The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1933-1963 9781442657465

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Collected Works of Northrop Frye VOLUME 21

The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1933–1963

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 The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions.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

The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1933–1963

VOLUME 21

Edited by Germaine Warkentin

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Germaine Warkentin (preface, introduction, annotation) 2006 Printed in Canada isbn-13: 978-0-8020-9209-0 isbn-10: 0-8020-9209-8

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 The educated imagination and other writings on critical theory, 1933–1963 / Northrop Frye ; edited by Germaine Warkentin. (Collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 21) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8020-9209-0 isbn-10: 0-8020-9209-8 1. Literature – History and criticism. 2. Criticism. I. Warkentin, Germaine, 1933– II. Title. III. Series. pn81.f753 2006

809

c2006-902841-9

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

Contents

Preface ix Credits and Sources xiii Abbreviations xv Introduction xvii 1 Dr. Edgar’s Book 3 2 Art Does Need Sociability 7 3 Music in Poetry 9 4 The Anatomy in Prose Fiction 23 5 The Nature of Satire 39 6 Nichols and Kirkup’s The Cosmic Shape 58 7 R.F. Patterson’s The Story of English Literature 59

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Contents 8 The Function of Criticism at the Present Time 60 9 The Four Forms of Prose Fiction 77 10 Levels of Meaning in Literature 90 11 A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres 104 12 The Archetypes of Literature 120 13 Three Meanings of Symbolism 136 14 The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes 146 15 Towards a Theory of Cultural History 150 16 Art in a New Modulation 169 17 Ministry of Angels 175 18 Critics and Criticism 184 19 Myth as Information 189 20 Content with the Form 197 21 Forming Fours 203 22 The Language of Poetry 214 23 The Transferability of Literary Concepts 224 24 An Indispensable Book 230

Contents

vii 25 “Preface” and “Introduction: Lexis and Melos” 235

26 The Ulysses Theme and Tragic Themes in Western Literature 249 27 Nature and Homer 254 28 Sir James Frazer 267 29 Interior Monologue of M. Teste 276 30 World Enough without Time 284 31 Literature as Possession 295 32 New Directions from Old 307 33 The Well-Tempered Critic (I) 322 34 The Well-Tempered Critic (II) 337 35 Myth, Fiction, and Displacement 401 36 The Imaginative and the Imaginary 420 37 The Educated Imagination 436 Notes 495 Emendations 521 Index 523

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Preface

From 1951 to 1955 I was a student in Honours Philosophy at University College in the University of Toronto. On the small campus of those days, I was surrounded by students in the famous “English Language and Literature” course, but the colleges then functioned independently, and though I studied some English I never sat in Northrop Frye’s legendary classes on Blake, Milton, and prose of thought. Frye was nevertheless a campus celebrity, and even those of us buried in The Critique of Pure Reason could identify his still-golden head across the room when a visiting lecturer set up shop. However, as I discovered with pleasure when I read his Diaries for this edition, he and I had occupied parallel universes, living in the same part of town, going to the same concerts and art exhibits, and knowing many of the same people; my oldest professor was Fulton H. Anderson, who as a young man had taught Frye, and my earliest student mentor was the late Anne Carnwath, who was among his favourite pupils in the 1950s. When I began teaching English at Victoria College in 1970 we continued to occupy our separate spaces, but with growing grave affection. With my background in Philosophy I could see where his thinking was going, but that was not where I did my work. Early on, he restored to life a course I had bungled the previous year. He was generous to the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, of which I became director; our 1516 “Novum Instrumentum,” a copy now known as “the Northrop Frye Bible,” was the result. Increasingly at Victoria’s lunch-time “High Table” we would sit side by side, amiably gesturing across the chasm that, for me at least, separated the distinguished theorist from the apprentice literary historian. This is undoubtedly why the Northrop Frye you will meet here is a figure seen in his own history, a working writer and teacher as I was. Yet his critical

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thinking had some effect on me, not only in my editing of James Reaney, the Canadian poet so deeply committed to Frye’s ideas, but in the way the shape of his thought—always in a state of becoming—rescued me from Descartes and Kant rather as he observes Vico had rescued him from Spengler (TBN, 63). This volume includes almost all of Frye’s published articles pertaining to critical theory that appeared before the end of 1963. The chief omissions are the student essays in which he began to consider some of these issues, his writings on modern culture, and his early writings on Canada, which appear in volumes 3, 11, and 12 respectively of the Collected Works. In particular, the essays in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (NFMC) should be read as a companion to those collected here. The present volume has been arranged chronologically according to date of first publication; when articles were originally given as speeches, however, the date is that of delivery of the speech, though the text may be taken from the printed version. Headnotes to the individual items specify the copy-text (in the form “From such-and-such a text”), and list all known reprintings of the item. 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 revise essays for inclusion in his own collections, such as Fables of Identity, and such revised versions then become the source of the authoritative text. All substantive changes to the copy-text are noted in the list of emendations. All authoritative printed versions have been collated, and any variants of particular interest are mentioned in notes. In preparing the text, the general practice of the Collected Works has been followed 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, they have been silently regularized throughout the volume. For instance, Canadian spellings ending in -our have been substituted for American -or ones, commas have been added before the “and” in sequences of three, and titles of poems have been italicized. Sometimes, where editors have added commas around such expressions as “of course,” these have been silently removed to conform with the more characteristic usage in the typescript. Notes identify the source of all quotations that I have been able to track down; in the case of short classical passages, the section number, from the Loeb edition, has been placed in square brackets in the text. Notes

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provided by Frye himself are identified by [NF] following the note. Authors and titles mentioned in passing are not annotated, but life dates and date of first publication of books are provided in the index. Acknowledgments A number of people have helped me in the preparation of this volume, and I am happy to record my debt to them. Alvin Lee and Jean O’Grady of the Collected Works have given me much- valued support during the several years in which the volume, with its very diverse contents, was in gestation. My fellow-editor Robert D. Denham has also given precious assistance. The articles were originally expertly typed or scanned by Alex Stephens. I thank them and also my dear friend and one-time student Ward McBurney, who reviewed the text with his usual thoroughness and expert knowledge, inserted late-blooming endnotes, prepared the index, and generally saved me from error. Graduate assistants Chris Jennings and Mary Ellen Kappler tracked down a number of quotations for the notes. The staff of Victoria University Library were patient with my escalating requests for manuscript boxes and annotated books. Among others who have answered queries and provided information are my colleagues in the University of Toronto Department of English (especially Eleanor Cook, David Galbraith, E. Ruth Harvey, H.J. Jackson, Alexandra Johnston, Jay Macpherson and Heather Murray). I would like to pay admiring tribute to the international network of Paracelsus scholars who tried so willingly to identify the supposed Paracelsus allusion in no. 4 but in the end had to give up. Valued assistance of other sorts came from Harold Averill, Ian Balfour, Ronald A. Bosco, Michael Dolzani, A.C. Hamilton, Nicholas Kiessling, Wallace McLeod, John McClelland, Donald E. Moggridge, Stephanie Pena-Sy and her father Esteban Pena-Sy, Angela Prediger of the Victoria College Registrar’s office, Alice Rathé, Kenneth J. Rea, John Shawcross, Mary Louise VanDyke of the Dictionary of American Hymnology at Oberlin College, Jane Widdicombe, Mary Beth Wilkes of the English Institute at Harvard, Thomas Willard, and Leif Vaage. Finally, I am indebted to my husband, John Warkentin, for many long discussions of Frye’s work, and for his meticulous reading of a late draft of the Introduction.

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Credits and Sources

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 American Psychiatric Association for “The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” from The American Journal of Psychiatry, 119 (October 1962). Comparative Literature for “Review of The Ulysses Theme and Tragic Themes in Western Literature,” from Comparative Literature, 9 (Spring 1957). Daedalus for “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement,” reprinted by permission of Daedalus, Journal of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the issue entitled, “Evolution and Man’s Progress” (Summer 1961, vol. 90, no. 3). Indiana University Press for The Well-Tempered Critic, The Page-Barbour Lectures, University of Virginia, March 1961 (1963). The Johns Hopkins University Press for Review of Critics and Criticism, from Shakespeare Quarterly, 5 (1954), 78–80. ©. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kenyon College for “Literature as Possession,” from the Kenyon Alumni Bulletin (1960). The Kenyon Review for “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (Spring 1950,

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vol. 12, no. 2), “The Archetypes of Literature” (Winter 1951, vol 13, no. 1), and “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” (Autumn 1951, vol. 13, no. 4). Copyright The Kenyon Review. Stoddart Publishing for The Educated Imagination (1963). Reproduced with the permission of House of Anansi Press. The University of Toronto Press for “Music in Poetry,” from University of Toronto Quarterly, 11 (January 1942); “The Nature of Satire,” from University of Toronto Quarterly, 14 (October 1944); “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” from University of Toronto Quarterly, 19 (October 1949); “Towards a Theory of Cultural History,” from University of Toronto Quarterly, 22 (July 1953); “Content with the Form,” from University of Toronto Quarterly, 24 (October 1954). Virginia Quarterly Review for “An Indispensable Book,” from Virginia Quarterly Review, 32 (Spring 1956). Yale French Studies for “Three Meanings of Symbolism,” from Yale French Studies, 9 (1952). With the exception of those listed above, all works are printed by courtesy of the Estate of Northrop Frye/Victoria University.

Abbreviations

AC Ayre CW D DG DV EI FI FS GC LN

LS NB NF NFC

Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. John Ayre. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Collected Works of Northrop Frye The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Northrop Frye. Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. James Polk. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. Northrop Frye. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1991. Northrop Frye. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1963. Northrop Frye. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. Northrop Frye. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. Northrop Frye. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 5–6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Notebook Northrop Frye Northrop Frye in Conversation. Ed. David Cayley. Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992.

xvi NFCL

Abbreviations

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, 1932–1939. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 1–2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. NFL The books in Frye’s personal library, now in the Victoria University Library NFMC Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. CW, 11. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. NFR Northrop Frye on Religion: Excluding “The Great Code” and “Words with Power.” Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. CW, 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. NFSEL Nuosiluopo Fulai Wen lun xuan ji [Northrop Frye: Selected Essays]. Ed. Wu Chizhe. Beijing: China Press of Social Sciences, 1997. RT Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 13. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. RW Northrop Frye. Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935–1976. Ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1990. StE Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, 1932–1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 3. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. SM Northrop Frye. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. TBN The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. TS Typescript TSE Northrop Frye. T.S. Eliot. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963. WE Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French. CW, 7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. WP Northrop Frye. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. WTC Northrop Frye. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

Introduction

In the fall of 1933, Northrop Frye, newly graduated from Victoria College in the University of Toronto and studying theology at its sister college, Emmanuel, reviewed The Art of the Novel, by his former teacher Pelham Edgar. Published in the college’s historic literary magazine Acta Victoriana, which he had edited, the review is Frye’s first attempt—for publication, at least—to write literary criticism. It introduces what is chronologically the first of three volumes of the Collected Works devoted to his evolution as a critical theorist. Brief and perhaps necessarily appreciative, it exhibits two continuing features of Frye’s criticism: his loyalty to his intellectual community, and the coherence of his ideas from the inception of his career to its end. In it we can trace the beginnings of a critical theory sharply marked by its sense of the connectedness of all parts of the imaginative experience. Two decades later, as one of Edgar’s successors in the chairmanship of the English department at Victoria, Frye edited a collection of his teacher’s essays, grousing for weeks in his diary about the old man’s persistent widow and the unwelcome task. But he always recognized it was Edgar who gave him his first great subject, the poetry of William Blake (Ayre, 70–1) and it may also have been Edgar who introduced him to the possibility of a Canadian poetry (NFC, 46). This volume of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye brings together the writings on critical theory that Frye published between his review of Edgar in 1933 and The Educated Imagination in 1963, that is, from the age of twenty-one until shortly after his fiftieth birthday. A series of meaty essays were digested into Frye’s second important book, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and discussing them I have tried to focus on the thinking of the young Frye, leaving to Robert Denham, editor of the Anatomy, his revisions and second thoughts. There are reviews and addresses written

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as Frye emerged into the public eye and acquired international renown, many of which were collected in 1963 in Fables of Identity. That year was a turning point for Frye; he published not only The Well-Tempered Critic (no. 34) and his reluctantly written, controversial, yet very popular short study of T.S. Eliot, but also The Educated Imagination (no. 37), which is in many ways the culmination of his early thinking about writing and teaching. If The Educated Imagination has been termed a popularizing version of the Anatomy, it also provides a foretaste of Frye’s last big book, Words with Power (1990), where he reaffirmed the importance of communicating with all those who wished to learn, “including, of course, whatever academic critics are willing to take a more detached attitude” (WP, xix). Despite the public responsibilities he patiently took on, Frye was privately convinced that the artist and the critic were creatures whose business it was to upset the status quo.1 The youthful Frye spent a lot of time looking at pictures and discussing them with his wife Helen Kemp (who was teaching at the Art Gallery of Toronto), but he left no writing on painting as significant for his critical evolution as some early notes on music.2 Frye was intensely and learnedly musical; he collected scores, playing them expertly on the piano and like a musician studying them in his easy chair (see page xix). An early diary entry observes that every normal man has an alternate career, and his is that of music (D, 12); coming across a good source of scores in a New York shop, he is cheered by having found a spiritual home in that great city (D, 573). At the end of the Toronto Bach Festival of 1950, with “all that glorious music” and the attendant cheerful socializing, he records “Three of the happiest days I have ever spent in my life,” and cites Sean O’Faolain on “that bridge, which every artist longs for, between the loneliness of his private dreams and the gaiety of the public square” (D, 327). There is an almost Miltonic relationship between this intense musicality and the structural creativity of Frye’s writings, one he alluded to when introducing Spiritus Mundi (1976), where he described his constant return to favourite topics as resembling the theme and variation form in music (SM, vii).3 Frye read and wrote with a profound sense of the connections of things; his favoured modes were romance and comedy, and his model of belief and understanding came from a vision of sublime coherence. Such a way of imagining ought to have placed him securely in the conservative hierarchical culture emanating from the medieval and Renaissance sources he read so acutely. But his Methodist upbringing and education

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The distinguished critic practises in his alternative career. This photo of Northrop Frye at the piano, taken by his brother-in-law Roy Kemp, is from the mid-1950s. (Victoria University Library, Toronto).

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as well as his intense response to his undergraduate reading of Blake made this coherence seem profoundly democratic. Such a revolutionary way of seeing did not lead to the despairing separation from sources of renewal he would describe in “New Directions from Old”: “the bleak and frightening world of outer space . . . [and] the ordinary world of human experience, with all its anomalies and injustices” (319). Frye’s reality—for that is what it was—he thought of as fundamentally intelligible; you could make sense of it by the work of the imagination. Late in life he told David Cayley that for his chosen poet Blake it was such creating acts of the imagination which defined the relationship between God and man (Cayley, 56–9). Yet with respect to all three characteristics—coherence, democracy, and intelligibility—Frye was swimming upstream against powerful currents in the literary modernism of his time, to say nothing of the frequent timidity and routine of the academy of which he was an often frustrated member. His creative position had emerged from the collision in a single person of intellectual brilliance, provincial Methodism, and a gift for system-building, and it had all the limitations of those characteristics. Frye’s brilliance secluded him even as a young candidate for the ministry, and such seclusion fostered his love of systems and models. Furthermore, the task of making literature intelligible meant he had constantly to make it intelligible to a very demanding reader—himself—by means of the ever-exfoliating patterns to which his notebooks attest. An important experience of his student years was reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), where he encountered both the Faustian gloom of Spengler’s thesis of Europe’s wintry decline, and the cyclical patterning of cultures that underpinned the thesis. “The boldness of his leaping imagination, the kaleidoscopic patterns that facts make when he throws them together, the sense of the whole of human thought and culture spread out in front of one . . . all make up an experience not easily duplicated” (SM, 194). Frye rejected Spengler’s conservative social vision and his heavy pessimism, but given his own genius for patternmaking he felt a quick sympathy with the philosopher’s method of reasoning by analogy. In particular he recognized the organic nature of Spengler’s model, “divining in him the principle of historical interpenetration: everything that happens is a symbol of everything else that’s contemporary with it,” as he later wrote (LN, 617). Spengler’s rigorously philosophical approach to the structural issues posed by history taught him that “linear history is really, at bottom, a vulgar and complacent

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assumption that we represent the inner purpose of all history” (SM, 183). The egocentrism of the latter view Frye customarily lampooned as the “butterslide” theory of Western culture, “according to which this or that spiritual or cultural entity was ‘lost’ after Dante or Raphael or Mozart or whatever the author was attaching his pastoral myth to” (387).4 At the same time he rejected Spengler’s view of the cycles of culture as closed and mechanical. Frye’s conviction of the power of rebirth in human experience would lead him in the 1960s and ’70s to Giambattista Vico, whose theory of the historical ricorso, where civilizations that mature eventually return to their beginnings in barbarism, but within them possess core elements of reflection that enable them to initiate renewal, became part of “the attempt to come to terms with Spengler, or at least what Spengler did to me” (TBN, 63). Throughout his life two things kept Frye’s system-building in balance. One was his writerly gift for language, as we encounter it in the salty vernacular of his diaries and reviews and the clarity and genial dignity of his studies of Blake and the Bible. As a child Frye was not only a reader, but a precocious writer, and at his mature best he remains the most enjoyable academic critic of his generation. The other balancing element was teaching. From 1938 to within only a few weeks of his death in 1991 Frye taught nearly the whole range of English, American, and Canadian literature, in later years concentrating on Shakespeare and “the Bible and literature,” to class after class of Ontario undergraduates. As he aged and increased in renown he had the privilege of teaching only a graduate and an undergraduate course. But essentially he followed the career of a University of Toronto professor of his time, teaching the full curriculum from Chaucer to Eliot, with the daily reading and deep intimacy with the texts that such teaching requires. “I think all my books have been teaching books rather than scholarly books,” he later wrote; “I keep reformulating the same central questions, trying to put them into a form to which some reader or student will respond: ‘Yes, now I get it’” (DG, 141). If Frye the critical theorist was sui generis, it was not just by authors, but by the dailiness of his attention to them, that his critical theory was polished and fed. Part of this dailiness was the vigorous social life enjoyed by a young man and his wife both educated in, and now tightly involved with, the ongoing life of a Methodist college in a provincial university in a city remote from the sources of cultural life its intellectuals admired. When Frye came to Victoria College from Moncton in 1929, it had 760 students,

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almost all taught within the college in small groups, the University of Toronto had 6,000, and there were 600,000 people in Toronto, largely of English, Scots, and Irish origin. In 1991, the year he died, Victoria registered 3,260 students, multi-ethnic in origin and studying all over the campus, there were 56,000 students at the University of Toronto, and the city itself had grown to 2,275,000. These decades of massive change encompassed the Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War; as Frye later told David Cayley, while re-reading Fearful Symmetry for a reprint “I discovered what I hadn’t realized before: how very much the rise of Nazism was on my mind and how terrified I was by the clarity with which Blake saw things . . .” (Cayley, 65). Frye in maturity is remembered as a benevolent but austere figure, socially somewhat withdrawn unless he was among old friends, a group from which both his first wife, Helen Kemp, and his second, Elizabeth Eedy Brown, were drawn. But as a young teacher in the 1940s and ’50s, whose helpmate was expected to be active in the social whirl of the college, he led a life of frenetic activity: coping with the visits of relatives, teaching, editing, going to concerts and art exhibits, attending—and giving—parties. In the early 1960s his responsibilities as principal of Victoria College (1959–66) and his growing international renown led him to muse on the impossibility of keeping diaries.5 Consequently his private record ceases of the daily encounters with students, fractious colleagues, and the obligations of his position as a clergyman (the latter “without portfolio,” as he wryly described his ministry).6 This quotidian existence was conducted in tandem with an inner life of startling richness, energy, and productivity, one which found expression in the sheer physical joy of constant writing for publication, annotating the books in his library, and scribbling in his multiplying private notebooks, of which seventy-seven remain among his papers in the Northrop Frye Fonds at Victoria College.7 Frye was a champion typist by the age of sixteen, but he would abandon in frustration the attempt to type his notebook entries; it was the physical encounter with pen and paper he needed, as the regular stride of his small, often unreadable, script shows. The notebooks are topic- or project-related, rather than chronological, and they are not complete; one entry ruefully mentions his regret at having thrown out, in a hotel room in London, Ontario, a particularly good one that he had written in Seattle.8 The notebooks were his workshop; composed of short, almost aphoristic entries, they range associatively over whatever literary and intellectual issue he was currently

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pondering. In their profusion, still incompletely mined by students of Frye, we find the same mischievous wit and social irony as in the diaries, combined with frank reflections on what he constantly deplored as his inadequacies: his physical awkwardness, his guilty wish that some uncomfortable situation would just go away, his tendency to day-dream, and—most engagingly—his admitted willingness to knock the scaffolding out from under whatever grand structure he was currently elaborating (AC, 29). Above all, the notebooks, with their diagrams, private hilarity, and deep reflectiveness, show how his critical system not only evolved but constantly reinvented itself, how it was energized and given life by the sense of process that was fundamental to Frye’s critical experience. It was further sustained by a major stylistic feature of the notebooks: their use of inner dialogue. Jonathan Hart observes that in his occasional forays into fiction—none of them published in his lifetime—Frye shows a real gift for dialogue.9 No wonder, for throughout his life he talked to himself constantly on paper, dropping the occasional verbal bomb on his critics, excitedly setting out new ideas, admonishing himself (“bitched the day” he writes gloomily in 1942 [D, 22, 23]), drawing and redrawing diagrams, and erupting in glee when something particularly good struck him. This lively inner dialogue constitutes an ongoing act of writing that may be as central to our understanding of the critic as any of his propositions about criticism itself. If Frye was a voracious reader as an adolescent (Shaw was an early favourite, and had a lasting effect on his pungent and economical style), it was the literature he studied as part of his course in “Philosophy and English” that first gave system to his reading. “English” had been part of the university curriculum even in England for only five decades, and the approach to it was still more or less belle-lettristic. It was thus a relatively new and exciting field, though it had entered Victoria’s then-independent curriculum as early as 1868.10 In the mid-1930s the Toronto department would devise the famed honours course in “English Language and Literature” (ca. 1938–72) that not only trained three decades of Ontario high school teachers, but produced such critics, academics, and writers as Hugh Kenner, Margaret Atwood, Annabel Patterson, and Dennis Lee, plus a Governor-General of Canada, Adrienne Clarkson. The small, college-centred classes in “EL & L,” as it was known, worked intimately together for four intense years; until the early 1970s, when to his disgust

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the honours courses were abolished, Frye was well acquainted with all his students, “my kids” as he called them in his diaries. Intellectually EL & L was an attempt to come to grips with the entire canon, not only on historical principles but in a way that genuinely trained the students’ minds, or at least the minds of those who were going to teach high school in Ontario. It was probably EL & L about which the phrase “From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” was coined, since that is exactly how it proceeded. Students in their first year began with Old English, and travelled on through the centuries until in their fourth year they met with the moderns, whoever those were currently thought to be. American and Canadian literature were tacked onto the first year as an afterthought, Canadian writings occupying the last six weeks, if the lecturer managed to get to them. For those who studied and taught it, EL & L was thus both comprehensive in its ambitions and very provincial. But above all it was thorough; the conscientious student would emerge having read not only Beowulf, but most of Shakespeare, the complete Faerie Queene, almost all of Milton, including his prose, a rich selection of early and later drama and shorter poetry, all the major eighteenth-century novels, including Clarissa and Tom Jones, and a thick tranche of Romantic and Victorian poetry, the novel, and prose of thought (a Toronto specialty). As for the conscientious professor, he had to teach most of them. This Frye did, though with less frequent forays into the Victorian and modern novel to which, outside of Joyce, he appears to have paid less attention. If from Pelham Edgar’s teaching Frye drew as his first subject the towering figure of Blake, his own work as a teacher encompassed both the authors of the EL & L curriculum and the structure constituted by their stately historical progress. For Frye the historical development of literature was a practical aspect of literary study, not central to it. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the existence of that structure in the Toronto curriculum secured his own trust in the possibility that the concept of structure could be made intelligible to those who wished to learn. Frye did not always include his colleagues among those who wished to learn; throughout his teaching career he tended to find his fellowprofessors (in English, at least) hide-bound by their hierarchical concept of their discipline, which included not only ranking the students, but also ranking the excellence of the authors they taught, and indeed, a snobbish tendency to rank each other according to the degree of “taste” they

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displayed.11 He also found the Anglophilia of his colleagues and of cultural Ontario stultifying, despite his friendships with English-born academics sojourning in Toronto such as Herbert Davis, Wilson Knight, and Eric Havelock. His aversion had been aggravated by two years of study at Oxford, where he discovered himself becoming more and more North American as he penetrated the veil of authority the English seemed to claim on every topic. His encounter with the cultural vacancy and class snobbery he detected there had results later evident in his cold critique of T.S. Eliot’s social conservatism.12 Turning away from England would shape Frye’s early career. After his appointment at Toronto in 1939 he produced several major essays for the recently founded University of Toronto Quarterly at a time when, to the local academy, an appearance there clearly signalled a young man’s promise. But he quickly looked elsewhere for a wider audience, turning not to English journals like The Review of English Studies or Essays in Criticism but to the American Kenyon Review and Hudson Review. As his diaries show, he had a healthy interest in the shape of his career, and was delighted when his ambitions were rewarded by recognition south of the border, first with the acceptance of essays and reviews by respected editors, later with a Guggenheim fellowship and increasing invitations to lecture at American colleges. After the watershed year of 1950, when “Levels of Meaning in Literature” appeared in the Kenyon Review, twothirds of the essays and reviews in this volume would be published in the United States. Frye’s North American orientation, and his increasing renown, would lead in 1975 to a year at Harvard as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, and to his presidency in 1976 of the Modern Language Association of America. If by 1950 Frye had exhausted the outlets for writing about critical theory in Canada (though in this period he still published there on other topics) he thus moved directly from a position among the better-known North American academics to international status among the most distinguished critical theorists of his generation. Born in 1912, Frye historically occupies a place among the great post– First World War generation of philosophers and theorists stretching from Wittgenstein (b. 1889) through Lacan (b. 1901), Adorno (b. 1903); Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908), Barthes (b. 1915), Althusser (b. 1918), de Man (b. 1919), and Foucault (b. 1926) to Derrida (b. 1930).13 But of these men he was the only one (saving, perhaps, the later de Man) for whom North America, with its vast expanse, puritanism, immigrant cultures, and

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raucous voice, was not more or less legendary. At the same time, he was a different kind of North American, refusing all invitations—and there were many—to leave Canada for a well-funded chair in some leading American university. If the American academy gave him the opportunity to develop his critical stance, that stance was firmly taken up from a position on the other side of the border. In the years after the publication of The Educated Imagination in 1963, with which this volume concludes, Frye would find an audience in Canada too; indeed, by teaching a number of its emerging poets and novelists, he would help to create that audience. For the ambitious young thinker who wrote these essays and reviews that dream had yet to be realized. “When I first began to write it,” Frye wrote late in life, “I realized that criticism was something different from literature, because I myself was a critic and not a poet or novelist or dramatist. Yet I felt that I was no less ‘creative’ than those who were, creativity being an attribute of a writer’s mind and not of the genres he happens to be working in” (WP, xvii). No one who encounters the subversive wit of the opening paragraphs of “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction” (1942; no. 4) would be likely to think Frye an “uncreative” writer. Almost all his earliest writings are nonliterary prose of this kind: occasional pieces, reviews and commentary written on demand for local periodicals such as the social-democratic monthly Canadian Forum (which in due course he edited) and the more conservative society weekly Saturday Night. At the same time he was endlessly rewriting his Blake book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), as well as reviewing much current Canadian poetry. The reviews collected here exemplify less the reviewer’s task of reading closely than the systematization of literary forms he was developing in his notebooks. Assessing Edgar’s book, he seizes on its conventional promise of “a systematic study of the structural evolution of the English novel” and shakes out its implications: “Systematic” means that the approach is eclectic rather than subjective, inductive rather than a priori . . . Purely subjective criticism is, of course, only theoretically possible: but it should be noted that everything which has any communicative value in criticism is objective; because it must appeal to aesthetic principles which transcend a purely individual collection of likes and dislikes. The more subjective the criticism, the nearer it tends to aesthetic anarchy. (3–4)

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But a cheeky “letter to the editor” of Saturday Night (no. 2) protests an aging portrait painter’s ignorance of literary coteries, early demonstrating the necessary bond between the artist and the “gaiety of the public square.” Frye’s ensuing writings elaborate, with less youthful hauteur, these principles of system, comprehensiveness, detachment, and community. Even as he was rewriting the Blake book, Frye was thinking systematically through what went beyond it, in long, heavily revised studies of poetry, prose fiction, satire, and the role of criticism itself. “Music in Poetry” (1942, no. 3) discusses two arts in which he was deeply interested, but also illustrates his habitual revision and reuse of material.14 It began as a student essay on Browning written in 1932–3 (StE, 3), was rewritten as Frye’s first long essay to appear in the UTQ, and was then broken up in 1956 to be absorbed into “Lexis and Melos” (no. 25) and in 1957 into the Anatomy. “Music in Poetry” sets out to cock a snook at banalities about poetic harmony. From his strong position as a musical amateur, Frye points out that Music is not a sequence of harmonies: the word “harmony” in music ought always to be in inverted commas. Music is a sequence of discords ending in a harmony . . . when music attains “harmony” it has reached its final resolving chord and is all over . . . When we find a careful balancing of vowels and consonants and a dreamy sensuous flow of sound, we are probably dealing with an unmusical poet. (11)

His examples, ranging from Campion to Vachel Lindsay, are impertinently chosen from seemingly unmusical cases such as metaphysical poetry and invective; for example (on Browning): “only a musician would be interested in the stumbling rhythm of a funeral procession scrambling up a steep hillside” (13). Many of Frye’s essays show the same exuberance, but not all pay such close attention to the technicalities of craft. “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction” (1942, no. 4) also originated in a student essay (StE, 19), possibly for his Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden, and establishes the preoccupation of a lifetime: defining the meaning of “literary.” It initiates many of Frye’s persistent themes, displays the remarkable extent of his early reading—the examples are chiefly classical—and illustrates his systematic mode of inquiry. Rewritten several times, possibly as the result of one of the few rejections he ever received, it too would be absorbed into the Anatomy. This often very funny essay

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attempts “to get away from the old Ptolemaic view of prose literature as made up of novels, bad novels, formless fiction, and Examples of Prose Style, some of which last might by stretching a point be put under belles lettres. It pleads for a more Copernican perspective, and tries to show that there is evidence for one” (24). Significantly, the first prose form examined is that of romance, with its ancient ancestry, stately narrative progression, and stable conventions, and Frye marks its migration into the tale (Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, The Turn of the Screw, The Prussian Officer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) even after the rise of the novel. What draws him is their “kinship in form,” and he proceeds to search for “the main formal characteristics” of a typical homologous group. His chosen genre is the Menippean satire, convenient to the purpose because it bridges forms, periods, and topics and has many distinguished practitioners. His test case is Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, because on the surface it does not resemble the classical satires Frye has been discussing: The Anatomy of Melancholy is not a medical treatise which has accidentally survived in literature because of its style: it is not a freak of fantastic erudition; it is not a scholar’s crib or vade-mecum. It is exactly the same kind of encyclopedic survey of a mad world we have found [in Erasmus and Agrippa] . . . except that it is longer and more comprehensive. Not a single feature of our form is missing from it: not even the dialogue, for quotations from books can speak as eloquently of the confusion of the wise as table talk . . . The Anatomy of Melancholy is literature itself, and it is high time that Burton was dragged into the central and commanding literary position he ought to hold. (35).

And it is in the “anatomy” of Burton’s title that Frye finds a name for “what we can now stop calling ‘our form.’ . . . One of the main reasons for overlooking the fact that Lucian, Rabelais, Erasmus, Swift, and Voltaire are connected in form as well as in tone has been the lack of a simple word, like ‘novel’ or ‘romance,’ to describe that form” (35–6). The anatomy was Frye’s form as well, a fact Angus Fletcher would later use (see below) to remind Frye of its limitations as well as its strengths. A comparison of this early essay with its two descendants reveals not only Frye’s techniques of revision, but the lines along which his thinking was developing. In the second version (Hudson Review, 1950, no. 9) he cuts the laughs and begins with a lightning and rather querulous survey of English examples. The transformation is not a matter of condensation

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or stylistic change, but results from the fresh thought that can be traced in the musings of the diaries and notebooks of this period, as Frye moves away from his earlier preoccupation with Blake and begins to pile up examples and questions from his teaching and reading. Upon his original structure he practises the skills of analysis and differentiation that distinguish his critical method, revealing ever more shrewd analogies (who else would have recognized the Menippean element in The WaterBabies?). All these unfolding elements are combined into an elegant formal scheme not unlike the “intricate scheme of parallel contrasts” in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the latter embodying a fifth and quintessential form, which Frye associates with scripture. “To go further,” he concludes demurely, “would exceed our present objective, which is merely to give an explanation of some literary phenomena that appear to need it.” Until, that is, he kicks the scaffolding away yet again and installs much of the argument in the Fourth Essay, “Theory of Genres,” of his own great Anatomy. Frye thus did much of his thinking about criticism in the eye of his academic public, revising published essays, cutting, pasting, and constantly re-envisioning earlier insights. “The Nature of Satire” (no. 5) was drafted briskly in eight-point form in August of 1942 (D, 18–20); elements of its thinking are distilled into the presentation of the forms of satire in the Anatomy, but the earlier essay shows him working his way through a series of wittily chosen examples to achieve that distillation, and it still makes sense to read the two together. Three in particular of the early essays are of foundational importance for Frye’s thinking, for his emerging career, and for the Anatomy. The first is “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (no. 8). It began life as a paper for the university’s Humanities Colloquium, the writing of which can be traced in his diary for 1949. Frye knew universities elsewhere were sniffing around (D, 214), and though he was temporarily impatient with “Victoria’s corniness” (D, 54) his stature at Toronto increased daily; students crowded his classrooms and sat wherever they could find a place. The paper, which he initially called “First Steps in Literary Criticism,” was designed to boil down his ideas for a project he called, in the private terminology of his notebooks, “Liberal.”15 “The trick was to bite off a single point & make it clearly,” he noted, and added that “the time was not spent in the usual revision” (D, 142–3). Later, reviewing the achievements of “an exceedingly happy year,” he decided it was one of the best things he’d done (D, 214). His revision for the Anatomy was partly stylistic, eliminating some examples and expanding

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others, smoothing over points made too abruptly, and keeping in sight the early objections to his theories about a “scientific” literary criticism. However, the original paper is leaner and more direct, and it is also signally Toronto-centred, anticipating the presence of figures like Fulton Anderson (the philosopher and once Frye’s teacher), Marshall McLuhan, whom gossip reported was “out to get” him, and A.S.P. Woodhouse, who dominated the English department as Anderson dominated Philosophy. Frye worried that Woodhouse, who liked the paper but went home early, may have thought himself glanced at, “though nothing was further from my intentions: Woodhouse tries to sound like a pedant, but he’s really a great man & doesn’t fool me for a minute” (D, 143).16 Whatever the case, the simplicity and rhetorical coherence of Frye’s argument makes “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” before its later expansions, a key to much of the work of his middle years. Frye’s target is the view that criticism is parasitical on the arts, which he defends as “a continuously emancipating factor in society” (61). The critic’s job is to get as many people as possible in contact with the best that has been and is being thought and said. He is not a jackal prowling through the detritus of literature, but a thinker with a set of principles. The critic needs to read inductively, watching for those features that suggest the presence of a coherent body of data; Frye believed that inductive reading was at the root of his own method.17 He is careful, however, to point out that if criticism is a science, it is a social, not a natural one. A further problem is that even the form of literary history has yet to be discovered. A priority is “to see what literature is, and try to distinguish the category of literature among all the books there are in the world . . . To the historian there is nothing that cannot be considered historically; to the philosopher nothing that cannot be considered philosophically” (71). Likewise, he argued “literature exists in a verbal universe, which is not a commentary on life or reality, but contains life and reality in a system of verbal relationships. This conception of a verbal universe, in which life and reality are inside literature, and not outside it and being described or represented or approached or symbolized by it, seems to me the first postulate of a properly organized criticism” (73). The task of criticism at the present time is thus to establish the conditions within which such a development can take place. Within the year Frye was to have the opportunity to put his program before a wider public. On 6 February 1950 he was “thrown into a tizzy & a twitter” (D, 251) by a letter from Philip Rice, managing editor of the

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A.S.P. Woodhouse, Milton scholar and perennial chair of English at Toronto’s University College. Frye deeply admired his masterly administrative gifts. (University of Toronto Archives)

H. Marshall McLuhan, the rival star from neighbouring St. Michael’s College, with whom Frye had a gingerly relationship. (Robert Lansdale Photography Ltd./ University of Toronto Archives)

Edmund (Ted) Carpenter, youthful Toronto anthropologist and associate of McLuhan, with whom Frye conducted a celebrated campus debate in 1952. (Toronto Star Archives)

Ronald S. Crane of the University of Chicago, leader of the “Chicago School” of critics, with whom, despite doubts about his prose style, Frye had a very friendly relationship. (Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

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Kenyon Review, praising his work and requesting an article—by 15 February—for his journal. Frye complied, dragging out the “meaning” paper he had written for the Philosophical Club and, within a week, carving from it a major statement of his emerging principles of literary form which expands on a brief reference made in the “Function” paper to the need for a taxonomy of meaning. “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (no. 10) begins by frankly acknowledging its roots in the medieval scheme of four levels of signification: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological or moral, and the anagogic, but it looks not at the philosophical problems posed by this structure, but rather the way it is manifested in literature. The essay is nevertheless one of the most rigorously theoretical and closely argued Frye ever wrote. With serene authority he lays out his four levels: first is the pre-literary verbal symbol, the centripetal energy of whose syntactic and representative relations forces us inward towards the total meaning of the verbal structure that comprises the literal level. There follows one of the most mysterious yet important passages he wrote: “Understanding a verbal structure literally is the incommunicable act of total apprehension which precedes criticism . . . Every genuine response to art, whether critically formulated or not, must begin in the same way, in a complete surrender of the mind and senses to the impact of the work of art as a whole” (92). It is in this primal coherence, this response to the experience of integritas (Joyce’s term in Portrait of the Artist) that literary language begins. Drawing on Sidney’s “the poet never affirmeth” Frye then points out that literature is a set of hypothetical statements that are not facts, but point to facts; indeed, “whatever is clearly hypothetical is clearly literary.” At the third level we meet with the conventions or archetypes that organize such hypothetical statements, which are hard to distinguish from myth, with its evident tropological/moral dimension. The fourth level is that of language as a total interlocking structure, of which literature is the objective counterpart. “The poet’s new poem merely articulates what was already latent in the order of words, and the assumption of a single order of words is as fundamental to the poet as the assumption of a single order of nature is to the natural scientist . . . Language in a human mind is not a list of words with their customary meanings attached, but a single interlocking structure, one’s total power of expressing oneself. Literature is the objective counterpart of this, a total form of verbal expression which is recreated in miniature whenever a new poem is written” (102). Frye’s first readers south of the border must have encountered with

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amazement the massive authority of this still almost unknown critic, but his reputation quickly grew as he expanded his ideas in articles and reviews for American journals over the next decade. He rapidly sent “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” to Kenyon, and this energetic essay in classification, with its many examples (no. 11) appeared in the next volume. But it was “The Archetypes of Literature” (no. 12) that became his most-reprinted article, quickly joining other classics of modern criticism as a textbook standard. Most of “Archetypes” was written in only a few days in 1950, during the summer that began his Guggenheim year at Harvard. The speed with which it was written almost defeats summary; despite its confidence and rigour, no essay of Frye’s (at least in this volume) comes closer to the rapid, associative movement of his notebook entries. Elements of “The Archetypes of Literature” appeared in the Polemical Introduction and the Second and Third Essays of the Anatomy of Criticism, but the paper led a vigorous independent life for many years. “The Archetypes of Literature” demonstrates in detail what Frye had argued in his colloquium paper: that criticism is a science. Few of Frye’s statements have proved more controversial. In his diary for 17 July 1950 he wrote, I think I may as well come out flat-footed for calling literary criticism a science & go on from there. The damn fools wouldn’t listen to me when I expounded the general shape of criticism in the Blake book, so maybe the prospect of their being able to acquire something of the scientist’s self respect may make them pick up their unpredestinating ears a bit. So I’ve got it clear to start with that the transitive learning & teaching process is one of criticism & not one of literature itself.” (D, 409)

This would suggest that as with his earlier reference to mathematics, Frye intended the term “science” to provide a mere analogy, one indicating the objective and systematic characteristics he thought criticism ought to have. Readers, however, took the term more literally, many concluding that he sought to define criticism as a controlled and measurable discipline. In an unhappy paradox, Frye’s attempt to liberate literary study from the tyranny of ‘taste” backfired; few paid attention to the dry caveat he added in the “Polemical Introduction” to the Anatomy that “if there are readers for whom the word ‘scientific’ conveys emotional overtones of unimaginative barbarism, they may substitute ‘systematic’ or ‘progressive’ instead” (AC, 7–8).

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Frye’s target in “Archetypes” is the misapprehension that literary criticism somehow provides “background” for the “real” experience of literature, and his position is presented with a cool detachment designed to defamiliarize many common assumptions. “What is at present missing from literary criticism,” he holds, “is a co-ordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole.” It is clear that “criticism cannot be systematic unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so, an order of words corresponding to the order of nature in the natural sciences.” His first postulate is thus “the same as that of any science: the assumption of total coherence . . . Criticism, as a science, is totally intelligible; literature, as the subject of a science, is, so far as we know, an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries, and would be even if new works of literature ceased to be written” (124). What are the signs pointing to such a coherence? One is the phenomenon of recurrence, which literature exhibits at every level from narrative to fragment. These recurrent features he terms archetypes, and they appear in pre-literary expressions such as ritual, myth, and folk tale as well as in the greatest classics that so constantly revert to them. Context is fundamental, however, for if the archetypal island is Prospero’s, it may also be Circe’s. Defending literature against the “representational fallacy” that bedevils it, Frye makes one of his most-quoted statements: “Properly used as critical terms, an author’s narrative is his linear movement; his meaning is the integrity of his completed form. Similarly an image is not merely a verbal replica of an external object, but any unit of a verbal structure seen as part of a total pattern or rhythm” (129). Around the central figure of myth—sun, god, hero—we find the rhythm of narrative, a quest myth with four phases he sees in terms of the seasons of the year (though Frye changed his mind about these; here spring is associated with romance and summer with comedy whereas in AC they are reversed). The critic must begin with the diversity of humanity’s sacred scriptures, for from them emerge the elements of myth—ritual in the case of drama, epiphany in the case of lyric—and from those elements the literary genres. And if art aims at “the realizing of a world in which the inner desire and the outward circumstance coincide . . . the central myth of art must be the vision of the end of social effort, the innocent world of fulfilled desires, the free human society” (133). Five other articles also ended up in the Anatomy. Frye admitted in his

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diary that he was only mildly interested in “Three Meanings of Symbolism” (1953, no. 13) and was guessing his way through the references to Mallarmé (D, 465–6). He used the occasion to explore his terms “centripetal” and “centrifugal.” The centrifugal movement takes us from words to the things they mean (or that we conventionally associate with them); here the word is “a symbol in the sense of a sign, or representation outside the pattern of words” (136–7). The centripetal movement builds towards establishing a larger pattern or context, “the whole verbal pattern”; here “the word is a symbol in the sense of an image, or unit of a verbal structure.” “Towards a Theory of Cultural History” (1953, no. 15) develops his typology of the levels of the hero, descending from the divine being of myth to the ironic or absurd “hero” upon whom the reader can look down. Frye traces five modes of fiction which appear chronologically, from myth, to romance, to the high mimetic, the low mimetic and the ironic, each appearing in two phases, the tragic (when the hero is isolated from his community) and the comic (when he is incorporated into it). This diagrammatic approach enables him to point out the way in which the modes curve back upon themselves, as the ironic hero of the low mimetic mode begins to evoke faint images of the sacrificed god of myth, and the poet himself—oracle, bard, minstrel—is entrusted with a kind of encyclopedia of everything civilization needs to remember, Dante’s Commedia being the best example. In the Romantic period the poet becomes the Romantic hero, isolated and visionary. In our own age he sees himself as a craftsman, a “pure artist” and in a Viconian ricorso, is returned to the condition of oracle. Reviewing the belated translation of Ernst Cassirer’s 1923 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (no. 19) Frye had an opportunity to revisit these questions of myth and symbol. In 1947 he had given a cordial but briskly dismissive review to Ross Nichols and James Kirkup’s The Cosmic Shape (no. 6); they do not tell us, he observes, how their hoped-for erection of Jung’s theory of archetypes into a national mythology would prevent it ending in “one more self-conscious prance around a maypole by antiquarian simple-lifers” (58). Cassirer was by now a figure of chiefly historical importance, but Frye’s review, summarizing the vast and influential effect of myth criticism on twentieth-century thought, points out his role in bringing the term “myth” into systematic philosophy. The relative absence of an aesthetic in Cassirer’s work gives him the opportunity to examine what relation myth has to language in general, and literature specifically.

