York: Garland, 1979), 2:81. 26 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 169. Marx says: "Of [Crusoe's] prayers and the like, we take no account here, since our friend takes pleasure in them and sees them as recreation." 27 See Swift, Gulliver's Travels, pt. 4, chaps. 4-10. 28 "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," in The Writings and Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Toronto: George N. Morang, 1901), 4:176. 29 See Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932). 30 Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 180 (vol. 3, chap. 36). 31 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 308. 5. CBC Goethe Salute i In act 2, Egmont says: "As if whipped on by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time sweep the light chariots of our destiny along, and the most we can do is to maintain courage and calm, hold the reins tight, and steer the wheels to right or left, here avoiding a stone and there avoiding a plunging crash." See Goethe's Plays, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 323. 6. Long Sequacious Notes 1 G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (London: Bodley Head, 1909), 1-2. 2 The exact phrase has not been found, but cf. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jiirgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken, 1973), 389. 3 In "Bentham" (1938), J.S. Mill refers to Bentham and Coleridge as "the two great seminal minds of England in their age." Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 77.

Notes to pages 45-57

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4 The aphorism reads simply, "A Word a Focal Point" (Inquiring Spirit, 101). 5 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London: Penguin, 1966), 302 (chap. 33). 6 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 1:174. 7 Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, 168-70. 8 "Psilanthropy" means "the doctrine that Jesus Christ was a mere man"; on p. 381 Coburn quotes Coleridge's Table Talk (1835), which applies this term to Unitarians. 9 "Captured one time by sharp desire, Apollo / Made him gifts of skills that were the god's—/ Augury and the lyre and speeding arrows. / lapyx, however, to postpone the death / Of a father desperately ill, preferred / To learn the powers of herbs, a healer's ways, / And practise without glory silent arts." Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (London: Penguin, 1985), 382 (bk. 12,11. 537-43)10 Arnold's quotation is from an article on Marx by John Macdonell: "Karl Marx and German Socialism," The Fortnightly Review, i March 1875, 391. 11 "If there be joy in the world, truly the man of pure heart possesses it." Thomas a Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, trans. Abbot Justin McCann (New York: New American Library, 1957), 56 (chap. 4). 7. Lord Byron 1 Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: J. Murray, 1973-82), 7:229 (18 November 1820). 2 Byron's Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1814) was set to music by Arnold Schoenberg as his Op. 41 (1942), with Napoleon's tyranny suggesting Hitler's. The piece was for string quartet, piano, and soloist, who declaimed in recitative (Sprechgesang). 3 Lady Jane Oxford (1774-1824) was married by her father to Edward Harley, the fifth Earl of Oxford, on 3 March 1794. It was a bad marriage and her husband was only in law the father of her children, who were called the Harleian Miscellany, after the literary collection brought together by the second Earl of Oxford. The affair with Byron started in 1812 and lasted for a couple of months, ending when she left for the Continent. 4 "'In the very grand and tremendous drama of Cain,' says Scott, 'Lord Byron has certainly matched Milton on his own ground.' And Lord Byron has done all this, Scott adds, 'while managing his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality.'... Alas,... one has only to repeat to oneself a line from Paradise Lost in order to feel the difference .... Byron is so negligent in his poetical style, he is often, to say the truth, so slovenly, slipshod, and infelicitous, he is so little haunted by the true use and con-

362

Notes to pages 57-70

summate management of words, that he may be described as having for this artistic gift the insensibility of a barbarian; — which is perhaps only another and less flattering way of saying, with Scott, that he 'manages his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality.'" See "Byron," in Essays in Criticism, 2nd ser., vol. 4 of The Works of Matthew Arnold, 15 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1903), 128-9. 5 See no. 2, n. 13 6 See Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1897), 19° (chap. 21). Although Byron's poem is recited on examination day at Tom Sawyer's school, it is not recited by Tom, who instead butchers Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death. 7 The quoted lines comprise the middle stanza of Byron's famous lyric, She Walks in Beauty. While it is one of many poems that Byron composed to music, it is not among those he titled Stanzas for Music. 8 Byron's Letters and Journals, 6:211 (20 August 1819). 9 See, for example, the edition of Hobhouse's Swiss Diary for the period from 26 August to 11 October 1816, published on line at http://www.hobbyo. com / s witzerland .php. 10 Byron's Letters and Journals, 2:194 (*3 September 1812). 11 Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), 1:12. 12 See Byron's Preface, in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 179-80. 13 William Beckford, Vathek, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E.F. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1966), 109. 14 Byron's Letters and Journals, 2:193 (1O September 1812). 15 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, in Three Gothic Novels, 48. 16 The phrase is from Byron's long letter to John Murray on William Lisle Bowles's edition of Pope, which Murray published as a pamphlet. See Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Peter Gunn (London: Penguin, 1984), 312. 17 Byron's Letters and Journals, 6:231 (26 October 1819). 18 Ibid., 8:148 (6 July 1821). 19 George Paston and Peter Quennell, "To Lord Byron" (London: John Murray, 1939), 15920 In his satire Apocolocyntosis, or the apotheosis of a pumpkin. 21 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: J.M. Dent, 1908), 145 (bk. 2, chap. 9). 22 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: J.M. Dent, 1912), 279-80 (bk. 4, chap. 7). 23 Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (London: Penguin, 1946), 12. 24 W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1970), 246. Yeats made the remark about George William Russell (AE).

Notes to pages 72-80

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8. Foreword to Romanticism Reconsidered 1 For Hulme's attack on Romanticism, see "Romanticism and Classicism" (probably dating from 1911-12, posthumously published 1924), in The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 59~73- In his own article NF alludes to Eliot's preference for poetry predating a "dissociation of sensibility" in his "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951). For some of Pound's anti-Romantic remarks, which included calling Wordsworth "a silly old sheep" and Blake "dippy William," see Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), 277, 72. 2 See NF's n. 3 to no. 9, below. 3 The Coleridge quotation is from the prose "Argument" to the poem Religious Musings, in Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, 91. 4 William Wordsworth, "Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads," in Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 4559. The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism 1 Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, ed. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 253 (7 August 1799). 2 T.E. Hulme, "Romanticism and Classicism," in Collected Writings, 66. 3 See the article "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms," [in Arthur O. Lovejoy] Essays in the History of Ideas ([Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,] 1948) [228-53]. [NF] 4 Of Education, in The Works of John Milton, 4:286. 5 Sarah Binks, by Paul G. Hiebert ([Toronto: Geoffrey Cumberlege,] 1947) [6]. The joke, however, like so many jokes, is anticipated in Finnegans Wake [London: Faber & Faber, 1939], 203. [NF] Joyce writes: "Was it yst with wyst or Lucan Yokan or where the hand of man has never set foot?" 6 Marjorie H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (1946). [NF] 7 Shelley's Jupiter is the supreme deity of Prometheus Unbound, referred to by Shelley in his preface as "the Oppressor of mankind." Byron's Arimanes is the Lord of Nemesis in Manfred, whose "shadow is the Pestilence" (2.4.913). The Lord in the prologue to Goethe's Faust invites Mephistopheles to try and do his worst to Faust. For the Baudelaire reference, see Even When She Walks in Les Fleurs du Mai, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982), 33. Hardy's Immanent Will appears, for instance, in The Unborn in Time's Laughingstocks and Other Poems. 8 A Vision, 8. 9 Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers ([New Haven: Yale University Press,] 1951). [NF]

364

Notes to pages 81-9

10 Religio Medici, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 1:26 (pt. i, sec. 16). 11 I am not assuming that man was not responsible for his civilization in preRomantic times, but it makes a good deal of psychological difference whether man is regarded as the continuous creator of his civilization or merely as the trustee of an original form given him by God. [NF] 12 Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2:2546. 13 Sonnet ("When I have fears that I may cease to be"), 1. 6. 14 As did T.S. Eliot in "The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 288. 15 The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:232 (19 February 1818). 16 Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, 237 (chap. 12). 17 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 207 (Lecture 6). 18 See "The Correspondent Breeze," reprinted in M.H. Abrams, ed., English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism ([New York: Oxford University Press,] 1960) [37-54]. [NF] 19 Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1:921. 20 Blake uses "Giant Forms" in the Preface to Jerusalem, "To the Public" (pi. 3); then again in pi. 53,1. 8 (K62O, 684/Ei45, 202). For Wordsworth's "huge and mighty forms" see The Prelude, bk. i, 1. 398 (1850) or 1. 425 (1805). 21 [Edward Bostetter,] The Romantic Ventriloquists ([Seattle: University of Washington Press,] 1963). [NF] 22 Letters of John Keats, 2:67 (19 February 1819). 23 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Speculations on Metaphysics, in Complete Works, ed Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 6:64. 24 The allusions to Blake are to the Introduction to the Songs of Experience, the "And did those feet" lyric from Milton, and the poem from the Rossetti MS beginning "The Caverns of the Grave I've seen." [NF] 25 Milton, pi. 15,1. 39 (K497/Eno). 26 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 158. 27 D.H. Lawrence, Selected Poems, ed. Mara Kalnins (London: J.M. Dent, 1992), 7528 Of particular interest is the Yeatsian identification of chance and choice in the passage quoted. [NF] In StS, NF then refers the reader to his discussion of Yeats's Thirteenth Cone, where chance and choice are one, in the essay "The Top of the Tower" (StS, 259). 29 Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, pt. 56: "Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek'd against his creed." 30 As NF's next remark indicates, he has in mind here W.H. Auden's Atlantis (1941), which describes a trip to Atlantis in a "ship of fools."

Notes to pages 90-9

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31 See no. 2, n. 14. 32 A topical allusion to a new book when the paper was written. [NF] See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). 33 T.S. Eliot, "Dante," in Selected Essays, 242. 34 In "Romanticism and Classicism" Hulme maintained that he neded to prove two things, "first that a classical revival is coming, and second, for its particular purposes, fancy will be superior to imagination" (59). For his stress on intuition over intellect in art, and his debt to Bergson, see p. 72. 35 Five poems appeared in The New Age in 1912 under the provocative title "Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme." By no means complete, the five poems represent nearly a quarter of Hulme's known compositions; however, the influence of Hulme's poetry was out of all proportion to its bulk. 36 See, for example, Arnold's discussion of the Romantics in "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Essays in Criticism, ist ser., vol 3 of The Works of Matthew Arnold, 7-11, which he concludes with the assertion about Byron and Wordsworth that "they had their source in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind." 37 Greek Architecture, in The Works of Herman Melville (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 287.

10 A Study of English Romanticism 1 In Shaw's one-act play of 1913, The Music Cure, the following exchange occurs: REGINALD [exhausted but calm]: Why does valerian soothe me when it excites cats? There's a question to reflect on! You know, they ought to have made me a philosopher. THE DOCTOR: Philosophers are born, not made. REGINALD: Fine old chestnut, that. Everybody's born, not made. THE DOCTOR: You're getting almost clever. From The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (London: Oldham Press, 1931), 1126. The original remark is not from Horace but is a proverbial tag. 2 The Garden of Cyrus, in Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 1:226 (chap. 5). 3 See Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe ([Oxford: Clarendon Press,] 1921). [NF] 4 Besides Blackmore's The Creation, quoted at p. 20, above, NF is thinking of such poems as the Hymn to Science by Mark Akenside (1721-70), An Essay on the Universe in Four Books by Moses Browne (1704-87), and the Ode to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton: Inscribed to the Royal Society by Allan Ramsay (1686-1758). 5 Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama (London: Macmillan, 1925), 522.

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Notes to pages 99-106

6 See "On Poesy or Art/' in Biographia Literaria, ed. [J.] Shawcross [London: Oxford University Press, 1954], 2:257-8. [NF] The terms natura naturata and natura naturans have medieval roots, but their modern usage in Schelling, Coleridge, and others descends from Spinoza. 7 Parenthetical references to Death's Jest-Book and Beddoes's other plays are to The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. H.W. Donner (London: Oxford University Press, 1935). 8 Blake, Europe, pi. 15,1. 2 (K245/E66). 9 The title of the pamphlet for which Shelley was expelled from Oxford. 10 Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 801. 11 Ibid., 812. 12 This term in this book means the whole period from the beginning of the Christian era down to the latter part of the eighteenth century. [NF] 13 Cf. Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris ([London: Faber & Gwyer,] 1928), chap. i. [NF] 14 For De Quincey's enthusiasm for Ricardo, see "Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy, Chiefly in Relation to the Principles of Mr. Ricardo" (1824), in The Works of Thomas De Quincey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1859), 10:195-287. See also "The Services of Mr. Ricardo to the Science of Political Economy, Briefly and Plainly Stated" (1824), in Thomas De Quincey: The Uncollected Writings (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1890), 1:154-9. The most convenient English source for Goethe's scientific writing is probably Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Surkhamp, 1988). This volume includes the first part of Goethe's Theory of Colour (German, 1810) as well as excerpts from his scientific journal On Morphology, which contains an "Outline for a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, Commencing With Osteology" (1820). 15 See his Hymne de I'Univers (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961). 16 T.S. Eliot's "unreal city" is in The Waste Land, 1. 60; Charles Baudelaire's "fourmillante cite" is from the preface to Les Fleurs du Mai; Belgian poet EmileVerhaeren (1855-1916) wrote Les Villes Tentaculaires in 1895. 17 The Prelude, bk. i, 1. 398 (1850) or 1. 425 (1805). 18 The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816-1879, £d. H.E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 2:144. 19 Religio Medici, in Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 1:26 (pt. i, sec. 16). 20 The concept of a "speaking picture" derives from Horace's Ut pictura poesis, or "As is painting, so is poetry" (Ars Poetica, \. 361). The idea that painting and poetry, as mimetic arts, are similar was widely repeated in Renaissance and later criticism, but began to be attacked in the eighteenth century by G.E. Lessing in his essay Laokoon (1766). 21 I take this term from Robert Schumann's piano music; cf. the

Notes to pages 106-25

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Davidsbundlertanze, op. 6, and the conclusion of the Carnival, op. 9 ("Marche des Davidsbiindler contre les Philistins"). [NF] In 1831 Schumann had invented a "League of David" composed of music lovers—dead, alive, and imaginary—to battle against Philistine musical tastes. 22 John Milton, Sonnet 16 (On His Blindness), 1. 3. 23 See the "Annotations to Reynolds," K465/E652. 24 This concept recurs throughout Hazlitt's work. See, for example, the lecture "On Shakespeare and Milton," reprinted in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 307-12. 25 The Higher Pantheism, in The Poetry of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969), 1204-5. 26 For a violent and roughly contemporary reaction to this, see George Borrow's The Romany Rye ([London: John Murray,] 1857), chap. 7 of the Appendix. [NF] 27 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 183. 28 The influence of these has, paradoxically, popularized the notion that Romanticism has no consistent imaginative structure, but is only a chaotic period of subjectivity and relativism, at most a number of contradictory tendencies, following the dissolution of the great chain of being. It is hoped that the present book, along with some of those listed in the bibliography, will help the reader to put Humpty Dumpty together again by himself. [NF] 29 The whole of Pound's Canto 45 is a complaint about "usura" (usury). "Usura slayeth the child in her womb / It stayeth the young man's courting / It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth / between the young bride and her bridegroom / CONTRA NATURA" and so on. 30 See "The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 288. 31 Wordsworth, The Recluse, 1. 821. 32 Rimbaud, Lettre du voyant. See also no. 2, n. 14. 33 Endymion, bk. 2,1.14. 34 The Vision of Judgment, 11. 688-9. 35 See Friedrich Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966). 36 Despondency Corrected is the title of bk. 4 of Wordsworth's The Excursion. 37 This is, of course, Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony ([London: Oxford University Press,] 1933). [NF] 38 The poem, whose first line is "O why was I born with a different face," occurs in a letter to Butts, 16 August 1803, K828-9/E733. 39 No. 206 of his Pensees (1670), normally translated as "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." 40 The scheme of the present book perhaps owes something to that of D.G. James, The Romantic Comedy ([London: Oxford University Press,] 1948), though the differences in attitude are obvious. [NF]

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Notes to pages 126-39

41 I am not suggesting that it was Beddoes's fault that his play was not published earlier, only that it is always unfortunate for literature not to have important works published in their primary chronological place. I think this principle applies also to the poetry of Hopkins. [NF] 42 Life and Habit, vol. 4 of The Works of Samuel Butler (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 109. 43 These lines are spoken by Orlando. 44 Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 614-15. 45 Bosola is a main character in John Webster's The Duchess ofMalfi (written 1612/13, published 1623); Vendice is the misguided revenger of The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) by Thomas Middleton. 46 Edward E. Bostetter's The Romantic Ventriloquists[: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron (Seattle: University of Washington Press,] 1963) deals with this feature of Romantic poetry, though it is not concerned with Beddoes. [NF] 47 Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 595. 48 T.S. Eliot, "Christopher Marlowe," in Selected Essays, 123. 49 Death Sweet, in Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 243. 50 "Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry" (1864). [NF] See The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot (London: The Economist, 1965), 2:321-66. 51 "The Works of Edgar Allan Poe," Essays and Reviews. [NF] See The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), 24:107-17. 52 Yeats does not refer specifically to the bardo in his poems or letters, but "The Gates of Pluto" (the final section of A Vision, 1926) includes some discussion of reincarnation. Yeats describes the "coming to self-knowledge" of the spirit after death, and the various states that the soul undergoes before its "return." 53 The Phases of the Moon, 1.118. 54 I owe this view of Goethe to Barker Fairley, Goethe's Faust: Six Essays ([Oxford: Clarendon Press,] 1953). [NF] 55 In a letter to Thomas Forbes Kelsall (i April 1826), Beddoes wrote: "Thank you for the box to day—because it has come. You're right, the Cenci is best, because truest. [...] Why did you send me the Cenci? I open my own page, & see at once what damned trash it all is. No truth or feeling" (Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 619). 56 Cf. Eliot's comment on the "tomorrow" speech in "The Three Voices of Poetry," in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 100. 57 "The plot then is the first principle and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: character comes second" (Poetics, 6.14). 58 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pi. 7,1.18 (Ki5i/E36). 59 From Gosse: the Donner Variorum edition has another and much more verbose reading. [NF] See Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 328-9.