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Frye had been thinking about this problem as a result of a famous 1952 debate with the young anthropologist Edmund Carpenter (see p. xxxi), before a large campus crowd, from which he would draw “The Language of Poetry” (no. 22). The set topic was “Are there universal symbols?” Frye defended the affirmative, and reported the discussion “forced me to clarify an issue I’ve not yet honestly faced—what in hell is an archetype?” (D, 518, where there is an early summary of the argument). Rather than stressing the isolation of the individual poem, as modernist criticism tended to do, he argued that if objective nature is the mother of poetry by providing its content, and the form of the poem itself is its father, then the poet is a kind of midwife, ensuring that the energy of one is transmitted to the other by means of the archetype, the symbol as communicable unit. “We can get a whole literary education simply by picking up one conventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature” (217). Even the Bible “ends in a fairy tale about a damsel in distress, a hero killing dragons, a wicked witch, and a wonderful city glittering with jewels” (210). In Frye’s view, “For the critic there is no such thing as private symbolism, or, if there is, it is his job to make sure that it does not remain so” (222). At the same time, neither poet nor audience may be aware of their fullest extent, a point he drives home by mischievously discussing archetypal elements in Molière’s Le malade imaginaire. Once the Anatomy appeared, Frye was more than ready to move on to fresh projects, and in the reviews and lectures during its gestation and after its success, we can see their outlines emerging. Frye was an experienced lecturer, speaking from file cards and writing up his notes afterwards, and his service on the Canadian Forum and the UTQ made him an especially experienced reviewer. He could be scathing, as he was with The Story of English Literature (no. 7); listing the achievements of the author, R.F. Patterson, he wrote “With such a record there ought to be something in the present book to disprove the statement that he has no critical sense and can’t write for nuts, but I didn’t find it.” Usually he was more genial; sustained by the affection for popular song and story he had absorbed from another of his teachers, John Robins, he approaches the Opies’s book on nursery rhymes (no. 14) with respect for their impressive scholarship and a connoisseur’s appreciation of their gift for disposing of fallacies. Here, as elsewhere, he argues that nursery rhymes are not just the best introduction to poetry there is, but sometimes the only

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poetry people ever get, because the natural love of it is often destroyed in school. His kindly review of Suzanne Langer’s Feeling and Form (no. 16) sees her as a good populariser, with the breezy style he enjoys. Nevertheless, he points out firmly that she tends to use ideas as touchstones rather than addressing central philosophical issues, and talks too much about other critics’ ideas. In reviewing René Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (no. 24) he was not above settling an old score. When Fearful Symmetry first appeared, Wellek had charged Frye with failing in two essential tasks of criticism: evaluation and poetic analysis.18 Frye’s serious, detailed, and not unadmiring review of Wellek ends with the pointed observation “In Mr. Wellek’s book there is abundant evidence for the distinction between genuine criticism and the kind of pseudocriticism that results from premature value judgments” (234). Frye did a lot of routine reviewing—“The Ulysses Theme and Tragic Themes in Western Literature” (no. 26) for example—but he was always rigorous. Of a volume of criticism by Paul Valéry, a poet he liked (no. 29), he writes, “In any such collection there is bound to be a good deal of repetition, but it is instructive to see how few ideas Valéry really had on the subject” (276) and promptly supplies some of his own, among them a succinct definition of the difference between Longinan and Aristotelian critics. Despite his interest in Jung and his long-distance approval of the yearly Eranos conferences, his review of their volume for 1957 (no. 30) differentiated sharply between followers of Jung “who find his ideas useful and apply them in their own work,” and “Jungian commissars,” “who keep revolving around the Master expounding his message for our times” (285). The same review gave him a chance to acknowledge the work of Mircea Eliade, whose criticism he knew and admired, though here he did so chiefly by talking about Sir James Frazer, whom he admired even more. He was just then writing the short piece on Frazer that appeared in Architects of Modern Thought (no. 28). Frazer’s impact on him as a student in 1934 had been revelatory, and his annotated copies show that he studied The Golden Bough intensively in the following years. This essay is particularly interesting for the teacherly attention Frye pays to Frazer’s historical context, underpinned by his own experience teaching Toronto’s course in nineteenth-century thought. Four major reviews of 1953–4 show Frye beginning to assess, and in some cases confront, important public statements on aspects of criticism central to his own thinking. In a review of books by Allen Tate, Herbert Read, and Francis Fergusson (no. 17) he eviscerates, again with deadly

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cordiality, Tate’s post-Cartesian despair at the “fragmenting of the western mind,” and the conservative ideas about culture based in his “almost perversely intellectualized” concept of history (177). Tate and Read are united by their determinism, in Tate’s case cultural, in Read’s psychological. In assessing both books Frye transcends constraints that might have affected his own intellectual formation, in Tate the Spenglerian heritage, in Read the psychological interpretation of Romanticism, by indirection thus laying foundations for responding to the critics of his own work who were accumulating. With Fergusson he enters the territory of a critic who is not a determinist, and who can challenge Frye’s own long and intense reading of Dante. Here we see what Frye values not only as a critic but as a reader, for despite reservations he praises Fergusson for catching “the sense of suppressed excitement that we feel in these [closing] cantos: here we are in the centre of the Commedia, and therefore at the centre of our whole literary experience, and so the memory of other things near the centre, late plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles, the Bible, some moments in Plato and in modern poetry, crowd into our minds, and we glimpse a mass of converging rays of significance, as though there were one great thing that the whole of literature had to say to us” (182). In 1954 Frye reviewed both Critics and Criticism, the handbook of essays by “Chicago school” critics then in every graduate student’s briefcase (no. 18), and the published version of R.S. Crane’s five arduous Alexander lectures, given at the University of Toronto in 1952 (no. 20). Frye knew Chicago well, and was drawn to his colleagues there, having corresponded with Crane (see p. xxxi) as early as 1949. In Critics and Criticism he analyses cordially, but with a sharp sense of their limitations, the sometimes polemical approaches of several members of the “school.” Crane’s Alexander lectures, however, he recognizes as a statement that rises above partisanship to address genuine issues. Rephrasing Crane’s contrast between Aristotle’s poetics and those of rhetoricians from Cicero down to the New Critics, Frye observes, “The Aristotelian view is that poems are made objects: they are made out of words, it is true, but words are their material and not their form. The Aristotelian says that a poem has a verbal structure; the rhetorician says that it is one” (198). Frye is sympathetic to Crane’s critique of the deductive approach to criticism— “all methodologies can find in poetry only what they have previously determined to look for” (199)—but concludes that his principles for evading this circularity are only vaguely formulated; they amount to the

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set of sensible practices followed by experienced teachers of literature, and indeed by rhetorical critics when they are actually practising their art on specific poems. In the fourth of these major reviews (no. 21) Frye dealt with Jung, a thinker in whom he was deeply read; ever the teacher, he outlines in its opening pages a good primer for the Jungian neophyte, and the concluding ones are equally enlightening about the alchemical tradition. Frye had found his personal experience of individuation Jungian in character (D, 94). However, he kept a critical distance from Jung’s theory of archetypes, which he analyses with easy mastery here, constructing a bridge between two phases of Jung’s thought that the great psychotherapist had left unbuilt. “There is, to use his own term, a complex in Jung’s mind that makes him balk like a mule in front of the final acceptance of the totality of the self, the doctrine that everybody is involved in the fate of everybody else, which the uncompromising charity of the great religions invariably insists on” (207). The key archetype that unlocks this acceptance is the heroic quest, with its descent into darkness followed by a renewal of life evoking the cycle of nature through the seasons. Noting the close relationship of Jung’s ideas with those of Frazer in The Golden Bough, and the way in which both have been eagerly absorbed by thinkers outside their original disciplines, Frye suggests that “Jung seems to be leading Freud’s great discoveries in the direction of a first-hand study of literature” (209), by which he means an essentially archetypal criticism. “The archetype is thus primarily the communicable symbol, and archetypal criticism deals with literature as a social fact and as a technique of communication.” Indeed, it is in this formulation of a criticism that is principled, systematic, social, and communicable that our understanding of Frye’s later criticism can begin to shape itself. He, of course, had been shaping it in that way since the beginning. In Fables of Identity (1963), Frye collected some of his post-Anatomy writings, and this book too ended up in every graduate student’s briefcase, a companion to the more demanding master work. Here Frye was applying his ideas about mythological criticism to specific authors and their works: not only Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake, but Sterne, Byron, Dickinson, Yeats, and especially Wallace Stevens and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, both of which he enjoyed citing as often as possible. Fables of Identity is introduced by four essays grouped together that restate central ideas of the Anatomy; in “The Archetypes of Literature,” as

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we have seen, this is the coherence of criticism as an organized body of knowledge. In “Myth, Fiction and Displacement” (no. 35) he returns to the section on thematic modes in the First Essay of the Anatomy. In “Nature and Homer” he considers the intersection of experience and convention, and in “New Directions from Old” the relationship between literature and what he calls “cosmology,” or beliefs about humans as they exist in space and time. As we shall see, both the concept of displacement and the problem of how convention deals with experience would exercise his opponents. “New Directions From Old” indirectly suggests Frye’s own position in history, at least as he assessed it when the essay first appeared in 1961. Central to Frye’s view is the recurrence of the typical in literary works. From its place mid-way between events and ideas, poetry faces away from the particularity of events towards the forms of thought and their recurring metaphors. Its physical world is not so much cyclical as divided into above and below, “the heavens and hells of the religions contemporary with the poet,” with their related images of ascent and descent. The background of assumptions about existence against which such myths are deployed he terms their “topocosm.” Historically, Frye remarks on the prevalence of myths of descent in the twentieth century, replacing the ascent to a heavenly vision of medieval and Renaissance poets. “With Romanticism another ‘topocosm,’ almost the reverse of the traditional one, begins to take shape. On top is the bleak and frightening world of outer space. Next comes the ordinary world of human experience, with all its anomalies and injustices. Below, in the only place left for a locus amoenus, is the buried original form of society, now concealed under the historical layers of civilization” (319–20). Though he does not say so directly, it is within this bleak topocosm that he and his contemporaries seem to be situated. Frye would return to this vision of history three decades later in the opening essay of his last book, The Double Vision, “The Whirligig of Time, 1925–90.” Contemplating his own life, he wrote that “History moves in a cyclical rhythm which never forms a complete or closed cycle. A new movement begins, works itself out to exhaustion, and something of the original state then reappears, though in a quite new context presenting new conditions” (DV, 3). In 1961 he had passed the same insight off in a witticism: “now that politics and science at least are beginning to focus once more on the moon, it is possible that a new construct will be formed, and a new table of metaphors organize the imagery of our poets” (321).

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But it was evident even then that unlike determinists who saw civilization as declining until it got to their point in history—or declining into their point in history—Frye had found, perhaps in his own labyrinthine cave, a different well-spring of renewal. If many of his later writings restate his central principles in terms appropriate to their respective audiences, it is perhaps because in each case he was seeking to locate for them that source of renewal, and sometimes seeking on his own behalf as well. Frye’s lectures and reviews of this period explore many of these emerging ideas. In 1955 he participated in a high-level conference at Princeton on “The Transferability of Literary Concepts” (no. 23); Frye’s session was chaired by the astronomer Harlow Shapley and the participants were John A. Wheeler, professor of physics at Princeton, and the Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. Frye used the occasion to illuminate his view of the relationship between literature and the sciences, stressing the kinship between hypothesis as scientists use it and the metaphors of verbal art. A 1962 lecture to the American Psychiatric Association (no. 36) attempted to bridge the same gap for a different audience, in this case by considering the fundamental psychiatric issue of the relationship between sense and vision, experience and desire. Sense is the domain of science, and it constantly improves; vision is the realm of the artist, and because it is pure desire, can reach its limits at once. This gives Frye an opportunity to examine changing concepts of sense and vision in literature, for example, in that fundamental text of psychiatry, The Anatomy of Melancholy, where he treats the psychiatrists to a mischievous reading— in full—of Burton’s revolting but very funny passage on the illusion of the beauteous mistress. Completing this volume are two small books by Frye, both published in 1963. If The Educated Imagination (no. 37) was the most energetic, charming, and persuasive book he ever produced, The Well-Tempered Critic (nos. 33 and 34) he aptly compared to the boxes of Silenus, those statues of the ugly satyr that only when opened revealed images of the gods; indeed, the third of its lectures begins with the humble admission, “Literary criticism is more complicated than most disciplines” (380). But the two books, written only months apart, are closely related and both have been very influential. The title of The Well-Tempered Critic plays on the musical system of equal temperament, in which keys otherwise remote from each other are made to co-exist in relative harmony. Such a co-

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ordinating principle is missing in literary criticism, and Frye early states that he is looking for principles that would enable a teacher “to specialize, say, in Chaucer but modulate to the key of Dostoievsky or Plato” (323, 339). Reading The Well-Tempered Critic and The Educated Imagination together, we sense that he was working out in the first book the rationale for the second: not the answer, but “the place at which the answer must start.” That place is education, because the pressure of the social environment in which education takes place creates the host of false distinctions (prose is normal, verse is not) from which critical theory has to disentangle itself. Significantly, the earliest elements of The Well-Tempered Critic (no. 33) appeared in the students’ own Acta Victoriana, and it is a model of its kind, still fresh and teachable today. In the fuller version Frye examines more closely than he does almost anywhere else the rhythms of prose and verse, and of the “squirrel chatter” of ordinary speech in our society, building up a picture of how we learn to write, whether well or badly. Narrow classroom concepts of style are abandoned in order to raise a moral point: genuine speech is the result of a genuine personality, and assumes a genuine hearer; a group of such hearers makes up a society. He finds the high style “whenever a speaker is honestly struggling to express what his society, as a society, is trying to be and do” (335, 353). “Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance . . . This is what free speech is” (354). How then does this affect the literary critic, who is faced with the conflict between participating as a social being and detaching himself as a critic? Frye’s answer is to take the essentially civic process he had been outlining and turn it around on the critic, who must evade the stock responses and pedantry of his craft to engage in the fundamental act of criticism, the disinterested response that makes it possible for literature to participate in our lives and we in its articulateness. What happens as we read is the sense of a growing body of knowledge, which constitutes criticism as such. Such knowledge can be taught and learned; it makes literature accessible to any student of good will and prevents it from stagnating among the elites. In the last chapter of The Well-Tempered Critic, “All Ye Know on Earth,” Frye writes, “We said in the first chapter that the end of literary education is an ethical and participating aim, the transfer of imaginative energy from writer to reader, but we have not yet found the means to this end” (394). In The Educated Imagination he found that means (at least for

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the world of literature) by returning to the classroom, this time via the radio. In commissioning the Massey Lectures for 1962 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had turned not only to an experienced lecturer, but to an experienced radio speaker.19 Frye wrote his six lectures quickly and easily (they entirely lack the clogged earnestness of The WellTempered Critic), and the published result has been by far the most popular book of any in the series.20 There are few ideas here that are new to anyone familiar with what he had written so far, yet there is a profound sense of freshness, of a great mind working at the top of its form, of directness, energy, and delight. Frye relates that he is often asked “What good is the study of literature? Does it help us to think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it? What is the function of the teacher and scholar, or of the person who calls himself, as I do, a literary critic? What difference does the study of literature make in our social or political or religious attitude?” (437). These are practical concerns, yet “The literary writer isn’t giving information, either about his subject or his state of mind: he’s trying to let something take on its own form, whether it’s a poem or play or novel or whatever” (450). This language of practical life is inevitably superseded by literature’s visionary language, in which we give a social, human shape to the world we desire. In the imagined worlds of others, furthermore, we meet with their desires, sometimes in forms we abhor. This is because the only limits of the imagination, and the world of art it brings with it, are the limits of our humanity, and if it brings the genuine joy of feeling a part of what we know, it also brings the risks to which The Well-Tempered Critic had devoted much attention. By its tolerance and detachment, the imagination distances us from the opposites of fanaticism and dilettantism that the world of experience so richly provides. The hypothetical models of human life we develop in literature don’t have to meet the test of science (for example, they can’t effectively be censored, because they are neither moral nor immoral). Yet literature is no escape from life; in a serious writer it is deadly serious, stretching us upwards towards the ideal and downwards towards its opposite. As such it is not a contest between exhibits with prize ribbons, but rather man’s revelation to man. How then should we teach literature? Frye recommends that we start at the centre and work outwards; in literature that centre is poetry, which, unknowingly but rightly, is where children begin their verbal experience. In Frye’s ideal education literature has the same relationship

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to history, philosophy, laws, and so forth, that mathematics has to the physical sciences; it makes possible hypotheses, and endows them with form. Societies, however, have a way of producing debasing social mythologies that also appeal to the imagination, and curtail the power of choice which underpins our freedom. In the Tower of Babel of contemporary civilization we need to listen to the quiet voice of “the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi” (494). The Educated Imagination is often termed Frye’s “little Anatomy.” It may mark a farewell to one approach Frye had been using during the nearly three decades of his life in the academy. In it he passes on to the widest possible audience the most succinct summation of his experience as a critic. To see where he would now turn, we have to go back to the ending of The Well-Tempered Critic, where he wrote, “To go beyond this point would take us into a world of higher belief, a view of the human situation so broad that the whole of literature would illustrate it. But clearly no axioms of such a view could be formulated: all formulations would either have to be too narrow to apply to the whole of literature, or too vague to have definite meaning” (394). In the next three decades, he would not only search for such axioms, but attempt to give them form. In the fall of 1948 Frye, as yet unknown except for his recent Blake book, appeared at the annual conference of the English Institute in New York to speak on “The Argument of Comedy.” “He was so terrified at giving his first major paper to a scholarly gathering, that the occasion was totally lost on him,” writes his biographer, John Ayre (209). By 1953 Frye was heading the Institute’s supervising committee, in 1955 and 1965 he chaired the conference and edited its proceedings, and in 1965, he became the subject of the conference itself, the first individual critic—let alone a living one—to be so honoured. In that year’s proceedings Murray Krieger wrote, “Whatever the attitude towards Northrop Frye’s prodigious scheme one cannot doubt that, in what approaches a decade since the publication of his masterwork, he has had an influence—indeed an absolute hold—on a generation of developing critics greater and more exclusive than that of any one theorist in recent critical history.”21 Between 1948 and 1965 the obscure Canadian professor had become the most-read critic in North America and increasingly abroad, and the independence and originality of his critical path was evident. The only parallel is with the immediate impact Jacques Derrida had on the suc-

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ceeding generation of critics when his earliest influential paper, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” was given only a year later at the Johns Hopkins Conference on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” (1966). The English Institute essays freeze in their sights a critic still only fiftyfour years old, as well as those who assessed his work or, in the case of W.K. Wimsatt, deplored it. Clearly none of them found the task easy. Frye’s response was printed with the papers and is courteous and noncombative, though there is one quiet dig at Wimsatt’s genuinely rude paper. Wimsatt, a leader among the New Critics, had scorned the foundation of Frye’s system as a “wintry cellar,” to which Frye retorted, “though it might also be called a ratproof foundation” (136).22 Krieger’s introductory essay makes a heroic attempt to adapt his own not entirely sympathetic views to the assessment of Frye’s system-making. Acknowledging the roots of Frye’s theory in Romanticism, he points to the challenge its “cosmic pretension” makes to the tradition of T.E. Hulme and Eliot. Modern criticism had attempted to divorce itself from all metaphysical claims, but Frye’s theorizing “in its very recklessness, has seized the imagination of the rest of us” (3). But if Frye is a dynamic centre of energy, a paradoxical effect of his theory that we construct the world in terms of our desires is that he constructs the world of literature in terms of his own desires; the result of Frye’s educational program is that he himself has been turned into a practical scheme of education, a flattened diagram, rather than a living and changing entity. Angus Fletcher’s paper on Frye’s Utopianism accords the Anatomy its natural “rhythm”— that of the genre of anatomy—but then takes Frye’s own description of the genre, with its picaresque and Menippean features, and turns it back on the critic: “Evidently the genre assumes wholeness and hence becomes encyclopedic, but within this wholeness it cuts out endless fragments, whose coherence is a given of the argument and whose correspondence with historical reality will be based on a kind of humorous observation” (58). Nevertheless, like Krieger he acknowledges Frye’s capacity to restore the dimension of sacred time to the domain of criticism after a long period of secularism. Wimsatt’s paper is a tirade against Frye’s “ruthless, categorizing, assimilative, subsuming drive” (90); he terms Frye’s theories nothing more than a shell game, and treats him alternately as an entertainer and a deviser of forgeries (his term). Applying the New Critical technique of close reading to almost everything Frye had written, he sees only contradictions and inconsistencies (many of

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which Frye had already acknowledged), and the result is delivered without much charity and little of the courtesy of Frye’s other doubters. The essays by Krieger, Fletcher, and Wimsatt are historical artifacts now. They represent the genuine concerns felt by readers of Frye in the 1960s: the holes and inconsistencies in his system, its apparent unhistoricism, his rejection of evaluative criticism, and (though they would not openly admit it) his infuriating detachment. Only in Geoffrey Hartman’s “Ghostlier Demarcations” do we encounter a critic who could assemble Frye’s strengths and limitations in a single argument, and even intimate where, as a critic, he might be headed. Reprinted in Hartman’s influential Beyond Formalism, the essay had a long-lasting effect on the understanding of Frye’s work. Hartman accepts Frye’s position astride the critical world, but points out that his new vantage point, “with its promise of mastery,” also brings with it an “enormous expanded burden of sight” (109). Thus he holds Frye not to the views of his colleagues, but to their tasks: “What must . . . be judged is not his comprehensiveness, which is extraordinary, or his intentions, which are the best since Matthew Arnold, but how well he has dealt with problems every literary critic faces whatever his attitude to systematic thought” (114). Among these problems are those of systematic thought, cultural position (elitist evaluation versus democratic detachment), the awareness of historical particularity, and the responsibility both for verbal analysis and the counterpoint of contrary argument. It is this apparent absence of “counterpoint” in Frye’s writing, the dialogic exchange between the mythical and the historical, between critical vision and critical opposition, that most deeply concerns Hartman. Its cause he locates in the conscious spatiality of Frye’s system, citing the notorious passage in “Myth, Fiction and Displacement” where Frye had written “When a critic deals with a work of literature, the most natural thing for him to do is freeze it, to ignore its movement in time and look at it as a completed pattern of words with all its parts existing simultaneously” (402). This is an evasion, says Hartman; “one of the most formal differences of literature is omitted if we cannot encompass by reflection its moving power in time” (122). Turning to the problematic dimension of myth, he asks by what process is myth’s authenticity revealed if no theology sustains it? Frye’s concept of “displacement”—“the adaptability of myth and metaphor to canons of morality or plausibility”—may reveal and in part resolve the difficulty of such accommodations,23 yet myth too is historical; it can never be found in the purity which Frye

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claims for it. “The sense that art is addressed, that it is always in dialogue, is what historical criticism furthers” (128). “Instead of examining the verbal, Frye immediately subsumes it in what is called the ‘verbal universe’” (128). “Is there room in Frye’s criticism—which has many chambers and not all opened—for that radical doubt, that innermost criticism which art brings to bear on itself? Or does his system circumvent the problematic character of verbal fictions? . . . It is here that one possibility of progress lies: in honoring the problematic relation of words to a reality they mediate rather than imitate” (129). What view of Frye’s criticism did his colleagues propose in 1965 that we can share today? Certainly, they gave an early and positive account of his roots in the Romantic tradition, recognizing not only the way in which its democratization carried forward the project of a genuinely classless culture, but its challenge to the narrowness and rationalism of modernist writing on literature. In seeking radical doubt in Frye, however, Hartman was pointing to a question that literally could not be answered by critics emerging from that kind of rationalism. The belief that criticism lays down laws was still too ingrained, as Wimsatt’s sputterings made clear. One of the Romantic features of Frye’s criticism was that it proceeded as if criticism were a process, not a legislative act, though it revealed its rationalist side in the critic’s confidence that the imaginative world was fundamentally intelligible. Part of this process as Frye engaged in it was his style; a major weakness in the 1965 assessments was their blindness to the subversive elements in Frye’s prose. All of his interlocutors stress that they enjoy his writing, but curiously, in view of the New Critical techniques they routinely practised, they all (Wimsatt honourably excepted) treat his style as a pleasant but trivial feature. Yet Frye’s plain and witty demotic is intimately bound up both with the democratization he strove for, and with the dialogue for which Hartman searched in vain. If criticism is a process for the thinker, it becomes a process for the reader as well, who is induced to enter the verbal world of the critic—indeed the very possibility of a verbal world— by familiar allusions, shared jokes, unexpected examples, and a good deal of salt. No critic of 1965 took the step of inquiring into Frye’s cultural origins, except for Hartman, who did so only to pass over them. Demanding historical particularity from his criticism, they did not think to examine the historical particularity of the critic himself: his Methodist heritage with its emphasis on direct experience, the distinctive intellectual life of a

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university that had harboured thinkers as diverse as Harold Innis and Charles Cochrane,24 indeed, his status as a Canadian peering into their world over a border that the internationalism of the time simply ignored. Perhaps had the question been raised, it could not have been answered; the work of the “Toronto School”—Innis himself, Havelock, Carpenter, McLuhan—was only beginning to make a wider mark, and though the independent literary reputation Canada developed after 1960 was already in the making, Frye’s position in it was not yet understood. Furthermore, it is only since Frye’s death that we have entered the parallel world constituted by his notebooks, diaries, and annotated books. When they are set beside the published writings, we become aware of the immense creative energy of his ongoing thought, its self-mockery, its gloomy reversals, its joyous sense of play. The dialogue Hartman vainly looked for had chiefly been internalized; rightly or wrongly, what Frye sought to share publicly was the evolving vision, though his sense of the polysemous nature of literature opened a wider field for debate. By 1992, when Frye’s life-time legacy was assessed at another conference, it was precisely the dialogic element in his criticism to which Julia Kristeva pointed, and the Viconian principle of renewal in his historical vision that Hayden White and Nella Cotrupi recognized.25 In “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” (no. 9 in this volume) Frye had written, “a great romancer should be examined in terms of the conventions he chose. William Morris should not be left on the side lines of prose fiction merely because the critic has not learned to take the romance form seriously. Nor, in view of what has been said about the revolutionary nature of the romance, should his choice of that form be regarded as an ‘escape’ from his social attitude” (80). Frye is now acknowledged as a “romance” critic, inviting his readers to engage in the descent and ascent that the romance hero endures as he first searches for identity and then experiences the joy of renewal. In the decades after 1965, Frye undertook a heroic journey himself, moving outward into the public world to practise what in his case he quite literally preached. As he wrote in Words with Power, “radically new directions in the humanities can only come from the cultural needs of . . . [the] lay public and not from any one version of critical theory, including my own so far as I have one” (WP, xix). In his middle writings (1963–82) he elaborated a “myth of concern” upon which this self-imposed task centred, and which constitutes the social form of the democratization he drew from his Romantic heritage. That done, he returned in The Great Code (1982), and Words with

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Power (1990), to the mythological, and specifically biblical, structure of Western literature. However, in his last book, The Double Vision (1991) he addressed with gentle touch but transcendent irony the very issues of history, time, and nature that his critics of 1965 had complained he had passed over. Frye wrote, The omnipresence of time gives some strange distortions to our double vision. We are born on a certain date, live a continuous identity until death on another date; then we move into an “after”-life or “next” world where something like an ego survives indefinitely in something like a time and place. But we are not continuous identities; we have had many identities . . . through life, and when we pass through or “outgrow” these identities they return to their source . . . Every moment we have lived through we have also died out of into another order. (DV, 84–5)

This is Frye’s final version of history, and it is saturated in his own particularity; a self-described “Methodist parson” (334), he is addressing the audience of the United Church in which he was ordained, and as an elderly man with a fatal illness, he knows that his personal exploration of identity is coming to an end. It is the cyclical image of Spengler he evokes, but in the more open form of the Viconian ricorso and—perhaps most personally—identified with the myth of the hero’s quest. His concluding wisdom is that “our life in the resurrection . . . is already here, and waiting to be recognized” (DV, 85). In the interpenetration of present and past, readiness and recognition, the shape of Frye’s earliest critical thinking is still present. The journey of descent and ascent ends, however, not in the critic’s own world, but in the one before which he bows his head.

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The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1933–1963

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1 Dr. Edgar’s Book Christmas 1933

Review of The Art of the Novel, by Pelham Edgar (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933). From Acta Victoriana, 58 (Christmas 1933): 17–20. Reprinted as “Systematic Criticism” in RW (1990), 123–6. Pelham Edgar, who chaired the English Department at Victoria College for thirty-eight years, was an instinctive talent-spotter, and sensed Frye’s intellect early in his undergraduate career. Edgar taught the course on the Romantics in which Frye first studied William Blake (Ayre, 70–1). Frye edited his reminiscences, Across My Path (1952), and was still referring to his old teacher as late as The Educated Imagination (1962; see no. 37 in this volume).

Too fulsome applause in a review generally does a book more harm than good, especially if it be inspired by an otherwise very pardonable local pride. With the question of its critical soundness, of course, the reviewer alone is concerned. But praise is more dangerous to the author than blame when it tends, as it often does, to saddle a book with a more ambitious program than was ever intended for it. Dr. Edgar aims, in his own words, “to present a systematic study of the structural evolution of the English novel.” The three adjectives indicate his three self-imposed limitations. “Systematic” means that the approach is eclectic rather than subjective, inductive rather than a priori. Dr. Edgar confines himself, in most cases, to essentials, to statements not easily challenged, to an impartial regard for the traditions. “Structural evolution” is, again, obviously opposed to historical evolution. The arrangement is chronological only. There is no detailed analysis of the whole aspect of novel writing done in any era; minor names are almost without exception ignored. Still less is there any attempt to collate the novel of any period with its

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contemporary social or cultural Zeitgeist. “English” signifies in this case, rather unfortunately, that the development and repercussions of Continental schools are practically omitted. All this means simply that Dr. Edgar set himself one specific task in writing the book, and it is doing him no service to insist that somehow or other he managed to achieve a result which, in his preliminary chapter, he expressly disclaims having attempted. The paucity of intelligent criticism on the English novel makes a book like this imperative. Apart from the all too short classic of Percy Lubbock,1 we are indebted chiefly to the oracular utterances of the novelists themselves. But these latter, with two important exceptions—Henry James and E.M. Forster—are inclined to be spasmodic rather than systematized, addressed more to the general reader at one extreme or the fellowcraftsman at the other, than to the student. In the above paragraph I have indicated the subjective, the a priori, and the historical approaches as other possibilities. Purely subjective criticism is, of course, only theoretically possible: but it should be noted that everything which has any communicative value in criticism is objective; because it must appeal to aesthetic principles which transcend a purely individual collection of likes and dislikes. The more subjective the criticism, the nearer it tends to aesthetic anarchy. Perhaps H.L. Mencken is typical of the school which bases its point of view in the critic’s own instinctive preferences, relying on fortissimo appeals to petty intellectual snobbishness and cultural prejudice for a point of contact. The attempts at evaluation of this critic in particular remind one of the first sweeper of the dusty room in the Interpreter’s House2—a striking effect without a tangible result. The a priori approach, of course, is that which “explains” a cultural development through the prism of an interpretation based on a perspective afforded, usually, by some section of philosophy. Thus that extraordinary piece of half-baked Freudianism, Régis Michaud’s The American Novel Today, after remarking at the outset with an almost Olympian calm that “great art is always pessimistic,”3 deals with the American novel tradition in terms of a revolt against Puritanism. This approach is a development of the subjective; exactly as Michaud takes his cue from Mencken. But in order to have unity or coherence it must have a corresponding limitation, not of subject matter, but of outlook. The most any such attempt can do is to bring out one essential aspect which may find its place in the work of a greater thinker. Such books in themselves are usually very interesting, often not much else.

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The most customary historical approach is represented in Phelps’s Advance of the English Novel, the ordinary textbook type of literary history which can have only the textbook value of giving elementary information. Not that Phelps is adequate even for that, but he is at least well known. For the rest, scattered and rather bewildering studies of individual novelists, or of small groups of novelists, take the place of a broad and intelligible body of criticism dealing with the novel itself. It is evident that a critical summation of the novel would require a synthesis of the historical and interpretative methods—in other words, the source for a philosophy of fiction is to be found in a philosophy of history. This, of course, is where Dr. Edgar’s book comes in. Interpretation through a preconceived attitude, and objective recording without any attitude, are the two essentials of systematic criticism which break down when worked out separately and have to be combined. They are complementary and not antithetical. Now the great historical principle in culture which serves as a starting-point for interpretation is the question of the evolution of art forms, and vice versa, so that a work dealing with this question must certainly be on the right track, assuming that its task is well performed. From this all other considerations radiate. It appears, then, that any further development in the criticism of fiction would be based on Dr. Edgar’s book or on some work very similar to it. It is true that the author says that he does not think his method affords a valid foundation for a philosophy of fiction. This would refer, I take it, to a general aesthetic theory implicated, necessarily, in a statement of a metaphysical attitude. But culture is a historical phenomenon. As long as the philosopher bases his aesthetic principles on the work actually done by artists, as Aristotle did, he is on safe ground; and that is his only safe ground. With this Dr. Edgar’s inductive survey is quite in harmony. His work has too the essential value of being based primarily on the theory and practice of that supremely articulate novelist, Henry James. It may become apparent in future that the novel, as an organic art form, is a nineteenth-century phenomenon, brought to its culmination and final fruition by the dignified American. Twentieth-century antipathy would therefore be the result not so much of various personal reactions as of the inherent breakdown of the novel itself. Each age has its own inevitable forms of expression: what ours are, God alone knows, but I do not think they include the novel. This would give James’s theories a peculiar position in regard to his medium which Dr. Edgar has not overlooked.

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Unfortunately this important factor is often swept away in the whirlwind of theorizing which follows artistic achievement. I suppose no one has a better right to speak on dramatic theory than Shakespeare, but what critic has ever paid the slightest attention to Hamlet’s remark that the business of the drama is “to show . . . the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” [Hamlet, 2.2.23–4]. Yet all valid dramatic theory must come to that point by some road. Henry James may not be Shakespeare, but in the history of the nineteenth-century novel he occupies the central part of a homologous position, and his opinions should be respected accordingly. The exhaustive and painstaking bibliography at the end, compiled by Miss Ray of the Victoria College library, is, by all appearances, easily the best procurable on the subject. This work is little short of monumental, consolidating and ordering as it does so much of what has gone before, and performing thereby an incalculable service for any future student of the field, from the freshman to the trained expert investigator. I could hardly ask for a more complete vindication of the arguments advanced above regarding the importance of the book. The working suggestions and the genealogical table of American novelists, the value of which latter is perhaps more mnemonic than critical, are stimulating and original additions.

2 Art Does Need Sociability August 1941

From Saturday Night, 16 August 1941: 2, where it appeared as a letter to the editor. Grier’s article talks almost exclusively about artists, and his few literary references are all in the single paragraph from which Frye quotes. Frye and his wife Helen were deeply interested in Canadian art. In 1938 Frye, in London, had written scornfully to Helen about the tepid English reviews of a Canadian art show at the Tate Gallery, in which Grier’s pictures were fortunately exiled to a back room; see NFHK 2, 796–7 as well as Frye’s review of the show, “Canadian Art in London,” Canadian Forum 18 (January 1939), 304–5.

In Sir Wyly Grier’s1 article “Sociability in Art,” in which he appears to be trying to say that Canadian painters ought not to organize because the poems of Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton were written by them and not by their friends, some questions are asked which seem to me to require answers. “Did Dante originate or modify his Inferno as a result of chatting with fellow members of a downtown club?” In a way, yes. Dante was a very clubbable man. But as his club in Florence had been dissolved he was compelled to invent another for the purposes of his poem.2 The Inferno is largely a series of conversations between Dante and spirits of people he knew well when they were alive, all of whom contribute to and modify the poem. “Had Shakespeare a tavern to which he withdrew to talk over his plays with lesser men?” Yes: it was called the Mermaid, and, as the historian Fuller says, “Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson.”3

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“Did not Milton, blind and solitary, dictate his Paradise Lost to his longsuffering daughters?” Not much of it, no: that is an old fable. In any case Milton was far more interested in being a storm centre of social activity than in being blind and solitary. “Do the other arts gain anything beyond friendly intercourse (if that) by hobnobbing with their fellow craftsmen?” The grammar of this is a little difficult to follow, but I think the answer is yes. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great pioneer among all organizers of artists, points out that “hobnobbing” is essential even for students in an academy: “It is generally found, that a youth more easily receives instruction from the companions of his studies, whose minds are nearly on a level with his own, than from those who are much his superiors; and it is from his equals only that he catches the fire of emulation.”4

3 Music in Poetry January 1942

From the University of Toronto Quarterly, 11 (January 1942): 167–79. Portions incorporated into AC, “Fourth Essay.” Some of the material was also absorbed into “Lexis and Melos” (no. 25 in this volume). Reprinted in RW, 14– 18, and in NFMC, 88–91. Annotated typescript in NFF 1991, box 37, file 3. Music was as important an art for Frye as painting. Technically well-equipped (he was a good pianist and an enthusiastic chamber music player), he had already done some music reviewing for Acta Victoriana, Saturday Night, and the Canadian Forum, and had even contemplated writing his Bachelor of Divinity thesis on music (Ayre, 46–8 and 96, and see the many references to listening to and playing music in NFHK and D). “Music in Poetry” has its roots in a student essay on Browning Frye wrote for Pelham Edgar in his last year as an undergraduate, 1932–3 (Ayre, 179; see “Robert Browning: An Abstract Study,” StE, 85–108). It was the first major piece of critical writing Frye published, and begins the series of substantial essays in which he began to develop over the next few years the ideas that he would integrate into Anatomy of Criticism.

I The epithet “musical” as applied to poetry has been the source of many crude misunderstandings; yet it deserves to be treated with respect, for it belongs to an equally distinguished art. There are two ways in which it can be properly used. It may describe poetry with accompanying music, or it may describe poetry which shows the direct or indirect influence of music, direct influence perhaps implying some technical knowledge on the part of the poet. It is this second kind of musical poetry that is our subject.

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Form in art is bound up with recurrence. When the form is spatial, as in painting, we usually call the recurrence in it a pattern; when it is temporal, as in music, we call it a rhythm. Poetry is, like music, a temporal and rhythmic art, but it also communicates images like painting. A personal bias may incline a poet to emphasize one quality and minimize the other. He may think of poetry as a cinema in which images flash across a stationary background or as a vehicle which collects images in the course of its own movement. We need extreme examples of this, for the distinction, though real enough, has admittedly a vague boundary. Here, then, is a fairly extreme instance of “cinematic” poetry, from Tennyson’s Oenone: O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. I waited underneath the dawning hills, Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark, And dewy dark aloft the mountain pine: Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris, Leading a jet-black goat white-horn’d, white-hooved, Came up from reedy Simois all alone. [ll. 45–52]

And here is a fairly clear case of “vehicular” poetry, from Browning’s The Flight of the Duchess: I could favour you with sundry touches Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess Heightened the mellowness of her cheek’s yellowness (To get on faster) until at last her Cheek grew to be one master-plaster Of mucus and fucus from mere use of ceruse: In short, she grew from scalp to udder Just the object to make you shudder. [ll. 825–32]

In the extract from Browning speed is a positive factor: it must be read as music is played, at a metronome beat. Tennyson, on the other hand, has tried to minimize the sense of movement: his poem should be read as he himself would have read it, very slowly and with much dwelling on the vowels. Both extracts repeat sounds very obtrusively, but the repetitions in Tennyson are there to slow down the advance of ideas (particu-

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larly in the first two lines), to compel the rhythm to return on itself, so to speak, and to elaborate, with the aid of the vowels, what is essentially a pattern of sound. In Browning the rhymes are intended to sharpen the accentuation of the beat: as they are sown more thickly the speed increases, and the narrator’s exasperation with it, as far as “ceruse.” Browning does not want a sound-pattern: he wants a cumulative rhythm. The speed and sharp accent of Browning’s poetry, then, are musical features in it which Tennyson’s poetry does not possess. It is difficult to see what the words Browning puts in parentheses can be except a musical direction: più mosso. Even thus far, we hardly need biographies to tell us that Browning knew much more about music than Tennyson and was much more likely to be influenced by it. But a more important point remains. Music is not a sequence of harmonies: the word “harmony” in music ought always to be in inverted commas. Music is a sequence of discords ending in a harmony. When a family lives in “harmony” it is in a stable and permanent situation: when music attains “harmony” it has reached its final resolving chord and is all over. Technically, “harmonies” in music are divided into concords and discords: the former are the common chords, which give an effect of completeness and aural satisfaction; the latter are all other possible chords, which require concords to complete or “resolve” them. But in any piece of actual music all chords are discords except the last. Any common chord but the tonic sounds incomplete, that is, it is a discord: so does an inversion of the tonic; and even the tonic in root position is still made a discord by the form of the music, which demands more music to complete itself rhythmically and satisfy the mind. In other words music is a process of Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony.1

Therefore all such phrases as “smooth musical flow” or “harsh unmusical diction” are generally the precise opposite of what we should say if we were to use the word “musical” in any sort of relation to music. When a poet who obviously knows what he is doing produces a harsh, rugged, dissonant poem, music is probably the cause of it. For such a diction is the poetic equivalent of counterpoint, and the musically-thinking poet often needs it to give his poem the tension and the driving accented impetus of music. When we find a careful balancing of vowels

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and consonants and a dreamy sensuous flow of sound, we are probably dealing with an unmusical poet. When we find sharp barking accents, crabbed and obscure language, mouthfuls of consonants and the bite and grip of many monosyllables, we are probably dealing with a musician. Certain corollaries follow. The musical, or cacophonous, diction is better fitted for the grotesque and horrible, or for invective and abuse. It demands a long cumulative rhythm sweeping the lines up into larger rhythmic units such as the paragraph. Hence musical poets are apt to distrust too obtrusive a rhyme-scheme because it interrupts the rhythmic continuity they want unless the lines are very short. Thus the musician Campion’s brilliant Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) is opposed to rhyme, and Milton points out that rhymed heroic verse is “of no true musical delight” because musical poetry must have “the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.”2 When Donne uses the heroic couplet, for instance, he parodies it; when Milton uses the Petrarchan sonnet he very nearly bursts it (in fact actually does so in The New Forcers of Conscience). Browning, we have seen, has a musical use for rhyme, but that is largely his own invention. Musical poetry is, of course, very likely to relapse into doggerel or prosiness in the attempt to fill out these larger rhythms, but it is congenial to a gnarled intellectualism of the so-called metaphysical type. It goes without saying that it is irregular in metre, leans heavily on enjambment, and makes an important feature of syncopation, in poetry the clash between metrical and semantic rhythms. This syncopation is a sure mark of musical poetry, and helps to distinguish it from speeded-up unmusical verse. Hopkins’s “sprung rhythm” is in origin a musical idea, wherever he derived it: in Swinburne’s anapests or the placid gum-chewing rhythm of Evangeline there is little musical influence. The Heretic’s Tragedy is a musical poem; Thyrsis is not. The Jolly Beggars is, the Ode on a Grecian Urn is not.3 Smart’s Song to David, with its pounding thematic words and the fortissimo explosion of its coda, is a musical tour de force;4 Pope’s Messiah is not musical. Vachel Lindsay is musical and Conrad Aiken is not, and so on. If the word “musical” is sentimentally used, we have said, it will be applied especially to those poems remarkable for levying no contribution on music whatever: if it is used as a vague metaphor meaning simply “pleasing,” it may come as something of a shock to hear The Rape of the Lock called unmusical. But it is no more derogatory to it to call it unmusical than to call it a bad example of blank verse if the word

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“unmusical” means, as it does throughout this article, poetry in which no connection with the art of music is perceptible. The ancient doctrine that the music of the spheres was a harmony is perhaps the oldest source of this confusion. In At a Solemn Musick Milton makes the discordant music of earth the symbol of the life of fallen man: in heaven there will be “perfect Diapason,” which in terms of the music we know means spending all eternity on one note. The same paradox is indicated, though less clearly, in Abt Vogler,5 and gives an additional twist to the ironic conclusion of Dryden’s St. Cecilia Ode. But with less careful writers the symbolic and literal senses of “harmonious” music were easily confounded. Browning is an excellent blackboard example of a musical poet. He has all the musical characteristics we have mentioned and several more. His love of swift movement, of horses galloping from Ghent to Aix and of rats scurrying into the river, could have been shared by anyone, but only a musician would be interested in the stumbling rhythm of a funeral procession scrambling up a steep hillside. Even the slower movements, Love among the Ruins, for example, keep up an insistent beating rhythmic figure, like a Bach aria. The last lines of his poems often contain a distinct “resolution,” ranging from the sudden thrust at the end of Porphyria’s Lover to the magnificent coda of Guido’s death speech, and the same musical propulsion towards a point of repose can be seen in the many long defences of the ultimately indefensible. His fondness for the themewith-variations form is reflected in Pippa Passes and The Ring and the Book. To insist on all the poems on musical subjects or on the various uses made of music, in the development of [Browning’s] Saul for instance, would only be to labour the point. II The distinction we have been making is less easy to draw before the death of Chaucer. In alliterative verse the number of syllables within the rhythmic beat may vary, just as the number of notes in a measure of music may vary. That gives alliterative poetry a musical freedom we hardly meet again before the Blake Prophecies. The rhymed romances are perhaps not so well entitled to this freedom, but they help themselves none the less.6 The lightness of the Middle English line, however, makes it a difficult medium for a motionless, resonant, contemplative poem of the sort Pope, Keats, and Tennyson habitually produced. The Pearl is an example of the amount of elaboration necessary, and even The Pearl’s

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poet was a musician.7 Thus, though one hardly feels that Chaucer was much influenced by music,8 his light tripping line, his narrative continuity, his dry impersonal style and the utter lack of any kind of soundpattern in him (proved by the two versions of his Prologue to The Legend of Good Women) make it hard to classify him with the three poets just mentioned. That wonderful contest of wryteling and gogeling,9 The Owl and the Nightingale, is written in octosyllabics as smooth as Chaucer’s, but it is two-part contrapuntal music all the same: it is impossible not to see something of what would later be called divisions on a ground10 behind it. The nightingale descants on the owl’s continuous monotony, and the owl’s cantus firmus insists on the nightingale’s elaborateness and periodic exhaustion. However that may be, modern musical poetry begins with the muchcursed Lydgate. Lydgate is not a great poet, and it is perhaps impossible to place him much higher than, say, Southey, whom he resembles in many respects. But he was no fool. He realized (occasionally) the futility of trying to imitate Chaucer, and he realized that the language as then pronounced was in too chaotic a state for a strict metre of any kind. He had therefore to borrow a hint from the exponents of rim-ram-ruf and develop a much freer pentameter line. This line is more heavily accented than Chaucer’s and is far more syncopated; the result is that it soon falls back into the old four-beat musical rhythm of alliterative verse. At first we are tempted to apply to Lydgate what the Minstrel says to Death in the Danse Macabre: This newe daunce / is to me so straunge Wonder dyverse / and passyngli contrarie The dredful fotynge / dothe so ofte chaunge And the mesures / so ofte sithes varie.11

But there is a dance there all the same: try the preceding stanza, Death’s speech to the Minstrel:

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15

Analysed prosodically as a pentameter stanza of Chaucer’s ABC type, the above is hopeless. The last line is not a pentameter at all. Read as a continuous four-beat line of musical poetry, it is quite simple. And the musical reading brings out what the prosodic analysis could never do, the grotesque, leaping-skeleton lilt of the voice of Death ending in the measured irony of the last line. My reading happens to elide the e in “cannest” and pronounce it in “folkes,” but if the scansion of Lydgate is musical rather than metrical we need not worry about this as long as we keep the four-beat rhythm. The same thing applies to caesural or final e’s and to words he may have accented differently, such as “Minstral.” We are not dealing with licentious deviations from Chaucer but with a different kind of verse altogether. Lydgate had, of course, no consistent poetic policy, but nevertheless he, not Chaucer, is the metrical ancestor of three of our most musical poets, Skelton, Dunbar, and Wyatt. The essential feature of the Skeltonic metre is that it is a musician’s attempt to cut the line to the bone in order to get as many accents and as much rhythmic variety as possible. The spirited prelude to Phyllyp Sparowe should be read exactly as the above quotation from Lydgate was read, four beats to a line. It is a quick, decisive, marching rhythm, with more rests and more accented beats coming together than we found in Lydgate. It needs dynamic markings, too, which Skelton does not provide:12 Pla ce bo, Who is there, who? Di le xi, Dame Margery; Fa, re, my, my, Wherefore and why, why?

Allegro con brio, forte

un poco accel.

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The Educated Imagination and Other Writings For the sowle of Philip Sparowe, That was late slayn at Carowe, Among the Nones Blake, For that swete soules sake, And for all sparowes soules, Set in our bederolles, Pater noster qui, With an Ave Mari, And with the corner of a Crede, The more shalbe your mede.

a tempo, piano rall. pianissimo a tempo, forte

rall. mf.

Skelton is not always so elaborate, but his speed is very seldom out of control. We do not expect a musician to lose his head merely because he is composing an Allegro instead of an Adagio, and Skelton, like Scarlatti after him, gets fidgety in a slow rhythm. Put him in the rhyme royal stanza, as in The Garland of Laurell, and he will tear it to pieces: That longe tyme blew a full tymorous blaste, Like to the Boriall wyndes, whan they blowe, That towres and tounes and trees downe cast, Drove clouds together like dryftes of snowe; The dredful dinne drove all the route on a row; Som trembled, som girned, som gasped, som gased, As people half pevissh, or men that were mased. [ll. 260–6]

Notice how the speed gathers from the first four words, helped by increasing alliteration, until it explodes in the galloping anapests of the last line. This represents a development of the rhyme royal which reaches its apogee in Wyatt’s They Fle From Me, a poem which bears the relation to the rhyme royal of Hopkins’s Windhover to the sonnet. In passages more typically Skeltonic than this the rhythm is reinforced with scraps of Latin, with nonsense syllables (which have an important place in musical poetry), with refrains (the refrain in Skelton or Dunbar is a thematic recurrence: in Oenone it establishes a similarity of pattern), and with long passages of anaphora which resemble the sequential repetitions of music. In The Garland of Laurell the poems to Margery Wentworth, Margaret Hussey, and Gertrude Statham are miniature musical rondos of the ABACA type. The musical poet’s instinct to use his technical resources in cursing

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somebody was doubtless responsible for the development of “flyting” as a literary exercise.13 In Dunbar’s Flyting with Kennedy a very intricate rhyming and metrical scheme is completely subordinated to the pounding accent: Mauch mutton, byt buttoun, peilit gluttoun, air to Hilhous; Rank beggar, ostir dregar, foule fleggar in the flet; Chittirlilling, ruch rilling, lik schilling in the milhous; Baird rehator, theif of natour, fals tratour, feyindis gett. . . .

Dunbar is a more restless experimenter than Skelton: not all of his experiments come off, however, and even so brilliant an effort as Ane Ballat of Our Lady, with its involved repetition of sounds like the clashing of bells, is, considered as literary jazz, somewhere between The Bells and Alexander’s Feast. On the other hand, the great Dance of the Seven Deidly Sinnis ranks easily with the best musical grotesqueries of Browning and Burns. Wyatt, too, is a musical radical, much closer to Skelton and Dunbar than to the conservative, unmusical reformer Surrey. He is the culmination of the post-Chaucerian musical tradition, and one of the subtlest lyric craftsmen in the language, though his beauty was concealed for centuries by bad editing. Take this sonnet: I abide and abide and better abide, And, after the olde proverbe, the happie daye: And ever my ladye to me dothe say, “Let me alone and I will provyde.” I abide and abide and tarrye the tyde And with abiding spede well ye maye: Thus do I abide I wott allwaye, Nother obtayning nor yet denied. Aye, me! this long abidyng Semithe to me as who sayethe A prolonging of a dieng dethe, Or a refusing of a desyred thing. Moche ware it bettre for to be playne, Then to saye abide and yet shall not obtayne.14

This is not a preliminary draft for Surrey, but a musical sonnet thought out in more poetic dimensions than Surrey knew existed. The rhythm

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opens with a Skeltonic vigour; there is the repeated clang of “abide” and the musical (but poetically very audacious) sequential repetition of the first line in the fifth. Then as hope follows expectancy, doubt hope, and despair doubt, the lively rhythm gradually slows down and collapses. In his ability to make the rhythm follow the curves of the meaning Wyatt has no superior. Surrey, however, established a new pentameter line for his century. Its prestige captured Spenser, who had begun with accentual experiments and contrapuntal singing-matches, but for his epic moved away from musical rhythms, as Milton moved towards them. Shakespeare, however, and most Elizabethan drama with him, grew steadily swifter in movement, breaking out of the line into galloping recitativos, with the diction becoming sharper and more dissonant, the imagery grimmer and more sombre, the thought more tangled and obscure—in short, more musical in every way. The use of music by Shakespeare, however, is outside our scope: his musical accompaniments and imagery have been dealt with, notably by Granville Barker and Wilson Knight,15 but such features as the contrapuntal construction of King Lear have yet to be analysed. The metrical basis of Donne and Herbert, too, is musical: a fact not always realized by their imitators. But Crashaw is the most ambitious musician of the metaphysical group. Musicks Duell describes a typically baroque form, the aria with instrumental accompaniment which had become increasingly popular since about 1600. To carry on an elaborate detailed description of the most abstract and wordless of arts for nearly two hundred lines, and make the result successful poetry, is (so far as I know) an unrivalled feat. It is perhaps worth noting that when the musician reaches his full close, or diapason, there is nothing for the nightingale to do but burst, which proves our point that all music preserves the tension of discord. Crashaw is one of the few musical poets whose diction presents a smooth surface. His imagery, though often called sensuous, has a musical suggestiveness, depending both on precision of sound and vagueness of sight. His religious poetry often begins with some kind of icon: a Biblical text, an emblem, a picture of St. Teresa, a crucifix, and the poem itself is a mental response, controlled by his ear, to the devotional stimulus of that icon. In his poem on the Sacrament he says to his other four senses:

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Your ports are all superfluous here, Saue That which lets in faith, the eare.

[Hymn in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, ll. 9–10] The result is that the sound of his poetry is more legato than that of most musical poets: it has a haunting, evocative quality to it worthy of Coleridge, and generally found in unmusical poets like him. For most of his great religious poems Crashaw uses a free fantasia or ode, which he often calls a hymn. The organization of these hymns is purely musical, and for the most part they require a very fluent line which can lengthen or shorten at will, a relentless pushing emjambment, and a fortissimo climax at the end. In the coda of The Flaming Heart this climax is weighted with alliteration and anaphora, as in the Song to David. More technical is the thematic use of words, of “love,” “lord,” “life,” and “death” in the St. Teresa ode, which opens: Loue, thou art Absolute sole lord Of Life & Death . . .;

and closes: Which who in death would liue to see, Must learn in life to dy like thee;16

and is analogous to music, in which the tonality is established at the beginning and returned to at the end. Cowley’s Pindaric was evidently intended as a rhythmically durchkomponiert17 development of the Crashaw hymn, in which, as in Wyatt, the rhythm and meaning would coincide. In Davideis Cowley attempted a musical epic in which his Pindaric experiments were to be incorporated but based on the heroic couplet. This disastrous error ruined the Davideis, and Milton’s rejection of rhyme for Paradise Lost is its epitaph. Nevertheless, the Davideis is an impressive monument of musical poetry. Cowley has an elaborate philosophy of music, some of it Platonic, much of it original. He chose David as a musical poet on whom he could centre that philosophy. The creative artist imitates the CreatorGod, whose creation is an energetic contrapuntal thrust and counterthrust of elements:

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The Educated Imagination and Other Writings As first a various unform’d Hint we find Rise in some God-like Poets fertile Mind, . . . [ll.125–6] Such was Gods Poem, this Worlds new Essay; So wild and rude in its first draught it lay; . . . [ll. 451–2] Water and Air he for the Tenor chose, Earth made the Base, the Treble Flame arose. . . . [ll. 457–8]

The ordering of elements in the macrocosm by God is paralleled by the ordering of humours in the microcosm by the artist; therefore music is therapeutic and David was able to cure Saul by music.18 Two features in Milton’s use of music may be glanced at. One is his careful perfecting of the enjambed paragraph, which begins with a set of three poems (On Time, At a Solemn Musick, and Upon the Circumcision), and, after wriggling through the sonnets and the paraphrase of Horace, forms the unit of the epics and expands into the recitativos of Samson Agonistes. The other is his use of resonant names, which is intended to produce a musical roar of sound in place of what must necessarily be vague imagery, Milton’s subject being what it is. Like Crashaw, like Jeremy Taylor, like many baroque writers, Milton must be read with a myopic eye and a keen ear, which should not miss such details as the vowel-crescendo of which he is so fond: Yet once more, O ye Laurels . . . (Lycidas, l. 1) O Prince, O Chief, of many Throned Powers . . . (Paradise Lost, bk. 1, l. 128)

“All passion spent” brings the great musical period of English poetry to a full close. The unmusical stopped couplet of Waller and Pope (Dryden needs qualification) then held sway, and Samuel Johnson, with his dislike of blank verse, of “the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse to verse,” and of any sacrifice of clarity of thought to speed of movement, preserves a consistently anti-musical attitude to poetry. “The musick of the English heroic line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together: this cooperation can be obtained only by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another, as a distinct system of sounds.”19 This dogma is a manifesto against not only Milton but all musical writing. The trend away from Pope and Johnson was less musical than one might at the time have expected. Burns of course was a musician. Blake, though a painter, preferred musical poetry: his frequent use of the

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term “Preludium” in the Prophecies has a musical reference which Wordsworth’s “Prelude” hardly possesses. But if Wordsworth had possessed more knowledge of music and had received more intelligent criticism his unfairly ridiculed attempts at high-speed musical grotesquerie, such as The Idiot Boy and Peter Bell, might have borne more fruit. Southey, too, badly needed a musical backing for his persistent experiments. In his preface to Thalaba his ignorance of it makes him stammer and mumble where Milton had spoken clearly: “I do not wish the improvisatorè tune;—but something that denotes the sense of harmony, something like the accent of feeling,—like the tone which every poet necessarily gives to poetry.”20 In the nineteenth century a great deal of reverent lip-service was paid to music by poets, in our language notably by Poe in The Poetic Principle. Few of the devotees of pure sound, however, had any real knowledge of music or any clear idea how to transfer its resources to poetry. Most of them went straight back to the Tennysonian unmusical sound-pattern, and they are partly responsible for the fact that the literary meaning of musical is unmusical. Browning is the only real musician of importance until the obvious poetic possibilities of jazz began to interest Vachel Lindsay, the author of Sweeney Agonistes [T.S. Eliot], and Mr. Auden, whose Oxford Book of Light Verse is almost an anthology of musical poetry. III These few suggestions, it is hoped, may explain a number of phenomena in English poetry that have so far not been satisfactorily explained, and provide hints for explaining others. Many further questions must here be left untouched. A discussion of musical prose, for instance, would centre on Tristram Shandy and Ulysses: the former has a very subtle and intricate musical organization. Perhaps, too, musical poetry is a wider term than poetry influenced by music. Beowulf is as musical in our sense as Milton, and Layamon has Skelton’s rattle and bounce: were these poets influenced by contemporary music? Possibly the genius of Northern Europe which produced the alliterative line and seems to have taken the lead in the development of contrapuntal music was also responsible for musical poetry as an independent though integral growth. Is not musical poetry confined to the Teutonic languages in any case? Surely the structure of French verse, for instance, nearly precludes it, and a great French musi-

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cal writer like Rabelais (Sterne’s ancestor in this respect) we should expect to turn to prose. Whether this is true or not, music has been a continuous and important tradition in English poetry since The Owl and the Nightingale at least, quite apart from its frequent appearance beside it in song and ballad.

4 The Anatomy in Prose Fiction Spring 1942

From the Manitoba Arts Review, 3, no. 1 (Spring 1942): 35–47. Heavily revised it appeared again as “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” (see no. 9 in this volume). Portions of the later version were incorporated into AC, “Fourth Essay.” Footnotes have been changed to endnotes. It is based on an essay Frye had written for Edmund Blunden at Oxford (Ayre, 178–9); as Ayre points out, there is a great deal of Frye himself in his description of the figure of the satirist as a defender of “art from all without but [who] ensures that there shall be no shirking of the infinite novelty and variety of the work to be done within.”

Prose is, unlike poetry, used for non-literary purposes, and for the intelligent study of literature it is essential to have some idea where literary prose ends and the non-literary begins. A great deal of prose survives in the purlieus of literature by virtue of something we vaguely call “style,” something that Gibbon has and that Buckle1 has not, though both wrote histories. But this distinction, though important and interesting, is not nearly so crucial to the proper understanding of literature as the narrower distinction between literary and expository prose, between prose which is literature and prose which is something else. It would be useful if our popular antithesis of “fiction” and “nonfiction” actually expressed such a distinction. If we were to call any form of prose outside of literature “non-fiction” and reserve the word “fiction” for prose which is literature, we should have a valuable and practicable critical term to work with. Montaigne’s Essays and Browne’s Urn Burial would then be fiction. But of course we do not use the word in as broad a sense as this: we generally think of fiction as about something admitted to be untrue and non-fiction as about everything else. Even

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this, if somewhat vulgar (it identifies the imaginary and the imaginative), has much to be said for it. But if we go to a circulating library we shall find Gulliver’s Travels and The Pilgrim’s Progress classified as “nonfiction,” because the popularity of the novel has proved great enough to make “fiction” a mere doublet of “novel” (the short story need not be considered at the moment). And not only in libraries but in literary criticism, the novel is accepted as the normal form of prose fiction. This gives any historical outline of literature a somewhat top-heavy appearance in regard to prose: twenty centuries of comparative chaos precede the eighteenth, when a mature and integrated tradition of novel-writing suddenly appears, like Melchizedek (Gen. 14: 18–20) without father, mother, or (since it still holds the field) descent. To this apocalypse everything in prose with any characters or story in it at all must have been tending. From the point of view of a novelist the characterization in Sidney’s Arcadia is rudimentary and the incidents implausible: Arcadia therefore represents a crude and abortive Elizabethan attempt at something which later sprang full-blown in Moll Flanders. This would have amused Sidney. What are we to do with Bunyan, Swift, or Voltaire? We can hardly deny that they wrote prose fiction, but we can hardly call them novelists, and therefore, from the point of view of the novel, their work has no form. Hence we hear a great deal about their style and thought, about Bunyan’s Puritan conscience and Swift’s hatred of mankind and Voltaire’s mocking wit, but little about any technical achievements in a definite literary medium, a point no one dealing with Balzac or Henry James would ignore. Outside this comes non-fiction, whether literary in intention and treatment or not. This is so large a classification that the usual view of English prose fiction postulates a gap in the seventeenth century which exactly covers the golden age of English prose. This article is an attempt to get away from the old Ptolemaic view of prose literature as made up of novels, bad novels, formless fiction, and Examples of Prose Style, some of which last might by stretching a point be put under belles lettres. It pleads for a more Copernican perspective, and tries to show that there is evidence for one.2 Sidney’s Arcadia is a romance, and its author had never seen or heard of a novel. The romance has its own traditions, which go back to Alexandrian times3 and, unlike the novel, it demands rigorous conventions, whether chivalric, erotic, allegorical, or pastoral. On the whole it stresses narrative rather than character, suggesting an impersonal march of circumstances which gives it a grave, melancholy, even fatalistic tone.

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Its conventional and stately style makes it naturally aristocratic: hence when the middle class turns to art one of its first art forms is mockromance, in the various forms of fabliau, picaresque, and quixotic satire, which merges readily into the novel. In his own tradition and convention, Sidney is our subtlest master of the polite style in prose fiction before Henry James. Even after the rise of the novel, a prose tale, more intense in incident and more stereotyped in characterization, more inclined to tragedy and the occult and to the use of a narrator, preserves a certain integrity and independence. Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, The Turn of the Screw, The Prussian Officer, Dr. Jekyll, all have a family resemblance they share with the romance and the ballad but not with Jane Austen or Meredith, who are closer to the comedy of manners. This tale form, of course, always takes the novel’s name when long enough to have a binding to itself. Hawthorne is always called a novelist though he was at some pains to explain that what he wrote was romance.4 And even beyond the romance, we find resemblances in tone, style, and mental attitude which may well imply a corresponding kinship in form. When Voltaire writes an imaginary conversation between Lucian, Erasmus, and Rabelais,5 we feel that these writers, along with Voltaire himself and “le docteur Swift” who is mentioned at the end, make up a very homogeneous group. Let us first see what the main formal characteristics of this group are, and then what further works of prose fiction belong to the same tradition. One passage in English criticism is relevant enough to our subject to be taken as a basis for discussion. It occurs in Dryden’s Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire. Dryden says: It will be necessary to say somewhat of another kind of Satire, which also was descended from the ancients; ’tis that which we call the Varronian Satire, (but which Varro himself calls the Menippean,) because Varro, the most learned of the Romans, was the first author of it, who imitated, in his works, the manner of Menippus the Gardarenian, who professed the philosophy of the Cynics. This sort of Satire was not only composed of several sorts of verse, like those of Ennius, but was also mixed with prose; and Greek was sprinkled amongst the Latin. . . . We have nothing remaining of these Varronian satires, excepting some inconsiderable fragments, and those for the most part much corrupted. . . .

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It appears, that Varro was one of those writers whom they called spoydog>loici, studious of laughter; and that, as learned as he was, his business was more to divert his reader, than to teach him. And he entitled his own satires Menippean. . . . Lucian, who was emulous of this Menippus, seems to have imitated both his manners and his style in many of his dialogues. . . . But Varro, in imitating him, avoids his impudence and filthiness, and only expresses his witty pleasantry. This we may believe for certain, that as his subjects were various, so most of them were tales or stories of his own invention. Which is also manifest from antiquity, by those authors who are acknowledged to have written Varronian satires, in imitation of his; of whom the chief is Petronius Arbiter. . . . Many of Lucian’s dialogues may also properly be called Varronian satires, particularly his True History; and consequently the Golden Ass of Apuleius, which is taken from his. Of the same stamp is the mock deification of Claudius, by Seneca: and the Symposium or Caesars of Julian, the Emperor. Amongst the moderns, we may reckon the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus, Barclay’s Euphormio, and a volume of German authors. . . . In the English, I remember none which are mixed with prose, as Varro’s were; but of the same kind is Mother Hubbard’s Tale, in Spenser; and (if it be not too vain to mention anything of my own), the poems of Absalom and MacFleckno.6

Now Petronius, Lucian, and Apuleius are, of course, easily the three greatest Classical writers of prose fiction, and to find all three in Dryden’s list suggests that the Menippean satire is the only really important form of prose fiction produced in antiquity, for the romances of Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus are quite minor by comparison. The technical quality which Dryden stresses in the Menippean satire is the mixing of prose with verse, but this is obviously no touchstone, though it is a recurring feature. The Menippean is the prose satire form corresponding to the poetic satire form of Juvenal and Horace.7 But another peculiarity Dryden mentions is more truly distinctive. Menippus and Varro were, unlike the satiric poets, professing philosophers, and their form is a mixture of satire with philosophy. This is brought out very clearly in the words given to Varro by Cicero: “. . . quadam hilaritate conspersimus, multa admixta ex intima philosophia, multa dicta dialectice.”8 Now satire, according to Juvenal’s useful if hackneyed formula, has an impartial interest in anything men do:

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Quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago libelli est.9

The philosopher, on the other hand, teaches a certain way or method of living: he stresses some things and despises others: what he recommends is carefully selected from the data of human life; he continually passes moral judgments on social behaviour. His attitude is dogmatic; that of the satirist is pragmatic. Hence a philosophical satire, as such, is not far from being a contradiction in terms. But the Menippean satire will not be wholly a satire on philosophy either, though it will include that. It will represent rather the collision between a selection of standards from experience and the feeling that experience is bigger than any set of beliefs about it. The Menippean satirist will demonstrate the infinite variety of what men do by showing the futility, not only of saying what they ought to do, but even of all attempts to systematize or formulate a coherent scheme of what they do. All philosophies of life abstract from life; and an abstraction implies the leaving out of inconvenient data. The satirist will bring up those inconvenient data, sometimes in the form of alternative theories which cancel one another out to equal zero. A fundamental pattern in the Menippean satire, then, is the setting of ideas and generalizations and theories and dogmas over against the life they are supposed to explain. It is given most clearly in Lucian’s Sale of Lives, in which a series of slave-philosophers pass in review, with all their arguments and guarantees, before a buyer who has to consider living with them. He buys a few, it is true, but as slaves, not as masters or teachers. Lucian’s attitude to Greek philosophy, however, is repeated in the attitude of Erasmus and Rabelais to the scholastics, of Swift to Descartes and the Royal Society, of Voltaire to Leibnitz. The Menippean satire is a professional, scholarly, clerical “criticism of life”: in the Christian period most of its great practitioners have been theologically trained. In subject matter it differs radically from the novel, for the novelist, like Juvenal, tries to be an impartial observer of man doing. The satirist is an observer of man thinking: he seeks ideas and their spokesmen as sedulously as the trained novelist avoids them. His form is more bookish than the novel, and he refers to and quotes from his predecessors more, as Lucian did with Menippus, a fact of great help in tracing the tradition. The novel is interested in people: in the satire, characters are stylized, stereotyped, presented as incarnations of theory, or, when social condi-

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tions are directly handled, as typical of trades, professions, or classes. The character books of the seventeenth century illustrate a similar approach. Squire Western belongs entirely to the novel; Thwackum and Square have some Menippean blood in them.10 The novel is roughly analogous to the scientific, the prose satire to the dialectic, method. The novel is concerned with the data of civilization; the Menippean satire with the data of culture. These antitheses are, like much else in this article, purposely over-simplified. This insistence on the comparative naiveté of systematic thought implies a thoroughgoing intellectual nihilism which should not be limited or cheapened by such ready-made epithets as “sceptical” or “cynical.” Scepticism itself is a dogmatic attitude, or at any rate became one in Greek philosophy. Cynicism is a little closer: Menippus was a cynic, and cynics are generally associated with the role of philosophical Thersites. In Lyly’s play Campaspe, for instance, Plato and Aristotle are bores, and Diogenes, who is not a philosopher at all but an Elizabethan clown of the Malecontent type, steals the show. But still cynicism is a philosophy, and one that may produce the strange spiritual pride of the Peregrinus of whom Lucian makes so searching and terrible an analysis. In the Sale of Lives the cynic and the sceptic are auctioned in their turn, and the latter is the last to be sold, dragged off to have his very scepticism refuted, not by argument but by life.11 Erasmus called himself Democritus Junior,12 follower of the philosophical laugher at mankind, but Lucian’s buyer considers that Democritus too has overdone his pose. No, the satiric attitude we have spoken of is not philosophical at all, or anti-philosophical: it belongs to Menippean satirists in their right as artists. The artist qua artist believes nothing. As a man he may believe anything; as an artist he is only looking for what he can use. “The poet,” said Sidney, “never affirmeth,”13 not because he has nothing to affirm but because everything he wishes to affirm exists for him only as potential “copy.” He may believe in something passionately, may devote his life to expounding it, but in the process of presenting that belief there must be a detachment beyond all scepticism. What he believes is poetic material, not poetic form, and must be subservient to the demands of that form. The Menippean satire is only the special kind of art which develops and expands this quality of creative detachment. The demand for order in thought produces a supply of philosophical systems, each claiming to be the way of explaining reality. Many such systems attract and convert artists, as the Epicurean did Lucretius. But as an equally

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great poet could have defended any other system equally well, any philosopher, if he had his way, would establish hierarchies in the arts entirely foreign to their nature, and would censor and expurgate as Plato wished to do to Homer. The Menippean satire is therefore art’s first line of defence against all such invasions. But precisely because the Menippean satirist is not taking an idle delight in watching philosophers disagree but an artist’s interest in the patterns their conflicts make, his dialogues need not be always satiric, in the narrow sense. The imaginary conversation, the Totengesprach,14 the cultural dialogue, are all species of the form, but the grave and rarefied beauty of Landor is as much a part of the tradition as the hair-pulling brawl of Lucian’s Symposium. Ideas may clash or they may simply interpenetrate. Religion is a subtler antagonist, for, if it has any claim to catholicity, it is able to make room for many different temperaments, many conflicting intellectual outlooks, and a culture broad enough to allow the arts to follow their own laws instead of being forced to comply with hasty a priori assumptions about their duties. Further, its claims to divine revelation are out of the satirist’s range. All a satirist can actually do with religion, then, is to expose the demonstrably false, or superstitious, element in it. He may feel with Lucian that the elimination of superstition would eliminate religion, or with Erasmus that it would restore health to religion, but what he feels is not his business as a satirist. Whether Zeus exists or not is a question: that men who think him vicious and stupid will insist that he change the weather is a fact, accepted by scoffer and devout alike. Hence the Menippean satire has a free hand in demonstrating that at any rate most of men’s ideas of religion are as inadequate to grapple with the whole of experience as their ideas of everything else are. The unit of superstition, so to speak, is the fanatic or bigot, who, whatever his label, is of course an enemy to all artists. Hatred and contempt for him is by no means confined to Menippean satirists, though, from Lucian’s Alexander to Voltaire’s Dr. Akakia,15 they have probably done most of the carving. There is no point our five writers are more completely agreed on, even if, in Lucian again, the bigot seems to be as essential to religion as the crank to social reform. Insofar as it is catholic, tolerant, a safeguard of the culture they are interested in and willing to let them alone, a religion may command both the service and the affection of a Menippean satirist. Of our five writers, only Voltaire shows any real sense of chafing in bondage: none of the

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others stopped very far short of saying all they wanted to say. Yet it is difficult for the hardest container to preserve indefinitely so corrosive a solvent as the Menippean satire. One feels that Erasmus’ irony suggests a much more complete overhauling of his church than either Reformation or Counter-Reformation achieved, and that the satire of the fifth book of Rabelais and A Tale of a Tub has eaten much further into the heart of Christianity than its authors would have admitted or perhaps intended. It is not in the long run practicable, when it is a visible and established church that is involved, to distinguish sharply between attacks on corruptions and attacks on the structure itself. Here again “sceptic” is irrelevant: here again, however, is the hint that any religion, like any philosophy, is a temporary and premature synthesis of experience. The principle that emerges from this is that conventional people who accept the moral and religious assertions made in their society, without attempting to rationalize, defend, or reform them, are closer to the satirist’s position. For this reason he often upholds them against the garrulous doctrinaire. Erasmus does this constantly, especially in the Fish-Eater.16 Butler in Erewhon, which we can see already belongs to the tradition, says he prefers his High Ydgrunites to vegetarians or pious musical bankers. When Montaigne points out what an eloquent case could be made for eating one’s parents instead of burying them, he is suggesting that on all such points convention must be our deepest conviction. The crank who logically proves the necessity of accepting a new theory, however good, is far easier to satirize than the ordinary man who pays his perfunctory respects to the existing theories doubtless invented by dead cranks. Convention, however, as this last remark indicates, is only fossilized dogma. The real strength of the conventional person is not in the conventions themselves, but in his common-sense way of handling them. He trusts to the rule-of-thumb conduct which he finds in experience actually does maintain his equilibrium from one day to another. Yet common sense can be so different from conventional standards as to make the latter look as perverted as a Saturnalia. The Menippean satire, therefore, can hardly stop short of attacking convention, but such an attack must be a general campaign against society rather than an exposure of an individual. The standard of common sense judges men by what they are and not by their titles or fortunes. Any superhuman world would presumably have such a common-sense standard as its minimum. The satirist does not know: his knowledge stops where life stops, but even so he knows

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that death is impartial, and, if that is an indication of what to expect later, the satire on life is sufficiently strong. Hence the species of Menippean satire represented by Lucian’s Kataplous and Charon, and by the medieval danse macabre. The pattern here is the contrast of the simple commonsense fact of the equality of death against the bewilderingly complex inequalities of life, which seems to be trying to ignore it. The same pattern recurs in the Utopian romance, another species of our form, in which a coherent and intelligible set of simple common-sense standards are set over against the complex absurdities and hypocrisies of conventional society. Yet it is precisely the complexity of data in experience the Menippean satirist insists on and the simple set of standards that he distrusts. Hence in the Utopian satire (i.e., in the Utopia which is prose fiction and not sociology) the ideal state is generally presented either as unattainable or as associated with something else undesirable. Montaigne’s cannibals have all the virtues we have not, if we do not mind being cannibals. More’s Utopia is an ideal state except that to enter it we must give up the idea of Christendom. The Houyhnhnms live the life of reason and nature better than we, but the real meaning of Swift’s irony is that such a life is actually nearer the capacities of animals than of humans. The same irony is in the danse macabre itself, in pastoral satire, and in primitivist satire of the L’Ingénu type.17 In all cases it falls into an a fortiori form: even cannibals and horses get many things right that we get wrong.18 But while common sense is perhaps as close to a norm as the Menippean satirist suggests, it too has certain implied dogmas, notably that the data of sense experience are reliable and consistent, and that our customary associations with things form a solid basis for interpreting the present and predicting the future. These sound reasonable enough, and the satirist is not quarrelling with them, but he cannot explore all the possibilities of his form without seeing what happens if he questions them. That is why he so often gives to ordinary life a logical and selfconsistent shift of perspective. He will show us society suddenly in a telescope as posturing and dignified pygmies, or in a microscope as hideous and reeking giants, or he will change his hero into an ass and show us how humanity looks from an ass’s point of view (not well), or he will announce that he has just returned from the moon and has found there absurd and fantastic creatures very like the ones he has left behind. The Utopia-parody of the Erewhon type belongs here, and of course the marvellous journey. The type of fantasy peculiar to the Menippean form

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is not allegorical, nor romantic, nor humorously grotesque, but a deliberate attempt to get away from customary associations, to reduce sense experience to one of many possible mental categories, to bring out the tentative, als ob [as if] basis of all our thinking. Emerson says that such shifts of perspective afford “a low degree of the sublime,”19 but actually they afford something of far greater artistic importance, a high degree of the ridiculous. The frequent use of obscenity in the form is closely connected with this. Convention means people parading in front of each other, and the preservation of it demands that the dignity of some men and the beauty of some women should be thought of apart from excretion, copulation, or other embarrassments. Constant reference to these latter brings us down to a bodily democracy paralleling the democracy of death in the danse macabre, and checks our lazy tendency to reduce concrete facts to glossy and carefully faked abstract ideas. The mind distressed by the horseplay and bad language in Rabelais or Petronius is likely to be a torpid, sluggish, maudlin mind, a prey to stately tyrants who never slip on banana peelings: not bigoted or superstitious, perhaps, but a willing victim of those who are. In the riotous chaos of Rabelais, Petronius, and Apuleius the Menippean satire plunges through to its final victory over common sense. When we have finished with their weirdly logical fantasies of debauch, dream, and delirium we wake up wondering if waking itself is not an abnormal mental state. Or perhaps Paracelsus’s suggestion is right that the things seen in delirium tremens are really there, like stars in daytime.20 Occasionally we are dropped bits of baffling and exasperating allegory, like the Cupid and Psyche story, elusive as a grin without a cat, or we are promised a final oracle. But Lucius becomes initiated and slips out of our grasp, aut indicavit aut finxit:21 Rabelais leaves us alone in the dark clutching a bottle with the echo of his last laugh. The Satyricon is a torn fragment from what seems like a history of some monstrous Atlantean race that vanished in the sea, still drunk. The only synthesis of experience that makes no claim to be anything more than one out of infinite possibilities is the work of art. But that too has its own canons, rules, and methods of structure, and this final synthesis must be hunted out of its lair. The jerky cinematic changes of scene in the long satire are a kind of parody of form in art, giving us the satura or mixed dish from which it derives its name. The satiric romance is apt

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to contain a lurking humorous allusion to more regularly constructed works such as the epic even if no deliberate attempt is made to burlesque them. A Tale of a Tub rambles on until its author includes a mock apology in the shape of a digression in praise of digressions. The Menippean satire is a kind of literary antimasque: no sooner have we decided that some form of high seriousness is necessary to the greatest art than in bursts this noisy and obscene monster to make the whole idea of a hierarchy in art look absurd. Not only does the Menippean satire defend art against all attack from without but ensures that there shall be no shirking of the infinite novelty and variety of the work to be done within. There is one other species of our form in Classical fiction that Dryden does not mention. I refer to the encyclopedic farrago represented by Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists and Macrobius’ Saturnalia. Here people sit at a banquet and pour out a vast mass of erudition on every subject that might conceivably come up in a conversation with a wealth of illustration, allusion, reference, quotation, and epigram. The cena (banquet) setting is a favourite one with Menippean satirists because it enables them to deal with their cultural subjects without having to worry about characterization or social background or other duties that belong only to a novelist. The loose farrago form is satiric, of course, and the display of erudition is an essential feature of our satire, recurring in the catalogues of Rabelais. Probably it had already been associated with it by Varro, who was enough of a polymath to make Quintilian, if not stare and gasp, at any rate call him vir Romanorum eruditissimus. Its place in satire is as an inductive and exhaustive method of demonstrating confusion in culture. When a sorcerer describes thirty or forty different kinds of divination to Panurge, it is not difficult for the latter to see that there is not much in any of them. But if he has wasted his time, the reader has not. Dusty learning has an appeal only for a certain type of mind: what we get here is a thick cloud of dust blown out of a library by a cyclone. Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights is generally bracketed with Athenaeus and Macrobius, but it has dropped its connection with prose fiction and has become a mere compendium of curious information. Even so it illustrates the affinity of our form with the compendium, and helps explain the occasional appearance in the tradition of such compendious byeblows as Erasmus’ Adagia and Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique. The author of A Tale of a Tub does not actually compose such a pandect,22 but he threatens to.

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The idea of a satire form, whether in poetry or prose, is more Roman and Renaissance than it is either medieval or modern. Medieval writers preserved every feature of the Menippean satire, including the mixture of prose and verse, kept alive partly by the prestige of Boethius. This last survives in Martianus Capella, and in other works like Aucassin et Nicolette not directly connected with our form. But Middle English produced no important Menippean satire, though in Latin we have Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium in the later twelfth century, an unusually Classicallyminded period. Intellectual paradox survived in the traditions of medieval rhetoric and in the art form of the postponed debate. But on the whole the clerical and professional satirists of the Middle Ages were more interested in social and moral than in metaphysical satire. The satiric survey of social types is in the danse macabre, of moral types in the homiletic formula provided by the Seven Deadly Sins. In both forms a desire to be comprehensive and impartial replaces the old satura technique. It is essentially this medieval comprehensive satire on a society classified into social and moral categories that survives in Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly (included in Dryden’s list) and Agrippa’s Vanity of the Arts and Sciences. Erasmus’ book is an ironic praise of the unpraisable and Agrippa’s a paradoxical attack on the conventionally accepted. At the same time the immense prestige of Lucian among humanists is well known, and behind Lucian stood those passages of brilliant cena debate in Plato, like the duel of Socrates and Thrasymachus or the opening of the Symposium, which belong to prose fiction rather than to systematic philosophy.23 We should, then, ascribe a good deal of Lucianic and Platonic influence to humanist satire, particularly Erasmus’ Colloquies. But with Erasmus and Agrippa as well as with Rabelais it is both impossible and unnecessary to say how much is evolution from the medieval and how much Classical revival. On the Continent the anonymous Satire Menippée and Barclay’s Euphormionis Satyricon (mentioned by Dryden) show their Classical affinities in their titles. English writers of prose fiction, on the other hand, preferred medieval models when they approached our form, the sevendeadly-sins scheme being the most popular,24 and not until Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy did the Menippean satire become an integral part of English literature. The connection of this book with the encyclopedic farrago is obvious

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enough, but the absence of any cena setting, dialogue, or narrative might lead us to suspect Burton’s literary claims. A closer examination will soon undeceive us. Burton’s title of “Democritus Junior,” borrowed from Erasmus,25 marks his Menippean ambitions clearly enough, and in the love-melancholy section, the most revised and expanded of all, quotations from Athenaeus, Lucian, Erasmus, and Agrippa pour off his pen.26 His introduction contains a Utopia: his digressions illustrate scholarly distillations of the main features of the tradition: the digression of air, of the marvellous journey; the digression of spirits, of the ironic use of the occult; the digression of the miseries of scholars, of the clerical satire. His lists of diseases and manias are not exactly obscene, but they contain enough of the material of obscenity to achieve much the same artistic effect as the catalogues of torcheculs and epithets of codpieces in Gargantua. The long lists of articles of diet take us back to Athenaeus, and there is a good deal, such as the string of consolatory phrases in the Remedies of Discontents section, which reflects only the magpie impulse to collect we have found to be related to the form.27 In all cases, of course, the method is that of the exhaustive catalogue of conflicting authorities also used by Rabelais. In short, The Anatomy of Melancholy is not a medical treatise which has accidentally survived in literature because of its style: it is not a freak of fantastic erudition;28 it is not a scholar’s crib or vade-mecum. It is exactly the same kind of encyclopedic survey of a mad world we have found The Praise of Folly and The Vanity of the Arts and Sciences to be, except that it is longer and more comprehensive. Not a single feature of our form is missing from it: not even the dialogue, for quotations from books can speak as eloquently of the confusion of the wise as table talk. The Anatomy of Melancholy is as truly prose fiction as a tale of Poe or a novel of Thackeray. Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity and Bacon’s Advancement of Learning may be works on theology and philosophy of great literary merit; but The Anatomy of Melancholy is literature itself, and it is high time that Burton was dragged into the central and commanding literary position he ought to hold. He is our greatest prose artist between Malory and Swift; his book is to Elizabethan prose what The Faerie Queene is to its poetry; he put the most comprehensive criticism of life into one book that English literature had seen since that Chaucer whom he delights to call “our English Homer.” More than that, his title supplies us with a name for what we can now stop calling “our form.” The word “anatomy” had already turned up in

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Elizabethan literature to describe comprehensive satiric treatises built on the model of Erasmus and Agrippa. “Anatomize” in Elizabethan England had the general sense of dissecting or analyzing, an “anatomy” being literally a skeleton, and hence acquired the figurative literary meaning of examining from a satiric or debunking point of view.29 Lyly’s Euphues is romance, but, being also a satire on the mental quality known as eIwyT[ or natural brilliance, it is also related to the anatomy, and hence is subtitled “Anatomy of Wit.” One of the main reasons for overlooking the fact that Lucian, Rabelais, Erasmus, Swift, and Voltaire are connected in form as well as in tone has been the lack of a simple word, like “novel” or “romance,” to describe that form. “Menippean satire” is cumbersome and obsolete: words to describe species of the form are too limited: “Anatomy” is English, comprehensive, and accurate. III The novel is obviously the product of a distinctive middle-class culture. Bunyan, the one great seventeenth-century writer who represents the Nonconformist middle class, is the only one who contributed anything of importance to the novel. The Anglican Walton’s Compleat Angler, on the other hand, is an anatomy, because of its mixture of prose and verse, its rural cena setting, its dialogue form, its deipnosophistical interest in food, and because of its gentle Menippean raillery of a society which considers everything more important than fishing and yet has discovered very few better things to do. Later on, the middle-class Whig Defoe worked on the novel while Swift, Tory and would-be bishop, ignored it. By the middle of the century the novel had won out: still, we should be surprised to find that Fielding had dropped all connection with the older form, and the lively Journey from This World to the Next proves the contrary. Samuel Johnson, who admired Burton, had some interest in the anatomy and contributed Rasselas to it, an interest he seems not to have felt for the novel. Tristram Shandy, however, is the one great example in our literature of the merging of novel and anatomy. Rabelais and Burton were Sterne’s teachers, and, like theirs, his masterpiece was not one book among others but simply his book, for nearly everything else he wrote could easily have been thrown into it, and the Sentimental Journey at any rate should have been. His satura disorganization needs no marbled page to illustrate it and no attacks on dogmatic critics to defend it. The digressions, the

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catalogues, the stylizing of character (with the simplicity of Uncle Toby exposing the complex crankiness of his brother), the marvellous adventures of the great nose, the quizzical ending, the cena discussions, the ridicule of all philosophers from the “Nosarians” to Locke, the clerical authorship, are familiar features to us by now. Peacock’s anatomies, with their verse interludes, their leisurely and brilliant cena conversations that cover every phase of culture, their stylized characterization, and their romantic settings which change the perspective of ordinary life just enough, are perhaps the most delicately beautiful we possess. They are free and easy in development, as anatomies should be, but are strictly controlled by a precise if indefinable sense of structure. The motto of The Misfortunes of Elphin comes from Petronius; that of Headlong Hall takes us back to our starting point: All philosophers, who find Some favourite system to their mind, In every point to make it fit, Will force all nature to submit.