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60 This remark, on reflection, seems pointless, except that it is true that Beddoes's world of the dead tends to become, like Shelley's world of immortality, an explicitly mythological world. [NF] 61 The eponymous character of "Hop-Frog" is a crippled, dwarf jester who takes revenge on his captor-king by tricking him and his seven ministers into attending a masque as chained Ourang-Outangs, then setting the room on fire with the masquers trapped inside. 62 J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (London: Methuen, 1961), 108 (act 3). 63 The allusion is to the comic retelling of medieval legends by R.H Barham (1788-1845). The poems first appeared in Bentley's Miscellany and The New Monthly Magazine starting in 1837, and were first collected in 1840. 64 Martin Heidegger is the main philosopher to make use of this concept. Heidegger uses Augenblick to mean a "moment of vision." A key usage is found in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 387-8. 65 Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 252-3. 66 Ibid., 240. 67 Fragment, Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 496. 68 Fragment, Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 492. 69 In i Samuel 28:7-20, Saul in disguise consults the Witch of Endor, who summons the recently-dead prophet Samuel to advise him. 70 Written in an Album at Clifton, in Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 103. 71 Draft version of lines by Sibylla: see Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 399. 72 There seems in fact to be a definite influence from Kant on Beddoes: see H.W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes ([Oxford: Basil Blackwell,] 1935), 213. [NF] For "Kant's riddle," see p. 167, below. 73 The theme of his Being and Nothingness (1943; trans. 1957). 74 Shelley refers to Nature's, and Necessity's, "unvarying harmony" in the sixth section of Queen Mab, 1. 203. 75 For Prometheus, see Shelley: Poetical Works, 826. In Blake's Jerusalem, Los complains to Jerusalem that "thou hast bound me down upon the Stems of Vegetation" (pi. 60,1.11, E2io/K692). 76 According to Graves, The Greek Myths, the name means "Disposer" (index). "Tethys' and Thetis' are names of the goddess as Creatrix (formed, like 'Themis' and Theseus,' from tithenai, 'to dispose' or 'to order'), and as Seagoddess, since life began in the sea" (11.2). 77 In the essay On Life (1815). For Godwin as a possible intermediate influence here see the edition of Godwin's Political Justice by F.E.L. Priestley ([Toronto: University of Toronto Press,] 1946), 3:109. [NF] 78 Introduction to Songs of Experience, K2io/Ei8. 79 A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 503.

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Notes to pages 155-64

80 Coleridge's essay "On the Principles of Genial Criticism" was originally conceived as a means of promoting an exhibition of the paintings of his friend Washington Allston (1779-1843), though in its final form it alluded only briefly to him (Biographia Literaria, 2:223,237)- NF may have in mind rather the long description of Allston's Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase (1806), in which Coleridge virtually wanders through the landscape. See The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2, pt. i, entry 2831. For natura naturans, see n. 6, above. 81 Shelley: Poetical Works, 811. 82 Ibid., 827. 83 Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 505-6. 84 Prometheus Unbound, 3.4.39; Endymion, bk. i, 1.16; The Bride's Tragedy, 3.5.8. [NF] 85 See A Defence of Poetry and The Four Ages of Poetry, ed. John E. Jordan (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1965), 42n. 52. 86 E.M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,] 1935). [NF] 87 Yeats's The Phases of the Moon brings together "Milton's Platonist" and "Shelley's visionary prince" (11. 15-16). The alternation of civilizations that are "primary" (objective, "comic," and democratic, as in Christianity) and those that are "antithetical" (subjective, "tragic," and aristocratic, as in Classical times), is a major theme in A Vision. 88 If this book had been a study of German Romanticism, the three poets chosen would (probably) have been Kleist, Heine, and Holderlin. The substitution of Heine for Shelley would have made this part of the argument easier to follow, as Heine adopts the old Joachim of Floris conception of the dawn of a third age of the Spirit following after the ages of Father and Son. See the ballad "Tannenbaum, mit griinen Fingern" in Die Harzreise (1826). Similarly in Blake, the martyred Son-figure, Ore or Luvah, is the son, not of the Father-figure Urizen, but of the Spirit-figure Los. [NF] 89 Shelley: Poetical Works, 812. 90 Fragments of an Unfinished Drama, in Shelley: Poetical Works, 483 (11.15-19). 91 Shelley: Poetical Works, 206. 92 Ibid., 277. 93 In particular, Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson ([London: SPCK,] 1953), and The Mind and Heart of Love, by M.C. D'Arcy, S.J. ([London: Faber,] 1945). [NF] 94 Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 505. 95 In his Defence of Poetry, p. 506, Shelley says that "It [poetry] justifies that bold and true word of Tasso—Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta" (None deserve the name of creator except God and the Poet). The quotation is from Pierantonio Serassi's Italian Life ofTorquato Tasso (1785).

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For the universal human mind in On Life, see Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 478. 96 NF is here equating creation and fall in Blakean manner. What Augustine actually says is that time came into existence with the creation. See Saint Augstine, Confessions, trans, with introduction and notes Henry Chad wick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 229 ff. (bk. 11, sec. 13 ff.). 97 Milton, pi. 15,11.39, 46 (K497/Eno). 98 Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 154 (16 November 1819). 99 Prometheus Unbound, 3.4.1. 100 T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 174 (act 3,11. 423-31)101 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1. 317. 102 "There may be heaven; there must be hell; / Meantime, there is our earth here—well!" Time's Revenges (1845), 11. 65-6. 103 Shelley: Poetical Works, 448. 104 "Note on Prometheus Unbound," in Shelley: Poetical Works, 271. 105 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934), 35. 106 "The Four Ages of Poetry," rpt. in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 509-14. 107 Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 482, 493. 108 Ibid., 505. 109 Ibid., 506. no T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, 1. 89 (end of pt. 2). 111 Letters of John Keats, 2:102 (21 April 1819). 112 Ibid., 1:243 ( X 3 March 1818). 113 The Fall of Hyperion, canto i, 1.199. 114 Letters of John Keats, 1:185 (22 November 1817). 115 Ibid., 1:139 (10 May 1817). 116 Ibid., 1:170 (8 October 1817). 117 Ibid., 1:281 (3 May 1818). 118 Ode on Indolence, \. 54. 119 Parenthetic references are to canto and line of Endymion. 120 See Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography ([London: Murray,] 1957), 2:886. [NF] Marchand points out that in a letter to John Murray (4 November 1820), Byron wote: "The Edinburgh praises Jack Keats or Ketch, or whatever his names are: why his is the Onanism of Poetry." In a later letter to Murray (9 November 1820), Byron added, "such writing is a sort of mental masturbation—he is always f—gg—g his Imagination. I don't mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into such a state, which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium."

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Notes to pages 181-202

121 Point Counter Point (Penguin: London, 1955), 124 (chap. 10). Rampion calls Shelley "a mixture between a fairy and a white slug." 122 Edmund Spenser, Mutabilitie, in The Fairie Queen, ed. Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1978), 1055 (canto 8, st. 2). 123 Letter to Ellen Delp, 27 October 1925. [NF] 124 The Crystal Cabinet, 1. 21 [K429/E488]. 125 Sonnet 5, Those hours that with gentle work did frame, 1.10. 126 Ode to a Nightingale, 1. 24 (st. 3). 127 Keats: Poetical Works, 351. 128 In a letter to Richard Woodhouse of 27 October 1818 Keats remarks that the poet has no identity; in a letter to George and Thomas Keats of 21 December 1817 he comments on the poet's "negative capability" of remaining in uncertainties. See Letters of John Keats, 1:387,193. 129 Letters of John Keats, 1:387 (27 October 1818). 130 Ibid., 1:207 (23 January 1818). 131 In Edgar Allan Poe's story "Ligeia," the narrator's second wife comes back from the dead and appears to take possession of him in the persona of his loved first wife Ligeia. 132 Letters of John Keats, 1:277 (3 May 1818). 133 Martin Heidegger, Erlaiiterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung (1951). Two of Heidegger's Holderlin essays are translated in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock ([London: Vision,] 1949). [NF] 134 Letters of John Keats, 1:185 (22 November 1817). 135 See T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 287-8. 136 Cf. Andrew Marvell, Thoughts in a Garden, 11. 47-8: "Annihilating all that's made, / To a green thought in a green shade." 137 Letters of John Keats, 2:323 (16 August 1820). 138 Ibid., 1:186 (22 November 1817). 139 Ibid., 1:143 (n May 1817). 140 Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, 1.100. 141 Letters of John Keats, 1:231 (19 February 1818). 142 So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch, in Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 296 (11. 23-4). 143 Letters of John Keats, 1:243 (^3 March 1818). 144 Ibid., 2:208 (21 September 1819). 145 Ibid., 1:232 (19 February 1818). 146 Ode on a Grecian Urn, st. 2,1. 4. 147 Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk. 6,1. 639. 148 Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 11.1-2 (K431/E49O). 149 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 504. 150 Letters of John Keats, 2:146 (24 August 1819). 151 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 12,1. 587.

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152 The reference is to the optimistic tutor in Voltaire's Candide (1759), who taught that this was the best of all possible worlds. 153 Letters of John Keats, 2:101 (21 April 1819). 154 Ibid., 1:185 (22 November 1817). 155 Ibid., 2:102 (21 April 1819). 156 Ibid., 2:5 (16 December 1818). 157 Ibid., 1:218 (30 January 1818). 158 T.S. Eliot, "Poetry and Drama," in On Poetry and Poets (1957), 87. [NF] 159 "The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." Biographia Literaria, 1:202 (chap. 13). 160 See no. 6, n. 7. 11. John Keats 1 Letters of John Keats, 1:185 (22 November 1817). 2 The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 2:173-6. 3 Letters of John Keats, 1:387 (27 October 1818). 4 The Keats Circle, 2:144. 5 Predictably, the efforts of Keats and Shelley were entitled Sonnet-—To the Nile, Hunt's being Sonnet—The Nile. 6 Letters of John Keats, 1:264 (8 April 1818). 7 For these three reviews, see Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G.M. Matthews (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 97-110,110-14, and 91-6. 8 Letters of John Keats, 2:293 (10 June 1818). 9 "Keats seems to me also a great poet.... The Odes—especially perhaps the Ode to Psyche—are enough for his reputation." T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), 100. 10 Burton relates the story of one Menippus Lycius, who was seduced by a serpent or "Lamia," from the fourth book of Philostratus's De vita Apollonii. See The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3:45-6 (3rd partition, sec. 2, member i, subsec. i). 11 Letters of John Keats, 2:167 (21 September 1819). 12 The Keats Circle, 2:73-4. 13 Letters of John Keats, 2:323 (16 August 1820). 14 Ibid., 2:359 (3° November 1820). 15 Ibid., 2:360 (30 November 1820). 16 The Keats Circle, 2:152. 17 In a letter dated 15 November 1888 to Buxton Forman (editor of Letters to Fanny Brawne, 1878), Patmore wrote, "I find nothing in these letters that

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Notes to pages 214-31

deserves a much better name than lust/ which, when compared with the integrity of heat in true passion, is toad-cold." Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, ed. Basil Champneys (London: George Bell, 1900), 2:271. Matthew Arnold, after quoting one of Keats's letters to Fanny, says that "It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. The sensuous man speaks in it, and the sensuous man of a badly-bred and badly trained sort." "John Keats," in Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism, ist and 2nd ser. (London: Everyman, 1964), 283. 18 The Keats Circle, 1:69. 12. Kathleen Hazel Coburn 1 When NF showed Coburn a draft of Fearful Symmetry, she was horrified at the complete lack of footnotes (Ayre, 187-8). 2 For the attitude of NF's Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden, see NFHK, 2:864. 3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ed. David Erdman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 2:78 14. In the Earth, or In the Air? 1 Selected Writings of Hans Denck, ed. and trans. Edward J. Furcha (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1975), 135. 2 Gouffre du neant may be translated "abyss of nothingness." The two poems by Baudelaire are Le Gouffre (1862) and Le Gout du neant (1859). 3 "Your Sailing to Byzantium, magnificent as the first three stanzas are, lets me down in the fourth, as such a goldsmith's bird is as much nature as man's body, especially if it only sings like Homer and Shakespeare of what is past or passing or to come to Lords and Ladies." Letter of Moore to Yeats, 16 April 1930, in W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 19011937, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 162. 4 W.B. Yeats, Blood and the Moon, pt. 2,1.14, and The Circus Animals' Desertion, final line. 5 Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 88. 15. Review of Patience and The Silver Box 1 It was this production of The Gondoliers that cemented the relationship between NF and Helen Kemp, he operating the arc light while she held the prompt book (see NFHK, 1:390,2:602). 2 Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), who was awarded honorary doctorates in

Notes to pages 231-42

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music from Durham University (1910), Oxford (1926), and Manchester (1930), and an LL.D. from St. Andrews in 1928, is most admired for her Mass in D (1891) and for her opera The Wreckers (1902-4). American composer, conductor, and critic Reginald de Koven (1859-1920) helped to establish the style of American light opera with musicals such as Robin Hood (1900) and The Highwayman (1897). 3 In NF's second year, "the drama group, Vic Dramatics, fell apart organizationally and Frye helped to pick up the pieces and organize the year" (Ayre, 66). 16. Review of H.M.S. Pinafore i Gate House, where NF had a single room from his second year on, was the "house" that linked the newer to the older section of the men's residence, Burwash Hall. 20. James, Le Farm, and Morris i Possibly Sir Oswald Mosley (1896-1980), The Alternative (Mosley Publications, 1947), which deals with the crisis of the European democracies in the face of Communism. 22. Joan Evans's John Ruskin 1 Peter Quennell, John Ruskin: The Portrait of a Prophet (1949); Derrick Leon, Ruskin, the Great Victorian (1949); Reginald Howard Wilenski, John Ruskin: An Introduction to Further Study of His Life and Work (1933). 2 Ruskin married Euphemia ("Effie") Gray in 1848. The marriage was annulled in 1854 for non-consummation, and in 1855 Gray married the painter John Everett Millais. In Evans's words, Ruskin "set his heart upon the child Rosa La Touche" (251) when they first met in 1859; she was ten years old, he was forty. On her seventeenth birthday he asked her to marry him, but her increasing mental instability and her parents' opposition precluded this. She died "wholly mad" (353) in 1875. Also in 1859, Ruskin met Margaret Alexis Bell, the headmistress of a private girls' school at Winnington, Cheshire. He paid frequent extended visits to the school until he quarrelled with Bell in 1865, enjoying chiefly, Evans suggests, the presence of the young female students "who fluttered everywhere and smiled at him as he passed" (256). The St. George's Company or Guild had its origin in the May 1871 number of Fors Clavigera, when Ruskin began soliciting funds for a scheme to buy land which was to be cultivated without the benefits of steam power, ready-made goods, and individual freedom (341). The Guild's

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Notes to pages 243-66

essentially vague and unworkable conception made failure inevitable, and Ruskin abandoned the scheme in 1886. The Whistler libel suit of 1878 arose when the painter sued Ruskin for writing of his Nocturne in Black and Gold that he had "never expected a coxcomb to ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" (372). Whistler won his case, but was awarded only a farthing in damages, both sides being ordered to pay their own legal costs. 3 Evans at 285n. 2 refers the reader to J.A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834-81 (1844), 2:298. 23. Emily Dickinson 1 References in square brackets preceded by "L" are to the numbered letters in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). 2 References in square brackets not preceded by an "L" are to the numbered poems in Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber & Faber, 1970). 3 Towards the end of chap. 2 of Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), the Red Queen says to Alice: "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: The Modern Library, 1900), 166. 4 Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 99. 5 Millicent Todd Bingham, Ancestors' Brocades (New York: Harper, 1945), 16. 6 Bingham, Ancestors' Brocades, 127. 7 "Walt Whitman," in Robert Louis Stevenson: Essays and Poems (London: J.M. Dent, 1992), 149. 8 The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 3:840. 9 The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3:1002. 10 The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 2:480. 11 See Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 1. 52. [NF] 12 From Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, ed Gardner D. Stout, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 262 ("Maria"). 13 See "The Gospel of the Hebrews," in The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars' Version, ed. Robert J. Miller (San Fransciso: HarperCollins, 1994), 432 (4b). 14 Unnumbered fragment, Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3:920.