Peacock is as consummate a master of the anatomy as Jane Austen is of the novel: he is therefore an equally important figure in English prose fiction. But he is never so recognized because his form is unpopular and neglected, a fact he himself has indicated along with a reference to its great past: “We would print these dialogues if we thought any one would read them: but the world is not yet ripe for this haute sagesse Pantagrueline” (Crochet Castle, chap. 10). Ripe or not, the anatomy has shown surprising vitality. Landor’s Imaginary Conversations belong to it; Blake’s Island in the Moon is a perfect example of it: it even runs underground into fairy tales and other disguises.30 Samuel Butler we have mentioned: he has a distinctive quality of being able to make out the most eloquently logical defences for his victims and to follow the tortuous meanderings of their self-hypnotism to their one outlet, that on the whole they would rather not give up their jobs. Dryden’s inclusion of his own Absalom in his list suggests that the parallel to the Butler anatomy in poetry would be the kind of Browning monologue represented by Sludge the Medium. The fourth great class of prose fiction, the confession, imaginative autobiography, or, as Mill called it, “mental history,” a more miscellaneous class without so well unified a tradition, occasionally merges with

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the anatomy. Montaigne is the most complete example of this: the very word “essay” implies the anatomist’s humorous disorderliness, and his type of irony is purely Menippean. Sartor Resartus, though a mental history, also shows many anatomic features, and its central thesis is a systematic working out of a favourite theme of Menippean fantasy. It had appeared in a different form in A Tale of a Tub. In our day, Mr. Aldous Huxley prefers the anatomy. The cena atmosphere of Crome Yellow and Antic Hay recalls Peacock; Point Counter Point has the peculiar stereotyping of character of the form; Brave New World belongs to the Utopian satire. Ulysses, of course, is among other things a brilliant summary of anatomic techniques. But whether the anatomy will again be a major form of fiction I cannot say. There are signs that it is possible. Writers are growing more accustomed to thinking of characters as typical of a particular class or culture. Conversation is becoming more argumentative and theoretical, concerned increasingly with general ideas, which makes for bad novels and good anatomies. Ours is an age of charlatanism beyond Lucian’s worst nightmares, of bigots Erasmus never found in a cowl, of teetotallers no Rabelais could liquidate, of pompous tyrants taller than the Emperor of Lilliput, of a melancholy Burton’s most horrendous hellebore could not move to break wind. Yet it is also an age which may again, after it has thrown off its incubus of violence and brutality, become sensitive to satire.

5 The Nature of Satire October 1944

From the University of Toronto Quarterly, 14 (October 1944): 75–89. Reprinted in Satire: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles A. Allen and George D. Stephens (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1962), 15–30; in Satire: An Anthology, ed. Ashley Brown and John L. Kimmey (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 323– 39; and in Satura: Ein Kompendium moderner Studien zur Satire, ed. Bernhard Fabian (Hildesheim: Olms, 1975), 108–22. Incorporated with major revisions into AC, 223–39. On 1 August 1942 Frye told himself “I have to do that satire paper, but it should be simple,” and proceeded to draft a detailed eight-point sketch (D, 18–20), on which he drew selectively for the developed version published two years later. He must have been in a “satire” frame of mind, for on the previous day he had contemplated writing a book on How to Write Literary Cant, with a chapter on “The Art of Belittling,” and another on “‘Manicheanism,’ or the art of reducing men & masterpieces to abstract nouns” (D, 18).

The word “satire” belongs to that fairly large class of words which have two meanings, one specific and technical, the other more general. In Roman literature, for instance, the study of satire is essentially the study of a specific literary form, or rather two literary forms, of that name: the poetic satire developed by Horace and Juvenal and the prose or “Menippean” satire developed by Petronius and (in Greek) Lucian. In English literature, with which we are at present concerned, the satire may also be and has been the name of a form. Juvenal and Horace are the models of Donne and Pope, and Lucian is the model of Swift. But this idea of a satire form is in English literature a Renaissance and neoClassical idea: it hardly existed in the Middle Ages, and it hardly exists

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now, though we still have our Hilaire Bellocs and Roy Campbells trying to blow up its dying fire with antique bellows. The word now means a tone or quality of art which we may find in any form: in a play by Shaw, a novel by Sinclair Lewis, or a cartoon by Low. Hence in dealing with English satire we must include not only Swift and Pope, who worked with the traditional models, but all the writers who have ignored the models but have preserved the tone and attitude of satire. A distinction essential to the treatment of Roman, and perhaps also of French, satire is quite unnecessary in English literature, which has never taken kindly to strict forms. But this, like all our cherished freedoms, was won for us by our ancestors. In the year 1597 Joseph Hall, who later became a bishop, published three books of what he called “Toothless Satires,” following them with three books of “Biting Satires.” Hall begins by saying that he is introducing something radically new into English literature: I first adventure, follow me who list, And be the second English satirist.

He does not mean that he has never heard of the Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman: he means that from the point of view of an imitator of Juvenal and Horace they are not satires. From this point of view his claim to be first is more or less correct: that is, he was about fourth. Later in his life Bishop Hall became involved in a controversy with Milton, who did not care for bishops. Milton carefully goes over Hall’s literary output to show, as the custom then was, that his adversary had been a fool from birth. When he comes to the “Toothless Satires” he says that this socalled first English satirist might have learned better from Piers Plowman, besides other works, and adds: “But that such a Poem should be toothless I still affirm it to be a bull, taking away the essence of that which it calls itself. For if it bite neither the persons nor the vices, how is it a Satyr, and if it bite either, how is it toothless, so that toothless Satyrs are as much as if he had said toothless teeth.”1 If there can be no toothless satires, it is the tone that makes a work of art a satire: if Langland is a great satirist because of his satiric attitude, Swift and Pope are so for the same reason, not because of their form. On this point posterity has decided for Milton against the bishop. As a tone or attitude, then, two things are essential to satire. One is wit or humour, the other an object of attack. Attack without humour, or pure

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denunciation, thus forms one of the boundaries of satire; humour without attack, the humour of pure gaiety or exuberance, is the other. Now these two qualities, it is obvious, are not simply different, but opposed. For satire one needs both pleasure in conflict and determination to win; both the heat of battle and the coolness of calculation. To have too much hatred and too little gaiety will upset the balance of tone. Man is a precocious monkey, and he wins his battles by the sort of cunning that is never far from a sense of mockery. All over the world people have delighted in stories of how some strong but stupid monster was irritated by a tiny human hero into a blind, stampeding fury, and how the hero, by biding his time and keeping cool, polished off his Blunderbore or Polyphemus at leisure.2 In literature, too, the slugging haymaker has no more chance against an expert pen-fencer than a bull in a bullfight. Milton, a deeply serious prophet haunted by the sense that he was responsible both to God and man for making the best use of his genius, had no gift for satire, and when we see this blind giant flailing at his buzzing assailants, we can only be thankful that he never encountered a first-rate satirist. The same is true of many Romantics. Lord Castlereagh, who did not kill himself before he had achieved an all-time high in unpopularity with poets, is described by Shelley, along with his confederate Sidmouth, as: two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one.3

This is very fine, but it is not fine satire. The poet is too angry and his victims too abstract. Let us try Byron: Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant! Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin’s gore, And thus for wider carnage taught to pant, Transferr’d to gorge upon a sister shore, The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want, With just enough of talent, and no more, To lengthen fetters by another fix’d, And offer poison long already mix’d.4

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Byron wrote some great satire, but this is evidently not it. Let us turn to Tom Moore: Why is a Pump like Viscount Castlereagh? Because it is a slender thing of wood, That up and down its awkward arm doth sway, And coolly spout and spout and spout away, In one weak, washy, everlasting flood!5

That does it exactly. It is rather flattering to one’s ego to be called a wolf or a scorpion; there is a certain thrill in being thought a dark and terrible emissary of the demonic powers. But nobody likes to be called a pump, at any rate not with so much enthusiasm. The satirist in whom the gift of seeing things absurdly appears most clearly as exuberance of mind is Dryden. He takes a physical pleasure in his victims; he transforms them into fantastic dinosaurs of bulging flesh and peanut brains. He is really impressed by the great bulk of his Falstaffian Og:6 Round as a globe, and liquor’d every chink, Goodly and great he sails behind his link.

He really admires the furious energy of the poet Doeg, and his heart is warmed by the spectacle of that noble Buzzard, Bishop Burnet: A portly prince, and goodly to the sight . . . A prophet form’d to make a female proselyte.

The great effectiveness of such satire comes from the victim’s realization that no one could laugh at him with such genuine pleasure unless he were genuinely amused. In other words, one cannot merely adopt satire to express a personal or moral feeling; one must be born with the sardonic vision. Now both humour and attack depend on certain conventions which are assumed to be in existence before the satirist begins to write. The world of humour is a rigidly stylized world in which generous Scotchmen, obedient wives, beloved mothers-in-law, and professors with presence of mind are not permitted to exist. All humour demands common agreement that certain things, such as a picture of a wife beating her husband

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in a comic strip, are funny. To introduce a comic strip in which a husband beats his wife would distress and perplex the average reader: it would mean learning a new convention. Similarly, in order to attack anything, satirist and audience must agree on its undesirability. The misery and cold of German soldiers in a Russian winter is matter for satire in our newspapers; the misery and cold of Russians is not. Much in these conventions is only fashion, and quantities of scandal, gossip, pasquinades, and lampoons have gone the way of all flashes. Even our sense of what constitutes absurdity has changed. “We laugh at deformed creatures,” says Sir Philip Sidney, but he does not speak for the twentieth century.7 That Milton was blind, Dryden poor, and Pope a cripple does not seem as amusing to us as to their contemporary enemies. When Nashe tells us of the trick Jack Wilton played on a Captain, and how the best of the joke was, that the Captain was arrested as a spy, racked, and flogged, we stop laughing long before Nashe does. Ben Jonson was a bricklayer’s stepson, and his many enemies expected every reference to bricklaying they made to be followed by knowing winks, leers, and guffaws. But the whole social attitude which enabled that to be humorous has disappeared, and the satire with it. National hatreds are no longer-lived. In the Hundred Years’ War, Laurence Minot vituperated the French; at the time of Flodden, Skelton poured scorn on the Scotch; when Holland was England’s trade rival, Marvell persuaded himself that he disliked the Dutch; in Napoleon’s time Canning’s poetry of the Anti-Jacobin held all revolutionary ideas up to ridicule. Many of these wrote excellent satire, but it has gone stale and mouldy, and at best is something to be rescued. Now no one would claim that Chaucer or Pope or Swift had any Olympian superiority to the passions and prejudices of their times. To what, then, do they owe their amazing vitality and power of survival? Denunciation, or humourless attack, is, we said, one of the boundaries of satire. It is a very hazy boundary, because invective is one of the most readable forms of literary art, just as panegyric is one of the dullest. It is simply an established datum of literature that we love to hear people cursed and are bored with hearing them praised; and almost any denunciation, if vigorous enough, is followed by a reader with the kind of pleasure that soon breaks into a smile. Now invective is never the expression of merely personal hatred, whatever the motivation for it may be, because the words for it simply do not exist in the language. About the only ones we have are derived from the animal world, but calling a man

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a swine or a skunk or even a cholera germ is merely an eructation. For effective attack we must reach some kind of impersonal level, and that commits the attacker, if only by implication, to a moral standard. As Shakespeare’s Thersites says of Menelaus, “to what form, but that he is, should wit larded with malice, and malice forced with wit, turn him to? To an ass, were nothing; he is both ass and ox; to an ox, were nothing; he is both ox and ass.” In the long run, then, the tone of antagonism or attack in satire must imply an assertion and a defence of a moral principle. The satirist, when attacked, takes a very high moral line. He is a prophet sent to lash the vices and follies of the time, and he will not stop until he has cleansed the foul body of the infected world. Pope says: Hear this, and tremble! you, who ’scape the Laws, Yes, while I live, no rich or noble knave Shall walk the World, in credit, to his grave, TO virtue only and her friends a friend, The world beside may murmur, or commend.8

That, you see, is what Pope is really doing when he is reflecting on the cleanliness of the underwear worn by the lady who had jilted him. And as far as the survival power of his satire goes, he is quite right. Hence satire based on persisting moral sentiments has a better chance for immortality than satire based on fluctuating ones, satire which strikes roots in the soil of stupidity, treachery, slovenliness, hypocrisy, and all the other things that are as evil today as in Chaucer’s time. Again, we said that the humour of gaiety was the other boundary of satire. But as Juvenal truly said that whatever men do is the subject of satire, and that in consequence it is difficult not to write it,9 it follows that most humorous situations are at least indirectly satiric. Non-satiric humour tends to fantasy: one finds it most clearly in the fairy worlds of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Walt Disney, in Celtic romance and American tall tales. Yet even here one can never be sure, for the humour of fantasy is continually being pulled back into satire by means of that powerful undertow which we call allegory. The White Knight in Alice who felt that one should be provided for everything, and therefore put anklets around his horse’s feet to guard against the bites of sharks, may pass without challenge. But what are we to make of the mob of hired revolutionaries in the same author’s Sylvie and Bruno, who got their instructions mixed and yelled under the palace windows: “More taxes!

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less bread!” Here we begin to sniff the acrid, pungent smell of satire. Those fantastic romances, Gulliver’s Travels, Utopia, Erewhon, work on exactly the same principle. Now just as denunciation contributes morality to satire, so exuberance or gaiety contributes to it absurdity or grotesqueness. It is absurdity of a special kind, which I should tentatively call a poetic imagination in reverse gear. The imagination of Quixote, who saw a windmill as a hundred-armed giant, was a genuinely poetic one, if over-literal in its application; but it is the business of the satirist to see giants as windmills, Castlereaghs as pumps. Poetry may deepen and intensify the imaginative impact of things; satire belittles and minimizes it. Allegory in high gear gives us a Spenser or a Bunyan; allegory in reverse gear gives us a Tale of a Tub. Poetry may be as primitive as you please, and may thrive on superstition or false belief: satire means civilization and a confidence in the invincibility of the intelligence. I should define satire, then, as poetry assuming a special function of analysis, that is, of breaking up the lumber of stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, superstitious terrors, crank theories, pedantic dogmatisms, oppressive fashions, and all other things that impede the free movement of society. I say free movement rather than progress: progress, besides implying a theory of history to which one may or may not subscribe, implies also that all satire is revolutionary, or at least progressive, which is nonsense. This does not explain the total effect of satire, as we shall see, but it covers its primary objectives. For society to exist at all there must be a delegation of prestige and influence to organized groups: the church, the army, the medical and teaching professions, the government, all consist of individuals given more than individual power by the institution to which they belong. Whether they are given this power for good or for evil depends largely on them. If a satirist presents a clergyman, for instance, as a fool or a hypocrite, he is primarily attacking neither the man nor his church. The former is too petty and the latter carries him outside the range of satire. He is attacking an evil man protected by the prestige of an institution. As such, he represents one of the stumbling-blocks in society which it is the satirist’s business to clear out. We have spoken of the resemblance of the giant-killing myth to the technique of satire: there is in both a victory of intelligence over stupid power. In the sort of case we are considering, the satirist’s victim is a gigantic monster; monstrous because really a fool or a hypocrite while pretending to be otherwise; gigantic because protected by his position

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and by the prestige of the good men in it. The cowl might make the monk if it were not for the satirist. Hence, though Milton’s etymology may be wrong, his principle is right: “for a Satyr as it was born out of a Tragedy, so ought to resemble his parentage, to strike high, and adventure dangerously at the most eminent vices among the greatest persons.”10 The larger they come, the easier they fall. When the Philistine giant comes out to battle with the children of light, he naturally expects to find someone his own size ready to meet him, someone who is head and shoulders over every man in Israel. Such a Titan would have to bear down his opponent by sheer weight of words, and hence be a master of that technique of torrential abuse which we call invective. And as invective is very close to moral denunciation, we should expect it to be a form closely allied to preaching. Another reason for this is that the literary qualities necessary for good invective are essentially those of good swearing: a sense of rhythm, an unlimited vocabulary, and a technical knowledge of the two subjects which ordinarily form the subject matter of swearing, one of which is theology. Now if we want satire on military life and martial courage we should expect to find most of it in the army: Don Quixote could only have been the work of an old soldier. Similarly, we should not be surprised to find that the two greatest masters of invective, Rabelais and Swift, have been recruited from the clergy. The association between satire and preaching goes back at least to the Hebrew prophets, runs all through medieval sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins, and reaches its peak with the Reformation, when controversy poured oil on the fires. There is another reason why this last period, the sixteenth century, was the golden age of abuse. Controversy supplies the anger, but not the gaiety, of satire: for the source of the latter we must turn to the great influx of new words then coming in. The Elizabethans had a delight in words of a physical kind which we can hardly comprehend today, a kind of reversed drunkenness that comes from outpouring rather than intake. Words spawn and swarm in every corner of their writings: their expenditure of erudite technicalities, fantastically abusive epithets, and dizzily inclusive compounds was as reckless as their resources were inexhaustible both in coinage and in the plunder of every language in Europe, living or dead. They could hardly touch a foreign language without gloating over their own superior resources. Thus Cotgrave’s French dictionary defines the French word lourdans as: “a sot, dullard, grotnoll, jobernoll, blockhead; a lowt, lob, lusk, boare, clown, churle, clusterfist; a

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proud, ignorant and unmannerly swaine.” Rabelais tells of a man who retired to the country for quiet, and who found that the animals made such a noise that he could not sleep. Rabelais plagues him with nine sorts of animals; Urquhart of Cromarty, his Scotch translator, expands them to seventy. Urquhart, when not engaged in making Gargantua more Rabelaisian than Rabelais, was busy writing books with such titles as Trissotetras, Pantochronochanon, Exkubalauron, and Logopandecteison. In an age when even pedantry could produce such a Holofernes, invective is not likely to die of malnutrition. Marston, Bishop Hall’s chief follower, is put into a play by his enemy Ben Jonson, given a purge, and made to vomit up some of his hard words. They include glibbery, lubrical, magnificate, turgidous, ventosity, oblatrant, furibund, fatuate, prorumped, and obstupefact. Thomas Nashe, the greatest prose satirist of the period, calls his opponent, Gabriel Harvey, an impotent mote-catching carper, an indigested chaos of doctorship, and a scholastical squitter-book. Here is one sentence from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which, if not directly satirical in itself, certainly illustrates the method and technique of invective: Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen juggler’s platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squis’d cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrowmouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp fox-nose, a red nose, China flat, great nose, nare simo patuloque, a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven, brown teeth, beetle-browed, a witch’s beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, a sharp chin, lave-eared, with a long crane’s neck, which stands awry too, pendulis mammis, “her dugs like two double jugs,” or else no dugs, in that other extreme, bloody-fallen fingers, she have filthy, long unpared nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tanned skin, a rotten carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splay-footed, “as slender in the middle as a cow in the waist,” gouty legs, her ankles hang over her shoes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a mere changeling, a very monster, an oaf imperfect, her whole complexion savours, an harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gait, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker (si qua latent meliora puta), and to

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thy judgment looks like a mard in a lanthorn, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest, and wouldest have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom, remedium amoris to another man, a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty, rank, rammy, filthy, beastly quean, dishonest peradventure, obscene, base, beggarly, rude, foolish, untaught, peevish, Irus’ daughter, Thersites’ sister, Grobian’s scholar; if he love her once, he admires her for all this, he takes no notice of any such errors or imperfections of body or mind, Ipsa haec delectant, veluti Balbinum polypus Agnae; he had rather have her than any woman in the world.11

Since Dryden, there has been little of this naive and childlike quality in satire, which has trusted more to the rapier that stabs the heart than to the singlestick that breaks the head. Abuse of this kind is based on a solid physical laugh, an earthquake in miniature, a laugh which begins far down in the abdomen, bursts the vest buttons, rolls the stomach, shakes the diaphragm, suffocates the throat, reddens the face, and finally reduces the whole body to rolling and kicking in an epilepsy of joy, then, after quieting down, returns for the next few hours in a couple of dozen squalls of splutters, gasps, and reminiscent chortles, and finally sinks into the subconscious to be left until called for. As Carlyle says: How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies a cold glitter as of ice: the fewest are able to laugh, what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snigger from the throat outwards; or at best, produce some whiffling husky cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool: of none such comes good.12

Urquhart of Cromarty, an ardent Royalist, is reputed to have laughed on King Charles’s Restoration until he burst himself and died. And anyone who has glanced at an old copy of Punch can see that their cartoons, with their enormous captions, elaborately festooned with garrulous explanations and parenthetic postscripts, are aimed at a John Bull or fox-hunting squire for whom a laugh was an exhausting indoor exercise. Such a fox-hunting squire might survive to hear himself described by Oscar Wilde as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. There is an entirely different kind of laughter; not the forte of invective but the piano of irony, which, like the poisoned rings of the Renaissance, distils its venom in a friendly handshake, unnoticed by its bulky victim.

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For better or worse, it is the tiny David with his sudden and vicious stones who goes out to battle now, and the great Rabelaisian bellow has dropped out of literature. For that kind of satire flourishes in a world of solid assurances and unshakable values; the whole weight of a confident society is flung into the scales against limp affectation. The less sure society is of its assumptions, the more likely satire is to take the line of irony, of the method laid down once for all in the dialogues of Plato. It is impossible not to sympathize with the floundering red-faced brawlers in Plato, with the Thrasymachus or Callicles who is inexorably led on from one trap to another while Socrates sits quietly and smiles. Yet we know that they can never win, because they can never lay a finger on Socrates. Socrates pleads his own ignorance, convicts his opponents of equal ignorance, and there, in most of the shorter dialogues, we are. The master of irony has done nothing but sow doubt and confusion. He calls himself a midwife, but all he does is kill the mother and demonstrate that there is no child. For irony is not simply the small man’s way of fighting a bigger one: it is a kind of intellectual tear-gas that breaks the nerves and paralyses the muscles of everyone in its vicinity, an acid that will corrode healthy as well as decayed tissues. We have said that satire is primarily directed at the impediments of society; but irony has an automatically expansive and destroying force; it is a bomb dropped on an objective which, if it misses that, will at any rate hit something in an enemy’s territory. Take, for example, the warfare of science against superstition. Here the satirists have done famously. Chaucer and Ben Jonson riddled the alchemists with a cross-fire of their own jargon; Nashe and Swift hounded astrologers into premature graves; Browning’s Sludge the Medium annihilated the spiritualists; and a rabble of occultists, numerologists, Pythagoreans, and Rosicrucians lie dead in the wake of Hudibras. But when triumphant science turns to shake hands with the satirists, there is again that little prick of the poisoned ring. For all satirists are not so ready to see the sharp dividing line between alchemists and chemists, a Rosicrucian cell meeting and the Royal Society. Samuel Butler makes his scientists discover an elephant in the moon which turns out to be a mouse in the telescope. It does not matter; their scientific reputation is at stake, and an elephant in the moon it must be. Swift’s Grand Academy of Lagado, in Gulliver’sTravels, is a vast scientific laboratory in which professors are deeply engaged in such experiments as “to sow land with chaff, wherein he affirmed the true seminal virtue to be contained.” In fact there seems

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to be as perennial a warfare between satire and all forms of science and philosophy, as between satire and superstition. What Rabelais and Erasmus thought of the scholastics, Swift thought of the Cartesians; and what Voltaire thought of the Leibnitzians, Samuel Butler II thought of the Darwinians. In every case it is not the doctrine but its application to society that is attacked; however, the satirist has a latent distrust of the adequacy of human reason that becomes most articulate in Gulliver’s Travels: I was going on to more particulars, when my master commanded me to silence. He said whoever understood the nature of Yahoos might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning equalled their malice. But when a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He seemed therefore confident, that instead of reason, we were only possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices.13

Similarly with religion. There is a great deal of hypocrisy and corruption in any church, and a great deal of superstition in popular worship. Any really devout person would welcome a satirist who cauterized such infections as an ally of true religion. But once a hypocrite who sounds exactly like a good man is sufficiently blackened, the good man himself may begin to seem a little dingier than he was. Thus Burns’s Holy Willie is doubtless only a reprobate, but does not his confession make many others, who would say Amen to much of it, look a little like Holy Willies? When frae my mither’s womb I fell, Thou might hae plunged me in hell, To gnash my gums, to weep and wail, In burnin’ lake, Where damned devils roar and yell, Chain’d to a stake. Yet I am here a chosen sample, To show thy grace is great and ample; I’m here a pillar in thy temple, Strong as a rock, A guide, a buckler, an example To a’ thy flock.14

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Even the God Holy Willie is praying to begins to take on some of his features, just as the God of the Pharisee’s prayer was a Pharisee. The same thing happens to the treatment of superstition. In Lilliput, we are told, They bury their dead with their heads directly downwards, because they hold an opinion, that in eleven thousand moons they are all to rise again, in which period the earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready standing on their feet. The learned among them confess the absurdity of this doctrine, but the practice still continues, in compliance to the vulgar.15

But does not the satire go on quietly eating its way into the very heart of our own views of immortality, no matter how smug or how vague? In the same writer’s Tale of a Tub we are much more convinced that Jack and Peter are wrong than that Martin is right. Or again, take that scene, one of the most powerfully ironic in all literature, at the climax of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck has to decide whether he will go to heaven to the white slave-owners’ God or to hell for stealing Jim out of slavery. We know that the white slave-owners’ God is a bogey, an example, as Goya would say, of what a tailor can do. But Huck does not know that. He is no Prometheus Unbound; it never occurs to him to doubt that the white slave-owners’ God is the only true God. And in contemplating his predicament we can only say that the half-gods have gone: we have no evidence that the gods have arrived. And if we fall back from the outworks of faith and reason to the solid and tangible realities of the senses, satire will follow us even there. A slight shift of perspective, a different tinge in the emotional colouring, and the same real, physical world becomes an intolerable horror. Gulliver’s Travels show, in rapid review, man from a large perspective as a venomous little rodent, man from a small perspective as a noisome and clumsy pachyderm, the mind of man as a bear-pit, and the body of man as a compound of filth and ferocity. Swift shows us everything about the human body that can be made to appear disgusting and nauseating; his account of old age is the most hideous on record; and his sense of the nastiness and sordidness of ordinary life, which oozes through his Directions to Servants and his more unquotable poems, seems not so much abnormal as merely perverse. But he is simply following where his satiric genius leads him, and without raising any questions about his “purpose,” surely anyone who had attentively read Swift could never

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again find complete satisfaction in gratifying his senses. And that is an important barrier in civilization removed. The fact that all great satirists have been obscene suggests that obscenity is an essential characteristic of the satirist. Swift is in the direct tradition of the medieval preachers who painted the repulsiveness of gluttony and lechery; and his account of the Struldbrugs is a late version of the medieval dance of death. The preoccupation of medieval satirists with the theme of death, often assigned to morbidity, is part of the same moral criticism. It is all very well to eat, drink, and be merry; but one cannot always put off dying until tomorrow. We are getting close to one of the fundamental facts about satire: that the sardonic vision is the seamy side of the tragic vision. We usually associate satire with comedy, but to the extent that a comedy is satiric it possesses a more than comic seriousness. A comedy is, or purports to be, a study of human behaviour, and in its most concentrated forms, in a play by Congreve or a novel by Jane Austen, we are superficially conscious of only an amiable and civilized prattle. The satire in such a comedy comes as a kind of backfire or recoil after it is read or seen as a whole. Once read, deserts of futile snobbery and simpering insipidity open up on all sides of it, and we begin to feel that Congreve and Jane Austen are more aware than a less able comedian would be of the importance of being earnest. Collins, in Pride and Prejudice, being a mere jackass, is treated as comic relief; but if the novel’s main theme had been the married life of Charlotte and Collins, how long would Collins continue to be funny? And when this chattering world of card-parties and dances comes under direct satiric fire, it turns into a racking nightmare of horror: As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spite, So these their merry, miserable Night; Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide, And haunt the places where their Honour died. See how the World its Veterans rewards! A Youth of Frolics, an old Age of Cards; Fair to no purpose, artful to no end, Young without Lovers, old without a Friend; A Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot; Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot!16

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It is possible for comedy on a very high plane, the plane of The Tempest, the Franklin’s Tale, or The Magic Flute, to escape altogether from satire; but tragedy can never separate itself from irony. Flights of angels sing Hamlet to his rest in the climax of a frantically muddled attempt at revenge which has taken eight lives instead of one. Cleopatra fades away with great dignity and solemn music after a careful search for the easiest way to die. And in King Lear, when the mad old king scampers off the stage with his flowers stuck in his hair, or Gloucester makes a noble farewell speech, throws himself from a cliff, and falls a couple of feet, tragedy and irony have completely merged in something which is neither, and yet both at once. The sublime and the ridiculous are convex and concave of the same dark lens. One may find this in the middle of one of the most terrible and bloody tragedies in English literature, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: What’s this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper-prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison. [4.2.114–20]

Or one may find this in a modern American ballad, of uncertain parentage: The old grey hearse goes rolling by, You don’t know whether to laugh or cry, For you know some day it’ll get you too, And the hearse’s next load may consist of you. They’ll take you out, and they’ll lower you down While men with shovels stand all around: They’ll throw in dirt, and they’ll throw in rocks, And they won’t give a damn if they break the box. And your eyes drop out and your teeth fall in, And worms crawl over your mouth and chin: They invite their friends and their friends’ friends too, And you look like hell when they’re through with you.17

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At what point does the fact of death cease to be tragic and become a grim joke? When Mr. E.J. Pratt, in his poem called The Drag-Irons, describes the hauling up of a drowned captain, is his mood the tragic one of violent death or the satiric one of the indignity of the body? But with his Captain’s blood he did resent, With livid silence and with glassy look, This fishy treatment when his years were spent To come up dead upon a grapnel hook. [ll. 5–8]

The same principle is clear in Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales is simply a human comedy: it is not a deliberate satire. Chaucer studies his pilgrims carefully, but does not distort or caricature them. If they are fools and weaklings, they will come out as that, and we may call the result a satire if we wish; if they are decent people, like the knight or the ploughman, they will come out as such. To this larger comic aim both tragedy and satire must be subordinated. The Knight’s Tale is pathetic rather than tragic; it is sad, but it is told to amuse the pilgrims. The Merchant’s Tale is bitter and cynical; but, again, that is merely a contributing aspect to the human comedy. In the Troilus the case is very different. Here we have a full-dress tragedy, complete in itself, with all the unanswerable problems in it that tragedy raises. And when its hero dies his tragic death, he ascends into the stars and looks down upon the world: And in hymself he lough right at the wo Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste; And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste. [bk. 5, ll. 1821–4]

The laugh of pure satire is the echo to his tragedy. Satire at its most concentrated, therefore, is tragedy robbed of all its dignity and nobility, a universal negation that cheapens and belittles everything. Gulliver’s Travels destroys every standard of values except the life according to reason and nature, and then demonstrates that such a life is impossible. More makes a shambles out of Christian Europe, contrasts it with a heathen Utopia, and finally shows us that there is little hope of Utopian principles being applied to Europe and that Christianity has started to destroy the Utopia. Langland’s great vision culminates in something very like a triumph of Antichrist. It is against this background

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that we are able to see why the most deliberate and self-conscious satire in English literature, Pope’s Dunciad, comes to the conclusion it does. It is not only the triumph of Dullness but the triumph of satire that that great poem records, and in the complete triumph of satire the victor reigns, like Elizabeth in Ireland, only over ashes and dead carcasses: Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d; Light dies before thy uncreating word; Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall, And Universal Darkness buries All. [bk. 4, ll. 649–56]

Now, one may reasonably ask, what is the use, or, if that is too vague a question, the motive, of this art of nihilism? For the occupational hazards of satire are very considerable. “Certainly, he that hath a satirical vein,” says Lord Bacon, “as he maketh others afraid of his wit, so he had need be afraid of others’ memory.”18 Satire got Nashe, Jonson, Marston, and Wither into gaol; it got Defoe into both gaol and the pillory; it involved Dryden and Pope in squabbles which their worst detractors will hardly affirm they enjoyed; and it perhaps had more to do than is generally thought with the poverty and neglect of Samuel Butler. Skelton, satiric poet and thrice-crowned laureate, tutor to King Henry VIII in his youth, has put the position of the satirist as plaintively as anyone. It was only fair that he should, for the sixteenth century made him a buffoon, the seventeenth ignored him, in the eighteenth Pope called him “beastly,” and in the nineteenth a female historian called him an abandoned wretch whose tutorial influence undoubtedly explained King Henry’s Bluebearding tendencies: What can it avail . . . To rhyme or to rail, To write or to indite, Either for delight Or else for despight? Or books to compile Of divers manner style,

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The Educated Imagination and Other Writings Vice to revile And sin to exile? To teach or to preach, As reason will reach? Say this, and say that, His head is so fat, He wotteth never what Nor whereof he speaketh . . . Or if he speak plain, Then he lacketh brain, He is but a fool; Let him go to school . . . And if that he hit The nail on the head, It standeth in no stead. The Devil, they say, is dead, The Devil is dead!19

As for the use, that is the concern of posterity. The true seminal virtue of satire is not in the chaff, and it takes a good deal of winnowing to separate the harvest from the husks of gossip and insult. The use an age makes of satire thus depends on its own problems. In an age such as ours, when the urgency of radical change is a main preoccupation, the innate nihilism of satire, reactionary and wrong-headed as it often is, can be put to a revolutionary use. Langland was doubtless what we should now call a Tory, but his identification of Christ with the honest workman Piers Plowman cuts through all the fat of compromise with the world down to the bare bones of an eternally subversive and anarchic Christianity, and that is his meaning for us. Dickens’s influence also is for us completely radical, whatever he himself may have been. When his Pickwick goes from the law court into the debtor’s prison, it never once occurs to him that the accumulated legal wisdom of his country, which has decided against him, is entitled to the smallest respect whatever. That is a useful frame of mind to have in citizens of a free democracy who are determined not to be hag-ridden by precedent. That curious self-depreciation in respect to physical courage which is so characteristic of the Englishman is also closer to satire than it looks. It is founded on the profoundly satiric belief that physical dignity can only last as far as the first banana peeling. Cockney cheek and impudence have done much to

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save England from swaggering and posturing tyrants; the Jorrocks of that neglected Victorian genius Surtees, who is one of the best Cockneys in literature, will do for an example: “You ’air-dresser on the chestnut ’oss,” roars Mr. Jorrocks, during a check, to a gentleman with very big, ginger whiskers, “pray, ’old ’ard!” “Hair-dresser,” replies the gentleman, turning round in a fury, “I’m an officer in the ninety-first regiment.” “Then you hossifer in the ninety-fust regiment, wot looks like an ’airdresser, ’old ’ard!”20

Satire, in short, is the completion of the logical process known as the reductio ad absurdum, and that is not designed to hold one in perpetual captivity, but to bring one to the point at which one can escape from an incorrect procedure. Just as a mother tells a timid child afraid of the dark that there is nothing there, so the satirist presents ignorance and confusion with a negation. And when the public tells the satirist that the devil is dead, the very smugness of the response proves that his work has had some effect. I have said that the sardonic vision is the seamy side of the tragic vision, but Skelton’s remark provides me with a more exact image for what I mean. At the bottom of Dante’s hell, which is also the centre of the spherical earth, Dante sees Satan standing upright in the circle of ice, and as he cautiously follows Virgil over the hip and thigh of the evil giant, letting himself down by the tufts of hair on his skin, he passes the centre and finds himself no longer going down but going up, climbing out on the other side of the world to see the stars again. From this point of view, the devil is no longer upright, but standing on his head, in the same attitude in which he was hurled downward from heaven upon the other side of the earth. Both tragedy and satire take us into a hell of narrowing circles, a blasted world of repulsiveness and idiocy, a world without pity and without hope. Both culminate in some such vision as that of Dante’s, of the source of all evil in a personal form. Tragedy can take us no farther; but if we persevere with the satirist, we shall pass a dead centre, and finally see the gentlemanly Prince of Darkness bottom side up.

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6 Nichols and Kirkup’s The Cosmic Shape September 1947

Review of The Cosmic Shape: An Interpretation of Myth and Legend, with Three Poems, by Ross Nichols and James Kirkup (London: The Forge Press, 1946). From the Canadian Forum, 27 (September 1947): 143. Frye’s reasons for taking on a review of this book are evident; his brief account is generous but thoughtful, not least for pointing out weaknesses in a myth-based criticism that is insufficiently rigorous.

The authors believe that Jung’s theory of “archetypes” has provided a formula for gathering together the myths of all countries into a single gigantic mythical form, in which the death-and-resurrection pattern founded on the return of spring looms most prominently. This thesis has got far beyond the stage of intuitive guesswork which they appear still to be in, but their comments are often illuminating and some of the illustrative poems, notably The Sleeper in the Earth,1 have much eloquent and haunting power. They feel that England should develop the genuine thing that the Nazi blood-and-soil cult perverted, education in national mythology associated with a growth of symbolic poetry and drama and a revival of traditional rituals. This has been tried before, and the authors do not tell us how to prevent it from ending in one more self-conscious prance around a maypole by antiquarian simple-lifers.

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7 R.F. Patterson’s The Story of English Literature December 1947

Review of The Story of English Literature, by R.F. Patterson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947). From the Canadian Forum, 27 (December 1947): 215. Richard Ferrar Patterson was an English editor and encyclopedist. Though he had also published How to Write and What to Read (London, 1933), whatever expertise that book may have displayed didn’t save him from Frye on this occasion, whose own critical writing is both pungent (as here) and literate.

In spite of its name, this book is a series of thumbnail biographical sketches of about 250 English writers from Chaucer on. The author, according to the blurb, is a first-class honour graduate of Cambridge in English, successor of Rupert Brooke as Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholar, general editor of the Scottish Text Society, and the writer of several books on literary subjects. With such a record there ought to be something in the present book to disprove the statement that he has no critical sense and can’t write for nuts, but I didn’t find it.

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8 The Function of Criticism at the Present Time October 1949

From the University of Toronto Quarterly, 19 (October 1949): 1–16. Reprinted in Our Sense of Identity: A Book of Canadian Essays, ed. Malcolm Ross (Toronto: Ryerson, 1954), 247–65; in Modern Literary Criticism, 1900– 1970, ed. Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 198–208; in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (New York: Longman, 1989), 541–52; and in Literary Criticism and Theory, ed. Robert Con Davis and Laura Finke (New York: Longman, 1989), 656–67. [Incorporated into AC, 3–29.] This is the colloquium paper, “First Steps in Literary Criticism,” that Frye wrote fairly quickly and with little revision between 13 and 27 February (D, 125–42, passim) and presented at the Humanities Colloquium on 28 February 1949. The Humanities Colloquium was an irregularly held, low-key University College event. Though Frye had already published Fearful Symmetry and was an increasingly popular teacher, he was still making his way among his colleagues, and was a bit disheartened by the paper’s apparently mixed reception (Ayre, 217 and D, 142–3); nevertheless, he remained confident about its ideas, and the paper eventually formed the basis of the famed “Polemical Introduction” to Anatomy of Criticism.