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15 The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3:825. 16 Unnumbered fragment, Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3:925. 24. The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century 1 All three of Milton's antiprelatical tracts, "Of Reformation" (1641), "Of Prelatical Episcopacy" (1641), and "The Reason of Church Government" (1642) express the view that the Gospels do not sanction the existence of bishops. See The Works of John Milton, 3:514-617, 618-52, 736-861. For an example of a bishop who is really an overseer, see Milton's description of Timothy as Bishop of Ephesus, 3:630-1. 2 Areopagitica, in The Works of John Milton, 4:319. Aristotle's proairesis is generally translated "choice" with the sense of "deliberate choice" (e.g., Ethics, 17) or "purposive choice." 3 The Reason of Church-government urg'd against Prelaty, in Works of John Milton, 3:225. 4 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Works of John Milton, 5:19. 5 Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 4:169-70. 6 Ibid., 4:162. 7 Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 8:84. 8 Ibid., 8:72. 9 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 4:174. 10 Ibid., 4:175. 11 Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 8:129-30. 12 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 168. 13 Butler, Life and Habit, 18. 14 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (London: Pan Books, 1976), 340 (chap. 78). 15 Samuel Butler, Erewhon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 145 (chap. 17). 16 William Morris, News from Nowhere, ed. Krishan Kumar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 100 (chap. 15). 17 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 4:177. 18 J.S. Mill, "Bentham," 108. 19 "Utilitarianism," in Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 207. 20 The reference is to John Stuart Mill's wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, a strong-

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Notes to pages 281-95

minded feminist and socialist. In his Autobiography Mill praised her extravagantly as his intellectual superior and the inspirer, reviser, and virtual coauthor of many of his works. 21 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 78 (discourse 5, sec. 2). 22 Ibid., 78 (discourse 5, sec. 2). 23 Ibid., 85 (discourse 5, sec. 6). 24 Ibid., 135 (discourse 7, sec. 6). 25 Culture and Anarchy, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 5:190-1 (chap. 5). 26 Ibid., 147 (chap. 3). 27 Ibid., 113 (chap. i). 28 Theses on Feuerbach, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 5:3. 29 Culture and Anarchy, 184 (chap. 5). 30 T.H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London: Pilot Press, 1947), loin. 20. 25. Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 1 In chap. 15 of The Warden Trollope describes how Mr. Popular Sentiment produces a novel, The Almshouse, exposing with melodramatic exaggeration the supposed abuses of the clergy. 2 T.S. Eliot, "Wilkie Collins and Dickens," in Selected Essays, 468. 3 AC, 166. [NF] 4 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 13. 5 Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Margaret Card well (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 217 (chap. 23). 6 Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (1900), passim. 7 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 908 (chap. 66). 8 [E.M. Forster] Aspects of the Novel ([Harmondsworth: Penguin,] 1927) 80 (chap.3, "People")]. [NF] 9 See, for example, Bleak House, 223 (chap. 15) and 341 (chap. 23). 10 Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 54 (bk. 2, chap. 6). 11 Ibid., 625 (bk. 18, chap. 48). 12 See, for example, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 468 (chap. 39). 13 Bouvard et Pecuchet is an unfinished novel by Flaubert, published posthumously in 1881. The original edition contained, as an appendix, Flaubert's

Notes to pages 295-315

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

379

"Dictionnaire des Idees Recus," which was published as a separate volume in 1913. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 209 (chap. 27). Wyndham Lewis, "An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce," in Time and Western Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 1O5See Wyndham Lewis, "The Greatest Satire is Non-Moral," in Men without Art (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 92-3. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. John Holloway (London: Penguin, 1973), 579 (bk. 2, chap. 8). Ibid., 725 (bk. 2, chap. 21). Dickens, Oliver Twist, 422 (chap. 51). See NF's "The Argument of Comedy," in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D.A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58-73. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 39 (bk. i, chap. i). Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. George Woodcock (London: Penguin, 1970), 137 (bk. 2, chap. 7). Lewis Carrroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 7. 26. The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris

1 "Morris as I Knew Him," in Bernard Shaw: The Complete Prefaces, ed. Dan H. Laurence and Daniel J. Leary (London: Penguin, 1993-97), 3:2&42 J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 1:10. 3 Mackail, Life of William Morris, 332. 4 The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 1:162 (22 June 1872). 5 Collected Letters of William Morris, 2:807 (9 August 1882). 6 The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 96. 7 "Author's Preface," in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W.H. Gardner and N.H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 45. 8 Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 29. 9 William Morris, News from Nowhere, 33 (chap. 5). 10 "The Lesser Arts," in The Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A.L. Merton (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 40. 11 Carryle, Sartor Resartus, 210. 12 "The Nature of Gothic," in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), 10:197. 13 Life of William Morris, 2:210.

380

Notes to pages 317-31

14 Political Writings of William Morris, 241. 15 See Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (New York: Modern Library, 1951), chaps. 6 and 11. 16 Morris, News from Nowhere, 70 (chap. 10). 17 William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), 2:506. 18 Ibid., 2:507. 19 Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 134. 20 Collected Letters of William Morris, 2:203 (i July 1883). 21 Morris, News from Nowhere, 202 (chap. 29). 22 "The Nature of Gothic," in Complete Works of John Ruskin, 10:188. 23 See no. 10, n. 29. 24 William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, ed. Florence S. Boos (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1:52. 25 W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (Gerrard's Cross: Colin Smythe, 1981), 86. 26 Morris, The Earthly Paradise, 1:342. 27. The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifal 1 Nietzsche said of Wagner and Schopenhauer that "they negate life, they slander it." Of Parsifal he remarked, "For Parsifal is a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life—a bad work." Nietzsche Contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 670, 675. 2 NF's Notebook 143 has a lengthy book-by-book analysis of Wolfram's poem: see Michael Dolzani's edition of Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance, CW, 15 (NR, 167-81). 3 Wagner wrote to Ludwig: "Yes! I must have complete freedom with this final work; for, like Tell, I am bound to say that if this too slips weakly from my hands, I have no other work to send out into the world." See Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans, and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1987), 896 (25 August 1879). 4 Buhnenweihfestspiel (a stage-consecrating festival drama) was Wagner's subtitle for Parsifal. 5 AC, 282. 6 See esp. Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, 458-9. 7 Chretien de Troyes left his Perceval; ou le Roman graal unfinished at his death ca. 1185; there were at least three early medieval continuations. Chretien de Troyes's Arthurian Romances, trans. W.W. Comfort (Dent, 1967), is an annotated volume in NF's library in Victoria University Library. 8 "To have Chr. sung by a tenor—what a disgusting idea!" Cosima Wagner's

Notes to pages 335-53

381

Diaries, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (London: Collins, 1978-80), 2:935. 9 W.H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 404. 10 See sec. 52, bk. 3, of The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover, 1966), 1:255-67. 11 For the abuse, see n. i above. Nietzsche praised the overture as, among other things, "a sublime and extraordinary feeling, experience, happening of the soul at the basis of the music, which does Wagner the highest credit.... Has any painter ever painted such a melancholy gaze of love as Wagner did with the last accents of his prelude?" Selected Letters ofFriedrich Nietzsche, ed. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 259-60 (21 January 1887). 12 Alfred Lorenz, Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner (The Secret of Form in Richard Wagner), 4 vols. (Berlin: Hesses Verlag, 1924-33), an analysis of the later operas. 28. Some Reflections on Life and Habit 1 Butler, Life and Habit, 137. 2 Ibid., 22. Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92) was a fiery English Baptist who preached to large crowds at his Metropolitan Temple in London. 3 Ibid., 109. 4 Ibid., 67. 5 Ibid., 44. 6 Ibid., 203. 7 NF is no doubt referring to Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). 8 Butler, Erewhon, 202-5 (chap. 24).

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Emendations

page/line 2 5/6-7 26/35 27/39 28/11 31/20 32/5

story or plot for study or plot (as in TSS) religion for relation (as in TSS) limitation or for limitation of For we that live to please for And they that live to please Blessed Mary Flanders for the Blessed Mary of Flanders "I prefer death a thousand times" for "I had rather death a thousand times" 32/6 "And I prefer a thousand times - to death" for "I had rather a thousand times than death" 36/7 the cultural the fairly new for the cultural to the fairly new 49/9 Arnold's reading for Arnold reading 66/4 as popular for at popular 67/19 Lake Poets for Lake poets (as earlier in the essay) 70/20 "vagabond libertine" for "libertine vagabond" 72/15 are all the more significant for is all the more significant 76/21 "I object even to the best of the Romantics" for "I object to even the best of the Romantics" 89/2 hedgehog in for hedgehog. In (as in Romanticism Reconsidered) 99/7 Monsters for Mountains 106/17 Davidsbund for Davidsbundler 134/33-4 "Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents" for "Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the final crescents" 143/22 this world for the world 157/8 A Defence for The Defence (and elsewhere) 169/27 lone remarks for Panthea remarks 206/8 livery stable for livery stables 221/37 new kind of relationship for new relation 225/20-1 others on the redemptive for others the redemptive

384 230/36 232/4

Emendations

works of German composers for works of German those who were present on both nights for those who were on both nights 279/7 We have now found out for We know 280/22-3 essay On Liberty for Essay on Liberty 296/13 grotesque puppet for "grotesque puppet" (the phrase itself does not appear in the novel) 323/17 House of the Wolf ings for House of Wolf ings 325/13 in The Earthly for the The Earthly 332/14 been transformed for transformed 335/10 Parsifal is much more for The Parsifal is much more (corrected in NF's offprint) 336/27 what this means altogether for what this meant altogether (corrected in NF's offprint) 344/2 Butler realized for Butler realizes (as in preliminary TS) 344/4 He quoted for He quotes 353/9 never dreamed of for ever dreamed of (as in MM)

Index

Abrams, M(eyer) H(oward) (Mike) (b. 1912): "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age" (1963), 72, 73, 74; The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), 11, 84; Natural Supernaturalism (1971), 222 Absurd, the, 156; in Beddoes, 150; in Dickens, 289, 307-8; knowledge as, 133-4 Achilles, 160 Acta Victoriana: NF writes for, 234 Actaeon, 183 Action: in Beddoes, 139-40,143; and consciousness, 166; heroic, 165, 334-5; in Milton, 164,166 Adam, 80,163; Christ as new, 330; dream of, 180; knowledge of, 87-8; in Milton, 63, 83,104; traditional and Romantic, 103 Addison, Joseph (1672-1719): aphorisms of, 19; on taste, 28; The Vision ofMirza (1711), 60 Adonis, Gardens of, 85,184,186 Aesthetics: and ideology, 220-1; of Morris, 315 Agape, 162; and eros, 163; redemption via, 105. See also Caritas; Love Alchemy, 98. See also Magic Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (1836-1907), 253

Alienation, 124, 316; myth, 177; from nature, 103 Allegory: life as, 85; in Morris, 312 Allston, Washington (1779-1843): Coleridge on, 155 America: discovery of, 35; geometry of, 153-4 American Civil War, 248, 251, 270 Amory, Thomas (1691-1788): The Life of John Bunde (1756), 25 Amphion, 190,193 Anabasis: and rebirth, 190. See also Ascent Analogy, 20, 97; as language of God, 107; "like" as sign of, 162 Anarchy, 125; in Dickens, 296, 300; in Morris, 317-18 Anatomy form: in the eighteenth century, 25 Anaximander (ca. 610-546 B.C.), 144 Andromeda, 305 Animals: in Dickens, 305; in poetry, 13 Annals of the Fine Arts, 210 Anthropomorphism, 222 Anti-intellectualism, 352 Aphorisms: of Coleridge, 43-5, 48. See also Fragmentation Apocalypse, 222-3,282; in Keats, 201; and liberty, 273; thinking of, 173

386 Apollo: in Keats, 193; oracle of, 115 Apuleius, Lucius (b. ca. A.D. 125), 186 Aquinas, St. Thomas (ca. 1225-74): Summa Theologica, 94 Arbuthnot, John (1667-1735): The History of John Bull (1712), 20 Archetype(s), 73; from Beattie, 24-5; Beddoes's characters as, 138 Architecture: Gothic, 322; Morris on, 315 Ariel, 158,159 Aristocracy, 344; authority of, 276-9 passim; barbarians as, 283; in Dickens, 298; fraternity of, 320; Romantic view of, 109-10. See also Leisure class Aristophanes (ca. 448-ca. 388 B.C.): The Frogs, 134 Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), 6, 8,115; on catharsis, 12; on plot, 137; proairesis in, 273 Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), 9, 271; as anti-Romantic, 90; on Byron, 57; on culture, 282-4; on liberty, 320; on Keats, 214; on the university, 2856; Culture and Anarchy (1869), 283; Empedodes on Etna (1852), 118; Notebooks of Matthew Arnold, ed. Lowry et al. (1950), 48-9 Arthur, legend of, 328. See also Grail Artist: responsibility of, 105-6 Art(s), 81; counter-environment of, 106; democratization of, 317; identity of, 328; moral force of, 176-7; and nature, 8,19; origin of, 69; as play, 25; reality via, 286; Romanticism in, 75-6; and society, 309 Ascent: of Christ, 114; failure of, 193; in Keats, 190-1. See also Anabasis; Quest

Index Asimov, Isaac (1920-92): Foundation trilogy (1951-53), 311 Astrology, 98 Astronomy, 98,100; in Chaucer, 107-8 Atlantic Monthly, 248 Atlantis, 89,190; in Romantic myth, 86; in Shelley, 167 Attis, 331 Auchinleck, Lord (1706-82), 6 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907-73), 69, 90; For the Time Being (1944), 89; The Sea and the Mirror (1944), 335 Augustan Age, 7, 321-2; art in, 11; characteristics of, 27; interpenetration in, 29-30; metaphor in, 14 Augustine, St. (A.D. 354-430), 58; on the fall, 166 Aurelius, Marcus (A.D. 121-80), 49 Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 32,76; comedies of, 123; Love and Freindship (pub. 1922), 82,111; Northanger Abbey (1818), 59, 82; Pride and Prejudice (1813), 54; Sense and Sensibility (1811), 82 Authority: of genius, 106; spiritual, 271-86 passim; temporal, 274-7 passim Autohypnosis, 90 Babe, Murray W., 234 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750), 18 Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans and Baron Verulam (1561-1626), 25,45,48, no Bage, Robert (1720-1801): The Fair Syrian (1787), 32; Hermsprong (1796), 32, 35 Bagehot, Walter (1826-77): on the grotesque, 133