The subject matter of literary criticism is an art, and criticism is presumably an art too. This sounds as though criticism were a parasitic form of literary expression, an art based on pre-existing art, a second-hand imitation of creative power. The conception of the critic as a creator manqué is very popular, especially among artists. Yet the critic has specific jobs to do which the experience of literature has proved to be less ignoble. One obvious function of criticism is to mediate between the artist and his

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public. Art that tries to do without criticism is apt to get involved in either of two fallacies. One is the attempt to reach the public directly through “popular” art, the assumption being that criticism is artificial and public taste natural. Below this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back to Rousseau. The opposite fallacy is the conception of art as a mystery, an initiation into an esoteric community. Here criticism is restricted to masonic signs of occult understanding, to significant exclamations and gestures and oblique cryptic comments. This fallacy is like the other one in assuming a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation it assumes is inverse. But art of this kind is cut off from society as a whole, not so much because it retreats from life—the usual charge against it—as because it rejects criticism. On the other hand, a public that attempts to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it likes, brutalizes the arts. Rejection of criticism from the point of view of the public, or its guardians, is involved in all forms of censorship. Art is a continuously emancipating factor in society, and the critic, whose job it is to get as many people in contact with the best that has been and is being thought and said, is, at least ideally, the pioneer of education and the shaper of cultural tradition. There is no immediate correlation either way between the merits of art and its general reception. Shakespeare was more popular than Webster, but not because he was a greater dramatist; W.H. Auden is less popular than Edgar Guest,1 but not because he is a better poet. But after the critic has been at work for a while, some positive correlation may begin to take shape. Most of Shakespeare’s current popularity is due to critical publicity. Why does criticism have to exist? The best and shortest answer is that it can talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, and cannot say anything. And, though it sounds like a frantic paradox to say that the poet is inarticulate or speechless, literary works also are, for the critic, mute complexes of facts, like the data of science. Poetry is a disinterested use of words: it does not address a reader directly. When it does so, we feel that the poet has a certain distrust in the capacity of readers and critics to interpret his meaning without assistance, and has therefore stopped creating a poem and begun to talk. It is not merely tradition that impels a poet to invoke a Muse and protest that his utterance is involuntary. Nor is it mere paradox that causes Mr. MacLeish, in his famous Ars Poetica, to

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apply the words “mute,” “dumb,” and “wordless” to a poem. The poet, as Mill saw in a wonderful flash of critical insight, is not heard, but overheard. The first assumption of criticism, and the assumption on which the autonomy of criticism rests, is not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows, any more than the painter or composer can. The poet may of course have some critical ability of his own, and so interpret his own work; but the Dante who writes a commentary on the first canto of the Paradiso is merely one more of Dante’s critics. What he says has a peculiar interest, but not a peculiar authority. Poets are too often the most unreliable judges of the value or even the meaning of what they have written. When Ibsen maintains that Emperor and Galilean is his greatest play and that certain episodes in Peer Gynt are not allegorical, one can only say that Ibsen is an indifferent critic of Ibsen. Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is a remarkable document, but as a piece of Wordsworthian criticism nobody would give it more than about a B+. Critics of Shakespeare are often supposed to be ridiculed by the assertion that if Shakespeare were to come back from the dead he would not be able to understand their criticism and would accuse them of reading far more meaning into his work than he intended. This, though pure hypothesis, is likely enough: we have very little evidence of Shakespeare’s interest in criticism, either of himself or of anyone else. But all that this means is that Shakespeare, though a great dramatist, was not also the greatest of Shakespearean critics. Why should he be? The notion that the poet is necessarily his own best interpreter is indissolubly linked with the conception of the critic as a parasite or jackal of literature. Once we admit that he has a specific field of activity, and that he has autonomy within that field, we are forced to concede that criticism deals with literature in terms of a specific conceptual framework. This framework is not that of literature itself, for this is the parasite theory again, but neither is it something outside literature, for in that case the autonomy of criticism would again disappear, and the whole subject would be assimilated to something else. Here, however, we have arrived at another conception of criticism which is different from the one we started with. This autonomous organizing of literature may be criticism, but it is not the activity of mediating between the artist and his public which we at first ascribed to criticism. There is one kind of critic, evidently, who faces the public and another who is still as completely involved in literary values as the poet himself.

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We may call this latter type the critic proper, and the former the critical reader. It may sound like quibbling to imply such a distinction, but actually the whole question of whether the critic has a real function, independent both of the artist at his most explicit and of the public at its most discriminating, is involved in it. Our present-day critical traditions are rooted in the age of Hazlitt and Arnold and Sainte-Beuve, who were, in terms of our distinction, critical readers. They represented, not another conceptual framework within literature, but the reading public at its most expert and judicious. They conceived it to be the task of a critic to exemplify how a man of taste uses and evaluates literature, and thus how literature is to be absorbed into society. The nineteenth century has bequeathed to us the conception of the causerie, the man of taste’s reflections on works of literature, as the normal form of critical expression. I give one example of the difference between a critic and a critical reader which amounts to a head-on collision. In one of his curious, brilliant, scatter-brained footnotes to Munera Pulveris, John Ruskin says: Of Shakespeare’s names I will afterwards speak at more length; they are curiously—often barbarously—mixed out of various traditions and languages. Three of the clearest in meaning have been already noticed. Desdemona—“dysdaimonja,” miserable fortune—is also plain enough. Othello is, I believe, “the careful”; all the calamity of the tragedy arising from the single flaw and error in his magnificently collected strength. Ophelia, “serviceableness,” the true, lost wife of Hamlet, is marked as having a Greek name by that of her brother, Laertes; and its signification is once exquisitely alluded to in that brother’s last word of her, where her gentle preciousness is opposed to the uselessness of the churlish clergy:—“A ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling.”2

On this passage Matthew Arnold comments as follows: Now, really, what a piece of extravagance all that is! I will not say that the meaning of Shakespeare’s names (I put aside the question as to the correctness of Mr. Ruskin’s etymologies) has no effect at all, may be entirely lost sight of; but to give it that degree of prominence is to throw the reins to one’s whim, to forget all moderation and proportion, to lose the balance of one’s mind altogether. It is to show in one’s criticism, to the highest excess, the note of provinciality.3

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Ruskin is a critic, perhaps the only important one that the Victorian age produced, and, whether he is right or wrong, what he is attempting is genuine criticism. He is trying to interpret Shakespeare in terms of a conceptual framework which belongs to the critic alone, and yet relates itself to the plays alone. Arnold is perfectly right in feeling that this is not the sort of material that the public critic can directly use. But he does not suspect the existence of criticism as we have defined it above. Here it is Arnold who is the provincial. Ruskin has learned his trade from the great iconological tradition which comes down through Classical and Biblical scholarship into Dante and Spenser, both of whom he knew how to read, and which is incorporated in the medieval cathedrals he had pored over in such detail. Arnold is assuming, as a universal law of nature, certain “plain sense” critical assumptions which were hardly heard of before Dryden’s time and which can assuredly not survive the age of Freud and Jung and Frazer and Cassirer. What emerges from this is that the critic and critical reader are each better off when they know of one another’s existence, and perhaps best off when their work forms different aspects of the same thing. However, the causerie does not, or at least need not, involve any fallacy in the theory of criticism itself. The same cannot be said of the reaction against the causerie which has produced the leading twentieth-century substitute for criticism. This is the integrated system of religious, philosophical, and political ideas which takes in, as a matter of course, a critical attitude to literature. Thus Mr. Eliot defines his outlook as Classical in literature, Royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion;4 and it is clear that the third of these has been the spark-plug, the motivating power that drives the other two. Mr. Allen Tate describes his own critical attitude as “reactionary” in a sense intended to include political and philosophical overtones, and the same is true of Hulme’s Speculations, which are primarily political speculations.5 Mr. Yvor Winters collects his criticism under the title In Defence of Reason. What earthly business, one may inquire, has a literary critic to defend reason? He might as well be defending virtue. And so we could go through the list of Marxist, Thomist, Kierkegaardian, Freudian, Jungian, Spenglerian, or existential critics, all determined to substitute a critical attitude for criticism, all proposing, not to find a conceptual framework for criticism within literature, but to attach criticism to one of a miscellany of frameworks outside it. The axioms and postulates of criticism have to grow out of the art that the critic is dealing with. The first thing that the literary critic has to do is

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to read literature, to make an inductive survey of his own field and let his critical principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that field. Critical principles cannot be taken over ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these. Further, an inductive survey of his own field is equally essential for the critic of painting or of music, and so each art has its own criticism. Aesthetics, or the consideration of art as a whole, is not a form of criticism but a branch of philosophy. I state all this as dogma, but I think the experience of literature bears me out. To subordinate criticism to a critical attitude is to stereotype certain values in literature which can be related to the extraliterary source of the value judgment. Mr. Eliot does not mean to say that Dante is a greater poet than Shakespeare or perhaps even Milton; yet he imposes on literature an extra-literary schematism, a sort of religiopolitical colour filter, which makes Dante leap into prominence, shows Milton up as dark and faulty, and largely obliterates the outlines of Shakespeare. All that the genuine critic can do with this colour filter is to murmur politely that it shows things in a new light and is indeed a most stimulating contribution to criticism. If it is insisted that we cannot criticize literature until we have acquired a coherent philosophy of criticism with its centre of gravity in something else, the existence of criticism as a separate subject is still being denied. But there is one possibility further. If criticism exists, it must be, we have said, an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field. The word “inductive” suggests some sort of scientific procedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? The writing of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are involved in the historian’s treatment of evidence, and that the presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history from legend. Is it also a scientific element in criticism which distinguishes it from causerie on the one hand, and the superimposed critical attitude on the other? For just as the presence of science changes the character of a subject from the casual to the causal, from the random and intuitive to the systematic, so it also safeguards the integrity of a subject from external invasions. So we may find in science a means of strengthening the fences of criticism against enclosure movements coming not only from religion and philosophy, but from the other sciences as well. If criticism is a science, it is clearly a social science, which means that it should waste no time in trying to assimilate its methods to those of the

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natural sciences. Like psychology, it is directly concerned with the human mind, and will only confuse itself with statistical methodologies. I understand that there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere that displays a list of Hardy’s novels in the order of the percentages of gloom that they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged. Yet as the field is narrowed to the social sciences the distinctions must be kept equally sharp. Thus there can be no such thing as a sociological “approach” to literature. There is no reason why a sociologist should not work exclusively on literary material, but if he does he should pay no attention to literary values. In his field Horatio Alger and the writer of the Elsie books6 are more important than Hawthorne or Melville, and a single issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal is worth all of Henry James. The literary critic using sociological data is similarly under no obligation to respect sociological values. It seems absurd to say that there may be a scientific element in criticism when there are dozens of learned journals based on the assumption that there is, and thousands of scholars engaged in a scientific procedure related to literary criticism. Either literary criticism is a science, or all these highly trained and intelligent people are wasting their time on a pseudo-science, one to be ranked with phrenology and election forecasting. Yet one is forced to wonder whether scholars as a whole are consciously aware that the assumptions on which their work is based are scientific ones. In the growing complication of secondary sources which constitutes literary scholarship, one misses, for the most part, that sense of systematic progressive consolidation which belongs to a science. Research begins in what is known as “background,” and one would expect it, as it goes on, to organize the foreground as well. The digging up of relevant information about a poet should lead to a steady consolidating progress in the criticism of his poetry. One feels a certain failure of nerve in coming out of the background into the foreground, and research seems to prefer to become centrifugal, moving away from the works of art into more and more research projects. I have noticed this particularly in two fields in which I am interested, Blake and Spenser. For every critic of Spenser who is interested in knowing what, say, the fourth book of The Faerie Queene actually means as a whole, there are dozens who are interested primarily in how Spenser used Chaucer, Malory, and Ariosto in putting it together. So far as I know there is no book devoted to an analysis of the argument of The Faerie Queene itself, though there are any number on its sources, and, of course, background. As for Blake, I have

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read a whole shelf of books on his poetry by critics who did not know what any of his major poems meant. The better ones were distinguishable only by the fact that they did not boast of their ignorance. The reason for this is that research is ancillary to criticism, but the critic to whom the researcher should entrust his materials hardly exists. What passes for criticism is mainly the work of critical readers or spokesmen of various critical attitudes, and these make, in general, a random and haphazard use of scholarship. Such criticism is therefore often regarded by the researcher as a subjective and regressive dilettantism, interesting in its place, but not real work. On the other hand, the critical reader is apt to treat the researcher as Hamlet did the grave-digger, ignoring everything he throws out except an odd skull that he can pick up and moralize about. Yet unless research consolidates into a criticism which preserves the scientific and systematic element in research, the literary scholar will be debarred by his choice of profession from ever making an immediately significant contribution to culture. The absence of direction in research is, naturally, clearest on the very lowest levels of all, where it is only a spasmodic laying of unfertilized eggs in order to avoid an administrative axe. Here the research is characterized by a kind of desperate tentativeness, an implied hope that some synthesizing critical Messiah of the future will find it useful. A philologist can show the relationship of even the most minute study of dialect to his subject as a whole, because philology is a properly organized science. But the researcher who collects all a poet’s references to the sea or God or beautiful women does not know who will find this useful or in what ways it could be used, because he has no theory of imagery. I am not, obviously, saying that literary scholarship at present is doing the wrong thing or should be doing something else: I am saying that it should be possible to get a clearer and more systematic comprehension of what it is doing. Most literary scholarship could be described as prior criticism (the so-called lower criticism of Biblical scholarship), the editing of texts and the collecting of relevant facts. Of the posterior (or “higher”) criticism that is obviously the final cause of this work we have as yet no theory, no tradition, and above all no systematic organization. We have, of course, a good deal of the thing itself. There is even some good posterior criticism of Spenser, though most of it was written in the eighteenth century. And in every age the great scholar will do the right thing by the instinct of genius. But genius is rare, and scholarship is not.

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Sciences normally begin in a state of naive induction: they come immediately in contact with phenomena and take the things to be explained as their immediate data. Thus physics began by taking the immediate sensations of experience, classified as hot, cold, moist, and dry, as fundamental principles. Eventually physics turned inside out, and discovered that its real function was to explain what heat and moisture were. History began as chronicle; but the difference between the old chronicler and the modern historian is that to the chronicler the events he recorded were also the structure of history, whereas the historian sees these events as historical phenomena, to be explained in terms of a conceptual framework different in shape from them. Similarly each modern science has had to take what Bacon calls (though in another context) an inductive leap, occupying a new vantage ground from which it could see its former principles as new things to be explained. As long as astronomers regarded the movements of heavenly bodies as the structure of astronomy, they were compelled to regard their own point of view as fixed. Once they thought of movement as itself an explainable phenomenon, a mathematical theory of movement became the conceptual framework, and so the way was cleared for the heliocentric solar system and the law of gravitation. As long as biology thought of animal and vegetable forms of life as constituting its subject, the different branches of biology were largely efforts of cataloguing. As soon as it was the existence of forms of life themselves that had to be explained, the theory of evolution and the conceptions of protoplasm and the cell poured into biology and completely revitalized it. It occurs to me that literary criticism is now in such a state of naive induction as we find in a primitive science. Its materials, the masterpieces of literature, are not yet regarded as phenomena to be explained in terms of a conceptual framework which criticism alone possesses. They are still regarded as somehow constituting the framework or form of criticism as well. I suggest that it is time for criticism to leap to a new ground from which it can discover what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework are. And no one can examine the present containing forms of criticism without being depressed by an overwhelming sense of unreality. Let me give one example. In confronting any work of literature, one obvious containing form is the genre to which it belongs. And criticism, incredible as it may seem,

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has as yet no coherent conception of genres. The very word sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable and alien thing it is. In poetry, the commonsense Greek division by methods of performance, which distinguishes poetry as lyric, epic, or dramatic according to whether it is sung, spoken, or shown forth, survives vestigially. On the whole it does not fit the facts of Western poetry, though in Joyce’s Portrait there is an interesting and suggestive attempt made to redefine the terms.7 So, apart from a drama which belongs equally to prose, a handful of epics recognizable as such only because they are Classical imitations, and a number of long poems also called epics because they are long, we are reduced to the ignoble and slovenly practice of calling almost the whole of poetry “lyric” because the Greeks had no other word for it. The Greeks did not need to develop a classification of prose forms: we do, but have never done so. The circulating-library distinction between fiction and non-fiction, between books which are about things admitted not to be true and books which are about everything else, is apparently satisfactory to us. Asked what the form of prose fiction are, the literary critic can only say, “well, er—the novel.” Asked what form of prose fiction Gulliver’s Travels, which is clearly not a novel, belongs to, there is not one critic in a hundred who could give a definite answer, and not one in a thousand who would regard the answer (which happens to be “Menippean satire”) as essential to the critical treatment of the book. Asked what he is working on, the critic will invariably say that he is working on Donne, or Shelley’s thought, or the period from 1640 to 1660, or give some other answer which implies that history, or philosophy, or literature itself, constitutes the structural basis of criticism. It would never occur to any critic to say, for instance, “I am working on the theory of genres.” If he actually were interested in this, he would say that he was working on a “general” topic; and the work he would do would probably show the marks of naive induction: that is, it would be an effort to classify and pigeon-hole instead of clarifying the tradition of the genre. If we do not know how to handle even the genre, the most obvious of all critical conceptions, it is hardly likely that subtler instruments will be better understood. In any work of literature the characteristics of the language it is written in form an essential critical conception. To the philologist, literature is a function of language, its works linguistic documents, and to the philologist the phrase “English literature” makes sense. It ought not to make any sense at all to a literary critic. For while the philologist sees English literature as illustrating the organic growth of

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the English language, the literary critic can only see it as the miscellaneous pile of literary works that happened to get written in English. (I say in English, not in England, for the part of “English literature” that was written in Latin or Norman French has a way of dropping unobtrusively into other departments.) Language is an important secondary aspect of literature, but when magnified into a primary basis of classification it becomes absurdly arbitrary. Critics, of course, maintain that they know this, and that they keep the linguistic categories only for convenience. But theoretical fictions have a way of becoming practical assumptions, and in no time the meaningless convenience of “English literature” expands into the meaningless inconvenience of the “history of English literature.” Now, again, the historian must necessarily regard literature as a historical product and its works as historical documents. It is also quite true that the time a work was written in forms an essential critical conception. But again, to the literary critic, as such, the phrase “history of English literature” ought to mean nothing at all. If he doubts this, let him try writing one, and he will find himself confronted by an insoluble problem of form, or rather by an indissoluble amorphousness. The “history” part of his project is an abstract history, a bald chronicle of names and dates and works and influences, deprived of all the real historical interest that a real historian would give it, however much enlivened with discussions of “background.” This chronicle is periodically interrupted by conventional judgments of value lugged in from another world, which confuse the history and yet are nothing by themselves. The form of literary history has not been discovered, and probably does not exist, and every successful one has been either a textbook or a tour de force. Linear time is not an exact enough category to catch literature, and all writers whatever are subtly belittled by a purely historical treatment. Biography, a branch of history, presents a similar fallacy to the critic, for the biographer turns to a different job and a different kind of book when he turns to criticism. Again, the man who wrote the poem is one of the legitimate containing forms of criticism. But here we have to distinguish the poet qua poet, whose work is a single imaginative body, from the poet as man, who is something else altogether. The latter involves us in what is known as the personal heresy, or rather the heroic fallacy. For a biographer, poetry is an emanation of a personality; for the literary critic it is not, and the problem is to detach it from the personality and consider it on impersonal merits. The no man’s land between biography

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and criticism, the process by which a poet’s impressions of his environment are transmuted into poetry, has to be viewed by biographer and critic from opposite points of view. The process is too complex ever to be completely unified, Lowes’s Road to Xanadu being the kind of exception that goes a long way to prove the rule.8 In Johnson’s Lives of the Poets a biographical narrative is followed by a critical analysis, and the break between them is so sharp that it is represented in the text by a space. In all these cases, the same principle recurs. The critic is surrounded by biography, history, philosophy, and language. No one doubts that he has to familiarize himself with these subjects. But is his job only to be the jackal of the historian, the philologist, and the biographer, or can he use these subjects in his own way? If he is not to sell out to all his neighbours in turn, what is distinctive about his approach to the poet’s life, the time when he lived, and the language he wrote? To ask this is to raise one of the problems involved in the whole question of what the containing forms of literature are as they take their place in the conceptual framework of criticism. This confronts me with the challenge to make my criticism of criticism constructive. All I have space to do is to outline what I think the first major steps should be. We have to see what literature is, and try to distinguish the category of literature among all the books there are in the world. I do not know that criticism has made any serious effort to determine what literature is. Next, as discussed above, we should examine the containing form of criticism, including the poet’s life, his historical context, his language, and his thought, to see whether the critic can impose a unified critical form on these things, without giving place to or turning into a biographer, a historian, a philologist, or a philosopher. Next, we should establish the broad distinctions, such as that between prose and poetry, which are preparatory to working out a comprehensive theory of genres. I do not know that critics have clearly explained what the difference between prose and poetry, for instance, really is. Then we should try to see whether the critic, like his neighbours the historian and the philosopher, lives in his own universe. To the historian there is nothing that cannot be considered historically; to the philosopher nothing that cannot be considered philosophically. Does the critic aspire to contain all things in criticism, and so swallow history and philosophy in his own synthesis, or must he be forever the historian’s and philosopher’s pupil? If I have shown up Arnold in a poor light, I should say that he is the only one I know who suggests that criticism can be, like history and philosophy, a

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total attitude to experience. And finally, since criticism may obviously deal with anything in a poem from its superficial texture to its ultimate significance, the question arises whether there are different levels of meaning in literature, and, if so, whether they can be defined and classified. It follows that arriving at value judgments is not, as it is so often said to be, part of the immediate tactic of criticism. Criticism is not well enough organized as yet to know what the factors of value in a critical judgment are. For instance, as was indicated above in connection with Blake and Spenser, the question of the quality of a poet’s thinking as revealed in the integration of his argument is an essential factor in a value judgment, but many poets are exhaustively discussed in terms of value without this factor being considered. Contemporary judgments of value come mainly from either the critical reader or the spokesman of a critical attitude. That is, they must be on the whole either unorganized and tentative, or overorganized and irrelevant. For no one can jump directly from research to a value judgment. I give one melancholy instance. I recently read a study of the sources of mythological allusions in some of the romantic poets, which showed that for the second part of Faust Goethe had used a miscellany of cribs, some of dubious authenticity. “I have now, I hope,” said the author triumphantly at the end of his investigation, “given sufficient proof that the second part of Faust is not a great work of art.” I do not deny the ultimate importance of the value judgment. I would even consider the suggestion that the value judgment is precisely what distinguishes the social from the natural science. But the more important it is, the more careful we should be about getting it solidly established. What literature is may perhaps best be understood by an analogy. We shall have to labour the analogy, but that is due mainly to the novelty of the idea here presented. Mathematics appears to begin in the counting and measuring of objects, as a numerical commentary on the world. But the mathematician does not think of his subject as the counting and measuring of physical objects at all. For him it is an autonomous language, and there is a point at which it becomes in a measure independent of that common field of experience which we think of as the physical world, or as existence, or as reality, according to our mood. Many of its terms, such as irrational numbers, have no direct connection with the common field of experience, but depend for their meaning solely on the interrelations of the subject itself. Irrational numbers in mathematics may be compared to prepositions in verbal languages, which, unlike nouns and verbs, have no external symbolic reference. When we distin-

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guish pure from applied mathematics, we are thinking of the former as a disinterested conception of numerical relationships, concerned more and more with its inner integrity, and less and less with its reference to external criteria. Where, in that case, is pure mathematics going? We may gain a hint from the final chapter of Sir James Jeans’s Mysterious Universe, which I choose because it shows some of the characteristics of the imaginative leap to a new conceptual framework already mentioned. There, the author speaks of the failure of physical cosmology in the nineteenth century to conceive of the universe as ultimately mechanical, and suggests that a mathematical approach to it may have better luck. The universe cannot be a machine, but it may be an interlocking set of mathematical formulas. What this means is surely that pure mathematics exists in a mathematical universe which is no longer a commentary on an “outside” world, but contains that world within itself. Mathematics is at first a form of understanding an objective world regarded as its content, but in the end it conceives of the content as being itself mathematical in form, so that when the conception of the mathematical universe is reached, form and content become the same thing. Jeans was a mathematician, and thought of his mathematical universe as the universe. Doubtless it is, but it does not follow that the only way of conceiving it is mathematical. For we think also of literature at first as a commentary on an external “life” or “reality.” But just as in mathematics we have to go from three apples to three, and from a square field to a square, so in reading Jane Austen we have to go from the faithful reflection of English society to the novel, and pass from literature as symbol to literature as an autonomous language. And just as mathematics exists in a mathematical universe which is at the circumference of the common field of experience, so literature exists in a verbal universe, which is not a commentary on life or reality, but contains life and reality in a system of verbal relationships. This conception of a verbal universe, in which life and reality are inside literature, and not outside it and being described or represented or approached or symbolized by it, seems to me the first postulate of a properly organized criticism. It is vulgar for the critic to think of literature as a tiny palace of art looking out upon an inconceivably gigantic “life.” “Life” should be for the critic only the seed-plot of literature, a vast mass of potential literary forms, only a few of which will grow up into the greater world of the verbal universe. Similar universes exist for all the arts. “We make to

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ourselves pictures of facts,” says Wittgenstein,9 but by pictures he means representative illustrations, which are not pictures. Pictures as pictures are themselves facts, and exist only in a pictorial universe. It is easy enough to say that while the stars in their courses may form the subject of a poem, they will still remain the stars in their courses, forever outside poetry. But this is pure regression to the common field of experience, and nothing more; for the more strenuously we try to conceive the stars in their courses in non-literary ways, the more assuredly we shall fall into the idioms and conventions of some other mental universe. The conception of a constant external reality acts as a kind of censor principle in the arts. Painting has been much bedevilled by it, and much of the freakishness of modern painting is clearly due to the energy of its revolt against the representational fallacy. Music on the other hand has remained fairly free of it: at least no one, so far as I know, insists that it is flying in the face of common sense for music to do anything but reproduce the sounds heard in external nature. In literature the chief function of representationalism is to neutralize its opposing fallacy of an “inner” or subjective reality. These different universes are presumably different ways of conceiving the same universe. What we call the common field of experience is a provisional means of unifying them on the level of sense perception, and it is natural to infer a higher unity, a sort of beatification of common sense. But it is not easy to find any human language capable of reaching such exalted heights. If it is true, as is being increasingly asserted, that metaphysics is a system of verbal constructions with no direct reference to external criteria by means of which its truth or falsehood may be tested, it follows that metaphysics forms part of the verbal universe. Theology postulates an ultimate reality in God, but it does not assume that man is capable of describing it in his own terms, nor does it claim to be itself such a description. In any case, if we assert this final unity too quickly we may injure the integrity of the different means of approaching it. It does not help a poet much to tell him that the function of literature is to empty itself into an ocean of super-verbal significance, when the nature of that significance is unknown. Pure mathematics, we have said, does not relate itself directly to the common field of experience, but indirectly, not to avoid it, but with the ultimate design of swallowing it. It thus presents the appearance of a series of hypothetical possibilities. It bypasses the confirmation from without which is the goal of applied mathematics, and seeks it only from

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within: its conclusions are related primarily to its own premises. Literature also proceeds by hypothetical possibilities. The poet, said Sidney, never affirmeth. He never says “this is so”; he says “let there be such a situation,” and poetic truth, the validity of his conclusion, is to be tested primarily by its coherence with his original postulate. Of course, there is applied literature, just as there is applied mathematics, which we test historically, by its lifelikeness, or philosophically, by the cogency of its propositions. Literature, like mathematics, is constantly useful, a word which means having a continuing relationship to the common field of experience. But pure literature, like pure mathematics, is disinterested, or useless: it contains its own meaning. Any attempt to determine the category of literature must start with a distinction between the verbal form which is primarily itself and the verbal form which is primarily related to something else. The former is a complex verbal fact, the latter a complex of verbal symbols. We have to use the mathematical analogy once more before we leave it. Literature is, of course, dependent on the haphazard and unpredictable appearance of creative genius. So actually is mathematics, but we hardly notice this because in mathematics a steady consolidating process goes on, and the work of its geniuses is absorbed in the evolving and expanding pattern of the mathematical universe. Literature being as yet unorganized by criticism, it still appears as a huge aggregate or miscellaneous pile of creative efforts. The only organizing principle so far discovered in it is chronology, and when we see the miscellaneous pile strung out along a chronological line some coherence is given to it by the linear factors in tradition. We can trace an epic tradition by virtue of the fact that Virgil succeeded Homer, Dante Virgil, and Milton Dante. But, as already suggested, this is very far from being the best we can do. Criticism has still to develop a theory of literature which will see this aggregate within a verbal universe, as forms integrated within a totalform. An epic, besides occurring at a certain point in time, is also something of a definitive statement of the poet’s imaginative experience, whereas a lyric is usually a more fragmentary one. This suggests the image of a kind of radiating circle of literary experience in which the lyric is nearer to a periphery and the epic nearer to a centre. It is only an image, but the notion that literature, like any other form of knowledge, possesses a centre and a circumference seems reasonable enough. If so, then literature is a single body, a vast organically growing form, and, though of course works of art do not improve, yet it may be possible

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for criticism to see literature as showing a progressive evolution in time, of a kind rather like what Newman postulates for Catholic dogma. One could collect remarks by the dozen from various critics, many of them quite misleading, to show that they are dimly aware, on some level of consciousness, of the possibility of a critical progress towards a total comprehension of literature which no critical history gives any hint of. When Mr. Eliot says that the whole tradition of Western poetry from Homer down ought to exist simultaneously in the poet’s mind, the adverb suggests a transcending by criticism of the tyranny of historical categories. I even think that the consolidation of literature by criticism into the verbal universe was one of the things that Matthew Arnold meant by culture. To begin this process seems to me the function of criticism at the present time.

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9 The Four Forms of Prose Fiction Winter 1950

From The Hudson Review, 2 (Winter 1950): 582–95. Originally published as “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction” in the Manitoba Arts Review (1942); see no. 4 in this volume. Thoroughly revised as “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction,” reprinted in Modern Literary Criticism: 1900–1970, ed. Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 208–15; and in The Hudson Review Anthology, ed. Frederick Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1961), 336– 50. Incorporated into the “Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres,” of AC. The long history of this essay provides a notable example of the young Frye’s ability to recycle material, a product both of his consistency of mind and the pressures on him as an aspiring academic. Throughout the 1940s Frye had published work in the Canadian Forum and the University of Toronto Quarterly. “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction,” published in January 1950, was the first in a series of Frye’s important essays and reviews to appear in American critical journals, chiefly The Hudson Review and The Kenyon Review.

There seems to be no rational classification of prose forms. We are still struggling with the circulating-library conception of fiction as the opposite of “non-fiction,” fiction dealing with subjects admitted not to be true, and non-fiction with everything else. The basis for this distinction seems to be a hazy idea that the real meaning of fiction is falsehood or unreality. Thus an autobiography would be classified as non-fiction if the librarian believed the author, and as fiction if she thought he was lying. It is difficult to see what use this can be to a literary critic. Surely the word “fiction,” which, like poetry, means etymologically something made for its own sake, ought to be applied in criticism to any work of art in prose.

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Or, if that is too much to ask, at least some protest can be entered against the sloppy habit of identifying fiction with the one genuine form of fiction which we know as the novel. Let us look at a few of the unclassified books lying on the boundary of “non-fiction” and “literature.” Is Tristram Shandy a novel? Nearly everyone would say yes, in spite of its easygoing disregard of “story values.” Is Gulliver’s Travels a novel? Here most would demur, including the Dewey decimal system, which puts it under “Satire and Humour.” But surely everyone would call it fiction, and if it is fiction, a distinction appears between fiction as a genus and the novel as a species of that genus. Shifting the ground to fiction, then, is Sartor Resartus fiction? If not, why not? If it is, is The Anatomy of Melancholy fiction? If not, what is its place in English literature? The usual answer is that, though its subject matter is non-fiction, it is written with “style,” the presence of which always makes any book literary. Not many critics would want to explore the conception of style involved in this proposition. Is Borrow’s Lavengro fiction? Everyman’s Library says yes; the World’s Classics puts it under “Travel and Topography.” The literary historian who identifies fiction with the novel is greatly embarrassed by the length of time that the world managed to get along without the novel, and until he reaches his great deliverance in Defoe, his perspective is intolerably cramped. He is compelled to reduce Tudor fiction to a series of tentative essays in the novel form, which works well enough for Deloney but makes nonsense of Sidney. He postulates a great fictional gap in the seventeenth century which exactly covers the golden age of English prose. He finally discovers that the word “novel,” which up to about 1900 was still the name of a more or less recognizable form, has since expanded into a catchall term which can be applied to practically any book that is not “on” something. Clearly, this novel-centred view of prose fiction is a Ptolemaic perspective which is now too complicated to be any longer workable, and some more relative and Copernican view must take its place. When we start to think seriously about the novel, not as fiction, but as a form of fiction, we feel that its characteristics, whatever they are, are such as make, say, Defoe, Fielding, Austen, and James central in its tradition, and Borrow, Peacock, Melville, and Emily Brontë somehow peripheral. This is not an estimate of merit: we may easily prefer Moby Dick to The Egoist and yet feel that Meredith’s book is closer to being a typical novel. Fielding’s conception of the novel as a comic epic in prose seems funda-

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mental to the tradition he did so much to establish. In novels that we think of as typical, like those of Jane Austen, plot and dialogue are closely linked to the conventions of the comedy of manners. The conventions of Wuthering Heights are linked rather with the tale and the ballad. They seem to have more affinity with tragedy, and the tragic emotions of passion and fury, which would shatter the balance of tone in Jane Austen, can be safely accommodated here. So can the supernatural, or the suggestion of it, which is difficult to get into a novel. The shape of the plot is different: instead of manoeuvring around a central situation, as Jane Austen does, Emily Brontë tells her story with linear accents, and she seems to need the help of a narrator, who would be absurdly out of place in Jane Austen. Conventions so different justify us in regarding Wuthering Heights as a different form of prose fiction from the novel, a form which we shall here call the romance. The essential difference between novel and romance lies in the conception of characterization. The romancer does not attempt to create “real people,” for his major characters at least, but stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is to the romance that the student of Jung would go to find his “libido,” his “anima,” and his “shadow” reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively. That is why the romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around its fringes. Certain elements of character are released in the romance which make it naturally a more revolutionary form than the novel. The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages. The prose romance, then, is an independent form of fiction to be distinguished from the novel and extracted from the miscellaneous heap of prose works now covered by that term. Even in the other heap known as “short stories” one can isolate the tale form used by Poe, which bears the same relation to the full-length romance that the short stories of Chekhov or Mansfield do to the novel. We must admit, however, that “pure” examples of either form can never be found; there is hardly any modern romance that could not be made out to be a novel, and vice versa. The forms of prose fiction are mixed, like racial strains in human

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beings, not separable like the sexes. In fact the popular demand in fiction is always for a mixed form, a romantic novel just romance enough for the reader to project his “libido” on the hero and his “anima” on the heroine, and just novel enough to keep these projections in a reassuringly familiar world. It may be asked, therefore, what is the use of making the above distinction, especially when, though undeveloped in criticism, it is by no means unrealized. It is no surprise to hear that Trollope wrote novels and William Morris romances. The reason is that a great romancer should be examined in terms of the conventions he chose. William Morris should not be left on the side lines of prose fiction merely because the critic has not learned to take the romance form seriously. Nor, in view of what has been said about the revolutionary nature of the romance, should his choice of that form be regarded as an “escape” from his social attitude. If Scott has any claims to be a romancer, it is not good criticism to deal only with his defects as a novelist. The romantic qualities of The Pilgrim’s Progress too, its archetypal characterization and its revolutionary approach to religious experience, make it a well-rounded example of a literary form: it is not merely a book swallowed by English literature to get some religious bulk in its diet. Finally, when Hawthorne, in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, insists that his story should be read as romance and not as novel, it is possible that he meant what he said, even though he indicates that the prestige of the rival form has induced the romancer to apologize for not using it. Romance is older than the novel, a fact which has developed the historical illusion that it is something to be outgrown, a juvenile and undeveloped form. The social affinities of the romance, with its grave idealizing of heroism and purity, are with the aristocracy, and it revived in the period we call Romantic as part of the Romantic tendency to archaic feudalism and a cult of the hero, or idealized libido. In England the romances of Scott and, in less degree, the Brontës, are part of a mysterious Northumbrian renaissance, a Romantic reaction against the new industrialism in the Midlands, which also produced the poetry of Wordsworth and Burns and the philosophy of Carlyle. It is not surprising, therefore, that an important theme in the more bourgeois novel should be the parody of the romance and its ideals. The tradition established by Don Quixote continues in a type of novel which looks at a romantic situation from its own point of view, so that the conventions of the two forms make up an ironic compound, instead of a sentimental

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mixture. This subspecies ranges from the spoofing of Northanger Abbey to the clinical analyses of Madame Bovary and Lord Jim. We have spoken of the tendency to allegory in the romance, arising from the vaguely intensified significance which it gives to human activity. Sexual symbolism is close to the surface of most romance. One thinks of the very Freudian current of water which separates hero from heroine in Morris’s The Sundering Flood, and of even balder statements of sexual mythopoeia in Poe. On this level too appear the Jungian archetypes already mentioned. Symbolism of this sort may be largely involuntary on the author’s part, but conscious allegory belongs to the same tradition. One reason is that the romance, which deals with heroes, is intermediate between the novel, which deals with men, and the myth, which deals with gods. Prose romance first appears as a late development of Classical mythology, and the prose sagas of Iceland follow close on the mythical Eddas. We see the recrudescence of myth whenever a romancer makes his allegory explicit, as Christian mythical patterns reappear in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and even more primitive ones in Hawthorne. The novel does not have this affinity with the myth. It tends rather to expand into a fictional approach to history. The soundness of Fielding’s instinct in calling Tom Jones a history is confirmed by the general rule that the larger the scheme of a novel becomes, the more obviously its historical nature appears. As it is creative history, however, the novelist usually prefers his material in a plastic, or roughly contemporary state, and feels cramped by a fixed historical pattern. The so-called historical novel is generally a romance presenting some kind of historicized myth. It is perhaps this link with history and a sense of temporal context that has confined the novel, in striking contrast to the worldwide romance, to the alliance of time and Western man. II Autobiography is another form which merges with the novel by a series of insensible gradations. By itself it can hardly be called prose fiction at all; but most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that go to build up an integrated pattern. This pattern may be something larger than himself with which he has come to identify himself, or simply the coherence of his character and attitudes. We may call this very important form of prose fiction the confession form, following

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St. Augustine, who appears to have invented it, and Rousseau, who established a modern type of it. The earlier tradition gave Religio Medici, Grace Abounding,1 and Newman’s Apologia to English literature, besides the related but subtly different type of confession favoured by the mystics. Here again, as with the romance, there is some value in recognizing a distinct prose form in the confession. It gives several of our best prose works a definable place in fiction instead of keeping them in a vague limbo of books which are not quite literature because they are “thought,” and not quite religion or philosophy because they are Examples of Prose Style. The confession, too, like the novel and the romance, has its own short form, the familiar essay, and Montaigne’s livre de bonne foy is a confession made up of essays in which only the continuous narrative of the longer form is missing. Montaigne’s scheme is to the confession what a work of fiction made up of short stories, such as Joyce’s Dubliners or Boccaccio’s Decameron, is to the novel or romance. After Rousseau—in fact in Rousseau—the confession flows into the novel, and the mixture produces the fictional autobiography, the Künstlerroman [narrative of the artist’s life] and kindred types. There is no literary reason why the subject of a confession should always be the author himself, and dramatic confessions have been used in the novel at least since Moll Flanders. The “stream of consciousness” technique permits of a much more concentrated fusion of the two forms. When the confession is combined with the novel, however, the characteristics peculiar to the former show up clearly. Nearly always some theoretical and intellectual interest in religion, politics, or art plays a leading role in the confession. It is his success in integrating his mind on such subjects that makes the author of a confession feel that his life is worth writing about. But this interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships. In Jane Austen, to take a familiar instance, church, state, and culture are never examined except as social data, and Henry James has been described as having a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. The novelist who cannot get along without ideas, or has not the patience to digest them in the way that James did, instinctively resorts to what Mill calls a “mental history” of a single character. And when we find that a technical discussion of a theory of aesthetics forms the climax of Joyce’s Portrait, we realize that what makes this possible is the presence in that novel of another tradition of prose fiction.

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The novel tends to be extroverted and personal; its chief interest is in human character as it manifests itself in society. The romance tends to be introverted and personal: it also deals with characters, but in a more subjective way. (Subjective here refers to treatment, not subject matter. The characters of romance are heroic and therefore inscrutable; the novelist is freer to enter his characters’ minds because he is more objective.) The confession is also introverted, but intellectualized in content. Our next step is evidently to discover a fourth form of fiction which is extroverted and intellectual. III We remarked earlier that most people would call Gulliver’s Travels fiction but not a novel. It must then be another form of fiction, as it certainly has a form, and we feel that we are turning from the novel to this form, whatever it is, when we turn from Rousseau’s Émile to Voltaire’s Candide, or from Butler’s The Way of All Flesh to the Erewhon books, or from Huxley’s Point Counter Point to Brave New World. The form thus has its own traditions, and, as the examples of Butler and Huxley show, has preserved some integrity even under the ascendancy of the novel. Its existence is easy enough to demonstrate, and no one will challenge the statement that the literary ancestry of Gulliver’s Travels and Candide runs through Rabelais and Erasmus to Lucian. But while much has been said about the style and thought of Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire, very little has been made of them as craftsmen working in a specific medium, a point no one dealing with a novelist would ignore. Another great writer in this tradition, Huxley’s master Peacock, has fared even worse, for, his form not being understood, a general impression has grown up that his status in the development of prose fiction is that of a slapdash eccentric. Actually, he is as exquisite and precise an artist in his medium as Jane Austen in hers. The form used by these authors is the Menippean satire, also more rarely called the Varronian satire, allegedly invented by a Greek cynic named Menippus. His works are lost, but he had two great disciples, the Greek Lucian and the Roman Varro, and the tradition of Varro, who has not survived either except in fragments, was carried on by Petronius and Apuleius. The Menippean satire appears to have developed out of verse satire through the practice of adding prose interludes, but we know it only as a prose form, though one of its recurrent features (seen in Peacock) is the use of incidental verse.