Index Bailey, Benjamin (1791-1853): Keats writes to, 208 Ball, John (d. 1381), 279, 315 Ballad, 10, 257. See also Lyric Balzac, Honore de (1799-1856), 68 Bar do, 134 Barrie, Sir J(ames) M(atthew) (18601937), 231 Bates, John, 234 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-67), 66,122,133: froide majestein, 79; Correspondances (1857), 88,111,222, 223; Les Fleurs du mal (Prelude in, 1857), 104; Obsession (1857),222 Bauhaus movement, 315 Beattie, James (1735-1803): The Minstrel (1771-74), 25 Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616), and John Fletcher (1579-1625), 17,127; Philaster (1622), 213 Beauty: poetry of, 194; and truth, 178, 183,191,197 Becker, Carl (1873-1945): The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), 37,80 Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906-89), 22,134, 336 Beckford, William (1760-1844): Vathek (1786), 60, 61 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803-49), 115; the dead in, 157; noumenal and phenomenal world in, 149-50; the occult in, 171; water: of life in, 145-6; The Bride's Tragedy (1822), 125-9 passim, 158; Dirge and Hymeneal, 126; The Last Man, 136, 144; The Second Brother, 128-9, X43; The Two Archers, 126 - Death's Jest-Book (1850): 92,114, 125-50 passim, 172-3; characters in, 138-42; the grotesque in, 132-4; history in, 135; plot of, 138; two

387 brothers theme in, 130; unfinished, 131 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827), 84,169; Egmont Overture (op. 84) (1830), 41 Being, 205; in Beddoes, 143 Belief: images and, 77, 78; and imagination, 177; Romanticism as new, 102. See also Faith Bellamy, Edward (1850-98): Looking Backward (1888), 318 Belloc, (Joseph) Hilaire Pierre (18791953), 322 Benda, Julien (1867-1956): La Trahison des clercs (1927), 119, 323 Bennett, (Enoch) Arnold (1867-1931), 8 Beowulf, 116 Bergson, Henri (1859-1941), 90; on laughter, 291; on satire, 296 Berkeley, George (1685-1753), 19,23; esse est percipi, 30; Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Enquiries concerning the Virtues of Tarwater (1744), 36 Berlioz, Hector (1803-69), 68 Beulah, 169 Bhagavadgita, 204 Bianchi, Martha Gilbert Dickinson (1866-1943), 253 Bible: Dickinson reads, 259; myth of, 94,103; the primitive in, 36; rhythm of, 12. See also Scripture; Gospel Bingham, Millicent Todd (18801968), 253 Binswanger, Ludwig (1881-1966), 225 Biography, 3 Birth: death balances, 144; mystery of, 290-1 Blackwood's Magazine, 207; Endymion reviewed in, 209

388 Blake, William (1757-1827), 10,15, 153,196, 218; Atlantis in, 167; on cloven fiction, 202; Dickinson compared to, 266; emanations in, 169; the female will in, 187; on the fool, 138; on genius, 106; on history, 116; innocence and experience in, 108; Jerusalem in, 86; in London, 27; Luvah and Albion in, 164; the mechanical in, 154; myth of Urizen, 79; on natural religion, 153; Nobodaddy in, 260; NF's early reading of, 24; Ore in, 85,114; his Prophecies, 84; sky-gods in, 100; spectres in, 192; vehicular form of, 84-5 - works: America (1793), 103,190; Auguries of Innocence (1803), 13, 48, 201; The Book of Thel (1789), 181, 182,185; Europe (1794), 78-9,100; The Four Zoas (17967-1807?), 12,14, 131; I saw a chapel all of gold, 12; Island in the Moon (1784), 25; Jerusalem (hymn), 37; Jerusalem (Prophecy, 1804-20), 117; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), 37,90; Milton (1804-8), 117; O why was I born with a different face, 122; Songs of Experience (1794), 13,114, 198 Blanchot, Maurice (1907-2003), 225 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313-75): Decameron, 208 Body: mechanical, 153-4; spiritual authority in, 285; universe as, 97 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (ca. A.D. 480-524), 77 Boileau (-Despreaux), Nicolas (16361711), 26 Bolingbroke, Viscount (Henry St. John) (1678-1751), 22,274 Bolivar, Simon (1783-1830), 68

Index Borrow, George Henry (1803-81): Lavengro (1851), 21, 31 Bosch, Hieronymus (ca. 1460-1516), 132 Bostetter, Edward E.: The Romantic Ventriloquists (1963), 85 Boswell, James (1740-95): as artist, 36; his London Journal, 3, 9 Bowles, Samuel (1797-1851), 248,258 Bradbrook, M.C.: Ibsen the Norwegian (1966), 239 Brawne, Fanny (1800-65), 3-88,210, 212; Keats's letters to, 213 Brett, George Sidney (1879-1944), 215 Briareus, 289 Bride: in the lower world, 193; sister as, 103 British Critic: Endymion reviewed in, 210 British Empire, 32, 318; Byron and the, 70 Bronte, Charlotte (1816-55), 246 Bronte, Emily (1818-48), 246; Wuthering Heights (1837), 11:3 Brooke, Frances (1724-89): The History of Emily Montague (1769), 36 Brooke, Henry (1703-83): A Fool of Quality (1766), 25 Brothers, theme of, 112 Brown, Charles Armitage, 209, 210, 211 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-82): on nature, 81,105; The Garden of Cyrus (1658), 96 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (180662), 246 Browning, Robert (1812-89), !33/ !72/ 246, 304; Andrea del Sarto (1855), 29; The Bishop Orders His Tomb (1845), 136; Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887), 30 Buddha: as hero, 335

Index Buddhism: Wagner's interest in, 334, 340 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, ist Baron Lytton (1803-73), 287; A Strange Story (1862), 111 Bunyan, John (1628-88): The Holy War (1682), 112; The Pilgrim's Progress (1678-84), 87,118 Burke, Edmund (1729-97), 284; as conservative, no; doctrine in, 282; identity in, 204; law in, 283; temporal authority in, 275; Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1792), 34, 279; Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), 27 Burns, Robert (1759-96): 10,209,258; To a Mouse (1786), 13 Burton, Robert (1577-1640): Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 211 Butler, Samuel (1612-80): Hudibras (1663), 65 Butler, Samuel (1835-1902), 25,282, 284; Erewhon (1872), 182,278, 341, 352; Life and Habit (1877), 126,277, 341-53 passim; Luck or Cunning? (1886), 342; The Way of All Flesh (1903), 277 Byron, Allegra (1817-22), 54 Byron, Annabella, Lady (1792-1860), 54 Byron, Augusta Ada (1815-52), 54 Byron, George Gordon, Baron Byron of Rochdale (1788-1824), 76, 88, 125,126,198; brothers theme in, 113; burlesque in, 65; the exile in, 157; on history, 116; in Italy, 55; on Keats, 181; life of, 50-6; lyrics of, 56-8; new sensibility of, 69; plays of, 62-4; rhyme in, 132; satires of, 64-8; sister, 103; tales of, 59-62; temperament of, 188; youth of, 70i; in the Victorian Age, 69

389 - works: Beppo (1818), 52, 55, 64; The Bride ofAbydos (1813), 52; Cain (1821), 55,63-4,87,109,113,115; Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-17), 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58-9, 60, 61, 64, 66,85,113,120,131,142; The Corsair (1814), 52, 53, 59, 66, 70,142; The Curse of Minerva (1811), 52; Darkness (1816), 54, 87; The Destruction of Sennacherib (1815), 57; Don Juan (1819-24), 55, 58, 61, 64-6 passim, 69,70,85,122,131,142; The Dream (1816), 54; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), 51, 64; The Giaour (1813), 52; Heaven and Earth, 63-4,67-8; Hebrew Melodies (1815), 57; Hours of Idleness (1807), 51; Lara (1814), 52, 53, 59, 60, 87-8,113; Lines to Mr. Hodgson (1830), 62; Manfred (1816), 54, 59, 63, 67, 69,79; Marino Faliero (1821), 55, 62; Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1814), 53; Ode to Venice (1819), 55; The Prisoner of Chilian (1816), 54; Sardanapalus (1821), 55,64,70; She Walks in Beauty (1815), 57; Stanzas for Music, 57; The Two Foscari (1821), 55; The Vision of Judgment (1822), 55, 64, 67-8, loo, 113; Werner (1822), 62 Byronic hero, 119,142; as natural man, 112 Cain, 80; and Abel, 112 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro (160081), 328 Camus, Albert (1913-60): L'Etranger (1941), 122 Canada: literature of, 319 Canada Council, 93 Cannibal feast, 132 Capitalism: and Communism, 318;

390 eighteenth-century, 30; laissezfaire, 320 Caricature, characters as, 291 Caritas, 162. See also Agape; Charity; Love Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 125, 149-50, 243, 271, 281; on the aristocracy, 277; on Byron, 70; as conservative, no; the hero in, 11819; the intrinsic symbol in, 283; on Napoleon, 84; Past and Present (1843), 285; Sartor Resartus (183334), 46,70, 88,118,277, 314 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-98), 250; Alice books, 181; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), 302, 308 Cartesianism. See Descartes Castiglione, Baldassarre, Conte di Novilava (1478-1529): sprezzatura in, 279; The Courtier (1528), 4,221 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount (1769-1822), 53 Catharsis, 196; as product and process, 12-13 Catullus, Gaius Valerius (ca. 84-ca. 54 B.C.): his ode to Attis, 95 Cave(s): of the imagination, 162; in Keats, 191; in Shelley, 167,169 CBC, 41 Cervantes, Miguel de (1547-1616): Don Quixote (1605-15), 121 Chain of Being, 99,107,193 Champion, The, 208 Chapman, George (1578-1644), 17 Character(s): in Beddoes, 134-5; in Dickens, 287-8; mechanical, 296, 306; in modern fiction, 303: obsessed, 291, 294-5; realistic and romantic, 82 Chardin, Teilhard de (1881-1955), 101-2

Index Charity, 272. See also Caritas Charles II of England (1630-85), 16 Chastity, 181. See also Sex Chatterton, Thomas (1752-70), 13; and Keats, 197; and Rowley, 14; Mynstrelles Song, 10 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345-1400), 96; The Man of Law's Tale, 107; The Pardoner's Tale, 140; Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), 107 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (18601904), 135, 336 Chemistry, 98 Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) (18741936), 322; on Shaw, 45 Children: as aristocracy, 279, 320; in Dickens, 301-2 Chretien de Troyes: Perceval, 329, 332 Christ, 96,103,160,161,172; ascension of, 114; as dragon-killer, 330; epiphanies of, 200; harrows hell, 190; as hero, 164; as Logos, 284; poetry as, 163; Prometheus as, 163; quest of, 165. See also lesus Christianity, 176, 340; and action, 334-5; antithesis to, 160; Blake on, 78; creation myth of, 95; Dickinson's relation to, 260-5 passim; Grail symbolism of, 328-9; the imagination in, 153; myth of, 96-8,102; persecuting, 324; primitive, 322; recovery of myth in, 194 Christie, Margot, 42 Chronos, 166 Church, the, 194; and the aristocracy, 276; as bride, 165, 330; and culture, 283-4; university a function of, 282. See also Belief; Roman Catholic Church; Christianity Churchill, Charles (1731-64), 64; on Boswell, 3

Index Cimarosa, Domenico (1749-1801), 18 City, 100; of the dead, 147; destructive, 104; of God, 97,104,108 Civilization: the arts in, 81; as body, 153-4; man creates, 100-1,106; traditional and Romantic views of, 109-10 Clairmont, Claire (1798-1879), 54 Clark, Sir James (1800-62), 213 Clarke, Charles Cowden (1787-1877), 206 Class conflict, 283. See also Working class Classicism: and Romanticism, 7, 77-8 Cleland, John (1709-89): Fanny Hill (1749), 31 Coburn, Kathleen (Kay) (1905-91), 215-17; on Coleridge's notebooks, 44; The Inquiring Spirit (1951), 44-8 passim; The Grandmothers (1949), 217; In Pursuit of Coleridge (1977), 215 Code, Muriel, 232 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (17721834): 38, 51, 64, 67, 99; aphoristic thought of, 43-5, 48; on the clerisy, 285; Coburn on, 44, 216-17; and continuous prose, 45; as conservative, no; on freedom, 83; on the French Revolution, 73; on identification, 84; imagination in, n, 105; inner world of, 81; nature in, 155; religion in, 203-4; Aids to Reflection (1825), 44; Biographia Literaria (1817), 44, 46, 47,79; The Friend (1812), 44; Kubla Khan (1816), 85, 114,146; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) 84,102,103,120, 134, 336 Collins, Wilkie (1824-89), 29; The Moonstone (1868), 289

391 Collins, William (1721-59), 13; Ode on the Poetical Character (1747), 14; Ode to Evening (1748), 10 Comedy, 301; in Dickens, 290; identity in, 299; in romance, 118; in Shakespeare, 158-9; transformation of, 115,122-3. See also New Comedy Commonweal, 317 Communication, 204; Romantic, 194 Communion, 204; Christian and Romantic, 194-6; poetry of, 201 Communism: and the bourgeoisie, 320; and Morris, 318. See also Leninism; Marxism Community: the dead and, 147; Morris on, 316; of response, 204-5; Romantic, 194; and spiritual authority, 278, 282, 284-6 Comte, Auguste (1798-1857), 281 Concern: language of, 168; myth of, 102; poetry of, 198 Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), 69 Conscience: Coleridge on, 47 Consciousness, 168,186; and action, 166; in Beddoes, 133,144; as "drunken boat," 89; expanded, 120; and identity, 188-9; integrated, 118; and learning, 343, 349; as mechanical, 79; and memory, 351; mystical, 105; in poetry, n; reason as part of, 99; as separation, 103; in Shelley, 156 Constant, Benjamin (1767-1830): Adolphe (1816), 121 Context, art in, 328, historical, 18 Continuity: in the nineteenth century, 25; in Romantic poetry, 85 Convention: exhaustion of, 29; mythology contains, 94 Copernicus, Nicolas (1473-1543), 98 Copp, John (Johnny), 234 Corelli, Marie (1855-1924), 287

392 Corinthians, First Epistle to, 259 Correspondence, 98 Cosmology, 101; literary, 94; Romantic, 192,193 Counter-environment: literature as, 28 Courtly love: convention of, 121,180, 187,191; in Dickens, 302; poetry, 57. See also Mistress, cruel Cowley, Abraham (1618-67), 29 Cowper, William (1731-1800), 14,26; The Castaway (1803), 12; The Snail (1731X13 Crabbe, George (1754-1832), 13,76, 117; The Village (1783), 82 Craftsmanship: age of, 29 Crane, R(onald) S(almon) (18861967)/ 7 Crawford, Thomas James (Tommy) (1877-1955), 230,237,238 Creation, 162; artificial, 95; autonomy of, 106-7; and dream, 189; and evolution, 351; four levels of, 69, 77,78,82-3,99,107-9,123,179, 184; human and divine, 151,162-3, 199,200; innocence of, 324; to Keats, 178; from love, 105; man's power of, 81-5 passim; myth, 103; in the pastoral, 180; reality of, 176-7; sexual, 94-5; and suffering, 170 Creator, man as, 162 Criticism, 220; anti-Romantic movement in, 72, 90-1,101; of Coleridge, 46; contemporary, 313; eighteenthcentury, 28; genius and, 106; posterity as lazy, 17 Croker, John Wilson (1780-1857), 209; on Keats, 18 Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658), 119 Culture: authority of, 282-5; and economics, 319, 321