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The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their “humour” or ruling passion, their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behaviour. The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent. Here again no sharp boundary lines can or should be drawn, but if we compare a character in Jane Austen with a similar character in Peacock we can immediately feel the difference between the two forms. Squire Western belongs to the novel, but Thwackum and Square have Menippean blood in them. A constant theme in the tradition is the ridicule of the philosophus gloriosus. Lucian ridicules the Greek philosophers, Rabelais and Erasmus the scholastics, Swift the Cartesians and the Royal Society, Voltaire the Leibnizians, Peacock the Romantics, Samuel Butler the Darwinians, Huxley the behaviourists. The reason for this is that, while the novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry which the philosophus gloriosus at once symbolizes and defines. Petronius, Apuleius, Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire all use a loose-jointed narrative form often confused with the romance. It differs from the romance, however (though there is a strong admixture of romance in Rabelais), as it is not primarily concerned with the exploits of heroes, but relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature. It differs also from the picaresque form, which has the novel’s interest in the actual structure of society. At its most concentrated the Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern. This it often attains by giving it a logical and self-consistent shift of perspective, presenting it as Lilliputian or Brobdingnagian, or from the point of view of an ass, a savage, or a drunk. Or it will take the form of a “marvellous journey” and present a caricature of a familiar society as the logical structure of an imaginary one. Erewhon and Brave New World are modern examples. Such a distorting mirror produces at least the unity of its frame: without it, the Menippean satirist inclines to a disorderliness which in A Tale of a Tub reaches the point of including a digression in praise of digressions. The intellectual structure he builds up from his story makes for violent

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dislocations in the customary logic of narrative, though the appearance of carelessness that results reflects only the carelessness of the reader. The word “satire,” in Roman and Renaissance times, meant either of two specific literary forms of that name, one (this one) prose and the other verse. Now it means a tone or attitude which may be found in any form of art whether literary or not. In the Menippean satires we have been discussing, the name of the form also applies to the attitude. As the name of an attitude, satire seems to be a combination of fantasy and morality, bounded on one side by the play of fancy which has no moral sting, and on the other by an invective which has no spontaneous humour. But as the name of a form, the term “satire,” though confined to literature, is more flexible, and can be either entirely fantastic or entirely moral. The Menippean adventure story may thus be pure fantasy, as it is in the literary fairy tale. The Alice books are perfect Menippean satires, and so is The Water-Babies, which has been influenced by Rabelais. The purely moral type is a serious vision of society as a single intellectual pattern, in other words a Utopia. The short form of the Menippean satire is usually a dialogue or colloquy, in which the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas rather than of character. This is the favourite form of Erasmus, and is common in Voltaire. Here again the form is not invariably satiric in attitude, but shades off into more purely fanciful or moral discussions, like the Imaginary Conversations of Landor or the “dialogue of the dead.”2 Sometimes this form expands to full length, and more than two speakers are used: the setting then is usually a cena or symposium, like the one that looms so large in Petronius. Plato, though much earlier in the field than Menippus, is a strong influence on this type, which stretches in an unbroken tradition down through those urbane and leisurely conversations which define the ideal courtier in Castiglione or the doctrine and discipline of angling in Walton. A modern development produces the country-house weekends in Peacock and Huxley in which the opinions and ideas and cultural interests expressed are as important as the love-making. The novelist shows his exuberance either by an exhaustive analysis of human relationships, as in Henry James, or of social phenomena, as in Tolstoy. The Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon. The tendency of the form to expand into an encyclopedic farrago is most clearly marked,

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as we should expect, in Rabelais, notably in the great catalogues of torcheculs3 and epithets of codpieces and methods of divination. The encyclopedic compilations produced in the line of duty by Erasmus and Voltaire suggest that a magpie instinct to collect facts is not unrelated to the type of ability that has made them famous as artists. This creative treatment of exhaustive erudition is the organizing principle of the greatest Menippean satire in English before Swift, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Here human society is studied in terms of the intellectual pattern provided by the conception of melancholy, a symposium of books replaces dialogue, and the result is the most comprehensive survey of human life in one book that English literature had seen since Chaucer, one of Burton’s favourite authors. We may note in passing the Utopia in his introduction and his “digressions,” which when examined turn out to be scholarly distillations of Menippean forms: the digression of air, of the marvellous journey; the digression of spirits, of the ironic use of erudition; the digression of the miseries of scholars, of the satire on the philosophus gloriosus. The word “anatomy” in Burton’s title means a dissection or analysis, and expresses very accurately the intellectualized approach of his form. We may as well adopt it as a convenient name to replace the cumbersome and in modern times rather misleading “Menippean satire.” The anatomy of course eventually begins to merge with the novel, producing various hybrids including the roman à thèse and novels in which the characters are symbols of social or other ideas, like the proletarian novels of the last decade. It was Sterne, however, the disciple of Burton and Rabelais, who combined them with greatest success. Tristram Shandy may be, as was said at the beginning, a novel, but the digressing narrative, the catalogues, the stylizing of character along “humour” lines, the marvellous journey of the great nose, the symposium discussions, and the constant ridicule of philosophers and pedantic critics are all features that belong to the anatomy. IV To sum up, then: when we examine fiction from the point of view of form, we can see four chief strands binding it together, novel, confession, anatomy, and romance. The six possible combinations of these forms all exist, and we have shown how the novel has combined with each of the other three. Exclusive concentration on one form is rare: the early novels

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of George Eliot, for instance, are influenced by the romance, and the later ones by the anatomy. The romance-confession hybrid is found, naturally, in the autobiography of a romantic temperament, and is represented in English by George Borrow. The romance-anatomy one we have noticed in Rabelais: a fine modern example is Moby Dick, where the romantic theme of the wild hunt expands into an encyclopedic anatomy of the whale. Confession and anatomy are united in Sartor Resartus. More comprehensive fictional schemes usually employ at least three forms: we can see strains of novel, romance, and confession in Pamela, of novel, romance, and anatomy in Don Quixote, of novel, confession, and anatomy in Proust, and of romance, confession, and anatomy in Apuleius. I deliberately make this sound schematic in order to suggest the advantage of having a simple and logical explanation for the form of, say, Moby Dick or Tristram Shandy. The usual critical approach to the form of such works resembles that of the doctors in Brobdingnag, who after great wrangling finally pronounced Gulliver a lusus naturae [a joke of nature]. It is the anatomy in particular that has baffled critics, and there is hardly any fiction writer deeply influenced by it who has not been accused of disorderly conduct. As for the question which so many feel it necessary to ask at this point, whether Melville or Sterne “knew” that they were combining an anatomy form with a romance or a novel, the answer is, as usual, yes and no. They knew what they were doing, but they knew as creators know, not as critics explain. The reader may be reminded here of Joyce, for describing his books as monstrous has become a nervous tic. I find “demogorgon,” “behemoth,” and “white elephant” in good critics; the bad ones could probably do much better. The care that Joyce took to organize Ulysses and Finnegans Wake amounted nearly to obsession, but as they are not organized on familiar principles of prose fiction, the impression of shapelessness remains. Let us try our formulas on him. If a reader were asked to set down a list of the things that had most impressed him about Ulysses, it might reasonably be somewhat as follows. First, the clarity with which the sights and sounds and smells of Dublin come to life, the rotundity of the character-drawing, and the naturalness of the dialogue. Second, the elaborate way that the story and characters are parodied by being set against archetypal heroic patterns, notably the one provided by The Odyssey. Third, the revelation of character and incident through the searching use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Fourth, the constant tendency to be encyclopedic and

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exhaustive both in technique and in subject matter, and to see both in highly intellectualized terms. It should not be too hard for us by now to see that these four points describe elements in the book which relate to the novel, romance, confession, and anatomy respectively. Ulysses, then, is a complete prose epic with all four forms employed in it, all of practically equal importance, and all essential to one another, so that the book is a unity and not an aggregate. This unity is built up from an intricate scheme of parallel contrasts. The romantic archetypes of Hamlet and Ulysses are like remote stars in a literary heaven looking down quizzically on the shabby creatures of Dublin obediently intertwining themselves in the patterns set by their influences. In the “Cyclops” and “Circe” episodes particularly there is a continuous parody of realistic patterns by romantic ones which reminds us, though the irony leans in the opposite direction, of Madame Bovary. The relation of novel and confession techniques is similar: the author jumps into his characters’ minds to follow their stream of consciousness, and out again to describe them externally. In the novel-anatomy combination, too, found in the “Ithaca” chapter, the sense of lurking antagonism between the personal and intellectual aspects of the scene accounts for much of its pathos. The same principle of parallel contrast holds good for the other three combinations: of romance and confession in “Nausicaa” and “Penelope,” of confession and anatomy in “Proteus” and “The Lotus-Eaters,” of romance and anatomy (a rare and fitful combination) in “Sirens” and parts of “Circe.” In Finnegans Wake the unity of design goes far beyond this. The dingy story of the sodden HCE and his pinched wife is not contrasted with the archetypes of Tristram and the divine king: HCE is himself Tristram and the divine king. As the setting is a dream, no contrast is possible between confession and novel, between a stream of consciousness inside the mind and the appearances of other people outside it. Nor is the existential world of the novel to be separated from the intelligible world of the anatomy. The forms we have been isolating in fiction, and which depend for their existence on the common sense dichotomies of the daylight consciousness, vanish in Finnegans Wake into a fifth and quintessential form. All that we have space to say of this fifth form is that it is the one traditionally associated with scriptures and sacred books, and treats life in terms of the fall and awakening of the human soul and the creation and apocalypse of nature. The Bible is of course the definitive example of

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it: The Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Icelandic Prose Edda, both of which have left deep imprints on Finnegans Wake, also belong to it. Perhaps we could see tendencies to this form in Joyce’s masters, “stern swift and jolly roger” (Rabelais), if we were to read them as Joyce did. To go further would exceed our present objective, which is merely to give an explanation of some literary phenomena that appear to need it.

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10 Levels of Meaning in Literature Spring 1950

From The Kenyon Review, 12 (Spring 1950): 246–62. Incorporated into AC, Second Essay. First presented as a paper to the Philosophical Club at the University of Toronto (D, 214 and n. 3). Attempts to rewrite it for publication had proved frustrating, but after a flattering invitation from Philip Rice, editor of The Kenyon Review, NF recast it, admitting to himself that “it’s a square egg, though, and doesn’t come easily” (D, 256). The article appeared in April, 1950, very shortly after The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” was published by The Hudson Review (see no. 9 in this volume). The longer one has been familiar with a great work of literature, the more one’s understanding of it grows. It would be hard to formulate a more elementary principle of literary experience. Its plain implication, that literature has different levels of meaning, was made the basis of a systematic development of criticism in the Middle Ages, and a precise scheme of four levels of meaning—the literal, the allegorical, the tropological or moral, and the anagogic—was worked out and adopted by many great medieval writers, notably Dante. Modern criticism has not only ignored this, but seems to regard the problem of meaning in literature as merely an offshoot of the corresponding semantic problem in current philosophy. In offering a few suggestions about the possibility of a modern restatement of the medieval theory, I propose to bypass the philosophical questions involved, on the ground that the obvious place to start looking for a theory of literary meaning is in literature. The First Level Let us start with the word “symbol,” confining ourselves to verbal symbols. A symbol ordinarily implies at least two things, A, the symbol

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proper, and B, the thing represented or symbolized by it. With verbal symbols particularly, however, there seems to be a locus or path of signification which passes through a number of B’s. The verbal symbol “cat” is a group of black marks on a page representing a noise with the mouth which represents an idea called up from experience of an animal that says meow. A verbal symbol may be of any size: a word, a letter, a phrase, a sentence, or even larger word groups may be symbols. The total verbal structure, the poem or the book, may be regarded also as a single symbol complex. But whenever we attempt to answer the question, what does this symbol or symbol complex symbolize? we find ourselves travelling a centrifugal path from the verbal structure to a realm of experience outside it. We find this more difficult at some times than at others. It is easy enough to say, up to a point, what “cat” symbolizes, even what each of the three letters in it symbolizes. It is harder to say what the word “of” symbolizes, or the final letter of the word “lamb.” Here we have to enlarge our unit of symbolism to give an intelligible answer, and in the process we become aware of another direction of meaning, a direction not centrifugal this time but centripetal, not running outward into experience but inward into the total meaning of the verbal structure. The word “of,” we say, has not, like a noun, a direct one-to-one correspondence with a thing symbolized: one has first to relate it to other words. But it is clear that the same syntactic aspect of meaning is relevant even to nouns. If a writer uses the word “cat,” that verbal symbol represents, in addition to its centrifugal locus of meaning, a portion of the author’s total intention in putting it there. Its meaning in the verbal structure cannot be understood without relating it to the structure as a whole. Nor can we ultimately interpose even the “author’s intention” between the verbal symbol and the verbal structure, for the author’s intention ceases to exist as a separate factor as soon as his verbal structure is fixed. Centripetally, then, the verbal symbol does not represent anything except its own place in the verbal structure. We said that the latter may also be regarded as a single symbol complex. But from the centripetal point of view, in which the unit of symbolism is to be considered only in terms of its place in the total verbal structure, the total verbal structure itself does not “mean” anything except itself. Most uses of the term “literal,” whether medieval or modern, fail to make this distinction between the syntactic and the representative relations of a unit of symbolism. I do not understand the common assertion

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that the verbal symbol “cat” “means literally” a cat, the animal that says meow. It is surely obvious that the verbal symbol stands in a descriptive and representative relationship to actual cats. Dante says, in commenting on the verse in the Psalms, “When Israel came out of Egypt”: “For should we consider the letter only, the exit of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is what is signified to us.” But a historical event cannot be literally anything but a historical event; a prose narrative describing it cannot be literally anything but a prose narrative. In taking his example from the Bible, Dante perhaps felt the necessity of making first of all a respectful genuflection to theological rationalism: in any case there is no such pseudo-literal basis to his own Commedia. The literal level of meaning, though it takes precedence over all other meanings, lies outside the province of criticism. Understanding a verbal structure literally is the incommunicable act of total apprehension which precedes criticism. The preliminary effort to unite the symbols in a verbal structure, and the Gestalt perception of the unity of the structure which results, are the closest we can come to describing the literal level. Every genuine response to art, whether critically formulated or not, must begin in the same way, in a complete surrender of the mind and senses to the impact of the work of art as a whole. This occupies the same place in criticism that observation, the direct exposure of the mind to nature, has in the scientific method. “Every poem must necessarily be a perfect unity,” says Blake: this, as the wording implies, is not a judgment of value on existing poems, but a definition of the hypothesis which every reader must adopt in first trying to comprehend even the most chaotic poem ever written. In the theory outlined at the end of Joyce’s Portrait, the first of the three attributes of beauty, integritas, corresponds to our literal level. The Second Level When we say that such a complex verbal structure has “meaning,” we usually refer to the vast disordered tangle of centrifugal meanings running in all directions from its words and phrases. By the time we have apprehended the integritas or literal significance, we have recapitulated our whole education in centrifugal meaning, back to our earliest attempts to read. But after we have understood a verbal structure literally, we have then to relate it as a whole to the body of data which it represents.

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This process introduces the conception “literary” to our discussion of verbal structures. Verbal structures which are not “literary” are primarily descriptions of facts or truths external to themselves. What interests, say, a scientist or a historian about words is their accuracy in reproducing scientific or historical data. But one of the most familiar phenomena in the “literary” group is the absence of this controlling aim of descriptive accuracy. We should prefer to feel that a historical dramatist was capable of reading and using his sources accurately, and would not alter them without good reason. But that such good reasons may exist in literature is not denied by anyone, although they seem to exist only there. Literature, poetry especially, may always be recognized by the negative test of the possibility of departing from facts. Hence the words denoting literary structure, “fable,” “myth,” and “fiction,” have acquired a secondary sense of untruth, like the Norwegian word for poet, digter, which also means liar. Sir Philip Sidney remarked that “the poet never affirmeth,” and therefore cannot be said to lie. Literature presents, not an affirmation or repudiation of facts, but a series of hypothetical possibilities. The appearance of a ghost in Hamlet does not owe its dramatic appeal to the question whether ghosts exist or not, or whether Shakespeare or his audience thought they did. Shakespeare’s only postulate is, “let there be a ghost in Hamlet.” In this the poet resembles the mathematician rather than his verbal colleagues in history and science. The relation of literature to factual verbal structures has to be established from within one of the latter. Literature must be approached centrifugally, from the outside, if we are to get any factual significance out of it. Thus a historian could learn much from a realistic novel written in the period he is studying, if he knows how to allow for its hypothetical structure. It would not do much violence to customary language to use the term “allegorical” for this whole descriptive level of meaning, and say, for instance, that a realistic novel was an allegory of the life of its time. In literary criticism itself, the second level of meaning allows the critic to employ himself in that routine but indispensable activity which the master painters of the Renaissance assigned to their apprentices: the activity of filling in background. One begins talking about Lycidas, for instance, by itemizing all the things that Lycidas illustrates in the nonliterary verbal world: English history in 1637, the Church and Milton’s view of it, the position of Milton as a young poet planning an epic and a political career, the literary convention of the pastoral elegy, Christian

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teachings on the subject of death and resurrection, and so on. It would be quite possible to spend a whole critical life in this allegorical limbo of background, without ever getting to the poem at all, or even feeling the need of doing so. We do not ordinarily use the word allegory as we have just used it, however; we usually restrict it to the one exception to our rule that the relation of literature to fact must be established from outside literature. A writer is being explicitly allegorical when he himself indicates a continuous relationship of his central hypothetical structure to a set of external facts, or what he assumes to be facts. This continuous counterpoint between the saying and the centrifugal meaning is called allegory only when the relation is direct. If the relation is one of contrast, we call it irony. The purpose of allegory is to emphasize the connection of poetry with affirmative truth; the purpose of irony is to emphasize its withdrawal from it. What position, then, does literature occupy in relation to factual verbal structures? We may get a hint here from another argument of Sidney, which follows a general Aristotelian line. Sidney suggests that poetry is a kind of synthesis of history and philosophy. History gives the example of the hero without the precept; philosophy the precept without the example, and poetry gives us the poetic image of the hero which combines the two. Or, as we may say, literature, being hypothetical, unites the temporal event with the idea in conceptual space. On one side, it develops a narrative interest which borders on history; on the other, a discursive interest which borders on philosophy, and in between them is its central interest of imagery. We may thus distinguish three main rhythms of literature and three main areas of it, one in which narrative controls the rhythm, one in which a discursive interest controls it, and a central area in which the image controls it. This central area is the area of poetry; the parietal ones belong to prose, which is used for both hypothetical and descriptive purposes. If we look at the word “image” closely, we shall see that it really means symbol in its centripetal aspect, so that imagery in this sense is figuration, the arranging and patterning of verbal symbols. In medieval and Renaissance times this formed part of the study of rhetoric, and so we may attempt a tentative definition of poetry as the form of verbal expression which is organized on rhetorical principles. Of these the chief is of course recurrent metre; the auxiliary principles, alliteration, rhyme, quantity, or parallelism, are also rhetorical schemata. A commoner word for

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rhetorical figuration is style, but this word is too often used merely as a metaphor for the inscrutable mystery of genius. It would be surprising to find any sharp boundary separating narrative prose from history or discursive prose from philosophy. We can only say that whatever is clearly hypothetical is clearly literary. On the discursive side, the question arises whether the whole section of philosophy called “metaphysics” should be annexed to literature. The logical positivists claim that metaphysical systems are not descriptive of anything, but are hypothetical verbal structures depending for their integrity on propositions which are neither true nor false. A literary critic would certainly lose no respect for metaphysics if all this were true. And even if it is not, one has only to refer to Plato’s dialogues to show how useless any patented formula of classification would be. In any case we may isolate prose fiction as the form of prose which is organized on narrative principles, discursive prose being based rather on the proposition as its rhythmic unit. One may note in the history of discursive writing a recurring effort to isolate the propositional rhythm. Hence we have the aphorisms of Bacon, the quasi-Euclidean form of Spinoza’s Ethics, the thesis form of scholasticism, and, more recently, the tabulated aphorisms of Wittgenstein. As a rule such attempts defeat their original purpose by giving the reader the impression of a rhetorical device. Nevertheless, the organizing rhythm of discursive writing is logical rather than rhetorical. As for narrative prose, it is clear that we cannot restrict the conception of narrative to the gross events: the basis of narrative is the temporal order of symbols; in particular, the word-order which is the movement of literature. We may, then, suggest a link between narrative and grammar which would enable us to associate our three areas of literature with the three areas of the trivium into which the study of literature was formerly divided. It goes without saying, of course, that all three literary elements are simultaneously present in all literary works. Thus we may see how, for instance, a strong narrative or didactic interest in poetry tends to infuse poetry with the word-order of prose; and, conversely, how euphuism or elaborately figured prose tends to become “poetic.” Criticism was late in understanding the importance of prose, and the subject is bedevilled by two linguistic difficulties. “Prosaic” is not, as it ought to be, the exact equivalent of “poetic”; and there is no short word corresponding to “poem” for a literary work in prose, nor for a literary work in general: hence the use of such periphrastic ca-

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cophony as “hypothetical verbal structure” in the present article. Much more could be said on these points, but the general shape of the second level, or the external relations of literature with other verbal disciplines, should by now be clear enough. The Third Level The composing of a factual verbal structure is a “critical” operation; the composing of a hypothetical structure is a “creative”one, not that the two are ever separable. If there are three general aspects of hypothetical writing and a single creative process, we may best study the latter at the joining points of grammar and logic, of grammar and rhetoric, and of rhetoric and logic. The link between grammar and logic is generally recognized: we need only refer to Aristotle’s subject and predicate,1 and the metaphysical structures based on the fact that the verb “to be” implies both existence and identity. Again, a factual verbal structure cannot be descriptively correct unless it is verbally correct, and the accuracy of one’s meaning is inseparable from the order of one’s words. But this road is under construction: it is the other two that need surveying. The link between grammar and rhetoric appears to be a subconscious paronomasia, or free association among words,2 from which there arise not only semantic connections, but the more arbitrary resemblances in sound out of which the schemata of rhyme and assonance evolve. Finnegans Wake is an attempt to write a whole book on this level, and it draws heavily on the researches of Freud and Jung into subconscious verbal association. Uncontrolled association is often a literary way of representing insanity, and Smart’s Jubilate Agno, which is usually considered a mentally unbalanced poem, shows the creative process in an interesting formative stage: For the power of some animal is predominant in every language. For the power and spirit of a CAT is in the Greek. The sound of a cat is in the most useful preposition Kat’ euchen. . . . For the Mouse (Mus) prevails in the Latin. For edi-mus, bibi-mus, vivi-mus—ore-mus . . . For two creatures the Bull & the Dog prevail in the English, For all the words ending in ble are in the creature. Invisi-ble, Incomprehensi-ble, ineffa-ble, A-ble . . .

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For there are many words under Bull . . . For Brook is under Bull. God be gracious to Lord Bolinbroke. [Fragment B, pt. 4]

It is possible that similar sputters and sparks of the fusing intellect take place in all poetic thinking. The puns in this passage impress the reader as both outrageous and humorous, which is consistent with Freud’s view of wit as the escape of impulse from the control of the censor.3 In creation the impulse appears to be the creative energy itself, and the censor the force which adapts that impulse to outward expression, a force which might be called the “plausibility principle.” The final cause of all this paronomasia is the single interlocking verbal structure which is the literal work of art. When this has been developed to the point at which the author’s consciousness would normally accept it, it is still easy to see the links that hold it together. All symbols in a verbal structure are, to use a term now well established in criticism, ambiguous, both in sound and in meaning. The factual verbal structure reduces this ambiguity in two ways: first, by establishing a literal meaning, or context, and second, by aligning the verbal symbols with the things they describe. The hypothetical structure has deliberately discarded the latter: hence a poet’s words, for instance, are limited in their meaning by the context alone, and thus preserve a good deal of their original variety of connotation. The repetition of a word in poetry does not necessarily involve a repetition of the same meaning, for the context may be different. Pope’s Essay on Criticism uses the word “wit” in nine or ten different senses. If Pope’s emphasis were on centrifugal or descriptive meaning, such a semantic theme with variations could produce nothing but inextricable muddle. But in a poem the different senses all help to build up the word “wit” as a linguistic network of connotative meaning. The poet, in short, does not equate a word with a meaning: he establishes the powers or functions of words. As for assonance, there is clearly room in semantics for a renewed study of what may be called rhetorical etymology, the verbal associations that underlie thinking. The original is always the unexpected, and the dialogue of Plato’s that seems to me most prophetic of new developments in thought is the one that is generally regarded as an irresponsible jeu d’esprit. I refer to the Cratylus, which is clearly concerned with the relation between thought and verbal association. Free play with words passed itself off for centuries as real etymology, and when the latter was

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developed the former came to be regarded as fantastic nonsense. So it is from one point of view, but it still remains a datum for literary critics of inescapable importance. The link between rhetoric and logic, between the image and the concept, is in the diagrammatic structures underneath our thoughts, which appear in the spatial metaphors we use. “Beside,” “on the other hand,” “upon,” “outside”: nobody could connect thoughts at all without such words, yet every one is a geometrical image, and suggests that every concept has its graphic formula. I do not know that psychology has seriously examined the way in which the arrangement of ideas in thinking is revealed in the images unconsciously employed to illustrate it; and of course literary critics are only just beginning to realize that the figures, illustrations, analogies, and epithets—in short, the rhetoric—of discursive writing form an essential part of its meaning. But surely if someone says that science needs to be complemented by poetry or religion or personal emotion because it is a mere cold and dry approach to experience—a very common type of observation—he implies that his contrasting principle is warm and moist, and hence the old myth of the four elements of chaos, or perhaps an archaic creation myth like the one in the second chapter of Genesis, is the graphic formula of his argument. Further study along such lines would tend, not to minimize or obliterate the distinction between hypothetical and factual writing, but to show how the literary or creative process makes factual verbal structures possible, in the same way that the hypothetical structures of mathematics make the natural sciences possible. And if the literary critic once understands the ambiguous nature of literal verbal meaning, he need never again be caught in the rat-trap of identifying all meaning with descriptive meaning. As descriptive meaning is objective and intelligible, literature, in terms of this theory, must be either meaningless or descriptive of something subjective or emotional—suggestive or evocative of it, rather, as the subjective is too vague to be described. This implies that literature is an elaboration of the lyrical cri de coeur, and implies many other things which the critic well knows to be absurd. The establishing of the powers of words in literature takes us much further than a mere recognition of ambiguity. The understanding of metaphysics seems to depend on a technique of meditation based on the connotative aspect of meaning. One normally starts with a key word or concept, nature in Aristotle, form in Plato, noumenon in Kant, duration in Bergson, and considers the term in its centripetal relationships. The same

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is even more obviously true of theology. This power of comprehension is, of course, transferable and expansive: we may pass from one philosophical structure to another until we become aware of a larger verbal form called philosophy. The key words, nature, form, substance, time, being, and the rest, thus expand into conceptual archetypes, the linguistic elements or principles of this larger verbal form. The same thing happens with images. All criticism of poetry that gets beyond the second level of “background” begins with structural analysis, which identifies the recurring symbols and themes in the verbal structure, and separates them into their elements: this is the consonantia stage of Joyce’s theory.4 But these elements are the elements of literature as a whole, and are not confined to the structure in which they appear. Structural analysis thus expands into functional analysis. Moby Dick cannot remain within Melville’s novel: he is bound to be incorporated into our total verbal experience of leviathans and dragons of the deep from the Old Testament onward. This is not a mere process of association: the associations consolidate into archetypes of imagery. The archetypal features of narrative are of equal importance, and may be perceived in the different types of resolution: the quest resolution of romance, the festival resolution of comedy, the death resolution of tragedy. This conception of archetypes is based on the fact that literary education is possible, and that the understanding of individual works of art does expand into an understanding of literature as a whole. Individual works of art lose nothing of their individuality when we realize that they are not a series of bottled feelings, to be uncorked and resmelt like perfumes. The person who has attained a mature understanding of literature, beyond both dilettantism and pedantry, understands it archetypally, whether he himself realizes this or not. I add this last clause because of certain features in modern literature that have, until very recently, discouraged critics from trying to understand it on the third level. One of these is the law of copyright, which prevents a writer from using another man’s work as the basis of his own, as Chaucer did. This, by exaggerating the uniqueness of the work of art, has developed a criticism of connoisseurship, which talks less about literature than about the pleasures of possessing books. Hence a division grows between the creative and the critical functions which could hardly get started in an age which understood the real meaning of literary convention. The importance of convention in literature is in facilitating the comprehension of it on the archetypal level. For instance, when Milton sat

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down to write a poem in memory of a friend of his named Edward King, the question he asked himself was not,“What can I find to say about Edward King?” but, “How do the conventions and traditions of poetry demand that this sort of situation should be handled?” Poetry demands, as Milton saw it, that the elements of his theme should be assimilated to their archetypes. Edward King is, first, a dead man, who according to Christian doctrine will rise again. Hence the poem will not be about King, but about his archetype, Adonis, the dying and rising god, called Lycidas in Milton’s poem. This archetype prescribes the convention of the pastoral elegy, which historically developed out of the Adonis lament. King was also a poet and a priest, and is thus similarly linked with the appropriate archetypes Orpheus and Peter. All of these are contained in the figure of Christ, the archetype of King as an immortal soul. The poem urgently demands the kind of criticism that will absorb it into the study of literature as a whole, and this critical activity is expected to begin immediately, with the cultivated reader. This gives us a situation more like that of mathematics or science today, where the work of creative genius is critically assimilated to the whole subject so quickly that one hardly notices the difference between the two kinds of activity. An even closer connection between creation and criticism may be seen in Dante’s Convivio. The tropological level, therefore, is the archetypal level, or the mythical level, for I do not see any way of distinguishing archetype in this sense from myth. In all the kicking around that this latter term has had in current criticism, one may notice, as usual, three main types of what are generally called myths: the narrative myth (creation myth, death and resurrection myth), the image myth, including the myth of the god, or archetypal human character, and the conceptual myth. But the third level is traditionally the moral level as well, and we may inquire here what sense can be given to this word in criticism. There is clearly no use looking for direct correlations of aesthetic and ethical standards: one of the first laws of literature is that morally the lion lies down with the lamb. Bunyan and Rochester, Jane Austen and Huysmans, Shakespeare’s sublimity and Shakespeare’s obscenity, all belong together. Morality, like truth, is not within literature at all, and to derive moral values from it we must again approach it from outside. So far from being “moral” in any direct sense, the moral value of art seems actually to have something to do with the breaking down of customary moral reactions. This arises from the very nature of art as hypothetical.

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Morality is constantly tending to incorporate itself in a series of implied or expressed affirmations. But as soon as morality has decided one thing, the poet is apt to hypothesize another; and, as with truth, the affirmation limits, and the hypothesis seems to have something to do with emancipation or deliverance from the affirmation even if we believe the affirmation to be true or good. The moral value of art is connected with the fact that it forms part of a “liberal” education, and the axiom underlying a liberal education is that something does get liberated, even from the knowledge of good and evil. This something is not the liberating of the individual from the social imperatives of truth and goodness, but his introduction into the free world of verbal hypothesis. If we compare tragedy in art with suffering in life, for instance, we can see that the containing hypothetical form of the art makes tragedy pleasurable, even when there is no denial whatsoever of the reality of suffering. Liberation here is not escape, but an increase of intelligibility, a release of the powers of words. The moral level is the social level, for it is by virtue of its archetypes or myths that the work of art becomes the focus of a community. Factual verbal structures help to emancipate the human mind from the pragmatic and compulsory rituals of animal existence by giving it a conscious vision of what it has to do and see. Literature takes its place in a second effort of emancipation which gives man a vision of the total range of his creative powers, and of his own world in relation to that total power. We express one-third of the freedom of this vision, in which all the delight and instruction of art are fulfilled, when we speak of freedom of thought. The Fourth Level It is a simple axiom in the sciences that a “new” discovery merely articulates what was already latent in the order of nature. What we have just said should illustrate something of the vulgarity of the notion that a poet sits down with some blank paper and produces a new poem in a special act of creation ex nihilo. The poet’s new poem merely articulates what was already latent in the order of words, and the assumption of a single order of words is as fundamental to the poet as the assumption of a single order of nature is to the natural scientist. The difficulty in understanding this point arises from the confusion of language with dictionary language, and of literature with the bibliography of literature. Language in a human mind is not a list of words with their customary

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meanings attached, but a single interlocking structure, one’s total power of expressing oneself. Literature is the objective counterpart of this, a total form of verbal expression which is recreated in miniature whenever a new poem is written. Literary education, which assimilates separate works into archetypes or myths, leads us toward an intuition of this total form. And just as physics can be looked at from one point of view as a set of inferences from the assumption of a physical universe, so literature may similarly be regarded as a set of inferences from the assumption of a verbal universe. This verbal universe is that total vision of creative power which we met at the end of the third level, and which is not a diffused but a single vision, and to which every work of literature in the world owes everything it has of wonder and of glory. The assumption in the word “universe,” whether applied to physics or to literature, is not that these subjects are descriptive of total existence, but simply that they are in themselves totally intelligible. No one can know the whole of physics at once, but physics would not be a coherent subject unless this were theoretically possible. The argument of Aristotle’s Physics, which treats physics as the study of motion in nature, leads inexorably to the conception of an unmoved mover at the circumference of the world. In itself this is merely the postulate that the total form of physics is the physical universe. If Christian theology takes physics to be descriptive of an ultra-physical reality or activity, and proceeds to identify this unmoved first mover with an existent God, that is the business of Christian theology: physics as physics will be unaffected by it. The assumption of a verbal universe similarly leads to the conception of an unspeakable first word at its circumference. This in itself is merely the postulate that literature is totally intelligible. If Christian theology identifies this first word with the Word of God or person of Christ, and says that the vision of total human creative power is divine as well as human, the literary critic, as such, is not concerned either to support or to refute the identification. In Dante’s day the case was different. The whole idea of four levels had originally come from theology, and had been worked out in connection with the link between the Word of God and the Bible. For Dante, therefore, the anagogic level of total intelligibility was identical with the unfallen world of Christianity. Even Sidney, when he says “nature’s world is brazen; the poets only deliver a golden,”5 is probably thinking of two existent worlds, as he obviously does not mean that poetry gilds nature. In our own day, when Joyce speaks of the final claritas or intuition

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of the total form of art, he uses the theological term “epiphany,” though without committing himself to the theological affirmations involved. Still, the religious annexation of the anagogic level of literature is a historical fact. For us the immediate problem is to study the archetypes or myths of literature as parts of a whole, which we can hardly do without the help of the integrations of myth which have been made in the higher religions and incorporated in their scriptures and sacred books. Thus the Bible becomes, for the literary critic, an example of the literary form of the scriptures, which unites narrative myths (creation, redemption, etc.), image myths (the city, the garden, the personal God), and conceptual myths. The study of scripture as a certain type of hypothetical verbal structure would give point and direction to the current interest in myths and archetypes, which latter, it should be said, cannot be studied as separable content, but only as part of an analysis of literary form. This in turn would give point and direction to the allegorical criticism which is the main concern of the learned journals. And while the final insights into literature are unspeakable, and the fourth level is perhaps, like the first, largely outside the direct scope of criticism, the climbing of this four-storey mountain of meaning does not lead simply to an O altitudo! but to a panoramic view of the surrounding fields of cultivation.

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11 A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres Autumn 1951

From The Kenyon Review, 13 (Autumn 1951): 543–62. Incorporated into the “Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres,” of AC. Frye worked on this paper somewhat restlessly in January 1951 during his sabbatical sojourn at Harvard. “At present I find reading easier than writing, though next week I hope to finish my drama article. I want first of all to read what I call the ‘secondary’ Aristotle: Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric & Poetics . . . I seem to be at the point of looking down on literature from a height, no longer working inside it” (D, 455–6).

The opening words of Aristotle’s Poetics, in the Bywater translation, are as follows: Our subject being poetry, I propose to speak not only of the art in general but also of its species and their respective capacities; of the structure of plot required for a good poem; of the number and nature of the constituent parts of a poem; and likewise of any other matters in the same line of inquiry. Let us follow the natural order and begin with the primary facts.

This gives us a broad deductive program of criticism which approaches literature as biology approaches a system of organisms. We move from the classification of genera and species to the study of texture, from formal to rhetorical criticism. Applied to the drama, we may say that the first phase of the criticism of drama is the study of the structure of drama. The second phase is the study of its species, such as tragedy and comedy. The third phase is the study of historical varieties, such as the drama of the Elizabethan stage, and of the conventions peculiar to those

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varieties. From there we come down to the rhetorical analysis of individual writers and plays, and at the foundation we have the work of those concerned with literal recreation, the actor, designer, producer, and the editor who establishes the text. At present, we have, in addition to the editors and theatrical workers, a lively and growing body of rhetorical critics and an impressive apparatus of Geschichtswissenschaft [the science of history]. I am unable to explain why critics have shown so little interest in the first two stages as to have hardly budged an inch from Aristotle himself. Aristotle shows a good deal of respect both for literary history and for rhetoric, but he does not identify either with “poetics,” which for him clearly begins with establishing categories. After two thousand years of post-Aristotelian dramatic activity, one might almost expect that Aristotle’s views on dramatic form, like his views on the generation of animals, would be reexamined in the light of fresh evidence. But we still tend to assume that his tragedy and comedy exhaust the categories of drama, that each is the half of drama that is not the other. So when we come to deal with forms like the masque, opera, ballet, puppet play, mystery play, morality, commedia dell’arte, and Zauberspiel,1 we find ourselves in the position of the Renaissance doctors who refused to treat syphilis because Galen said nothing about it. Generic criticism is the second stage of criticism, and differs from structural criticism, the first stage, which is concerned with such matters as myth and ritual. It separates the structural from the historical critic, and enables the former to get clear of the tyranny of historical categories. The structural critic does not need to establish a solid historical tradition all the way from prehistoric fertility rites to the nature myth in The Winter’s Tale, or take sides in the quarrel of Classical scholars over the ritual origin of Greek drama: he is concerned only with the ritual and mythical patterns which are actually in the plays, however they got there. The study of genres, which takes all drama as contemporary and deals with categories prior to historical varieties (tragedy being a bigger thing than Greek or Elizabethan tragedy) should help to disentangle problems of structure from problems of origin. Of the six factors of drama listed by Aristotle, three are objective: narrative (mythos), characters (ethe), and meaning (dianoia); the other three, music, diction, and scenery, are instrumental. Aristotle’s conception of mimesis is predominantly based on verbal drama, and what his theory mainly lacks is an organic place for drama which is spectacular

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rather than mimetic, and in which music and scenery are of essential importance. In any case verbal drama, whether tragic or comic, has clearly developed a long way from the primitive idea of drama, which is to present a powerful sensational focus for a community. The scriptural plays of the Middle Ages are primitive in this sense: they present to the audience a myth already familiar to and significant for that audience, and they are designed to remind the audience of their communal possession of this myth. The scriptural play is a form of a spectacular dramatic genre which we may provisionally call a “myth play.” It is a somewhat negative and receptive form, and takes on the mood of the myth it represents. The crucifixion play in the Towneley cycle is tragic because the Crucifixion is; but it is not a tragedy in the sense that Othello is a tragedy. It does not, that is, make a tragic point; it simply presents the story because it is familiar and significant. It would be nonsense to apply such tragic conceptions as hubris to the figure of Christ in that play, and while pity and terror are raised, they remain attached to the subject, and there is no catharsis of them. The characteristic mood and resolution of the myth play are pensive, and pensiveness implies a continuing imaginative subjection to the story. The myth play emphasizes dramatically the symbol of spiritual and corporeal communion. The scriptural plays themselves were associated with the festival of Corpus Christi, and Calderon’s religious plays are explicitly autos sacramentales or Eucharist plays. The appeal of the myth play is a curious mixture of the popular and the esoteric: it is popular for its immediate audience, but those outside its circle have to make a conscious effort to appreciate it. In a controversial atmosphere it disappears, as it cannot deal with controversial issues unless it selects its audience. In view of the ambiguities attaching to the word “myth,” we shall speak of this genre henceforth as the auto. When a society’s religion is mythological rather than theological, when there is no clear-cut distinction between gods and heroes, or between the ideals of the nobility and the priesthood, the auto may present a legend which is secular and sacred at once. An example is the No drama of Japan, which with its unification of chivalric and other-worldly symbols and its dreamy un-tragic, un-comic mood so strongly attracted Yeats. It is interesting to see how Yeats, both in his theory of the anima mundi and in his desire to get his play as physically close to the audience as possible, reverts to the archaic idea of corporal communion. In Greek drama too there is no sharp boundary line. But in Christian societies we can see

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glimpses of a secular auto, a romantic drama presenting the exploits of a hero, which is closely related to tragedy, the end of a hero’s exploit being eventually his death, but which in itself is neither tragic nor comic, as it is primarily spectacular. Tamburlaine is such a play: there the relation between the hero’s hubris and his death is more casual than causal. This genre has had varying luck: much more in Spain, for instance, than in France, where the establishing of tragedy was part of an intellectual revolution. The two major attempts in France to move tragedy back towards heroic romance, Le Cid and Hernani,2 each precipitated a big row. In Germany, on the other hand, it is clear that the actual genre of many plays by Goethe and Schiller is the heroic romance, however much affected they have been by the prestige of tragedy. In Wagner, who expands the heroic form all the way back to a sacramental drama of gods, the symbol of communion again occupies a conspicuous place, negatively in Tristan, positively in Parsifal. In proportion as it moves closer to tragedy and further from the sacred auto, drama tends to make less use of music. If we look at the earliest extant play of Aeschylus, The Suppliants, we can see that close behind it is a predominantly musical structure of which the modern counterpart would normally be the oratorio, Wagner’s operas being perhaps describable as fermented oratorios. In Renaissance England the audience was too bourgeois for a chivalric drama to get firmly established, and the Elizabethan secular auto eventually became the history play. With the history we move from spectacle to mimesis, and the symbols of communion become much attenuated, though still there. The central theme is the unifying of the nation and the binding of the audience into the myth as the inheritors of that unity, set over against the disasters of civil war and weak leadership. One may even recognize a secular Eucharist symbol in the red and white rose, just as one may recognize in the plays that end by pointing to Elizabeth a secular counterpart of a mystery play of the Virgin. But the emphasis and characteristic resolution of the history play are in terms of continuity and the closing up both of tragic catastrophe and (as in the case of Falstaff) of the comic festival. One may compare Shaw’s “chronicle play” of Saint Joan, where the end of the play is a tragedy, followed by an epilogue in which the rejection of Joan is, like the rejection of Falstaff, historical, suggesting continuity rather than a rounded finish. The history merges so gradually into tragedy that we often cannot be sure when communion has turned into catharsis. Richard II and Richard III are tragedies insofar as they resolve on those defeated kings; they are

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histories insofar as they resolve on Bolingbroke and Richmond, and the most one can say is that they lean towards history. Hamlet and Macbeth lean towards tragedy, but Fortinbras and Macduff, the continuing characters, indicate the historical element in the tragic resolution. There seems to be a far less direct connection between history and comedy: the comic scenes in the histories are, so to speak, subversive. Henry V ends in triumph and marriage, but an action that kills Falstaff, hangs Bardolph, and debases Pistol is not related to comedy in the way that Richard II is related to tragedy. But tragic myths are significant in shape as well as social function, as tragedy selects only myths that end in catastrophe, or near it. Tragedy derives from the auto its central heroic figure, but the association of heroism with downfall is due to the presence of another element, an element which, when we isolate it, we call irony. The nearer tragedy is to the heroic play, the more we feel the inevitable rightness of the catastrophe; the nearer it is to irony, the more we feel the incongruous wrongness of it. These two attitudes are complementary: the feeling of rightness produces terror and the feeling of wrongness pity. The nearer the tragedy is to auto, the more closely associated the hero is with divinity; the nearer to irony, the more human the hero is, and the more the catastrophe appears to be a social rather than a cosmological event. Elizabethan tragedy shows a historical development from Marlowe’s demigods in a social ether to Webster’s analyses of a sick society; but Greek tragedy, which never broke completely from the auto, never developed a social form, though there are tendencies to it in Euripides. Tragedy, as a synthesis of heroic auto and irony, seems to be primarily a vision of law. On one level the operation of law appears simply as revenge, the neutralization of violence by counter-violence. Revenge, however, is clearly not the whole of tragedy, even when it appears as the vengeance of gods or the working of an external nemesis. The real necessity in tragedy is within existence: the tragic hero disturbs a balance which somehow or other must right itself. The Oresteia ends with the revenge of the Furies on Orestes giving place to a legal contract in which gods, men, and nature are all involved. This does not turn the action into a comedy, but fulfils and emancipates the tragic version. It is this legal synthesis, the order inherent in things, which is violated by the tragic hero. Aristotle, on the other side of Euripides, sees the violation as deliberate act (proairesis), and its nemesis as ethically, even physically intelligible. But we come nearer the heart of tragedy when the catastro-

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phe is seen, not as a consequence of what one has done, but as the end of what one is. The Christian original sin, the medieval wheel of fortune, the existentialist’s “dread” are all attempts to express the tragic situation as primary and uncaused, as a condition and not an act, and such ideas bring us closer than Aristotle’s flaw (hamartia) does to the unconscious crime of Oedipus, the unjust death of Cordelia, or the undeserved suffering of Job. When we pass beyond hamartia, the tragic version of law shows itself to be a vision of the supremacy of the event (mythos). As tragedy moves over towards irony, the sense of inevitable event begins to fade out, and the sources of catastrophe come into view. In irony catastrophe is either arbitrary and meaningless, the impact of an unconscious (in the pathetic fallacy malignant) world on conscious man, or the result of more or less definable social and psychological forces. Tragedy’s “this must be” becomes irony’s “this at least is,” a concentration on the foreground facts and a rejection of mythical superstructures. Thus the ironic drama is a vision of what in theology is called the fallen world, of simple humanity, man as natural man and in conflict with both human and non-human nature. In Shakespeare’s most completely ironic play, Troilus and Cressida, the sense of the fallen world is very acute: this is why we get the long harangues of Ulysses on the two primary facts of the fallen world, time and the chain of being. In nineteenth-century drama the tragic vision is practically identical with the ironic one, and hence nineteenth-century tragedies tend to be either Schicksal [destiny, fortune] dramas dealing with the arbitrary ironies of fate, or (clearly the more rewarding form) studies of the frustrating and smothering of human activity by the combined pressure of a reactionary society without and a disorganized soul within. Such irony is difficult to sustain in the theatre because it tends towards a stasis of action. In those parts of Chekhov, notably the last act of The Three Sisters, where the characters one by one withdraw from each other into their subjective prison cells, we are coming about as close to pure irony as the stage can get. Of Shakespeare’s major tragedies, Hamlet is marked as the nearest to irony by the fact that its theme is the breakdown of a normal tragic action. In Lear the main tragic theme has an ironic one in parallel counterpoint, Gloucester’s blinded vision of gods who kill men for sport being a Schicksal vision rather than a centrally tragic one. The ironic play passes through a dead centre of complete realism, a pure mime representing human life without comment and without imposing any sort of dramatic form beyond what is required for simple

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exhibition. This idolatrous form of mimesis is rare, but the thin line of its tradition can be traced from Classical mime-writers like Herodas to their tranche-de-vie descendants in recent times. The mime is somewhat commoner as an individual performance, and outside the theatre, the Browning monodrama is a logical development of the isolating and soliloquizing tendencies of ironic conflict. In the theatre we usually find that the spectacle of “all too human” life is either oppressive or ridiculous, and that it tends to pass directly from one to the other. Irony, then, as it moves away from tragedy, begins to merge into comedy. Ironic comedy, the dramatic form of satire, presents us with a scoundrelly or foolish society enough like our own to pass as “the way of the world.” The fact that the audience finds the society ridiculous implies moral judgment, but if the comedy is very ironic, there will be no characters in it to represent the audience’s attitude. As soon as we find sympathetic or even neutral characters in a comedy, the action begins to show a conflict between these characters and the ridiculous ones. Such a moral conflict brings us into the more familiar comic area where we have a group of ridiculous characters outwitted by another group, the core of which is usually a pair of young lovers, so that the action progresses towards the desirable goal or the “happy ending.” This is the pattern of comedy as we have it in the Menandrine3 tradition, in Terence, Ben Jonson, Molière, and their derivatives. We usually start with a character, or group of characters, who are what Ben Jonson calls “humours,” bound to certain predictable ritual patterns of behaviour. At the beginning of the play they are in control of the play’s society, and in conflict with the desires of the lovers. Their defeat is essential to the happy ending, and indicates what the constituents of a happy ending are. One element is the fulfilment of sexual love: it is hardly possible to imagine a non-satiric comedy without a central love interest. Another is a social judgment, the nature of which requires careful examining. The thing that makes the comic humour ridiculous is his lack of freedom: if he is for instance a miser, he can never meet any situation in anything but a miserly fashion. This lack of freedom is self-imposed, otherwise it would be tragic or pathetic. As the play proceeds, the young man moves nearer to the young woman, and eventually (as near the end as possible) the humours and blocking characters are reconciled or forced to submit to the hero’s—and the audience’s—desire. Thus a new society crystallizes around the hero’s triumph, and the moment that this new society appears is the moment of the comic resolution. Its appearance is

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regularly symbolized by some sort of party, a wedding, a banquet, or a dance; and this party manifests the social order that the audience prefers to the humours. The fact that sexual fulfilment is at the centre of this desirable social order is not perhaps in great need of explanation. The new society is liberal and pragmatic: it tolerates a wide variety of individuals, and its natural tendency is to reconcile the humours and include them in the final festivity. By its toleration the humour is enabled to get rid of his ritual compulsions. Thus in The Brothers of Terence, Demea, a harsh father, is contrasted with his brother Micio, who is indulgent. Micio being more liberal, he leads the way to the comic resolution, and converts Demea, but then Demea points out the indolence inspiring a good deal of Micio’s liberality, and releases him from a complementary humorous bondage. In comedy the pragmatically free society triumphs over all attempts to force standard patterns of behaviour on it. The antagonism between the spirit of comedy and dogmatic morality or philosophical Utopias is consistent from Aristophanes to the present day. Whenever the triumphant moral standard is explicit, the humours appear villainous rather than ridiculous, and we have that curiously flat and dead kind of comedy, humourless both in the Jonsonian sense and our own, which we know as melodrama. The melodrama has a great variety of popular by-forms, ranging from the thriller to the comédie larmoyante, but it seems not to have attracted a major dramatist. It does not follow that comedy is naturally anarchic or revolutionary, or that it is a simple repudiation of the tragic vision of law. The new society which comes to birth at the end of the play is not new to the audience: it only manifests what they have recognized all along to be the proper state of affairs. The motto of comedy, and the principle of the happy ending, is “this should be.” But “this should be” is a moral judgment, though it is the morality of the “open society” that eludes all moral codes, and the new society of the comic hero represents the victory, not of a simple pleasure principle, but of an emerging social dialectic. In the earliest extant comedy, The Acharnians of Aristophanes, the action of the hero, whose name is Dicaeopolis (“righteous city”), in making a personal peace with Sparta, celebrating the feast of Dionysus, and driving off all the humours who try to fill his life with war and misery, shows the social dialectic of comedy at least as clearly as it has ever been shown since. Thus, just as tragedy is a vision of the event or thing done, and just as irony is a vision of ethos, of the character individualized against his environment, so comedy is a vision of dianoia, of

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significance or meaning. And the meaning of drama is a social meaning. As an imitation of life, drama is, in terms of mythos, conflict; in terms of ethos, a representative image; in terms of dianoia, the final harmonic chord revealing the tonality under the narrative movement, it is community. In comedy events have to be sacrificed, however unplausibly, to the audience’s sense of what community should be. The further comedy moves from irony, the more it becomes what we here call ideal comedy, the vision not of the way of the world, but of what you will, life as you like it. Shakespeare, as these phrases show, is its great master: only in the problem comedies does he approach at all closely to the ironic form. In New Comedy the absurd character who blocks the hero’s desire is often the father, and it would not be difficult to trace the descent of most comic humours from a father-figure. Hence comedy often represents the defeat of the older generation by the younger one, or of the husband by the lover, which is psychologically much the same thing. But this simple antithetical structure, corresponding roughly to the revenge play in tragedy, does not express the deeper form of comedy, which is connected with the fact that the happy ending is the return of an undefined social ideal. In Aristophanes, when the resolution is not primarily ironic but in terms of what the author thinks proper (a point on which he rarely leaves us in doubt), the hero is normally an older man, who may be rejuvenated, as in The Knights, or released from a humour, as in The Wasps, but whose persistence through the comic action shows very clearly that the festive resolution expresses a meaning or dianoia that is anterior to the play. For the same reason The Tempest, where the theme of the ideal community is so prominent, polarizes its action around a younger and an older man, a lover and a benevolent teacher. The next step brings us to the extreme limit of comedy, the symposium, the structure of which is, as we should expect, clearest in Plato, whose Socrates is both teacher and lover, and whose vision moves towards an integration of society in a form like that of the symposium itself, the dialectic festivity which, as is explained in the opening of The Laws, is the controlling force that holds society together. It is easy to see that Plato’s dialogue form is dramatic and has affinities with comedy and mime; and while there is much in Plato’s thought that contradicts the spirit of comedy as we have outlined it, it is significant that he contradicts it directly, tries to kidnap it, so to speak. It seems almost a regular rule that the more he does this, the further he moves into pure exposition or dictatorial monologue: from a dramatic point of view the mere paralysis of irony.

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In our own day Bernard Shaw has tried much harder to keep the symposium in the theatre. His early manifesto, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, states that a play should be an intelligent discussion of a serious problem; and in his preface to Getting Married he remarks approvingly on the fact that it observes the unities of time and place. For comedy of Shaw’s type tends to a symposium form which occupies the same amount of time to pass on the stage that the audience consumes in watching it. However, Shaw discovered in practice that what emerges from the theatrical symposium is not a dialectic that compels to a course of action, but one that emancipates from formulated principles of conduct. The shape of such a comedy is very clear in the bright little sketch In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, where even the most highly developed human types, the saintly Fox and the philosophical Newton, are shown to be comic humours by the mere presence of other types of people. Yet the central symposium figure of the haranguing lover bulks formidably in Man and Superman, and even the renunciation of love for mathematics at the end of Back to Methusaleh is consistent with the symposium spirit. A traditional view of poetry, most familiar to us in Sidney’s Apology, sees it as intermediate between history and philosophy, its images combining the temporal events of the one with the timeless ideas of the other. We can now see that mimetic drama stretches from the history to the philosophy play (the act play and the scene play), with the mime, the pure image, halfway between. These three are specialized forms, cardinal points of drama rather than generic areas. But, as we have also seen, the whole mimetic area is only a part, a semicircle, let us say, of all drama. In the misty and unexplored region of the other semicircle of spectacular drama we have identified a quadrant that we have called the auto, and we have now to chart the fourth quadrant that lies between the auto and comedy, and establish the fourth cardinal point where they meet. When we think of the clutter of forms that belong here, we are strongly tempted to call our fourth area “miscellaneous” and let it go; but it is precisely here that we most need some new generic criticism. The further comedy moves from irony, and the more it rejoices in the free movement of its happy society, the more readily it takes to music and dancing. As music and scenery increase in importance, the ideal comedy crosses the boundary line of spectacular drama and becomes the form of the masque. In Shakespeare’s ideal comedies, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, the close affinity with the masque is not hard to see. The masque—or at least the kind of masque that is nearest to comedy, and which we shall here call the ideal masque—is still

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in the area of dianoia: it is usually a compliment to the audience, or an important member of it, and leads up to an idealization of the society represented by that audience. Its plots and characters are fairly stock, as they exist only in relation to the significance of the occasion. It thus differs from comedy in its more intimate attitude to the audience: there is more insistence on the connection between the audience and the community on the stage. The members of a masque are ordinarily disguised members of the audience, and there is a final gesture of surrender when the actors unmask and join the audience in a dance. The ideal masque is in fact a myth play like the auto, to which it is related much as comedy is to tragedy. It is designed to emphasize, not the ideals to be achieved by discipline or faith, but ideals which are desired or considered to be already possessed. Its settings are seldom remote from magic and fairyland, from Arcadias and visions of earthly Paradise. It uses gods freely, like the auto, but possessively, and without imaginative subjection. Its rather brittle and factitious quality is due to the fact that the society it compliments is normally identical with the ascendant class. The rather limited masque throws some light on the structure and characteristics of its two far more important and versatile neighbours. For the masque is flanked on one side by the musically organized drama which we call opera, and on the other by a scenically organized drama, which has now settled in the movie. Puppet-plays and the vast Chinese romances where, as in the movie, the audience enters and leaves unpredictably, are examples of pre-camera scenic masques. Both opera and movie are, like the masque, proverbial for lavish display, and part of the reason for it in the movie is that many movies are actually bourgeois myth plays, as half a dozen critics have suddenly and almost simultaneously discovered. The predominance of the private life of the actor in the imaginations of most moviegoers may perhaps have some analogy with the consciously assumed disguise of the masque. Opera and movie possess, unlike the masque, the power of producing spectacular imitations of mimetic drama. The opera can only do this by simplifying its musical organization, otherwise its dramatic structure will be blurred by the distortion of acting which the highly repetitive structure of music makes necessary. The movie similarly must simplify its spectacle. In proportion as it follows its natural bent for scenic organization, it reveals its affinities with other forms of scenic masque: with the puppet play in Chaplin and others, with the commedia dell’arte in recent Italian films, with the ballet and pantomime in musical comedies. When

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it succeeds in imitating a mimetic drama, the distinction between the two forms is not worth making, but the generic difference shows itself in other ways. Mimetic drama works towards an end which illuminates, by being logically connected with, the beginning: hence the parabola shape of the typical five-act mimetic structure. Aristotle calls this teleological quality in drama the discovery or recognition (anagnorisis): we have already touched on it in discussing comedy. Spectacular drama, on the other hand, is by nature processional, and tends to episodic and piecemeal discovery, as we can see in all forms of pure spectacle, from the circus parade to the revue. In the auto too, on the other side of spectacular drama, the same processional structure appears in the long continued stories of Shakespearean history and scriptural pageant. In the rotating performance and casual attendance of the movie, and the sequence of arias forcibly linked to dramatic structure by recitative in the opera, one can see the strong native tendency to linear movement in spectacular forms. The essential feature of the ideal masque is the exaltation of the audience, who form the goal of its procession. In the auto drama is at its most objective; the audience’s part is to accept the story without judgment. In tragedy there is judgment, but the source of the tragic discovery is still, so to speak, concealed on the other side of the stage; and whatever it is, whether anonymous or identified, it is stronger than the audience. In the ironic play, audience and drama confront each other directly; in the comedy the source of the discovery has moved across to the audience itself. The ideal masque places the audience in a position of superiority to discovery. The verbal action of Figaro is comic and that of Don Giovanni tragic; but in both cases the audience is exalted by the music above the reach of tragedy and comedy, and, though as profoundly moved as ever, is not emotionally involved with the discovery of plot or characters. It looks at the downfall of Don Juan as spectacular entertainment, much as the gods are supposed to look at the downfall of Ajax or Darius. The same sense of viewing the dramatic mimesis through a haze of spectacular exhilaration is also of central importance in the movie, as it is even more obviously in the puppet play from which the movie is chiefly descended. For our next step we must return to the masque proper. The further comedy moves from irony, the less social power is allowed to the humours. In the masque, where the ideal society is still more in the ascendant, the humours become degraded into the uncouth figures of the

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antimasque who rush in to interrupt the performance. Farce, being a non-mimetic form of comedy, has a natural place in the masque, though in the ideal masque its natural place is that of a rigorously controlled interlude. In The Tempest, a comedy so profound that it seems to draw the whole masque into itself, Stephano and Trinculo are comic humours and Caliban an antimasque figure, and the group shows the transition very clearly. The main theme of the masque involves gods, fairies, and personifications of virtues; the figures of the antimasque thus tend to become demonic, and dramatic characterization begins to split into an antithesis of virtue and vice, god and devil, fairy and monster. The tension between them partly accounts for the importance of the theme of magic in the masque. At the comic end this magic is held by the benevolent side, as in The Tempest; but as we move further away from comedy, the conflict becomes increasingly serious, and the antimasque figures less ridiculous and more sinister, possessed in their turn of powers of enchantment. This is the stage represented by Comus, which is very close to the open conflict of good and evil in the morality play. With the morality play we pass into another area of masque which we shall here call the archetypal masque, the prevailing form of most twentieth-century highbrow drama, at least in continental Europe, as well as of many experimental operas and unpopular movies. The ideal masque tends to individualize its audience by pointing to the central member of it: even the movie audience, sitting in the dark in small units (usually of two), is a relatively individualized one. A growing sense of loneliness is noticeable as we move away from comedy. The archetypal masque, like all forms of spectacular drama, tends to detach its settings from time and space, but instead of the Arcadias of the ideal masque, we find ourselves frequently in a sinister limbo, like the threshold of death in Everyman, the sealed underworld crypts of Maeterlinck, or the nightmares of the future in Expressionist plays. (The influence of the archetypal masque is strong enough to force otherwise straight comedies like those of Coward and Molnar into fetching their resolutions from the back of beyond, and I am informed that television drama, whose audience is still more isolated than that of the movie, also shows a strong hankering for lugubrious limbo fantasies.) As we get nearer the rationale of the form, we see that the auto symbol of communion in one body is reappearing, but in a psychological and subjective form, and without gods. The action of the archetypal masque takes place in a world of human types, which at its most concentrated becomes the interior of

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the human mind. This is explicit even in the old moralities, like Mankynd and The Castell of Perseveraunce, and at least implicit in a good deal of Maeterlinck and Pirandello. Naturally, with such a setting, characterization has to break down into elements and fragments of personality. This is why I call the form the archetypal masque, the archetype being Jung’s term for the aspects of the personality capable of dramatic projection. Whether Jung’s theory is good psychology, or democratic psychology, or better therapeutically than Freud, I do not know; and I could hardly care less. I know only that it is illuminating literary criticism, and that Jung’s persona and anima and counsellor and shadow throw a great deal of light on the characterization of modern allegorical, psychic, and expressionist dramas, with their circus barkers and wraith-like females and inscrutable sages and obsessed demons. The abstract entities of the morality play and the stock types of the commedia dell’arte (this latter representing one of the primitive roots of the genre) are similar constructions. A sense of confusion and fear accompanies the sense of loneliness: Maeterlinck’s early plays are almost dedicated to fear, and the constant undermining of the distinction between illusion and reality, as mental projections become physical bodies and vice versa, splits the action up into a kaleidoscopic chaos of reflecting mirrors. The mob scenes of German Expressionist plays and the mechanical fantasies of the apeks show the same disintegration at work in a social context. From the generic point of view, one of the most interesting archetypal plays is Andreev’s The Black Maskers, in which its authors saw reflected not only the destruction of an individual’s nobile castello, which is its explicit theme, but the whole social collapse of modern Russia. This play distinguishes two groups of dissociative elements of personality, one group connected with self-accusation and the other with the death wish, and it exhibits the human soul as a castle possessed by a legion of demons. It is evident that the further the archetypal masque gets from the ideal masque, the more clearly it reveals itself as the emancipated antimasque, a revel of satyrs who have got out of control. The progress of sophisticated drama appears to be towards an anagnorisis or recognition of the most primitive of all dramatic forms. At the far end of the archetypal masque, where it joins the auto, we reach the point indicated by Nietzsche as the point of the birth of tragedy, where the revel of satyrs impinges on the appearance of a commanding god, and Dionysus is brought into line with Apollo. We may

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call this fourth cardinal point of drama the epiphany, the dramatic apocalypse or separation of the divine and the demonic, a point directly opposite the mime, which presents the simply human mixture. The sacred auto and the archetypal masque together form a fourth area of drama, an era of communion which is the fulfilment of dianoia and the generating force of mythos. Its central point of epiphany is most familiar as the point at which the Book of Job, after describing a complete circuit from tragedy through symposium, finally ends. Here the two monsters Behemoth and Leviathan replace the more frequent demonic animals. The Classical critics, from Aristotle to Horace, were puzzled to understand why a disorganized ribald farce like the satyr play should be the source of tragedy, though they were clear that it was. In medieval drama, where the progression through sacred and heroic auto to tragedy is so much less foreshortened, the development is plainer. The most clearly epiphanic form of scriptural drama is the Harrowing of Hell play, which depicts the triumph of a divine redeemer over demonic resistance. The devils of that play are the Christian forms of figures very like the Greek satyrs, and dramatic groups generically very close to the satyrs are never far from any scriptural play that deals directly with Christ, whether tamed and awed as in the Secunda Pastorum, or triumphantly villainous, as in the crucifixion and Herod plays. And just as Greek tragedy retained and developed the satyr play, so Elizabethan tragedy retains a satyric counterpoint in its clown scenes and the farcical underplots of Faustus and many later tragedies. The same element provides those superb episodes of the porter in Macbeth, the grave-diggers in Hamlet, and the serpent-bearer in Antony and Cleopatra, which so baffled Classicallyminded critics who had forgotten about the satyr play. Perhaps we could make more dramatic sense out of Titus Andronicus if we could see it as an unharrowed hell, a satyr play of obscene and gibbering demons. The two nodes of the scriptural play are Christmas and Easter: the latter presents the triumphant god, the former the quiet virgin mother who gathers to herself the processional masque of the kings and shepherds. This figure is at the opposite end of the masque from the watching queen or countess of an ideal masque, with the virtuous but paralyzed Lady of Comus halfway between. A female figure symbolizing some kind of reconciling unity and order appears dimly at the end of the great panoramic masques of Faust and Peer Gynt, the “eternal feminine” of the former having some of its traditional links. Modern examples of the same epiphanic form range from the conventionally religious, such as

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Claudel’s Annunciation play,4 to the conventionally non-religious, such as Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen. This completes our conspectus of genres: it does not pretend to answer every conceivable “where would you put so-and-so?” question, but it attempts to add a few more letters to the critic’s hornbook, so that he will be able, generally speaking, to spell dog as well as cat. We may close with a final warning that generic criticism is not an attempt at classification or pigeon-holing, but at the systematic study of the formal causes of art.

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12 The Archetypes of Literature Winter 1951

From FI, 7–20. Originally published in The Kenyon Review, 13 (Winter 1951): 91–110, where it is no. 7 of “My Credo.” Reprinted in Chinese, in NFSEL, 79–96; in Myth and Method: Modern Theories of Fiction, ed. James E. Miller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 144–62; in Criticism: The Major Texts, enlarged ed., ed. Walter Jackson Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 601–9; in Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice, ed. John B. Vickery (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 87–97; in Modern Literary Criticism, 1900–1970, ed. Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 215–24; in An Introduction to Literary Criticism, ed. Laila Gross (New York: Capricorn Books, 1972), 326–40; in Dramatic Theory and Practice, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 897–901; in Wspo czensa teoria bada literackich za granic , ed. H. Markiewicz, trans. Apolonia Bejska (Krakow, 1972), 305–21; in The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982), 16–27; in two issues of The Strand [Victoria College, University of Toronto]: January 1974, 2–3, 6, with untitled preface by John Syrtash, and March 1973, with “Preface” by J[ohn] S[yrtash]; in Literary Theories in Praxis, ed. Shirley F. Stanton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); and in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David Richter (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 677–85, 2nd ed. (1998), 641–51; reprinted as “Arhetipovi Knjizevnosti,” trans. Nina ivan evi , in Knjizevnost [Belgrade] 37, nos. 4–5 (April–May 1982): 465–75; as “Az irolalom archetipusai” in A hermeneutika elmélete (Ikonológia és Müértel mezés 3), ed. Tibor Fabiny, trans. Katalin Fejér (Szeged: Attila József University, 1987), 545–64; as “Litteraturens arketyper” in Vagant [Oslo], no. 3 (1990): 41–5; and partially reprinted in Metodi di critica letteraria americana, ed. Marga Cottino–Jones

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(Palermo: Palumbo Editore, 1973), 96–101. Reprinted as a separate monograph entitled Bungaku no Genkei, trans. Toshitada Iketani (Nagoya: Nagoya eibei gendaishi kenkyu–kai [Nagoya Society for the Study of Contemporary British and American Poetry], 1974), 12 pp. Incorporated into the “Second Essay” of AC. Of all Frye’s essays in this volume, it is this one for which the writing is the best documented. On 23 June 1950, just before he left for his Harvard sabbatical, Frye agreed to do a paper for The Kenyon Review, postponing one on “the form of poetry,” which he in fact never did write. He mapped out the paper two days later, dismissing the need to keep the argument clear of his anticipated English Institute paper, “Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype,” which he was working on at the same time (in addition to a paper on Shaw). The outline concludes firmly, “four forms of ritual produce the four forms of drama, and the four forms of myth the four types of prose fiction, or at least so I devoutly hope” (D, 389), and despite a few uncertainties, when he settled down at Harvard to fill it out he finished the paper by the end of July though he was constantly interrupted by visitors. “I think I may as well come out flat-footed for calling literary criticism a science and go on from there,” he wrote, revising his map as he went on to produce the three-part structure of the final paper (D, 409–10). Reflecting on the experience in August as he struggled with the Blake paper (“like wading through glue”), Frye wrote that it had had “the excitement of discovery about it nearly all the way—it kept surprising me by what it turned up and it pretty well tore the balls out of my next book” (D, 428–9). And so it did; “The Archetypes of Literature” is the most anthologized of all Frye’s essays, and stands as a brilliant example of its critical moment, while looking both back to Frye’s formation as a critic and forward to his later work.

Every organized body of knowledge can be learned progressively; and experience shows that there is also something progressive about the learning of literature. Our opening sentence has already got us into a semantic difficulty. Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not that he is learning nature. Art, like nature, is the subject of a systematic study, and has to be distinguished from the study itself, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to “learn literature”: one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature. Similarly, the difficulty often felt in “teaching literature” arises from the fact that it cannot be done: the criticism of literature is all that can be directly

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taught. So while no one expects literature itself to behave like a science, there is surely no reason why criticism, as a systematic and organized study, should not be, at least partly, a science. Not a “pure” or “exact” science, perhaps, but these phrases form part of a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us. Criticism deals with the arts and may well be something of an art itself, but it does not follow that it must be unsystematic. If it is to be related to the sciences too, it does not follow that it must be deprived of the graces of culture. Certainly criticism as we find it in learned journals and scholarly monographs has every characteristic of a science. Evidence is examined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically; fields are investigated scientifically; texts are edited scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure; so is phonetics; so is philology. And yet in studying this kind of critical science the student becomes aware of a centrifugal movement carrying him away from literature. He finds that literature is the central division of the “humanities,” flanked on one side by history and on the other by philosophy. Criticism so far ranks only as a subdivision of literature; and hence, for the systematic mental organization of the subject, the student has to turn to the conceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the philosopher for ideas. Even the more centrally placed critical sciences, such as textual editing, seem to be part of a “background” that recedes into history or some other non-literary field. The thought suggests itself that the ancillary critical disciplines may be related to a central expanding pattern of systematic comprehension which has not yet been established, but which, if it were established, would prevent them from being centrifugal. If such a pattern exists, then criticism would be to art what philosophy is to wisdom and history to action. Most of the central area of criticism is at present, and doubtless always will be, the area of commentary. But the commentators have little sense, unlike the researchers, of being contained within some sort of scientific discipline: they are chiefly engaged, in the words of the gospel hymn, in brightening the corner where they are.1 If we attempt to get a more comprehensive idea of what criticism is about, we find ourselves wandering over quaking bogs of generalities, judicious pronouncements of value, reflective comments, perorations to works of research, and other consequences of taking the large view. But this part of the critical field is so full of pseudo-propositions, sonorous nonsense that contains no truth and no falsehood, that it obviously exists only because criticism, like nature, prefers a waste space to an empty one.

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The term “pseudo-proposition” may imply some sort of logical positivist attitude on my own part. But I would not confuse the significant proposition with the factual one; nor should I consider it advisable to muddle the study of literature with a schizophrenic dichotomy between subjective-emotional and objective-descriptive aspects of meaning, considering that in order to produce any literary meaning at all one has to ignore this dichotomy. I say only that the principles by which one can distinguish a significant from a meaningless statement in criticism are not clearly defined. Our first step, therefore, is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism: that is, talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowledge. Casual value judgments belong not to criticism but to the history of taste, and reflect, at best, only the social and psychological compulsions which prompted their utterance. All judgments in which the values are not based on literary experience but are sentimental or derived from religious or political prejudice may be regarded as casual. Sentimental judgments are usually based either on nonexistent categories or antitheses (“Shakespeare studied life, Milton books”) or on a visceral reaction to the writer’s personality. The literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange is pseudocriticism.2 That wealthy investor Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish. This sort of thing cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure-class conversation. We next meet a more serious group of critics who say: the foreground of criticism is the impact of literature on the reader. Let us, then, keep the study of literature centripetal, and base the learning process on a structural analysis of the literary work itself. The texture of any great work of art is complex and ambiguous, and in unravelling the complexities we may take in as much history and philosophy as we please, if the subject of our study remains at the centre. If it does not, we may find that in our anxiety to write about literature we have forgotten how to read it. The only weakness in this approach is that it is conceived primarily as the antithesis of centrifugal or “background” criticism, and so lands us in a somewhat unreal dilemma, like the conflict of internal and external relations in philosophy. Antitheses are usually resolved, not by picking one side and refuting the other, or by making eclectic choices between them, but by trying to get past the antithetical way of stating the prob-

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lem. It is right that the first effort of critical apprehension should take the form of a rhetorical or structural analysis of a work of art. But a purely structural approach has the same limitation in criticism that it has in biology. In itself it is simply a discrete series of analyses based on the mere existence of the literary structure, without developing any explanation of how the structure came to be what it was and what its nearest relatives are. Structural analysis brings rhetoric back to criticism, but we need a new poetics as well, and the attempt to construct a new poetics out of rhetoric alone can hardly avoid a mere complication of rhetorical terms into a sterile jargon. I suggest that what is at present missing from literary criticism is a co-ordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole. Such a principle, though it would retain the centripetal perspective of structural analysis, would try to give the same perspective to other kinds of criticism too. The first postulate of this hypothesis is the same as that of any science: the assumption of total coherence. The assumption refers to the science, not to what it deals with. A belief in an order of nature is an inference from the intelligibility of the natural sciences; and if the natural sciences ever completely demonstrated the order of nature they would presumably exhaust their subject. Criticism, as a science, is totally intelligible; literature, as the subject of a science, is, so far as we know, an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries, and would be even if new works of literature ceased to be written. If so, then the search for a limiting principle in literature in order to discourage the development of criticism is mistaken. The assertion that the critic should not look for more in a poem than the poet may safely be assumed to have been conscious of putting there is a common form of what may be called the fallacy of premature teleology. It corresponds to the assertion that a natural phenomenon is as it is because Providence in its inscrutable wisdom made it so. Simple as the assumption appears, it takes a long time for a science to discover that it is in fact a totally intelligible body of knowledge. Until it makes this discovery it has not been born as an individual science, but remains an embryo within the body of some other subject. The birth of physics from “natural philosophy” and of sociology from “moral philosophy” will illustrate the process. It is also very approximately true that the modern sciences have developed in the order of their closeness to mathematics. Thus physics and astronomy assumed their modern

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form in the Renaissance, chemistry in the eighteenth century, biology in the nineteenth, and the social sciences in the twentieth. If systematic criticism, then, is developing only in our day, the fact is at least not an anachronism. We are now looking for classifying principles lying in an area between two points that we have fixed. The first of these is the preliminary effort of criticism, the structural analysis of the work of art. The second is the assumption that there is such a subject as criticism, and that it makes, or could make, complete sense. We may next proceed inductively from structural analysis, associating the data we collect and trying to see larger patterns in them. Or we may proceed deductively, with the consequences that follow from postulating the unity of criticism. It is clear, of course, that neither procedure will work indefinitely without correction from the other. Pure induction will get us lost in haphazard guessing; pure deduction will lead to inflexible and over-simplified pigeon-holing. Let us now attempt a few tentative steps in each direction, beginning with the inductive one. II The unity of a work of art, the basis of structural analysis, has not been produced solely by the unconditioned will of the artist, for the artist is only its efficient cause: it has form, and consequently a formal cause. The fact that revision is possible, that the poet makes changes not because he likes them better but because they are better, means that poems, like poets, are born and not made. The poet’s task is to deliver the poem in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations, his desire for self-expression, and all the other navel-strings and feeding tubes of his ego. The critic takes over where the poet leaves off, and criticism can hardly do without a kind of literary psychology connecting the poet with the poem. Part of this may be a psychological study of the poet, though this is useful chiefly in analysing the failures in his expression, the things in him which are still attached to his work. More important is the fact that every poet has his private mythology, his own spectroscopic band or peculiar formation of symbols, of much of which he is quite unconscious. In works with characters of their own, such as dramas and novels, the same psychological analysis may be extended to the interplay of characters, though of course

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literary psychology would analyse the behaviour of such characters only in relation to literary convention. There is still before us the problem of the formal cause of the poem, a problem deeply involved with the question of genres. We cannot say much about genres, for criticism does not know much about them. A good many critical efforts to grapple with such words as “novel” or “epic” are chiefly interesting as examples of the psychology of rumour. Two conceptions of the genre, however, are obviously fallacious, and as they are opposite extremes, the truth must lie somewhere between them. One is the pseudo-Platonic conception of genres as existing prior to and independently of creation, which confuses them with mere conventions of form like the sonnet. The other is that pseudo-biological conception of them as evolving species which turns up in so many surveys of the development of this or that form. We next inquire for the origin of the genre, and turn first of all to the social conditions and cultural demands which produced it—in other words to the material cause of the work of art. This leads us into literary history, which differs from ordinary history in that its containing categories, “Gothic,” “Baroque,” “Romantic,” and the like are cultural categories, of little use to the ordinary historian. Most literary history does not get as far as these categories, but even so we know more about it than about most kinds of critical scholarship. The historian treats literature and philosophy historically; the philosopher treats history and literature philosophically; and the so-called history of ideas approach marks the beginning of an attempt to treat history and philosophy from the point of view of an autonomous criticism. But still we feel that there is something missing. We say that every poet has his own peculiar formation of images. But when so many poets use so many of the same images, surely there are much bigger critical problems involved than biographical ones. As Mr. Auden’s brilliant essay The Enchafèd Flood shows, an important symbol like the sea cannot remain within the poetry of Shelley or Keats or Coleridge: it is bound to expand over many poets into an archetypal symbol of literature. And if the genre has a historical origin, why does the genre of drama emerge from medieval religion in a way so strikingly similar to the way it emerged from Greek religion centuries before? This is a problem of structure rather than origin, and suggests that there may be archetypes of genres as well as of images. It is clear that criticism cannot be systematic unless there is a quality in

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literature which enables it to be so, an order of words corresponding to the order of nature in the natural sciences. An archetype should be not only a unifying category of criticism, but itself a part of a total form, and it leads us at once to the question of what sort of total form criticism can see in literature. Our survey of critical techniques has taken us as far as literary history. Total literary history moves from the primitive to the sophisticated, and here we glimpse the possibility of seeing literature as a complication of a relatively restricted and simple group of formulas that can be studied in primitive culture. If so, then the search for archetypes is a kind of literary anthropology, concerned with the way that literature is informed by pre-literary categories such as ritual, myth, and folk tale. We next realize that the relation between these categories and literature is by no means purely one of descent, as we find them reappearing in the greatest classics—in fact there seems to be a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to them. This coincides with a feeling that we have all had: that the study of mediocre works of art, however energetic, obstinately remains a random and peripheral form of critical experience, whereas the profound masterpiece seems to draw us to a point at which we can see an enormous number of converging patterns of significance. Here we begin to wonder if we cannot see literature, not only as complicating itself in time, but as spread out in conceptual space from some unseen centre. This inductive movement towards the archetype is a process of backing up, as it were, from structural analysis, as we back up from a painting if we want to see composition instead of brushwork. In the foreground of the grave-digger scene in Hamlet, for instance, is an intricate verbal texture, ranging from the puns of the first clown to the danse macabre of the Yorick soliloquy, which we study in the printed text. One step back, and we are in the Wilson Knight and Spurgeon group of critics, listening to the steady rain of images of corruption and decay. Here too, as the sense of the place of this scene in the whole play begins to dawn on us, we are in the network of psychological relationships which were the main interest of Bradley. But after all, we say, we are forgetting the genre: Hamlet is a play, and an Elizabethan play. So we take another step back into the Stoll and Shaw group and see the scene conventionally as part of its dramatic context. One step more, and we can begin to glimpse the archetype of the scene, as the hero’s Liebestod and first unequivocal declaration of his love, his struggle with Laertes and the sealing of his own fate, and the sudden sobering of his mood that marks the transition

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to the final scene, all take shape around a leap into and return from the grave that has so weirdly yawned open on the stage. At each stage of understanding this scene we are dependent on a certain kind of scholarly organization. We need first an editor to clean up the text for us, then the rhetorician and philologist, then the literary psychologist. We cannot study the genre without the help of the literary social historian, the literary philosopher, and the student of the “history of ideas,” and for the archetype we need a literary anthropologist. But now that we have got our central pattern of criticism established, all these interests are seen as converging on literary criticism instead of receding from it into psychology and history and the rest. In particular, the literary anthropologist who chases the source of the Hamlet legend from the pre-Shakespeare play to Saxo, and from Saxo to nature myths, is not running away from Shakespeare: he is drawing closer to the archetypal form which Shakespeare recreated. A minor result of our new perspective is that contradictions among critics, and assertions that this and not that critical approach is the right one, show a remarkable tendency to dissolve into unreality. Let us now see what we can get from the deductive end. III Some arts move in time, like music; others are presented in space, like painting. In both cases the organizing principle is recurrence, which is called rhythm when it is temporal and pattern when it is spatial. Thus we speak of the rhythm of music and the pattern of painting; but later, to show off our sophistication, we may begin to speak of the rhythm of painting and the pattern of music. In other words, all arts may be conceived both temporally and spatially. The score of a musical composition may be studied all at once; a picture may be seen as the track of an intricate dance of the eye. Literature seems to be intermediate between music and painting: its words form rhythms which approach a musical sequence of sounds at one of its boundaries, and form patterns which approach the hieroglyphic or pictorial image at the other. The attempts to get as near to these boundaries as possible form the main body of what is called experimental writing. We may call the rhythm of literature the narrative, and the pattern, the simultaneous mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we “see” what he means.

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The criticism of literature is much more hampered by the representational fallacy than even the criticism of painting. That is why we are apt to think of narrative as a sequential representation of events in an outside “life,” and of meaning as a reflection of some external “idea.” Properly used as critical terms, an author’s narrative is his linear movement; his meaning is the integrity of his completed form. Similarly an image is not merely a verbal replica of an external object, but any unit of a verbal structure seen as part of a total pattern or rhythm. Even the letters an author spells his words with form part of his imagery, though only in special cases (such as alliteration) would they call for critical notice. Narrative and meaning thus become respectively, to borrow musical terms, the melodic and harmonic contexts of the imagery. Rhythm, or recurrent movement, is deeply founded on the natural cycle, and everything in nature that we think of as having some analogy with works of art, like the flower or the bird’s song, grows out of a profound synchronization between an organism and the rhythms of its environment, especially that of the solar year. With animals some expressions of synchronization, like the mating dances of birds, could almost be called rituals. But in human life a ritual seems to be something of a voluntary effort (hence the magical element in it) to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle. A farmer must harvest his crop at a certain time of year, but because this is involuntary, harvesting itself is not precisely a ritual. It is the deliberate expression of a will to synchronize human and natural energies at that time which produces the harvest songs, harvest sacrifices, and harvest folk customs that we call rituals. In ritual, then, we may find the origin of narrative, a ritual being a temporal sequence of acts in which the conscious meaning or significance is latent: it can be seen by an observer, but is largely concealed from the participators themselves. The pull of ritual is towards pure narrative, which, if there could be such a thing, would be automatic and unconscious repetition. We should notice too the regular tendency of ritual to become encyclopedic. All the important recurrences in nature, the day, the phases of the moon, the seasons and solstices of the year, the crises of existence from birth to death, get rituals attached to them, and most of the higher religions are equipped with a definitive total body of rituals suggestive, if we may put it so, of the entire range of potentially significant actions in human life. Patterns of imagery, on the other hand, or fragments of significance, are oracular in origin, and derive from the epiphanic moment, the flash

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of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time, the importance of which is indicated by Cassirer in Myth and Language. By the time we get them, in the form of proverbs, riddles, commandments, and aetiological folk tales, there is already a considerable element of narrative in them. They too are encyclopedic in tendency, building up a total structure of significance, or doctrine, from random and empiric fragments. And just as pure narrative would be unconscious act, so pure significance would be an incommunicable state of consciousness, for communication begins by constructing narrative. The myth is the central informing power that gives archetypal significance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle. Hence the myth is the archetype, though it might be convenient to say myth only when referring to narrative, and archetype when speaking of significance. In the solar cycle of the day, the seasonal cycle of the year, and the organic cycle of human life, there is a single pattern of significance, out of which myth constructs a central narrative around a figure who is partly the sun, partly vegetative fertility, and partly a god or archetypal human being. The crucial importance of this myth has been forced on literary critics by Jung and Frazer in particular, but the several books now available on it are not always systematic in their approach, for which reason I supply the following table of its phases: 1. The dawn, spring, and birth phase. Myths of the birth of the hero, of revival and resurrection, of creation, and (because the four phases are a cycle) of the defeat of the powers of darkness, winter, and death. Subordinate characters: the father and the mother. The archetype of romance and of most dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry. 2. The zenith, summer, and marriage or triumph phase. Myths of apotheosis, of the sacred marriage, and of entering into Paradise. Subordinate characters: the companion and the bride. The archetype of comedy, pastoral, and idyll. 3. The sunset, autumn, and death phase. Myths of fall, of the dying god, of violent death and sacrifice and of the isolation of the hero. Subordinate characters: the traitor and the siren. The archetype of tragedy and elegy.

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4. The darkness, winter, and dissolution phase. Myths of the triumph of these powers; myths of floods and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero, and Götterdämmerung myths. Subordinate characters: the ogre and the witch. The archetype of satire (see, for instance, the conclusion of The Dunciad). The quest of the hero also tends to assimilate the oracular and random verbal structures, as we can see when we watch the chaos of local legends that results from prophetic epiphanies consolidating into a narrative mythology of departmental gods. In most of the higher religions this in turn has become the same central quest myth that emerges from ritual, as the Messiah myth became the narrative structure of the oracles of Judaism. A local flood may beget a folk tale by accident, but a comparison of flood stories will show how quickly such tales become examples of the myth of dissolution. Finally, the tendency of both ritual and epiphany to become encyclopedic is realized in the definitive body of myth which constitutes the sacred scriptures of religions. These sacred scriptures are consequently the first documents that the literary critic has to study to gain a comprehensive view of his subject. After he has understood their structure, then he can descend from archetypes to genres, and see how the drama emerges from the ritual side of myth and lyric from the epiphanic or fragmented side, while the epic carries on the central encyclopedic structure. Some words of caution and encouragement are necessary before literary criticism has clearly staked out its boundaries in these fields. It is part of the critic’s business to show how all literary genres are derived from the quest myth, but the derivation is a logical one within the science of criticism: the quest myth will constitute the first chapter of whatever future handbooks of criticism may be written that will be based on enough organized critical knowledge to call themselves “introductions” or “outlines” and still be able to live up to their titles. It is only when we try to expound the derivation chronologically that we find ourselves writing pseudo-prehistorical fictions and theories of mythological contract. Again, because psychology and anthropology are more highly developed sciences, the critic who deals with this kind of material is bound to appear, for some time, a dilettante of those subjects. These two phases of criticism are largely undeveloped in comparison with literary history and rhetoric, the reason being the later development of the sci-

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ences they are related to. But the fascination which The Golden Bough and Jung’s book on libido symbols3 have for literary critics is not based on dilettantism, but on the fact that these books are primarily studies in literary criticism, and very important ones. In any case the critic who is studying the principles of literary form has a quite different interest from the psychologist’s concern with states of mind or the anthropologist’s with social institutions. For instance: the mental response to narrative is mainly passive; to significance mainly active. From this fact Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture develops a distinction between “Apollonian” cultures based on obedience to ritual and “Dionysiac” ones based on a tense exposure of the prophetic mind to epiphany. The critic would tend rather to note how popular literature which appeals to the inertia of the untrained mind puts a heavy emphasis on narrative values, whereas a sophisticated attempt to disrupt the connection between the poet and his environment produces the Rimbaud type of illumination, Joyce’s solitary epiphanies, and Baudelaire’s conception of nature as a source of oracles. Also how literature, as it develops from the primitive to the self-conscious, shows a gradual shift of the poet’s attention from narrative to significant values, this shift of attention being the basis of Schiller’s distinction between naive and sentimental poetry. The relation of criticism to religion, when they deal with the same documents, is more complicated. In criticism, as in history, the divine is always treated as a human artefact. God for the critic, whether he finds him in Paradise Lost or the Bible, is a character in a human story; and for the critic all epiphanies are explained, not in terms of the riddle of a possessing god or devil, but as mental phenomena closely associated in their origin with dreams. This once established, it is then necessary to say that nothing in criticism or art compels the critic to take the attitude of ordinary waking consciousness towards the dream or the god. Art deals not with the real but with the conceivable; and criticism, though it will eventually have to have some theory of conceivability, can never be justified in trying to develop, much less assume, any theory of actuality. It is necessary to understand this before our next and final point can be made. We have identified the central myth of literature, in its narrative aspect, with the quest myth. Now if we wish to see this central myth as a pattern of meaning also, we have to start with the workings of the subconscious where the epiphany originates, in other words in the dream.