Index Curse, original, 165,166 Dance: of life, 166 Danse macabre: in Beddoes, 130,135 Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), 69,80, 174,182; Matilda in, 172; nature in, 170; Virgil in, 225; world picture of, 77; Convivio, 100; The Divine Comedy, 94,179; Inferno, 183; Paradiso, 78,96,107; Purgatorio, 171, 179-80,202; Vita Nuova, 162,176 Darkness: in Romanticism, 114,120 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-82), 22, 89,101,284, 353; The Origin of Species (1859), 342 Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802), 342 Darwinism, Social, 347 David, Evelyn, 238 Davies, Margaret, 238 Death: anxiety over, 133; cities of, 147; as the death of, 143-4;m Dickens, 303, 306; in Dickinson, 269; and dream, 171; in the grotesque, 1324; identification with, 87; the leveller, 135,141; and life, 132-4, 142,188,205; and love, 126-9 passim; mystery of, 291; nature as, 115,125; noumenal, 150; and sex, 185; signature speech of, 136; and time, 147. See also Thanatos Deconstruction: and myth, 226 Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731), 22; good and evil in, 30; Captain Singleton (1720), 30; Moll Flanders (1722), 21, 31; Robinson Crusoe (1719), 16, 21, 32, 33, 37; Roxana (1724), 31; The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), 16, 30 Deism, 23 Dekker, Thomas (ca. 1570-1632), 17 DeKoven, Reginald (1861-1920), 230 Delacroix, (Ferdinand Victor) Eugene (1798-1863), 68,84

Index Deluge, 190; and fall, 167. See also Flood De Man, Paul (1919-83): Allegories of Reading (1979), 219, 225-6; Blindness and Insight (1971), 219,220,225-6; The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), 219-26 Democracy, 124-5; death represents, 141; and Keats, 205 Demonic: in Keats, 195; interpenetration, 204; lovers, 126; world, 108, 114-15 Denck, Hans (ca. 1495-1527), 219 Denham, Sir John (1615-69), 28; Cooper's Hill (1642), 24 Dennis, John (1657-1734), 19 Depression, the, 347 De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859), 84-5,101; introversion in, 120; "The English Mail-Coach" (1849), 154; Savannah-la-Mar (1845), 86 De Regnier, Henri (1864-1936), 241 Derrida, Jacques (1930-2004): on Rousseau, 225 Descartes, Rene (1596-1650), 48,79 Descent, 190; in Dickens, 302; of identity, 114-15; in Keats, 183. See also Ascent; Quest Design: as absurd, 308; Morris on, 317 Desire, 156 Detective fiction, 36 Devil, the, 96 Dewey, John (1859-1952), 352 Dialectic: Coleridge detests, 45 Diana: as diva triformis, 183-4, *85; in Keats, 183 Dickens, Charles (1812-70): the absurd in, 289, 307-8; braggart soldier in, 292; Christmas in, 291; description in, 305; the double in, 304; dystopia in, 299; as fairy tale, 287,299, 302; family in, 296,299,

393 300-1; festivity in, 291; humours in, 287-308 passim; industry in, 297; institutions in, 296-8; marriage in, 291, 300; mystery and murder in, 291; probability in, 288-9; radical vision of, 289; recognition scenes in, 293; resurrection in, 306; stock devices in, 290; twin theme in, 304; violence in, 304-5 - works: Barnaby Rudge (1841), 301, 304; Bleak House (1852-53), 55,289, 291,292,293,294,295,297, 300, 301, 304, 307; The Chimes (1845), 301, 303, 306; A Christmas Carol (1843), 3°6, 307; David Copperfield (1850), 293,295,298,299, 301-2, 305, 306, 307; Dombey and Son (1846-48), 290,292,293,294,296, 297, 300, 302, 304, 305, 306, 307; Edwin Drood (1870), 289,290, 303, 305; Great Expectations (1860-61), 204,290,296,297,298, 300, 301; Hard Times (1852-56), 292,297,299, 300, 304, 305; Little Dorrit (1855-57), 288,294,295,296,297-8, 301, 302, 304, 305, 306, 307; Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), 291,294,297, 305; Nicholas Nickleby (1839), 290, 294, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 307; The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), 133,290,291,296, 302, 303, 304, 305; Oliver Twist (1837), 290, 294, 295, 297, 299, 300, 302, 304, 306; Our Mutual Friend (186465), 288,291,294,295,297, 300, 303, 305, 307; The Pickwick Papers (183637), 292-3,295, 297; A Tale of Two Cities (1859), 290, 301, 303, 304, 306 Dickinson, Edward (1803-74), 245 Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth (183086): awe in, 262-3,269; body and soul in, 265-6; circumference in,

394 251, 261-2, 264, 269; on death, 2645,268-70; diction of, 256; on her father, 246; first published, 249; friendships of, 246-9; and God, 259-65 passim; genius of, 270; grammar in, 255; on the Holy Spirit, 263-4; hymn form of, 246, 257; innocence and experience in, 266; life of, 245-70 passim; as Moses, 270; Paradise in, 264,267, 268, 270; perceptions of, 250; popularity of, 254; prose in, 258; riddles in, 255, 259; style of, 254-8 - works: Doubt Me! My Dim Companion! 268; I like to see it lap the miles, 255; I never told the buried gold, 269; It sifts from leaden sieves, 255; Love selects its own society, 168; Poem 48, 263; Poem 49,260; Poem 59,261; Poem 109, 252; Poem 123, 251; Poem 193,260-1; Poem 214,265; Poem 248, 268; Poem 256,268; Poem 354,256; Poem 357,260; Poem 400,266; Poem 419,266; Poem 441,251; Poem 4.4.2, 267; Poem 516, 255; Poem 623, 258; Poem 641, 256; Poem 677, 250; Poem 679,265; Poem 709,255; Poem 711, 255; Poem 721,269; Poem 722,249; Poem 733,263; Poem 745,254; Poem 756, 267; Poem 764, 254; Poem 810, 259; Poem 822,265; Poem 949,259; Poem 1037,256; Poem 1052,256; Poem 1068,267; Poem 1129,255; Poem 1182,269; Poem 1205,260; Poem 1207,257; Poem 1260,263; Poem 1283,268; Poem 1319, 262; Poem 1395,254; Poem 1421,270; Poem 1434,268; Poem 1439,263; Poem 1445,257; Poem 1454,257; Poem 1462,264; Poem 1463,254,255; Poem 1569,264; Poem 1576,266; Poem 1599,260; Poem 1601,266;

Index Poem 1615,256; Poem 1620,262; Poem 1658,255-6; Poem 1679,266; Poem 1701,262; Poem 1732,266; Poem 1733,262; Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890), 253; Struck, was I, nor yet by Lightning, 268; Success is counted sweetest, 249; Wild Nights! 251 Dickinson, Lavinia (1833-99), 246; publishes sister Emily, 252-3 Diderot, Denis (1713-84), 37 Dionysus, 96, 97,102,104; green world of, 159 Disraeli, Benjamin (1804-81), 287 Divinity: and poetry, 199 DNA, 343 Dobree, Bonamy (1891-1974): English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century (1959), 16-23 passim Doctrine: and scripture, 282 Dolphin: as salvation, 190 Donne, John (1572-1631), 136 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821-81), 68,239; Notes from Underground (1864), 74 Dragon: of death, 165; guards identity, 144; as illusion, 336; symbolism of, 330, 331 Drama: Jacobean, 311 Drayton, Michael (1563-1631): Endimion and Phoebe (1595), 186 Dream: and creation, 146-7,189; and death, 171; in Dickens, 303, 306; in Keats, 178; and poetry, 11, 204 Drugs, 352 "Drunken boat" construct, 284: consciousness as, 89; in Beddoes, 145; in Freud, 89,113-14. See also Rimbaud Dryden, John (1631-1700): prose of, 28; on Shakespeare, 17; Of Dramatic Poesy (1668), 29; Fables Ancient and

Index Modern (1706), 76; Religio Laid (1682), 26; Secular Masque (1700), 26,27 Duck, Stephen (1705-56): On Mites (1736), 27 Earth-mother goddess, 88, 95, 96,115 Earth spirit, 169; unity with, 162 Ecclesiasticus, Book of, 49 Eco, Umberto (b. 1932): The Name of the Rose (1981), 36 Economics: and culture, 319, 321 Eddison, E(ric) R(ucker) (1882-1945): Memison trilogy, 311 Eden, 77,80, 81, 97,103,104,108,113, 180,201-2; in Dante, 179-80; Jerusalem as, 86. See also Garden; Paradise Edgar, Pelham (1871-1948), 215 Education: ascent via, 80,108; Butler on, 277, 349; and culture, 283; in Dickens, 297; endless, 346; future of, 353; liberal, 350; Morris on, 314, 317; via nature, 104; past-centred, 348; via poetry, 105-6; and spiritual authority, 271, 272, 281; two levels of, 344 Ego, 73-4, 86 Eighteenth century: Byron as poet of, 64; enlightenment of, 25-6; language of, 38 Elgin, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin (1766-1841), 52 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-80), 31, 246, 287 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888-1965), 72,101,218; and Beddoes, 136-7; on Dante, 90; on death, 150; dissociation of sensibility in, no, 313; on farce, 132; on Keats, 210; meditation in, 201; on Shakespeare, 137; Ash-Wednesday (1930), 171; Burnt

395 Norton (1935), 176,182,184,191, 195; The Cocktail Party (1950), 171; East Coker (1940), 132; Family Reunion (1939), 289; Four Quartets (1935-42), 195; Gerontion (1920), 136,137; Little Gidding (1942), 221; The Love Song of]. Alfred Prufrock (1917), 137, 332; Marina (1930), 171; The Waste Land (1921), 49,104,134, 137,171,187,204, 330; "Wilkie Collins and Dickens," 289 Elizabeth I (1533-1603), 116 Elizabeth II (b. 1926), 277 Elpis (hope), 163 Emancipation. See Liberty Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82), 246,261 Energy, 159,166,190; absurd, 308; Byron releases, 69; and intelligence, 316; metrical, 84 Engels, Friedrich (1820-95): and Morris, 317 England: Eden as, 86 English Institute, 72 Ennui, 66 Enoch, Book of, 13 Entertainment, literature as, 28 Epiphany: historical, 18; types of, 200-1 Episode: and plot, 288-9 Equality: and liberty, 320 Eros, 96-7,102,104,126,185,191, 305; and agape, 163; in Dickens, 291, 306-7; redemption via, 105; in Shelley, 162,168,176; in Yeats, 224. See also Love Esau, 157; as Byronic hero, 112 Eternity, 145,166; identity resides in, 143-4;as now, 264 Euripides (ca. 480-406 B.C.), 231 Evans, Joan (1893-1977): John Ruskin (1954), 242-4

396 Everyman, 135

Evolution: and the Bible, 351; Butler on, 342; and progress, 346-8 Examiner, The, 207

Experience, 167-8; in Dickinson, 266; and innocence, 177-8,183,190; and knowledge, 351-2; limitations of, 149; underworld of, 162; vision of, 198 Ezekiel, Book of, 336; the primitive in, 35 Fairley, Barker (1887-1986), 41 Faith, 194,272; Romanticism revives, no; in Shelley, 162-4,166; and superstition, 351. See also Belief Fall, the, 96, 97,108,194; and deluge, 167; Pre-Romantic, 201-2; in Shelley, 169; traditional and Romantic, 103; vision annihilates, 166 Falstaff, 3 Fancy: truth of, in; visual nature of, 90 Fantasy, 133. See also Science fiction Farce, 132 Fascism, 83,125, 319; and Yeats, 160 Father-god, 95 Fear, 163,168 Femme fatale, 121, 329; in Shelley, 169 Fergusson, Robert (1750-74), 13; The Farmer's Ingle (1773), 10 Fertility: the Grail as symbol of, 32930,311 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814), 74; as Romantic philosopher, 75 Fiction: Byron's impact on, 68-9; formulaic, 36; plot and episode in, 288-9 Fielding, Henry (1707-54), 8, 36; Journey from this World to the Next

(1743), 25; Tom Jones (1749), n, 25,26

Index Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), 27 Fisher King, 332 Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), 122, 303; Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881), 295 Flood, the, 145. See also Deluge Folk tale, 94 Fool: death as, 129-30,133,136,1389,140-1; in Dickens, 307; in Parsifal, 331-2, 333 Formalism, 225 Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (18791970): on Dickens, 293 Foscolo, (Niccolo) Ugo (1778-1827): Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1798),

121 Foucault, Michel (1926-84): The Order of Things (1966), 38 Fragmentation, 90; in Beddoes, 136; in lyric poetry, n; Romantic poets resist, 85. See also Decentralization Franklin, Benjamin (1706-90), 30 Fraternity: and the aristocracy, 320 Frederick II (the Great) (1712-86), 119 Freedom, 97,106,152,172; and education, 350; Morris on, 316; and necessity, 272. See also Liberty French Revolution, 27, 73, 78, 93,100, 150,172,173, 204, 306, 307; tyranny of, 276 Frere, lohn Hookham (1769-1846): Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work ... by William and Robert Whistlecraft... relating to King Arthur and His

Round Table (1817), 65 Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), 37,102, 158,176, 307, 331, 344; Auden on, 89; the "drunken boat" construct in,89,113-14 Frye, (Herman) Northrop (1912-91): lectures at Western Reserve Uni-

Index versity, 93; on value judgments, 218; Anatomy of Criticism (1957), 25, 38; "The Argument of Comedy" (1949), 303; Romanticism Reconsidered (1963), 92 Future, 173,203, 226, 348; is the past, 176; progress towards, 347 Galileo (Galileo Galilei) (1564-1642), 98 Galsworthy, John (1867-1933): The Silver Box (1906), 231 Garden, the, 100,104. See also Eden; Paradise Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn (181065): Life of Charlotte Bronte (1856), 240 Gay, John (1685-1732): The Beggar's Opera (1728), 32; Trivia (1716), 18 Genesis, Book of, 345 Genius, 317; authority of, 106; in Byron, 142; demonic, 87-8; Dickinson as, 270 George, St., 189; and the dragon, 1656,330 George III (1738-1820), 67, 68 Ghosts: in Beddoes, 126,128,132, 147,192; in Dickinson, 269; in Keats, 192; in Shelley, 171 Gibbon, Edward (1737-94), 174; Coleridge on, 46; Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), 297, 322 Gide, Andre Paul Guillaume (18691951), 241 Gifford, William, 64 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (18361911), and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842-1900), 65; The Gondoliers (1889), 229; H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), 234-5, 255/ lolanthe (1882), 236,237-8; Patience (1881),

397 229; Pirates ofPenzance (1880), 230; Yeomen of the Guard (1888), 290 Gilbert, Susan (1830-1913), 246,247, 252,266 Gildon, Charles, 19 Gnosis: as imagination, 105,106-7; in Shelley, 163,166 God: as artist, 8; Blake on, 79; is dead, 152; Dickinson's relation to, 259-65 passim; as male, 333; and nature, 81,156; and poetry, 193; projected, 100-1; in Romanticism, 80; will of, 272 Gods: in Homer, 272; man creates, 151 Godwin, William (1756-1836): Mary Byron meets, 54; Enquiry concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793), 25 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (17491832), 5,44, 49,101,116,136, 216; and Byron, 70; Egmont (1787), 41-2; Faust (1808-32), 63, 70,79,86,100, 119,161; The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), 60,121 Golden Age, 77,80,104,108 Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-74), 26-7, 29 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich (b. 1931), 348 Gordon, Catherine (1764-1811): mother of Byron, 50 Gorky, Maxim (1868-1936), 324 Gospel: and law, 273; of nature, 152. See also Bible; Scripture Gothic literature, 59, 60,111; the primitive in, 36 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de (1746-1828): Disasters of War (series), 51 Grace, 105; descent of, 86; transformation of, 164; and will, 191

398 Grail legends: genesis of, 328-30; in Parsifal, 334, 335-6, 337. See also Arthur Graupner, Christoph (1683-1760), 18 Gray, Thomas (1716-71), 29; The Bard (1757), 14; The Fatal Sisters (1768), 10,36 Green, Matthew (1696-1737): The Spleen (1737), 18 Green world, 158,169; in Dickens, 303, 307; in Shelley, 159 Grotesque: in Beddoes, 132-4,142, 147; in Dickens, 302 Habit, 165, 351; and humours, 293; meaning of, 343, 344 Hades, 162,187,195. See also Hell Handel, Georg Friedrich (1685-1759), 196 Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928), 89, 319; Immanent Will in, 79; The Dynasts (1903-8), 99,108-9 Harlot, forgiven, 333 Harmony, 158. See also Music Hart House, 235; Dramatic Society, 231 Hartley, David (1705-57), 38; Observations on Man (1749), 35 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-64), 246 Haydon, Benjamin Robert (17861846), 207, 208, 211, 213 Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 207; Liber Amoris (1823), 121 Heaven, 77, 98,123,179,222; as city, 97; internal, 81; in Milton, 78; preRomantic, 86 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831), 279; in Shelley, 168 Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976), 194 Hell, 77,108,123,179; in Dickinson, 269; harrowing of, 174,190; in Parsifal, 336-7. See also Hades

Index Hemingway, Ernest Millar (18991961), 69 Herbert, Frank (b. 1920): Dune trilogy (1956-69), 311 Hercules, 190 Herder, lohann Gottfried (17441803), 37 Hero(es): Byronic, 59-62 passim, 6870; in Dickens, 291-2, 301; in eighteenth-century fiction, 32; in Milton, 164; romance, 332; Romantic forms of the, 115-21 passim; as symbol, 277 Herodias, 329 Herod the Great (74-4 B.C.), 89 Heroine(s): Byron's, 62-3; in Dickens, 300-2 passim; in eighteenthcentury fiction, 31-2; Gothic, 111, 181 Hesiod (8th c. B.C.), 163 Hexis, meaning of, 343, 344 Heywood, Thomas (ca. 1574-1641), 17 Hiebert, Paul Gerhardt (1892-1987): Sarah Binks (1947), 77 Hierarchy. See Creation, four levels of Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1823-1911), 251,258,260; compares Dickinson to Blake, 266; Dickinson contacts, 248 History: context of, 18; hero of, 119; humanist vision of, 322; of ideas, 76; liberation of, 174; Morris on, 321; redemption of, 176; Romantic rejection of, 116-17 Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 271 Hobhouse, lohn Cam, Baron Broughton (1786-1869), 51, 58 Holderlin, lohann Christian Friedrich (1770-1843), 131; on Rousseau, 226; Bread and Wine (1807); The Rhine (1808), 220

Index Holy Spirit, 111; Dickinson's relation to, 263-4 Homer: the gods in, 272; Achilles in, 116; Odyssey, 191, 328 Hooker, Richard (1553/4-1600), 101 Hope, 272; in Shelley, 162-4,166,172 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-89), 9; binaries of, 312 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65-8 B.C.), 26, 34; epistles, 28; poeta nascitur non fit, 95 Horror fiction, 32, 36 Housman, (A)lfred (E)dward (18591936), 69; The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux (1922), 79 Hugo, Victor (1802-85), 94, 324; Cromwell (1827), 13; La Legende des siecles (1859), 193 Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest) (18831917), 72,76,90 Humanism: as humanity, 353 Human nature: nature and, 83, 96-7, 99,104,108, no, 124 Hume, David (1711-76), 35 Humour: and death, 133; in Dickens, 287-308 passim; tagged, 293,294-5; and truth, 331 Humours: good and bad, 294; melodramatic, 305-6; obstructing, 301 Hunt, Leigh (1784-1859), 55, 207,208, 212 Hurd, Richard (1720-1808): Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), 36 Hutchinson, Sara (1775-1835), 216 Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894-1963), 278,284; Brave New World (1932), 299; Evolution and Ethics (1893), 285; Point Counter Point (1928), 181 Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906), 231; Ghosts (1881), 239; When We Dead Awaken (1899), 113 Icarus: and Bellerophon, 190

399 Ideal world, 82 Ideas: association of, 35; history of, 76 Identity, 87,124,190; and analogy, 162; of art, 328; "as" and "with," 188-9; in comedy, 299; as communion, 194-6; death guards, 144; eternity as world of, 143-4; fallen, 185; in Keats, 188,198,202; ladder of, 193; of life and death, 127,148-50; of man and nature, 97; metaphor as, 14; with nature, 97, no, 177-8; original, 103; primary and secondary, 162; of process, 99; quest of, 114-15; of realities, 192; recovery of, 96-7; in Shelley, 168; social and natural, 104; types of, 203-4; with larger power, 84 Ideology: frozen, 351; and mythology, 226; in Romanticism, 220, 2256 Idolatry: tradition as, 273 Illusion, 196; in Buddhism, 334; and innocence, 332; in Romanticism, 223; in storytelling, 8; temptation through, 335 Imagery: history of, 76-8; moralistic, 108; of order, 99; primacy of, 81; revolution in, 74 Imagination, 156,161,166; awakened, 193; and belief, 177; in Coleridge, 48; in Dickens, 299; divine, 106-7, 2°4; and epiphany, 200; eternal, 176; fancy over, 90; gnosis as, 105; in Keats, 199, 208; as love, 163; and poetry, 204; Prometheus as, 151-2; prophetic, 174; revolution in, 73; secondary, 11,14 Imitation, 81; of nature, 83; in Shelley, 172 Imperialism, 347; Morris on, 319 Impressionism, 155

Index

4OO

Incarnation, 89; Coleridge on, 48; and discarnation, 176; imagination as, 162; threat of, 100 Incest: in Byron, 60; Shelley on, 168-9 Indicator, The, 212 Individual, 124; as microcosm, 144; and nature, 117; and the sublime, no Industrial Revolution, 319 Inertia: Jupiter as, 157 Innocence: and creation, 324; in Dickinson, 266; and experience, 177-8,183,190; and illusion, 332; in Keats, 198; vision of, 180,181, 202-3 Intelligence: conscious and unconscious, 316, 343-6 passim; and energy, 316 Interpenetration: in the Augustan Age, 29-30; in Beddoes, 133,142; and poetry, 203; types of, 201; in Wordsworth, 80 lonesco, Eugene (1909-94), 22,134 Irony, 82, 303; in Eliot, 137; in Keats, 198; in Romance, 115,118,121-3 Isaac: and Ishmael, 112 Isaiah, Book of, 26 Ishmael, 157: as Byronic hero, 112 Israel, 103 Jackson, Helen Hunt (1830-85): Ramona (1884), 249; Mercy Philbrick's Choice (1876), 249 Jacob: Dickinson as, 261; and Esau, 112; his ladder, 35 Jacobean drama, 119; and Beddoes, 134-5,136 James, Henry (1843-1916): "The Jolly Corner" (1908), 269; What Maisie Knew (1897), 24° James, Mary Frances (1903-88), 41

James I of England (1566-1625), 116 Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826), 37 Jehovah, 159. See also God Jesus, 100,159, 324; and the Grail, 328; as hero, 335. See also Christ Johnson, Samuel (1709-84): 8, 27,46; on being, 30; Boswell on, 3-4; criticism of, 29; on Dryden, 28, 76; as father-figure, 6; on Gray's Bard, 14; on the Ossian poems, n, 12; Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), 9,29; Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick, at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane, 1747, 28; Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), 25, 60 Johnson, Thomas H. (1902-85): The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), 253, 255; The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), 253 John the Baptist, 329 Jolliffe, Charles D. (Charlie), 237 Jolliffe, Dick, 234,238 Jonah, Book of, 190 Jonson, Ben (1572-1637), 17, 296; The Alchemist (1610), 291; Bartholomew Fair (1614), 297; The New Inn (1629), 289; Epicene, or The Silent Woman (1616), 291; Volpone (1605), 291, 301 Joseph of Arimathea (ist c. A.D.), 329 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882-1941), 18,94,101, 303; Dickens influences, 296; Finnegans Wake (1939), 290; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 13, 174; Stephen Hero (1944), 200 Judaism, 95 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961), 25, 187 Kairos, 166

Kali, in

Index Kalidasa (fl. 5th century), 75 Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), 216; and Beddoes, 149; and Fichte, 75; and Romantic imagery, 167 Kean, Edmund (1789-1833), 208,211 Keats, Fanny (1803-89), 206 Keats, George (1797-1841), 208,209 Keats, John (1795-1821), 58, 64,73,75, 84,125,126,160,170,177; as a child, 198; on history, 116; ideal style of, 197-8; life of, 206-14 passim; his moods, 196-7; odes of, 195,196,197,199, 200; plotless, 138; on society, 83; symbol-essences in, 189,192,195; and temenos, 201 - works: To Autumn (1820), 88,211, 212; La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1820), 88,187,195, 210, 212; Bright Star (1838), 210; Calidore, 207; The Cap and Bells, 198, 211; In a DrearNighted December (1817), 208; Endymion (1818), 18, 85, 86, 92,104, 108,123,125,158,178-205; 208-10 passim; Epistle to Reynolds, 202; The Eve of St. Agnes (1820), 188,196, 201,210; The Eve of St. Mark (1816), 188,210; The Fall of Hyperion (1819; pub. 1856), 197, 211; On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1817), 207; On a Grecian Urn (1820), 88, 178,199,203,205,210,212; To Homer (1848), 184; Hymn to Pan (1817), 208; Hyperion (1820), 117,131,186, 188,193,197,199,210,211; Imitation of Spenser (1812), 207; I stood tiptoe upon a little hill, 207; On Indolence (1848), 210; Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1820), 188,195,208; Lamia (1820), 193,195,197, 211; Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), 212; On Melan-

401 choly (1820), 210,212; To a Nightingale (1820), 87,88,203,205,210,212; O Solitude (1815), 207; Otho the Great (1819), 131, 210; Poems (1817), 207; To Psyche (1820), 210,212; Sleep and Poetry (1817), 85,196,198-9,208; Staffa, 190; To —, 188; When I have fears that I may cease to be (1848), 81, 208 Keats, Thomas (1799-1818), 206,208; death of, 210 Kempis, Thomas a (1379-1471): The Imitation of Christ (1427), 49 Kierkegaard, S0ren Aabye (1813-55), 47, 89,239; the "drunken boat" construct in, 113-14 King, Stephen (1947), 348 Kinnaird, Douglas (1788-1830), 65 Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936), 258 Kleist, Heinrich von (1777-1811), 131; "Uber das Marionettentheater" (1801; pub. 1810), 221 Knowledge: of Adam, 87-8; and consciousness, 343-6; of death, 133; and experience, 351-2 Krishna: epiphany of, 205 Labyrinth, 184,190 Laforgue, Jules (1860-87), 109 Laissez-faire economy, 30 Lake Poets, 67 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de Monet, chevalier de (1744-1829), 342 Lamb, Lady Caroline (1795-1828), 53, 60 Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 208 Lang, Andrew (1844-1912), 253 Language: decay of, 28-9; of love, 163; music as, 340; poetic and discursive, 20 Latin: golden age of, 322; habit of, 343

4O2

Laughter, 147; obsession causes, 291 Law, 97; in Dickens, 297; man creates, 100-1; natural, 152-3 La Wallonie, 241 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (18851930), 69,101,102,104,181, 319; Song of a Man Who Has Come Through, 86-7 Lazarus, 332 Learning: and consciousness, 343, 349 Le Fanu, (Joseph) Sheridan (1814-73): In a Glass Darkly (1872), 240 Legend, 94 LeGuin, Ursula K. (b. 1929): Earthsea trilogy (1968-90), 311 Leigh, Augusta (nee Byron), 50, 54 Leisure, 320; and work, 316 Leisure class, 317. See also Aristocracy Leninism, 318. See also Communism; Marxism Leon, Derrick Lewis (1908-44): Ruskin the Great Victorian (1949), 242 Leviathan, 169,190 Lewis, Matthew (Monk) (1775-1818), 59 Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (18821957): "An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce," 296; The Human Age (1955), 296 Liberal, The, 55 Liberty, 101; Ancient Greek, 160; and equality, 283, 320; and reason, 273-5; in Shelley, 159,168,170,173, 176 Life: and death, 145,148-50,171,188, 205 Lipscomb, William (1754-1842): The Beneficial Effects of Inoculation (1783), 27 Literature: and abstraction, 222;

Index history of, 13,16-23 passim; improvement of, 29; mythology creates, 94; as product and as process, 8-13; and reality, 308; social function of, 105-6 Locke, John (1632-1704), 28, 35,174; Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), 27, 29; Treatises of Government (1790), 27 Lockhart, John Gibson (1794-1854), 209 Lodge, Thomas (1556-1625): Glaucus and Scilla (1589), 186 Logos, 273; Apollo as, 193; Christ as, 284; Coleridge on, 45, 48. See also Word London: in Dickens, 303; eighteenthcentury, 27 Longinus (the soldier who pierced Christ), 329 Longinus (fl. ist c. A.D.), 8; On the Sublime, 110-11 Lord's Prayer, 163 Love, 272; Byron on, 58; and death, 126-9 passim; dialectic of, 175; eros and agape as, 105; in Keats, 196; in Shelley, 162-4,166,168-9, *72; vision of, 168,169. See also Caritas Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken (1873-1963): on Romanticism, 73, 74 Lower world, 146-7 Lowth, Robert (1710-87): On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753), 36 Loyalty: and spiritual authority, 276; and the university, 286 Lucifer, 161. See also Satan Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (ca. 94-55 B.C.), 95 Lukacs, Gyorgy Szegedy von (18851971), 225 Lyric: audience of, 251-2; in Beddoes,

Index 136; of sensibility, 11. See also Ballad; Fragmentation Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800-59), 6 Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527): The Prince (1532), 221 Mackail, John William (1859-1945): Life of William Morris (1889), 310 Macpherson, James (1736-96): Ossian poems, 10,12,13, 36,116 Maeterlinck, Count Maurice (18621949)/136,241 Magic, 82,189,192-3; in Keats, 200; in Shakespeare, 158. See also Alchemy Magna Carta, 282 Mallarme, Stephane (1842-98), 38; L'Azur (1866), 222; Le tombeau de Verlaine (1897), 220 Mallett, Paul Henri (1730-1807): Northern Antiquities (1790), 36 Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471), 328 Mandeville, Bernard (1670-1733), 23, 32, 35; The Fable of the Bees (1714), 18,20-1, 30 Maritain, Jacques (1882-1973), 75 Marlowe, Christopher (1564-93): The Jew of Malta (pub. 1633), 132 Marvel, Ik (Donald G. Mitchell) (1822-1908): Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), 250 Marx, Karl (1818-83), 37, 49, 284, 307, 314; Communist Manifesto (1848), 318; Das Capital (1867-94), 32; Theses on Feuerbach (1932), 284 Marxism, 125,221; Auden on, 89; the "drunken boat" construct and, 113-14; and Morris, 310, 317-18. See also Communism; Leninism Mary, Virgin: as Queen of Heaven, 96

403 Mary Magdalen, 333 Massey, Walter Edward Hart (18641901), 215 Masterpiece: imaginative vision of, 20; judgment of, 22 Mattheson, Johann (1681-1764), 18 Matthew, Gospel of, 264 Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805-72), 68 McKnight, Ray, 230 McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall (191180), 341; The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), 90 Meaning, expression of, 29 Mechanism: of characters, 306; of humanity, 314, 316, 352-3; nature as, 79, 99,100,108,164-5; Romantic attitude to, 154 Meditation: as evolutionary, 347 Medusa, 169 Melbourne, Lady (1751-1818), 53,62 Melodrama, 302; in Dickens, 305 Melville, Herman (1819-91): on Greek architecture, 91; Moby Dick (1851), 69 Memory: conscious and unconscious, 351; in Dickens, 303 Menander (342-291 B.C.), 290; plots of, 289 Menippean satire, 25 Merrill, Stuart Fitzrandolph (18631915), 241 Metamorphosis, 282; in Dickens, 294; in Keats, 186,191; poetry of, 194 Metaphor, 97, 222; and emblems, 262; in the age of sensibility, 14 Methodism: the primitive in, 35 Metonymy, 222 Metre, 10,11 Micawber, 3 Middle Ages: ascent in, 80; as ideal society, 83; Morris on, 315; reactions against, 321; romance in, 117

404

Middle class: and liberty, 320 Miles gloriosus: death as, 129 Mill, Harriet Taylor (1807-58), 281 Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 7&/ 271, 282, 314; on Coleridge, 45; education in, 281; on spiritual authority, 279-81; On Liberty (1859), 280 Milne, A(lan) A(lexander) (18821956), 231 Milnes, Richard Monckton, ist Baron Houghton (1809-85): ed., Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848), 213 Milton, John (1608-74), 29, 69, 76, 80, 83, 88,94,197,271, 324; Coleridge on, 46; education in, 281; on genius, 106; on liberty, 101; his muse, 78; on poets, 106; on the Restoration, 16-17; spiritual authority in, 273-4; on temporal power, 283; universe of, 77-8,193; L'Allegro (1645), 160,196-7; Arcades (1632), 186; Areopagitica (1644), 273,281; Comus (1637), 83,85,162; Lycidas (1638), 186,190; Nativity Ode (1645), 26, 78, 99,174; Paradise Lost (1667), 33/ 59/ 63, 78,115,122,160-1,164, 179,182; Paradise Regained (1671), 165, 335; II Penseroso (1631), 160, 196-7; Samson Agonistes (1671), 274; Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), 274 Minos, King, 190 Mirrors: in Beddoes, 145; in Dickens, 304 Mistress, cruel, 121. See also Courtly love Modern Library (Random House), 240 Modern mind: two poles of, 80-1 Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622-73), 289; Les Precieuses

Index ridicules (1659), 300; Tartuffe (1664), 301 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-92), 46; as Ydgrunite, 278; "Of Cannibals" (1580), 35 Monteverdi, Claudio (1567-1643), 327 Moon, 109 Moore, John (1729-1802): Zeluco (1789), 59 Moore, Thomas (1779-1852), 64 Moore, T(homas) Sturge (1870-1944), 223 Morality: in literature, 106 Morley, Christopher, 3 Morris, William (1834-96), 136, 279; on the arts, 321-5; on centralization, 318-19, 321; five phases of his writing, 309-10; on fraternity, 320; on manufacture, 316; medievalism in, 116-17, 3!5/ 324; as Parnassian, 313; politics of, 310, 317-20; schizophrenia in, 311; on social planning, 315-16; on work, 313-17 - works: trans. The Aeneid (1875), 310; trans. Beowulf (1898), 310, 313; trans. The Odyssey (1887), 310; trans. Volsunga Saga (1870), 310; "Art and Socialism" (1884), 240; The Defence of Guenevere (poem) (1858), 309; A Dream of John Ball (1888), 310; The Earthly Paradise (1868/9-70), 309, 313, 324, 325; Gertha's Lovers (1899), 312; House of the Wolfings (1890), 323; "A King's Lesson" (1886), 310; "The Lesser Arts" (1878), 314, 316; The Life and Death of Jason (1867), 309; Love Is Enough (1873), 310; News from Nowhere (1891), 278-9, 310, 313, 316, 317-20 passim, 323; The Pilgrims of Hope (1885), 310; The Roots of the Mountains (1889), 312;

Index The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), 310; The Story of the Sundering Flood (1897), 310/ 312/ "Svend and His Brethren" (1856), 312; The Well at the World's End (1896), 310; The Wood beyond the World (1894), 310, 311 Mosely, Sir Oswald (1896-1980), 240 Mother: in romantic tragedy, 120,121 Mountain, Elizabeth (Bessie), 230, 234 Mount Holyoke College, 246 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (175691), 18; Don Giovanni (1787), 66 Murray, John (1745-93)7 53/ 55 Music: in Parsifal, 337-40; Schopenhauer on,337 Music of the spheres, 96,158,169,199 Mysticism, 264 Myth(s), 84, 93-4; characters as, 82; of concern, 102; and deconstruction, 226; man creates, 100-1,150-1,177; meaning of, 328; and mythology, 325; poetic origin of, 98 Mythology: decline of, 26; and ideology, 226; matriarchal, 96; and myth, 325; open, 177; Romanticism as new, 102-3; two structures descend from, 94 Mythopoeic poetry: plotless, 167; Romantic poetry as, 84-5 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) (1769-1821), 68,115,119; Byron on, 53; Keats on, 189; as Romantic, 83-4. Napoleonic wars, 93 Narcissus, 145; poetry of, 198 Narrative: plotless, 167 Nash, Ogden (1902-71), 65 Natural society, 34-7 passim, 103, no, 122 Nature, 345-6; ambivalent, 88-9; and

405 art, 8,19; in Dickens, 307; in the eighteenth century, 27; as female, 333; hero as, 119; identity with, 104,115,124,125,138,177-8; innocence in, 202; as mechanical, 79; as mother, 95,126,169; natura naturans, 99,138,155,221, 222; poetry of renewed, 20; pre-Romantic, 81; as process, 99,107; Romantic view of, 102,103-4,111-12; scientific and poetic visions of, 150-1; in Shelley, 166,170; spirit of, 161-2; spiritual authority from, 284; two levels of, 13, 22, 33, 34-5, 77,78,80, 95-7,104,108,109,123, 126,158-9, 222, 224, 331; unity with, 103-4. $ee also Creation, four levels of Nazism, 83. See also Fascism Necessity, 152-3; in Blake, 78-9; and freedom, 272 Negative capability, 188,199 Nemesis, 335 Neptune, 190 Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar) (A.D. 37-68): silver age of, 322 Nerval, Gerard de (Gerard Labrunie) (1808-55), 15 New Comedy, 299; Dickens as, 28994, 300, 301; festivity in, 291; nineteenth-century, 302-3 New Criticism: and Byron, 56 Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801-90), 47, 271; doctrine in, 283; on spiritual authority, 281-2; the university in, 285 New society: in comedy, 122 New Testament: and tyranny, 160. See also Bible; Gospel; Scripture Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), 28, 98,100; in Blake, 79; excitement over, 19; world picture of, 78;

406 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), 27 Nicolson, Marjorie (1894-1981): Newton Demands the Muse (1946), 20,78 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (18441900), 37,68, 96,239; on Parsifal, 333, 337; on truth, 222; on Wagner, 327; Thus Spake Zarathustra (188392), 113 19603,120; on campus, 348-9; knowledge and experience in, 352 Noah, 267; his ark, 89, 96 Noble savage, 34, 83,104 Noh plays, 336 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772-1801), 105 Novel: Gothic, 111; Romanticism and, 82. See also Fiction Obsession: in Dickens, 305; in humours, 294-5; in New Comedy, 291 Occult, 170. See also Tarot Oedipus, 161 Old Testament: will of God in, 272 Ongley, Fred, 238 Oracles: random, 200 Oracular: autohypnosis as, 90; in Beddoes, 146-7; cave, 115; composition, 13; metaphor as, 14; nature as, 88,111; rhythm, 12 Oram, Betty, 234 Order: images of, 99; universe as, 96, 98 Organic: versus mechanical, 79 Orpheus: Dickinson champions, 261; and Fury dice, 193 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50): Nineteen Eighty-Four d949), 79,299 Osborne, Dorothy (1627-95), 28 Ossian. See Macpherson

Index Ottava rima: in Byron, 64 Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramee) (1839-1908), 287 Ouroboros, 143 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.-A.D. 17), 26, 95; Metamorphoses, 186,191 Oxford: women at, 216 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine: Morris appears in, 309 Oxford University Press, 22 Pain: in Keats, 182; Shelley on, 156 Pandora's box, 163 Paradise: Dickinson's vision of, 264-9 passim, 270; of Keats, 201; lost, 177, 203. See also Eden; Garden Parataxis, 219 Past, the, 109,176,226, 348, 351. See also Future; Present Pastoral, 97,177, 348; in the Augustan age, 34; creation in, 180; in Keats, 182; and the prophetic, 324 Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton (1823-96), 214 Paul, St., 116,166; on liberty, 273 Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866), 25; The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), 174 Peasants' Revolt, 279, 315 Peninsular War, 51 Pepys, Samuel (1633-1703), 5 Percy, Thomas (born Piercy) (17291811): Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), 36 Peredur (Welsh Grail story), 329 Perfection, 29. See also Fantasy Pericles (ca. 490-429 B.C.): Age of, 160 Peter, St., 190 Philips, John (1676-1709): The Splendid Shilling (1701), 18

Index Philosophy, 94; Romantic, 75 Picturesque, the, 13 Plato (ca. 428-ca. 348 B.C.), 45, 337; the cave in, 162; unity in, 163; The Laws, 324; Phaedo, 172; The Symposium, 162,176 Plautus, Titus Maccius (ca. 250-184 B.C.), 289,290 Play: the anatomy and, 25; and work, 350 Pleasure: and pain, 121-2; in Romanticism, 74 Plot: in Dickens, 287-9, 300-7 passim; sequence within, 137-8 Poe, Edgar Allen (1809-49), 57,109; on the continuous poem, 57,90; Berenice (1835), 293; Hop-Frog; or, the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs (1850), 141; King Pest (1835), 133; "The Poetic Principle" (ca. 1845), 11 Poetry, 171; of concern, 198; contemporary, 15; continuous, 11-12, 85; and creation, 165; crusading, 204; diction of, 256; and divinity, 199; and eternity, 176; and experience, 149; healthy, 241; and identity, 162, 196; and imagination, 204; and interpenetration, 203; Keats's view of, 194; language of, 195; lyric, 251; oracular, 13; organic wholeness in, 225; original, 201; the poet's role, 106-7,116-17; the primitive in, 36; as product, 9; and prophecy, 174; and reality, 168; and religion, 177; of sensibility, 13; Shelley on, 157; and sleep, 178,191; sound and sense in, 11, 257; thought of, 176; unites man and nature, 97; and the Word, 163 Political science, 94 Politicians, 352 Polytheism: Romantic, 102

407

Pomona, 184 Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 7, 22, 28, 38, 75, 76; Byron and, 64,122; couplets of, 9; The Dunciad (1728), 10,16; An Essay on Criticism (1711), 29; The Messiah (1712), 26; Moral Essays (1731-35), 19; Peri Bathous: Or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), 29; The Rape of the Lock (1712), 18 Poseidon, 272 Pottle, Frederick Albert (1897-1987), 5 Poulet, Georges (1902-91), 225 Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885-1972), 72, no, 322; fragmentation in, 90 Power: creative, 81-5 passim, 106-7; stories as, 325 Praz, Mario (1896-1982): The Romantic Agony (1933), 121 Pre-Raphaelites, 322 Presence(s), 199, 200; in Dickinson, 266 Present, 173, 203, 226, 351; continuous, 9-10; in Dickinson, 264; eternal, 176; sacrifice of, 347 Priestly, F(rancis) E(thelbert) L(ouis) (1905-88), 341 Primitive: the eighteenth-century, 33-6 passim; in Romanticism, 83 Primitive societies: the dead in, 147 Prior, Matthew (1664-1721), 23 Process: identity of, 99; literature as, 8-13 passim Product: literature as, 8-n passim Progress: and evolution, 346-8 Projection, recovery of, 100-1,150-1, 177,194 Prometheus, 160; as Christ, 163; in Shelley, 164 Propertius, Sextus (ca. 5O-ca. 16 B.C.), 75

408 Prophecy: poetry as, 174; and the pastoral, 324 Prose: aphorisms and, 44; continuous and discontinuous, 258 Proserpine, 193 Proust, Marcel (1871-1922) 101; Romantic tragedy of, 121 Pseudepigrapha, 13 Psyche, 184 Pulci, Luigi (1432-84): Morgante maggiore (1481), 65 Puppet characters, 296 Purgatory: space as, 202-3 Pushkin, Alexander (1799-1837), 68 Pygmalion, 168 Quarterly Review: Endymion reviewed in, 209 Quennell, Peter (1905-94): Ruskin: The Portrait of a Prophet (1949), 242 Quest: imaginative, 200; mental, 118; and question, 332-3; renunciation of, 335; in Shelley, 165; of the soul, 114,118,178. See also Ascent; Descent Rabelais, Francois (1493-1553), 46 Radcliffe, Anne, nee Ward (17641823), 59,111 Reading: authentic, 176 Realism, 155; and imagination, 299; and romance, 118, 287; and Romanticism, 82,116-17 Reality, 80,166,182; via the arts and sciences, 286; in Beddoes, 143-4; cemetery of, 134; death as, 149; to Keats, 178; and literature, 308; new, 27; spatial projection of, 78-83 passim; two kinds of, 176-7; underworld of, 162; verbal, 38 Reason, 105; Age of, 22; belief in, 25; inferior to consciousness, 99; and

Index liberty, 272-5; and tyranny, 276 Rebirth, 147. See also Resurrection Recognition, 352 Redemption: myths of, 105; in Parsifal, 331, 333, 335, 337; traditional and Romantic, 103 Red Sea, 145; habit as, 165 Reformation, no, 321-2 Refrain: in lyric, 10 Regeneration, 152,163,169 Reincarnation, 147 Religion: eighteenth-century, 26; and poetry, 177,195 Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn) (1606-69): nature in, 155 Renaissance, 321-2; ascent in, 80 Repetition, 351; and education, 349; in literature as product and process, 10-11; Response, community of, 194,204-5. See also Saving remnant; Spontaneity Revelation, 194,222-3; Book of, 259; mythopoeic, 107; and spiritual authority, 273-4,282 Revolution, no, 147,165-6; as apocalypse, 73; and culture, 283-4; m Dickens, 307; and Eros, 176; and fraternity, 320; hope of, 163; inward, 83; and Morris, 317; in poetic imagery, 74; and revelation, 282; of Romanticism, 78-83 passim, 101, 102,108-10,114; and Shelley, 167, 172; and spiritual authority, 274-6; technological, 323 Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), 36; storytelling of, 9; Clarissa (1747-48), 11, 31; Pamela (1740-41), 9, 31 Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875-1926), 102; on the poet, 183 Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur (185491), 15; dereglement de tons les sens,

Index 13,115; on me pense, 14; as voyant, 90; Le Bateau ivre (1871), 89, 284; Les Illuminations (1886), 90; line Saison en enfer (1873), 12,115 Rodgers, Richard (1902-79), and Hammerstein, Oscar (1895-1960): The King and I (1951), 290 Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855), 64 Roman Catholic Church, problem of, 281; and Romanticism, 109-10 Romance: and Dickens, 303-4; endless, 85,131; of Morris, 309-12 passim; novels as, 82; and realism, 287; Romanticism transforms, 11519 Romanticism, 7-8, 92; antitheses in, 219; apocalyptic vision of, 117; art in, 11; and Classicism, 7; concern of, 177; conflicts in, 225; cosmos of, 192,193; creative power within, 81-5 passim; definition of, 72-4, 75-6, 93; divinity in, 199, 200; elitism of, 317; expanded consciousness in, 120; genesis of, 203; German, 159; inward nature of, 813; journey to the centre of, 86-8; metaphor in, 14; new mythology of, 102-3,105; NF becomes interested in, 218; reconsideration of, 91; rejects social process, 135; revolutionary cosmos of, 78-83 passim, 101,102,103,105,108-10, 114,123-4,150,153,192,193 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78), 4,5, 22,37,69,104,221,280; on civilization, 81, no; as Dante's Virgil, 2256; Holderlin on, 220; natural society in, 274-5; the primitive in, 35; Confessions (1782), 120; Reveries d'un solitaire (1782), 226 Ruskin, John (1819-1900): influences Morris, 314-15; life of, 242-4; The

409 Ethics of Dust (1866), 243; Praeterita (1885-89), 242; The Stones of Venice (1851-53), 314,322 Sacrifice: as quest, 334-5 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-Frangois, Marquis de (1740-1814): nature to, 88; Romantic irony of, 121 Salome, 329 Salvation, the dolphin as, 190 Samuel, Book of: Witch of Endor in, 146 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80), 75, 336; Being and Nothingness (1943), 150 Satan: in Milton, 59, 73-4,164,187, 191; as sky-god, 100 Satire, 122; Byron's, 64-8; eighteenthcentury, 26; of mechanical characters, 296 Saving remnant, the, 284-5. $ee a^so Response, community of Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775-1854), 75 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759-1805), 116,221 Schoenberg, Arnold (1874-1951), 53 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860), 37, 47, 74,126, 284; the "drunken boat" construct in, 89,113-14; Nietzsche detests, 337; Wagner reads, 334; The World as Will and Idea (1819), 337 Science, 80, 93,150-1; and law, 152; and mythology, 98; and Romanticism, 101 Science fiction, 109; and Morris, 311. See also Fantasy Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 51,76, 82; aristocracy in, 109; heroines of, 111; Ivanhoe (1819), 116; Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), 1]L3; R°b ^°y (1817), 36; Waverly (1814), 36

4io Scripture: and doctrine, 282; and truth, 281. See also Bible; Gospel; New Testament Self-awareness: tragedy of, 119-20 Self-consciousness: fall into, 109, no; sin of, 103 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger (ca. 4 B.C.-A.D 65), 135; Apocolocyntosis, 67; Thyestes, 132 Senex figure, 157,158 Sense, 80-1 Sensibility, Age of, 7-8, 9-10,11-12, 14,15, 27; Beddoes as change in, 133; Romanticism as new, 93 Severn, Joseph (1793-1879), 213; befriends Keats, 212 Sex: and death, 185 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), 69,197,240,250,271, 348; and his contemporaries, 17; comedy in, 158-9; out of fashion, 29; the fool in, 138; green world of, 307; imagination of, 107; magic in, 192-3; romantic comedies of, 123; temperament of, 188 - works: Antony and Cleopatra (1623), 159; As you Like It (ca. 1602-3), *23; Comedy of Errors (1623), 304; Cymbeline (1608), 136; Hamlet (1604-5), 116,119,129,132,170; Julius Caesar (1599), 42; King Lear (1608), 116, 331; Macbeth (1623), 132,137; Merchant of Venice (1600), 123; A Midsummer Night's Dream (1600), 116,118,123,158,184; Othello (1622), 295; Pericles (1609), 302; Romeo and Juliet (1597), 159, 180; The Tempest (1623), 158,189, 214, 307, 333, 335; Titus Andronicus (1607), 132; Twelfth Night (1600), 304; Venus and Adonis, 186; A Winter's Tale (ca. 1610), 168,289

Index Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), 231, 311; on God, 260; on Morris, 310; Back to Methusaleh (1921), 342; Candida (1933), 290; Man and Superman (1901-3), 70; The Music Cure (1913), 95 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (17971851), 173; Frankenstein (1818), 79, 122,164 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 60, 64,76,109,115,125,137,143, 193, 202,208,213; atheism in, 153; Byron meets, 54; on the creative process, 85; drowns, 55; and Eliot, 171-2; Eros in, 105; Greece in, 15960; and Keats, 178,198-9,207,212; on liberty, 101; magic in, 192-3; nature in, 155; plotless, 138; on poets, 105; and science, 151; sister in, 103; a slug, 181; wandering Jew figure in, 120 - works: Adonais (1821), 183,213; Alastor (1816), 88,120; Cenci (1819), 122,163; Cloud (1820), 155; A Defence of Poetry (1821), 79,157, 159,164,174,176, 201; Epipsychidion (1821), 162,168; Hellas (1822), 160,173,175-6; Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1817), 162; Julian and Maddalo (1824), 54,169; Letter to Maria Gisborne, 154; Mont Blanc (1817), 170; Necessity of Atheism (1811), 100; Ode to Heaven (1819), 169; Ode to Liberty (1820), 168; Ode to the West Wind (1820), 84,112; On a Future State, 172; On Life, 164; Prince Athanase (1824), 160; Prometheus Unbound (see below); Queen Mab (1813), 85,100,152-3, 156,160-1,163,167; The Revolt of Islam (1817), 85,151,165-6,167, 171-2,173; The Sensitive Plant

Index (1820), 172; Song to the Men of England (1839), 173; Speculations on Metaphysics (1840), 85; To a Skylark (1820), 218; The Triumph of Life (1824), 174,226; Witch of Atlas (1824), 154 - Prometheus Unbound (1820), 85,86, 87,90,92,100,117,123,125,150-76 passim, 319; Jupiter in, 79,152, 156-7,159,161,163-4,167,172-3 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (17511816), 64; The School for Scandal (1777), 26 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86), 25 Siegfried: legend of, 328 Silence: poetry of, 201 Simile, 97 Simrock, Karl Joseph (1802-76), 329 Sinclair, Lister (b. 1921), 42 Sky-gods, romantic, 79 Smart, Christopher (1722-71): Jubilate Agno (1758/9-63; pub. 1939), 12,13, 14; Song to David (1763), 10,12, 36 Smith, Adam (1723-90), 33 Smith, Aubrey C. (1863-1948), 234 Smith, Mrs. Spencer, 51-2 Smollett, Tobias George (1721-71): The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), 32 Smyth, Dame Ethel (1858-1944), 230 Social contract: in Burke, 34; in the eighteenth century, 33-4 Socialism, 320; Morris on, 319 Social science, 101 Society: and art, 309; and identity, 204; natural, 275, 276; obstructing and congenial, 289,291, 292,294, 296,298-9, 300; original, 83; the poet in, 116; transformation of, 282 Socrates (469-399 B.C.), 324 Soler, Antonio (1729-83), 18 Song of Songs: bride in, 95

411 Soul: Keats on, 202; quest of the, 114, 118,178 Sound patterns: in literature as product and process, 10-11; of poetry, 257 Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 11, 51, 70; Byron ridicules, 61; Vision of Judgment (1820), 67, 68 Space: as purgatory, 202-3 Sparagmos, 190. See also Fragmentation Spectator, The, 19, 29 Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936), 322 Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552-99), 195; stanzaic form in, 11; The Faerie Queene (1590-96), 80, 83,85,108, 112,179-80,182,186,201; Mutabilitie Cantos (1599), 179,182; The Shepheardes Calender (1579), 182 Spheres, music of. See Music of the Spheres Spirit: of God, 273; music as language of, 340; of Nature, 161-2 Spirits: elemental, 158,192-3; in Shelley,i58 Spontaneity: education towards, 350. See also Response, community of St. Michael's College, 341 Stars: as mechanical, 109; as original creation, 96, 98 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (17831842), 68 Sterne, Laurence (1713-68), 25; animals in, 13; Tristram Shandy (1759-65), 5, 8, 37, 65 Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955), 200 Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-94): on Poe, 133; on Whitman, 256 Stock response: humour of, 295 Storytelling: as power, 325. See also Fiction; Narrative; Plot Stream of consciousness, 8

412

Strindberg, August (1849-1912), 102, 135,136,231, 336; Dream Play (1902), 138,288; Great Highway (1909), 113 Structure: music as, 338; of Romantic poetry, 85 Subject-object split, 95,99,103,153, 165,170,171; in Romanticism, 225 Sublime, 12,110-11,126 Sullivan, Sir Arthur (1842-1900), 235. See also Gilbert Superstition: and faith, 351 Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 22, 25, 28,197; on dogma, 26; on Pope, 11; Drapier's Letters (1724), 16; Gulliver's Travels (1726), 16,21-2, 34; Journal to Stella (1710-13), 5; A Tale of a Tub (1704), 65 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (18371909), 57, 328; Tristram ofLyonesse (1882), 312 Symbol, intrinsic, 277, 283 Symbolisme, 137; vision in, 90 Symbolist movement, 149, 241 Symmetry: eighteenth-century, 27 Sympathy, imaginative, 12-13 Synge, John Millington (1871-1909): The Playboy of the Western World (1907), 142 Tarot, 330. See also Occult Tasso, Torquato (1544-95), 164, 327 Taste: eighteenth-century, 28 Tatler, The, 19 Taylor, John (1757-1832), 209, 214 Technology, 151,204; demonic, 154; military, 347; and revolution, 353; and uniformity, 323 Telemann, George Philipp (16811767), 18 Tell, William, 328 Temperament: creative, 188

Index Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-92), 9, 109,126,246, 328; In Memoriam (1833), 261; Lady ofShalott (1832; rev. 1842), 87; Ulysses (1844), 136 Terence, Publius Terentius Afer (ca. 190-159 B.C.), 289 Thanatos, 126, 305. See also Death Theatre of the Absurd, 133-4 Theism: in Coleridge, 48 Theology, 94; in the university, 285 Theory, educational, 271 Theseus, 190 Thetis, 160 Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914-53), 15, 319; Under Milk Wood (1954), 303 Thomson, James W. (1869-1941), 20 Thoreau, Henry David (1817-62), 246; Walden (1854), 270 Thought: poetic and aggressive, 174-5 Thurber, James Grover (1894-1961): The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1941), 352 Time: in Beddoes, 145; and death, 147; and the fall, 166; tyranny of, 176. See also Future; Past; Present Todd, Mabel Loomis (1858-1932), 252, 253,254 Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) (1892-1973): The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), 165, 3ii, 335 Totalitarianism, 204; cultural, 319. See also Communism; Fascism; Nazism; Tyranny Tradition, 273-4; art in, 328; and Morris, 325 Tragedy: in Keats, 197; revenge in, 147; in romance, 118; Romantic transformation of, 115,119-21 Traherne, Thomas (ca. 1637-74), 113 Transfiguration, 190

Index Transformation: vision as, 164 Trelawny, Edward (1792-1881), 55, 56 Trilling, Lionel (1905-75): "The Fate of Pleasure: Wordsworth to Dostoevsky" (1963), 72, 74 Trollope, Anthony (1815-82), 287; The Warden (1855), 287 Truth, 222; and beauty, 178,183,191, 197; and humour, 331; and myth, 177-8; and scripture, 281; and spiritual authority, 284 Turner, Gord, 238 Turner, Joseph Mallord William (1775-1851), 322; nature in, 155 Twain, Mark (Samuel Longhorne Clemens) (1835-1910): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 47; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), 57 Tyranny, 275-6; in Blake, 78-9,100; of Greece, 160. See also Totalitarianism Ugliness: Morris on, 314-17 passim Unconscious: Butler on, 343-4 Uniformity: and technology, 323 United States: aristocracy in, 277; literature of, 319 Unity: through love, 162-3 University: and the Church, 282; spiritual authority from, 285-6 University College (Toronto), 341 Urania: Milton's muse, 78 Utilitarianism: John Stuart Mill's, 281 Utopia, 316, 320; in romance fiction, 116 Valery, Paul (1871-1945), 241 Value judgments, 17, 46, 313; on Romanticism, 76; on Wagner, 327

413 Vaughan, Henry (1622-95), 113 Venus, 190 Verhaeren, Emile (18.55-1916), 24; Les Villes Tentaculaires (1895), 104 Verlaine, Paul (1844-96), 13; Parsifal (sonnet) (1886), 330 Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 37, 100-1,322 Victoria College, 341; Gate House in, 232; honour course at, 215; Music Club in, 229, 230,234, 235,236,238 Vinaver, Eugene: on Malory, 328 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Marro) (7019 B.C.), 34; Coleridge on, 46; Aeneid, 49; Fourth Eclogue, 26,16970 Virtue(s), Christian, 162-4 Vision, 173; apocalyptic, 117, 223; Dickens's radical, 298; Dickinson's paradisal, 264-9 passim, 270; human, 8; ideal, 176-7; of innocence, 114,177,180,181,198,202-3; of Jupiter, 157; liberated, 170; of love, 168,169; in Shelley, 164-6; two poles of, 153 Void, 166 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de (1694-1778), 4, 35,174; Candide (1759), 202 Wadsworth, Charles (1814-82), 247-8 Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard (181383): comitatus in, 336; as Nazi, 327; Flying Dutchman (1843), 338; Gotterdammerung (1876), 334; Lohengrin (1850), 327; Die Meistersinger (1868), 336; Parsifal (1882), 326-40 passim; Ring Cycle (1876), 165, 328, 334-5; Tannhauser (1845), 327,338; Tristan and Isolde (1857-59), 327, 328 Waller, Edmund (1606-87), 28

Index

414 Walpole, Horace (1717-97): Castle of Otranto (1764), 36, 60, 63 Walton, Evangeline Ensley (1907-96), 311 Wandering Jew, figure of, 149, 330; in Shelley, 160 War, cult of, 335 Warton, Joseph (1722-1800), 13; Essay on Pope (1757-82), 29, Warton, Thomas the Younger (172890), 13; History of English Poetry (1774-81), 36 Wasserman, Earl Reeves (1913-73): subtler language, 84 Waterloo, Battle of, 53 Watts, Isaac (1674-1748), 26 Webster, John (ca. 1580-1626): his influence, 17; The Duchess ofMalft (1623), 136 Welford, Jean Hardie, 234 Wellek, Rene (1903-95): "Romanticism Re-Examined" (1963), 72,73 Wentworth, Lady Isabella (16531733), 19 Wesendonk, Mathilde (1828-1902), 329 Wesley, John (1703-91), 10, 26 Westerns, 36 Weston, Jessie L. (1850-1928): From Ritual to Romance (1920), 330 Whig Revolution of 1688, 27 White goddess, 88,111-12 Whitman, Walt (1819-92), 12,256; There Was a Child Went Forth (1900), 198 Wilenski, John Ruskin (b. 1933), 242 Wilkes, John (1727-97), 68 Will: in evolution, 342; of God, 272; and grace, 191; renunciation of, 173 Williams, Charles Walter Stansby (1886-1945), 328 Wilson, Harriet (ca. 1807-70), 66

Wisdom: folly as, 133,138,140 Wit: theory of, 25 Witches, 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Joseph Johann (1889-1951), 47 Wolcot, John (1738-1819), 64 Wolfe, Thomas (1900-38), 69 Wolfram von Eschenbach (d. ca. 1230): Parzival, 327, 329, 330, 331, 332 Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-97), 32 Women: in Byron, 62-3; in Parsifal, 333. See also Heroine(s) Wood, Roy, 230 Woodhouse, Richard (1788-1834), 212 Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (18821941): "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924), 8 Word(s), 194,195; Coleridge on the, 48; creative, 163. See also Logos Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 7, 51,67, 72,76,81,99,121,198,199, 202,209,213,221,258,261, 319; Byron on, 64; Coleridge on, 45; correspondence in, 112; identity in, 203; Keats meets, 208; nature in, 88, 103-4,111,149,157,170; on the Ossian poems, 10; poetic diction of, 26; revolution in, 73; the sublime, 126; temperament of, 188; The Excursion (1814), 80,118; The Idiot Boy (1798), 84,154; Lyrical Ballads (1798), 14,27; Ode on Intimations of Immortality (1807), 103,113; Peter Bell (1819), 84,154; Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), 37, 76; The Prelude (see below); The Recluse, 86; Resolution and Independence (1807), 82,118; Simon Lee (1798), 200; To a Skylark (1825), 270; The Waggoner (1805), 84,154

Index - The Prelude (1805,1850), 104,105, 117,118,131,192, 200; mighty forms of, 80, 84,104; mothergoddess in, 88; the soldier in, 82 Work: and leisure, 316; Morris on, 314, 317; and play, 350 Working class, 317; and equality, 320; Morris on, 316. See also Class conflict Writer: Boswell as, 5-6; in history, 20; serious, 106 Writing: lucid, 350; process of, 8-13 passim Yale University, 3, 220 Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), 70, 101,102,104,109,136, 220; Byzantium in, 224; as conservative, no; double gyre, 134; on the Grail, 329-

415 30; image and emblem in, 223-4; on Shelley, 160; spirits in, 80; on the writer's mask, 4; Among School Children (1927), 223; Byzantium (1932), 223,224; The Celtic Twilight (1893), 324-5; Responsibilities (1914), 223; Sailing to Byzantium (1925), 223, 224; The Statues (1939), 224; The Tower (1928), 171; Vacillation (1932), 224 Yoga, 347 Young, Edward (1683-1765): Night Thoughts (1741), 28 Youth: Byron as, 70-1; education of, 317 Zelazny, Roger (Rodzher Zheliazny) (b. 1937): Amber trilogy, 311 Zen Buddhism, 201, 347 Zeus, 160