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The human cycle of waking and dreaming corresponds closely to the natural cycle of light and darkness, and it is perhaps in this correspondence that all imaginative life begins. The correspondence is largely an antithesis: it is in daylight that man is really in the power of darkness, a prey to frustration and weakness; it is in the darkness of nature that the “libido” or conquering heroic self awakes. Hence art, which Plato called a dream for awakened minds, seems to have as its final cause the resolution of the antithesis, the mingling of the sun and the hero, the realizing of a world in which the inner desire and the outward circumstance coincide. This is the same goal, of course, that the attempt to combine human and natural power in ritual has. The social function of the arts, therefore, seems to be closely connected with visualizing the goal of work in human life. So in terms of significance, the central myth of art must be the vision of the end of social effort, the innocent world of fulfilled desires, the free human society. Once this is understood, the integral place of criticism among the other social sciences, in interpreting and systematizing the vision of the artist, will be easier to see. It is at this point that we can see how religious conceptions of the final cause of human effort are as relevant as any others to criticism. The importance of the god or hero in the myth lies in the fact that such characters, who are conceived in human likeness and yet have more power over nature, gradually build up the vision of an omnipotent personal community beyond an indifferent nature. It is this community which the hero regularly enters in his apotheosis. The world of this apotheosis thus begins to pull away from the rotary cycle of the quest in which all triumph is temporary. Hence if we look at the quest myth as a pattern of imagery, we see the hero’s quest first of all in terms of its fulfilment. This gives us our central pattern of archetypal images, the vision of innocence which sees the world in terms of total human intelligibility. It corresponds to, and is usually found in the form of, the vision of the unfallen world or heaven in religion. We may call it the comic vision of life, in contrast to the tragic vision, which sees the quest only in the form of its ordained cycle. We conclude with a second table of contents, in which we shall attempt to set forth the central pattern of the comic and tragic visions. One essential principle of archetypal criticism is that the individual and the universal forms of an image are identical, the reasons being too complicated for us just now. We proceed according to the general plan of the game of Twenty Questions, or, if we prefer, of the Great Chain of Being:

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1. In the comic vision the human world is a community, or a hero who represents the wish-fulfilment of the reader. The archetype of images of symposium, communion, order, friendship, and love. In the tragic vision the human world is a tyranny or anarchy, or an individual or isolated man, the leader with his back to his followers, the bullying giant of romance, the deserted or betrayed hero. Marriage or some equivalent consummation belongs to the comic vision; the harlot, witch, and other varieties of Jung’s “terrible mother” belong to the tragic one. All divine, heroic, angelic, or other superhuman communities follow the human pattern. 2. In the comic vision the animal world is a community of domesticated animals, usually a flock of sheep, or a lamb, or one of the gentler birds, usually a dove. The archetype of pastoral images. In the tragic vision the animal world is seen in terms of beasts and birds of prey, wolves, vultures, serpents, dragons, and the like. 3. In the comic vision the vegetable world is a garden, grove, or park, or a tree of life, or a rose or lotus. The archetype of Arcadian images, such as that of Marvell’s green world or of Shakespeare’s forest comedies. In the tragic vision it is a sinister forest like the one in Comus or at the opening of the Inferno, or a heath or wilderness, or a tree of death. 4. In the comic vision the mineral world is a city, or one building or temple, or one stone, normally a glowing precious stone—in fact the whole comic series, especially the tree, can be conceived as luminous or fiery. The archetype of geometrical images: the “starlit dome” belongs here. In the tragic vision the mineral world is seen in terms of deserts, rocks, and ruins, or of sinister geometrical images like the cross. 5. In the comic vision the unformed world is a river, traditionally fourfold, which influenced the Renaissance image of the temperate body with its four humours. In the tragic vision this world usually becomes the sea, as the narrative myth of dissolution is so often a flood myth. The combination of the sea and beast images gives us the leviathan and similar water monsters.

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Obvious as this table looks, a great variety of poetical images and forms will be found to fit it. Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium, to take a famous example of the comic vision at random, has the city, the tree, the bird, the community of sages, the geometrical gyre, and the detachment from the cyclic world. It is, of course, only the general comic or tragic context that determines the interpretation of any symbol: this is obvious with relatively neutral archetypes like the island, which may be Prospero’s island or Circe’s. Our tables are, of course, not only elementary but grossly over-simplified, just as our inductive approach to the archetype was a mere hunch. The important point is not the deficiencies of either procedure, taken by itself, but the fact that, somewhere and somehow, the two are clearly going to meet in the middle. And if they do meet, the ground plan of a systematic and comprehensive development of criticism has been established.

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13 Three Meanings of Symbolism 1952

From Yale French Studies, no. 9 (1952), 11–19. Incorporated into the “Second Essay” of AC. Invited by Henri Peyre to contribute this essay to Yale French Studies, Frye couldn’t muster much interest in it. In January 1952 he wrote— showing his typical frustration with material he hadn’t fully evolved—“I picked up my symbolism paper and started working on it again. Some of its proportions are straightening out, but it’s only mildly interesting to me. It would be a lot more interesting if I knew what the hell I was talking about. I’m only guessing at what Mallarmé means, and the paper is closely bound up with a lyric chapter I haven’t worked out yet” (D, 465).

The word “symbolism” usually conveys not so much a meaning as a vague expectation that the writer is going to try to be up to date. Whatever it means, however, is conceivably important to literary criticism, so it is perhaps time to review and arrange the meanings of the word that are relevant to that subject. I recognize three aspects of modern literature to which the term is applicable, and my present concern is to give a systematic account of them, not to introduce a new sense of my own. The reader will therefore find the details of my argument elementary; the arrangement of them may be new. When we read anything we find our understanding of what we read moving simultaneously in two directions. One direction is centrifugal, moving from the words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association. The other direction is centripetal, trying to build up out of the words a larger pattern or context, an attempt which normally expands until it reaches the whole verbal pattern. In the centrifugal movement, the word is a symbol in the sense of a

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sign, or representation of a thing outside the pattern of words. In the other movement the word is a symbol in the sense of an image, or unit of a verbal structure. These two processes take place in all reading. The difference between a verbal structure that is literary and one that is not is a difference in a final intention of producing a structure of images or of signs. If the writer’s ultimate aim is not literary, he normally attempts to describe or give facts or truths about something, so that we read his words for their value as signs of that something. He is then judged by his truth, or correspondence between his words and the things they signify. Failure to correspond is falsehood; failure to make contact is tautology, a pattern of words which cannot come out of itself. These canons do not apply when the ultimate intention is literary, for in literature the relation of words to things is not true, not false, not tautological, and yet not meaningless either. It would best be described, perhaps, as hypothetical. In literature the sense of fact is subordinated to an ultimate intention of producing a pattern of words for its own sake. The sign values of symbols are ancillary to their importance as a structure of images. The centripetal meaning, or self-contained verbal pattern, seems to be the field of the responses connected with pleasure, beauty, and interest. The contemplation of a detached pattern, whether of words or not, is clearly a major source of the sense of the beautiful, and of the pleasure that accompanies it. It often happens that a descriptive piece of writing, such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, survives by virtue of its “style,” or interesting verbal pattern, after its value as a representation of facts has faded. The old precept that poetry is designed to delight and instruct sounds like an awkward hendiadys,1 as we do not feel that a poem normally does two different things to us, but we can understand it when we relate it to these complementary aspects of symbolism. In literature, that which entertains is prior to the didactic: or, as we may say, the reality principle is subordinate to the pleasure principle. In all descriptive verbal structures the order is reversed. Neither factor can, of course, ever be eliminated in any kind of writing. We are not concerned here with the status of verbal structures like theology or metaphysics, which in themselves are neither literary nor strictly factual. We are speaking from the point of view of literary criticism, according to which everything that relates literature to something outside literature is equally didactic and equally descriptive, whether

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the material related is the nature of absolute being or advice on the raising of hops. It is clear too that the proportion between the sense of being pleasantly entertained and the sense of being awakened to reality will vary in different forms of literature. The sense of reality is, for instance, far higher in tragedy than it is in comedy, where the logic of events usually gives way to the audience’s desire for a happy ending. It is also likely that writers temperamentally inclined to one form will develop theories rationalizing their preference into a general law of literature. In modern literature we may, out of the abundance of such theories, select the two that illustrate our present discussion most clearly. In the kind of naturalism generally associated with the name of Zola we find an extreme development of the representational aspect of symbolism. Here literature goes about as far in the direction of being descriptive, and of being judged in terms of truth rather than inner coherence, as it could go and still remain literature. The conception of symbolism involved here is the one which literature has in common with everything else in words. The antithesis of naturalism is the treatment of literature as pure verbal pattern, in which all elements of direct or verifiable statement are eliminated as far as possible. This is the movement generally called symbolisme proper, a term here expanded to take in everything within the radius of its influence. What we have said implies that the name of one of its English descendants, imagism, is a good translation of it. The great strength of symbolisme was that it did succeed in isolating the germ of literature, in identifying its distinctively literary quality. It may have been limited by its tendency to equate this isolation with the whole creative process, but what it lost in scope it gained in consistency. All its characteristics are solidly based on its conception of poetry as concerned with the centripetal aspect of meaning. Symbolisme maintains that the representational answer to the question “what does this mean?” should not be pressed in reading poetry. The poetic symbol means primarily itself in relation to the poem: if it is a symbol “of” anything, it is a symbol of the unity of the poem. In descriptive writing the centripetal aspect of meaning is a grammatical organization leading up, by clear syntax and a cautious incidental use of figurative language, to a systematic indication of things by words. Here the order of words follows the customary associative tracks of ordinary speech, for ordinary speech is utilitarian and descriptive. But in poetry influenced by the theories of symbolisme the indicative grammatical structure of ordinary speech is subordinated to metaphor, or the juxtaposing of im-

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ages. The poem as a whole cannot represent or indicate anything except the state of mind which produced it. This last means that the unity of a poem is best apprehended as a unity of mood, a mood being a phase of emotion, and emotion being the ordinary word for the state of mind directed towards the experiencing of pleasure or the contemplating of beauty. And as moods are not long sustained, poetry, for symbolisme, is essentially lyric poetry, longer poems being held together only by the use of the grammatical structures appropriate to descriptive writing. Poetic images do not state or point to anything but, by pointing to each other, they suggest or evoke the mood which informs the poem. That is, they express or articulate the mood. The emotion is not chaotic or inarticulate: it merely would have remained so if it had not turned into a poem, and when it does so, it is the poem, not something else still behind it. Nevertheless the words “suggest” and “evoke” are appropriate, because in poetry the word does not echo the thing but other words, and the immediate impact poetry makes on the reader is that of incantation, a harmony of sounds and the sense of a growing richness of meaning unlimited by denotation. (The frequent references to music by exponents of symbolisme in this connection are vague and confusing. They do not make it clear that singing and chanting are, at least in modern times, opposite and irreconcilable ways of relating words and music. The words of a singable lyric are neutral and conventional, ready to be absorbed into a musical structure. Poets who want their lyrics chanted, like the early Yeats, are precisely those who are most suspicious of musical settings.) The word, then, is a symbol which turns away from its sign meaning in the material world, not to point to something in the spiritual world, for this would still make it representational, but to awaken other words to suggest or evoke something in the spiritual world. This something is occasionally called by Mallarmé an Idea, but he usually speaks of it simply as a mystery, because it is manifested only in the poem, and the mind can gain no direct contact with it. It is rather a sense of spiritual unity suggested by words. Poetry leads us from the material thing through the verbal symbol as sign, into the verbal symbol as image, and thence into an apprehension of the Word, the unity of poetic experience. It follows that the relation of the material thing to the spiritual mystery of the Word is a kind of sacramental relation. Thus symbolisme, like the Courtly Love convention before it, resolves into an elaborate analogy of religion. The poet’s attitude to his public is not democratic but catholic.

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He should avoid anything like rhetoric, or the market-place view of words as like coins, to be exchanged, not for their own sakes, but as a medium for actions towards things. So far from being introspective or solipsistic, however, the poet as a personality is not in his poem at all. He is a priest of a mystery; he turns his back on his hearers, and invokes, chanting in a hieratic tongue, the real presence of the Word which reveals the mystery. It is only within that presence that he and his hearers communicate, and the experience is always new, for the Word is of a virgin birth. The poet brings about an apocalyptic separation of the pure Word from the sub-intelligent fact or thing, and his emblem is the swan, which sings at the death of its material self. There is a broad consistency in the main tradition of symbolisme as it develops through Mallarmé (the above is largely paraphrased from Mallarmé) to Claudel, Piguy, and Valéry in France, Rilke in Germany, and Pound and Eliot in England. There is a growing preoccupation with the conception of the “Word” both in its literary and in its larger aspects. These larger aspects are of course mainly religious, and by most poets of this group are explicitly related to the Christian conception of the Word of God as the Person of Christ. The application of such ideas need not be Christian, however: it certainly is not in Rilke, and in Pound it is linked, not to religion, but to a “Confucian” belief that the ordering of words is essential to the stability of society. Where the attitude to poetry is hieratic, one expects the attitude to society to correspond. Mallarmé is clear that the poet must be aristocratic: the primary emotion leading to creation is, on its negative side, repugnance to a world which has only an acquisitive interest in words. The symbolist poet tends to think of society as a centripetal unity of images, where social ideals like royalty and nobility and courtesy are represented by the concrete image of king, noble, and court. In such a society the poet has an obvious social function: in the modern world, poets have to form an intimate, almost conspiratorial group, courtiers of an invisible court. There are, of course, important differences among the attitudes that produced nostalgia for the aristocratic in Yeats, royalism in Eliot, and Fascism in Pound, but the reasons for adopting these attitudes have a strong family likeness. The same is true of the corresponding social attitudes of French poets in the tradition and of Rilke. In criticism, too, the tradition is broad enough to contain a great variety of differences in personal attitude. As a poet, T.S. Eliot has very little in common with Poe, yet Poe’s attack on the long poem and his defence of incantation

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belong to the same theoretical tradition as Eliot’s conception of the poet as catalyst and of the image as the “objective correlative” of the emotion. This central tradition is flanked by a heresy on each side. On one side is the prophetic heresy of Rimbaud and his “dérèglement de tous les sens,” which breaks through the hieratic attitude of symbolisme to something more primitive, ecstatic, and oracular, in which the manic and mantic are united, and so moves away from Mallarmé’s belief in art as a rigorous control of random or accidental utterance. On the other side is the aesthetic heresy, the belief that poetry aims at creating beauty. Aestheticism is to art what hedonism is to morals, the fallacy of making an object out of an attribute. I call it a fallacy because it seems to be a rule in the arts that, while all great art may be described as beautiful, the deliberate attempt to beautify only weakens the creative energy. In the earlier English developments of symbolisme, in Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, and Oscar Wilde, one often feels that the effort to make everything equally beautiful tends to make the poetic images fuse together into a sticky gelatinous mass. Even in the manifestoes of the later imagism, the insistence on the hardness and precision of poetic images has a touch of shrillness about it, and its relation to the “colour symphonies” of Fletcher2 and the prolix rhapsodies of Amy Lowell is somewhat ambiguous. Not all verbal symbols which are units of a verbal structure can serve as signs: prepositions and conjunctions, for instance, have no symbolic function except to interrelate other words. The proliferation of such words, however, goes with analytic languages like English and French and the descriptive habit of mind which works more easily with such a language. Much of the grammatical obscurity of modern poetry is connected with in attempt to retain a synthetic attitude to words which only a highly inflected language could sustain without some loss of clarity. (Most English words, other than onomatopoeic ones, which are in themselves images in the vulgar sense of word pictures, are Latin words in which the picture has faded. Colloquial attempts to increase vividness of speech often take the form of recreations of such words: compare “highbrow” with “supercilious.”) This fact about language puts the poet in a difficult position. He may describe things indirectly, thereby reviving the archaic forms of kenning and riddle, or he may make elaborate adjectival structures, hyphenated epithets, and the like carry the weight of his invention. The former method is especially characteristic of Rimbaud and the latter of the aesthetes. For the central tradition it becomes in-

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creasingly clear that the way to preserve hardness and precision is to base the diction on those images which are also signs, such as nouns and verbs. In practice this means that accuracy of observation, not a sense of beauty, is what is essential to sharpness of outline. In proportion as it realized this, English poetry influenced by symbolisme shook off a rather spineless languor and acquired far more energy and directness—so much so that the contrast between the later pre-Raphaelites and the mature verse of Pound and Eliot, even between the early and the later Yeats, is more striking than the continuity. A major influence in English poetry was the discovery that in Donne and his followers the whole world of conceptual thought had been used as effectively as observation of concrete things for poetic imagery. Thus the antithesis between symbolisme and naturalism began to dissolve. For writers of prose fiction in their turn realized that novelists who had devoted their attention to unifying the structure of their imagery were more serious artists than the documentary naturalists. Mallarmé and Zola represent a rather forced contrast in literature, but Laforgue and Flaubert do not, and the prose of Joyce, Proust, and Virginia Woolf showed as much benefit from the rapprochement as the contemporary poetry. By the mid-twenties of this century, the best poetry and prose being written formed, on the whole, a varied but coherent and intelligible unification of sensibility. A new movement in criticism, based on the centripetal interrelations of meaning in poetry, completed the structure. In this delightful and instructive development another tradition of symbolism in poetry tended to be overlooked, or, if remembered, mentioned only to be condemned. This is the tradition of mythopoeic poetry which in England runs from Spenser through Milton into Blake, Shelley, and Keats. In contrast to symbolisme, which is mainly French-inspired, Catholic, and intensely conservative, this mythopoeic tradition is mainly English-inspired, Protestant, and revolutionary. It is also, again in marked contrast to symbolisme, fervently rhetorical. And although the kind of symbolism it favours enters into all poetry, like the other two, the distinctiveness of the English mythopoeic strain has never, I think, been properly isolated. Much of it forms part of Romanticism, but it is not Romanticism. Byron and Scott were typical Romantics, and owed their contemporary fame largely to that fact. But Blake, Keats, and Shelley, the first two especially, had another quality which sets them outside the main Romantic movement, and the thoroughness with which Blake absorbed Milton, and Keats Spenser, shows their awareness of their traditions.

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The Romantic poets, however, were less interested in criticism than in the psychology of creation, and hence, while we read a great deal about the imagination and the way it operates as a mental process, we find no coherent theory of what it produces in poetry. It is clear, however, that they all regard imagination as a form of knowledge. The knowledge of things by signs is equated with the inductive and deductive operations of a “lower” reason (Verstand in German philosophy, “understanding” in Coleridge, “ratio” in Blake), which relates the outer world to the subject, but not the subject to the outer world. That is, it presents the world in a way which excludes the moods and emotions of the subject, and is therefore mechanical. It is also a less complete knowledge than the imaginative knowledge which includes the subjective factors, and which is a higher reason (Vernunft, “secondary imagination,” “vision”). And just as logic is the grammar of the lower reason, so rhetoric is the grammar of vision. We now pass from the theory of Romantic poetry to what we can infer from its practice. The knowledge of things by signs is contained by an order of nature which is, however dead and mechanistic, at least clear and consistent. It follows that imaginative knowledge is also contained by a higher or visionary order. Our knowledge of nature is organized by the great inductions, or laws of nature, which form its leading principles. Our knowledge of the order of vision is similarly organized by certain integrating symbols which, by their recurrence in major poetry, enable us to bind our imaginative comprehension together. This gives us a third conception of the symbol, which regards it as neither image nor sign, but as the product of the two. We may call it the conception of the symbol as archetype or myth. Archetypal symbolism carries a step further the union of image and sign, already traced. It is fundamentally a rhetoric held together by certain key symbols, marked as important either by emphasis or by recurrence. A simple example is a central symbol, a scarlet letter or a golden bowl or a white whale, which is dropped into a novel like a magnet into a pile of iron filings, to provide a unifying centre of attraction for all the other images. Because of its tolerance of rhetoric, archetypal symbolism faces its audience, and the drama is a genre as appropriate to it as the documentary novel is to naturalism or the artificial lyric to symbolisme. It makes art a direct revelation of knowledge, not an indirect suggestion to the feelings. Wherever we have archetypal symbolism, we pass from the question “What does this symbol, sea or

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tree or serpent or character, mean in this work of art?” to the question “What does it mean in my imaginative comprehension of such things as a whole?” Thus the presence of archetypal symbolism makes the individual poem, not its own object, but a phase of imaginative experience. Romantic poets, as critics, seldom face the implications of the fact that the existence of mythopoeic poetry implies a unity of imaginative experience which contains all literature, and which would naturally lead to a search for the unifying factors of such experience. Perhaps a half-conscious resistance to tradition and authority may account for the attention given to imagination as a creative process starting de novo in the mind of each poet. For the creative process is only one of these unifying factors; another is certainly tradition, with its handmaid, convention, as was clearly recognized in earlier centuries. In the Renaissance, the poet was conceived as the courtier or public orator, who, as humanist, or custodian of the great Classical structure of ordered speech, adapts its forms to his own time. For Spenser and Milton at least, the Protestant sense of the personal possession of the Word of God by the believer reinforced and complemented Renaissance humanism. Here we have a third unifying factor, the conceptual unity of all words in the Word which we have already met in symbolisme in a different form. As with symbolisme, the religious affinities are not essential, which means that they must be separated for the purposes of criticism. Coleridge, however, flutters around the word “Logos” like a moth around a lamp, unwilling to take refuge like symbolisme in a sacramental analogy, even more unwilling to drop his hobby of giving evidences of Christianity whenever he opened his mouth on literature, and yet continually aware that he was somewhere near the centre of the whole problem of criticism. Only Blake seems to be clear that what the archetypal poet directly reveals as imaginative knowledge is fundamentally an apocalyptic view of reality, which accounts for the strong revolutionary bias of archetypal poets. This last comes out in a curiously negative way in William Morris. The Earthly Paradise personifies the great archetypal narratives of Mediterranean and Baltic culture as a group of old men who forsook the world during the Middle Ages, refusing to be made either kings or gods, and who now interchange their myths in an ineffectual land of dreams. In the whole context of Morris’s thought, including its later Marxist developments, it is clear that these buried dreams have a tremendous revolutionary potency, as they are really the formal causes of all human energy. But there is no hint of this in The Earthly Paradise, which is a parable of

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archetypal poetry submerged by the antithesis of naturalism and symbolisme. It is impossible to understand the development of many modern poets without reference to this third conception of symbolism. The most striking example is Yeats. Yeats grew up in the tradition of symbolisme: the best known English book on the subject, that of Arthur Symons, was dedicated to him as its finest English representative. Yet he took pains to steep himself also in Blake, Spenser, Shelley and Morris, and tried to develop a rhetoric, to invent an iconography of archetypes, and to create a poetic drama (the struggles of symbolisme to make drama out of a profoundly anti-dramatic view of literature are full of a curious interest). He was deeply influenced by the Renaissance conception of the courtier, and though he tried to enter the temple of the Word through the dark and winding backstairs of occultism, what he was looking for is clear enough. And here, I am afraid, we have to stop rather abruptly, because modern criticism also stops here. Archetypal symbolism may be found in every poem worth reading, but criticism has little to tell us about it. This is chiefly because it has been so slow in gaining any real comprehension of the poets mentioned in the latter part of this article, who cannot be understood at all without some knowledge of the archetypal conception of symbolism. To go further would take us into the criticism of the future, and into a fourth conception of the symbol as monad, or unit of total poetic experience, with the aid of which we might, perhaps, begin a frontal assault on poets of the rank of Dante and Shakespeare. For the present our motto must be ne plus ultra.

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14 The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes February 1952

Review of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951). Text from the “Turning New Leaves” section of the Canadian Forum, 31 (February 1952): 258–60. Reprinted in RW, 163–6. Frye didn’t always recycle his work; he wrote the Forum review on 2 January 1952, and “emptied my usual line about nursery rhymes into that so that I’d be discouraged from making that speech again, and would have to think up another one” (D, 464). Which he did: in March he discussed the Opies’ book in a talk (D, 526) and there is almost no overlap between the two texts (see undated ms., NFF 1993, box 3, file 11).

The publishers boast that this work assembles “almost everything that is known about the subject” of nursery rhymes, and they may well be right. The book collects over five hundred rhymes, accompanying each with a bibliography of its appearances in previous collections, a few parallels in other languages, and, where possible or appropriate, a commentary. It is apparently the first scholarly effort at a definitive edition of them for over a century. During that century our knowledge of ballads, broadsides, folk songs, street cries, and mummer plays, all of which have contributed to nursery rhymes, has made tremendous strides, so this edition is certainly overdue. The study of nursery rhymes has been hampered by a large number of superstitions. The modern attacks on them by psychological neo-Puritans, obsessed by “sadism” instead of sin, have had a long ancestry. We learn that in the last century a certain Goodrich climaxed thirty years of incessant campaigning against nursery rhymes by writing one for a skit, just to show how easy it was, and thus the sum of his labours was the

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addition of one more jingle to the canon.1 Then again, it is natural that infantilism of various kinds should fasten on the nursery rhyme, and the infantilism of pedantry could hardly miss it. Firmly, and in some cases regretfully, the editors inform us that there is probably no connection between Jack and Jill and the gods Hjuki and Bil of the Scandinavian Edda. (Sample of argument: “Hjuki, in Norse, would be pronounced Juki, which would readily become Jack; and Bil, for the sake of euphony, and in order to give a female name to one of the children, would become Jill.”) That it is unlikely that the baby on the tree-top is the Egyptian child-god Horus, or even the old Pretender. That it is hardly reasonable to derive “the cat and the fiddle” from an alleged epithet “la Fidele” for Catherine of Aragon. That it is doubtful whether Mother Hubbard can be traced back to St. Hubert, the patron of dogs. That there is no evidence that Tommy Tucker is Cardinal Wolsey, or Simple Simon James I, or the lady riding to Banbury Cross Queen Elizabeth. The most enterprising of such speculators, the editors tell us, was a man named Ker,2 who a century ago undertook to prove that nursery rhymes were anti-clerical propaganda dating from the Middle Ages. His method was to translate them into a language of his own invention which he claimed to be medieval Dutch, and then retranslate them into the sentiments he wanted. On the other hand, the editors seem willing to admit that the shoe the old woman lived in was a phallic fertility symbol (hence its use at weddings), that “London Bridge” and “Oranges and Lemons” may contain echoes of a distant ritual of human sacrifice, that “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and “Hickory, Dickory, Dock” are numerals of long-extinct Celtic languages, and that a few rhymes have once had political allusions. Sometimes the editors are over-cautious and inconclusive, as well as too coy about the “indelicate” variants of their canon. But by presenting the bibliographical evidence clearly and in order, they do give us, in nearly every case, a kind of minimum working basis for any future theories. They dispose of the claim that the “Mairzy Doats” song of a few years ago was a spontaneous production of somebody’s little girl by placidly tracing it back to the year 1450. They demolish the legend about the origin of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which caused Henry Ford to restore what he thought was the school where those two maudlin infants turned up, and to have a book published on the subject. They have tracked down and identified several of those stray wisps of song and jingle which everyone knows, and nobody knows the origins of. (I seem to remember that it was a major effort of detection to locate the author of

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“Sweet Adeline,” not of course in the present collection, who turned out to be a serious-minded composer greatly chagrined to find that his song had become the national anthem of drunks.) From this dictionary we learn that “Where, O Where Is my Little Dog Gone?” is the first stanza of a comic German-dialect ballad of the nineteenth century which ends as follows: Un sausage ish goot, boloney of course, Oh where, oh where can he be? Dey makes un mit dog und dey makes em mit horse, I guess they makes em mit he.

We learn that the pig stolen by Tom the piper’s son was a candy pig, that Miss Muffet’s tuffet is more likely to be a grassy knoll than a three-legged stool, which is also possible, and that the old man thrown down stairs was a daddy-long-legs. The editors make it clear that, while some nursery rhymes were originally written for children, many come from the first stanza or two of popular songs that have been remembered by some hard-pressed mother or nurse, and, once brought into contact with children, preserved by the extraordinary conservatism of children that keeps calling for the same thing over and over without permitting a syllable’s change. Sometimes a popular song or ballad will develop from a nursery rhyme, and the popularity of the song confirms the status of the nursery rhyme: this happened with “If I had a donkey that wouldn’t go” and may have happened with “Old Mother Hubbard.” The whole subject of nursery rhymes is far broader than that very British and middle-class institution of the nursery, and its problems are the problems of all popular and oral literature. The subject has another importance too. Nursery rhymes are not only the best possible introduction to poetry; they represent almost the only genuine poetic experience that many people ever get. The child of three who is bounced upon somebody’s knee to the rhythm of “Ride a Cock Horse” is beginning to learn what poetry is. It is interesting to notice how much he does not need. He does not need a footnote telling him that Banbury Cross is twenty miles north of Oxford. He does not need the information that “cross” and “horse” make not a rhyme but an assonance. He certainly needs no guesswork identifying the fine lady with Queen Elizabeth or Lady Godiva or (by virtue of a pun that started as a

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leg-pull) Celia Fiennes. But, for one brief moment, he has participated in the intense physical ecstasy that poetry shares with music and the dance, the ecstasy of the thundering hexameters of Homer, the galloping alliteration of Beowulf, the sinewy blank verse that was bellowed at the noisy and restless audience of the Globe Theatre. Then he goes to school and discovers that poetry is really an unnatural and perverse way of distorting ordinary prose statements, and so of course loses interest. It is unlikely that his interest will be reawakened, either, unless he comes across something that can appeal to the childhood memory which lies buried deep in his stomach muscles. If he has been so completely processed by dull educational theory or sharp commercial practice that he has missed out even on nursery rhymes, there should be nothing to disturb his adjustment to reality, however dingy and foolish a reality it may be.

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15 Towards a Theory of Cultural History July 1953

From The University of Toronto Quarterly, 22 (July 1953): 325–41. Reprinted as “Bunkashi no riron no tame no oboegaki,” trans. Hiroshi Ebine, in Gendai hyoron shu [Modern Literary Criticism: A Collection], ed. Hajime Shinoda (Tokyo: Shuei-sha, 1978), 392–415. Incorporated into the “First Essay: Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes,” of AC. Written at a time when Frye was still struggling to reduce the symbolic patterns blossoming in his thinking to the expository demands of the book that was to become AC. Ayre (236–8) describes the genesis of this essay in a point-form outline Frye sketched on the back of the program for the installation of Lester B. Pearson (formerly a Vic student and eventually Prime Minister of Canada) as Chancellor of Victoria University, 4 February 1952. Frye’s eighth point described the hero or protagonist in his character as god (mythical phase), as hero (romantic phase), as leader (high mimetic phase), as one of us (low mimetic phase), and as inferior to us (ironic phase), employing the schema that underpins the “theory of modes” in AC.

In the second paragraph of the Poetics Aristotle speaks of the differences in works of fiction which are caused by the different elevations of the characters in them. In some fictions, he says, the characters are better than we are, in others worse, in still others on the same level. This passage has not received much attention from modern critics, as the importance Aristotle assigns to goodness and badness seems to indicate a somewhat narrowly moralistic view of literature. Aristotle’s words for good and bad, however, are spoudaios and phaulos, which have the primary connotations of weighty and light. In fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the

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level of the postulates made about him by the author and the expectations of the audience. Fictions may therefore be classified, not morally, but by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same. Thus: 1. If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the narrow sense of a story about a god. Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories, and enter literature more frequently as content than as form. 2. If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. 3. If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does has immediate social repercussions, and is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind. 4. If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience. This gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction. “High” and “low” have here no connotations of comparative value, but are purely diagrammatic, as they are when they refer to Biblical critics or Anglicans. On this level the difficulty in retaining the word “hero,” which has a more limited meaning among the preceding modes, occasionally strikes an author. Thackeray thus feels obliged to call Vanity Fair a novel without a hero. 5. If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity,

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the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true even when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is still being judged by the norms of a greater freedom. Looking over this table, we can see that European fiction, during the last fifteen centuries, has steadily moved its centre of gravity down the list. In the pre-medieval period literature is closely attached to Christian, Late classical, Celtic, or Teutonic myths. If Christianity had not been both an imported myth and a devourer of rival ones, this phase of Western literature would be easier to isolate. In the form in which we possess it, most of it has already moved into the category of romance. Romance divides into two main forms: a secular form dealing with chivalry and knight-errantry, and a religious form devoted to legends of saints. Both lean heavily on miraculous violations of natural law for their interest as stories. Fictions of romance dominate literature until the cult of the prince and the courtier in the Renaissance brings the high mimetic mode into the foreground. Then a new kind of middle-class culture introduces the low mimetic, which predominates in English literature from Defoe’s time to the end of the nineteenth century. During the last hundred years, most serious fiction has tended increasingly to be ironic in mode. The same progression may be traced in Classical literature too, in a greatly foreshortened form. Where a religion is mythological and polytheistic, where there are promiscuous incarnations, deified heroes, and kings of divine descent, where the same adjective “godlike” can be applied either to Zeus or to Achilles, it is hardly possible to separate the mythical, romantic, and high mimetic strands completely. Where the religion is theological, and insists on a sharp division between divine and human natures, romance becomes more clearly isolated, as it does in the legends of Christian chivalry and sanctity, in the Arabian Nights of Mohammedanism, in the stories of the judges and thaumaturgic prophets of Israel. Similarly, the inability of the Classical world to shake off the divine leader in its later period has much to with the abortive development of low mimetic and ironic modes that got barely started with Roman satire. At the same time the establishing of the high mimetic mode, the developing of a type of literature with a consistent sense of an order of nature in it, is one of the great feats of Greek civilization. Oriental fiction does not, so far as I know, ever get very far away from mythical and romantic formulas. We shall here deal chiefly with the five epochs of Western literature, as

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given above, using Classical parallels only incidentally. In each mode a distinction will be useful between naive and sophisticated literature. The former is primitive and popular, and the characteristics of a mode are revealed with great clarity in it. Also there is a general distinction between fictions in which the hero becomes isolated from his society, and fictions in which he is incorporated into it. This distinction is ordinarily expressed by the words “tragic” and “comic” when they refer to aspects of plot in general and not to forms of drama. Fictional Modes of the Tragic Tragic stories, when they apply to divine beings, may be called Dionysiac. These are stories of dying gods, like Hercules with his poisoned shirt and his pyre, Orpheus torn to pieces by the Bacchantes, Balder murdered by the treachery of Loki, Christ dying on the cross and marking with the words “Why hast thou forsaken me?” a sense of his exclusion, as a divine being, from the society of the Trinity. The association of a god’s death with autumn or sunset does not, in literature, necessarily mean that he is a god “of” vegetation or the sun, but only that he is a god capable of dying, whatever his department. But as a god is superior to nature as well as to other men, the death of a god appropriately involves what Shakespeare, in Venus and Adonis, calls the “solemn sympathy” of nature, the word solemn having here some of its etymological connections with ritual. Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy can hardly be a fallacy when a god is the hero of the action, for instance when the poet of The Dream of the Rood tells us that all creation wept at the death of Christ. Of course there is never any fallacy in making a purely imaginative alignment between man and nature, but the use of solemn sympathy in a piece of more realistic fiction indicates that the author is trying to give his hero some of the overtones of the mythical mode. Ruskin’s example of a pathetic fallacy is “the cruel, crawling foam” from Kingsley’s ballad about a girl drowned in the tide.1 But the fact that the foam is so described gives to Kingsley’s Mary a faint colouring of the myth of Andromeda. The same associations with sunset and the fall of the leaf linger in romance, where the hero is still half a god. In romance the suspension of natural law and the individualizing of the hero’s exploits reduce nature largely to the animal and vegetable world. Much of the hero’s life is spent with animals, or at any rate the animals that are incurable roman-

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tics, such as horses, dogs, and falcons, and the typical setting of romance is the forest. His death or isolation thus has the effect of a spirit passing out of nature, and evokes a mood best described as elegiac. The elegiac presents a heroism unspoiled by irony. The inevitability in the death of Beowulf, the simple treachery in the death of Roland, are of much greater emotional importance than any complications of hubris and hamartia that may be involved. Hence the elegiac is accompanied by a diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new one: one thinks of Beowulf looking, while he is dying, at the great stone monuments of the eras of history that vanished before him. Tragedy in the proper sense, the fiction of the fall of a leader (he has to fall because that is the only way that a leader can be isolated from his society), mingles the heroic with the ironic. In elegiac romance the hero’s mortality is primarily a natural fact, the sign of his humanity; in tragedy it is primarily a social and moral fact. The tragic hero has to be of a properly heroic size, but his fall is involved with a sense of his relation to society and with a sense of the supremacy of natural law, both of which are ironic in reference. Tragedy belongs chiefly to the two indigenous developments of tragic drama in fifth-century Athens and seventeenthcentury Europe from Shakespeare to Racine. Both belong to a period of social history in which an aristocracy was fast losing its effective power but still retained a good deal of ideological prestige. The central position of tragedy proper in the five tragic modes, balanced midway between godlike heroism and all-too-human irony, is expressed in the conception of catharsis. The words “pity” and “fear” may be taken as referring to the two general directions in which emotion moves, whether towards an object or away from it. Naive romance, being closer to the wish-fulfilment dream, tends to absorb emotion and communicate it internally to the reader. Romance, therefore, is characterized by the acceptance of pity and fear, which in ordinary life relate to pain, as forms of pleasure. It turns fear at a distance, or terror, into the adventurous; fear at contact, or horror, into the marvellous; and fear without an object, or dread (Angst), into a pensive melancholy. It turns pity at a distance, or concern, into the theme of chivalrous rescue; pity at contact, or tenderness, into a languid and relaxed charm; and pity without an object (which has no name but is a kind of animism, or treating everything in nature as though it had human feelings) into creative fantasy. In more sophisticated romance the characteristics peculiar to the

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form are less obvious, particularly in the Chanson de Roland, where there is an almost high mimetic sobriety of tone. But the softening influences that work in the opposite direction from catharsis are still there. In tragedy, however, pity and fear become, respectively, favourable and adverse moral judgments, which are relevant to tragedy but not central to it. We pity Desdemona and fear Iago, but the central tragic figure is Othello, and our feelings about him are mixed. The particular thing called tragedy that happens to the tragic hero does not depend on his moral status. If it is causally related to something he has done, the tragedy is in the inevitability of the consequence of the act, not in its moral significance as an act. Hence the paradox that in tragedy pity and fear are raised and cast out. Aristotle’s hamartia or “flaw,” therefore, is not necessarily wrongdoing, much less moral weakness: it may be simply a matter of being a strong character in an exposed position, like Cordelia. The exposed position is nearly always the place of leadership, in which a character is exceptional and isolated at the same time, giving us that curious blend of the inevitable and the incongruous which is peculiar to tragedy. The principle of the hamartia of leadership can be more clearly seen in naive tragedy, as we get it in The Mirror for Magistrates and similar collections of tales based on the theme of the wheel of fortune. In low mimetic tragedy, pity and fear are neither purged nor absorbed into pleasures, but are communicated externally, as sensations. In fact the word “sensational” could have a more useful meaning in criticism if it were not merely an adverse value judgment. The best word for low mimetic or domestic tragedy is, perhaps, pathos, and pathos has a close relation to the sensational reflex of tears. Pathos presents its hero as isolated by a weakness which appeals to our sympathy because it is on our own level of experience. I speak of a hero, but the central figure of pathos is often a woman or a child (or both, as in the death scenes of Little Eva and Little Nell),2 and we have a whole procession of pathetic female sacrifices in English low mimetic fiction from Clarissa Harlowe to Hardy’s Tess and James’s Daisy Miller. We notice that while tragedy may massacre a whole cast, pathos is usually concentrated on a single character, partly because low mimetic society is more strongly individualized. Again, in contrast to tragedy, pathos is increased by the inarticulateness of the victim. The death of an animal is usually pathetic, and so is the catastrophe of defective intelligence that is frequent in modern American literature. Wordsworth, who as a low mimetic artist was one of our

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great masters of pathos, makes his sailor’s mother speak in a flat, dumpy, absurdly inadequate style about her efforts to salvage her son’s clothes and “other property”—or did before bad criticism made him spoil his poem. Pathos is a queer ghoulish emotion, and some failure of expression, real or simulated, seems to be peculiar to it: it will always leave a fluently plangent funeral elegy to go and batten on something like Swift’s choking memoir of Stella. Highly articulate pathos is apt to become a factitious appeal to self-pity, or tear-jerking. The exploiting of fear in the low mimetic is also sensational, and is a kind of pathos in reverse. The terrible figure in this tradition, exemplified by Heathcliff, Simon Legree, and the villains of Dickens, is normally a ruthless figure strongly contrasted with some kind of delicate virtue, generally a helpless victim in his power. The root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong. Hence the central tradition of sophisticated domestic pathos is the study of the isolated mind, the story of how someone recognizably like ourselves is broken by a conflict between the inner and outer world, between imaginative reality and the sort of reality which is established by a social consensus. Such tragedy is concerned with mania or obsession, as frequently in Balzac, or with the conflict of dream and waking life, as in Madame Bovary and Lord Jim, or with the impact of inflexible morality on experience, as in Melville’s Pierre and Ibsen’s Brand. The type of character involved here we may call by the Greek word alazon, which means boaster, impostor, or hypocrite, someone who pretends or tries to be what he is not. The most popular types of alazon are the miles gloriosus and the learned crank or obsessed philosopher. We are most familiar with such characters in comedy, where they are looked at from the outside, so that we see only the social mask. But the alazon may be one aspect of the tragic hero as well: the touch of miles gloriosus in Tamburlaine, even in Othello, is unmistakable, and so is the touch of the obsessed philosopher in Faustus and Hamlet. It is possible to study a case of obsession or hypocrisy sympathetically in a dramatic medium, but it is very difficult to do it from the inside: even Tartuffe, as far as his dramatic function is concerned, is a study of parasitism rather than hypocrisy. The analytic approach belongs more naturally to prose fiction or to a semi-dramatic medium like the Browning monologue. Allowing for this, Conrad’s Lord Jim becomes a lineal descendant of the

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miles gloriosus, as we can see if we compare him with Shaw’s Sergius or Synge’s playboy, who are parallel types in a comic setting. It is, of course, easy enough to take the alazon at his own valuation: this is done for instance by the creators of the inscrutable gloomy heroes in Gothic thrillers, with their wild or piercing eyes and their dark hints of interesting sins. But the result is not tragedy so much as a kind of comedy without humour. The conception of irony meets us in Aristotle’s Ethics, where the eiron is the man who deprecates himself, as opposed to the alazon. Such a man makes himself invulnerable, and, though Aristotle disapproves of him, there is no question that he is a predestined artist, just as the alazon is one of his predestined victims. The term “irony,” then, indicates a technique of appearing to be less than one is, which in literature becomes most commonly a technique of saying as little and meaning as much as possible, or, in a more general way, a pattern of words that turns away from direct statement or its own obvious meaning. (I am not using the word “ironic” itself in any unfamiliar sense, though I am exploring some of its implications.) The ironic fiction-writer, then, deprecates himself and, like Socrates, pretends to know nothing, even that he is ironic. Complete objectivity and suppression of all explicit moral judgments are essential to his method. Thus pity and fear are not raised in ironic art: they are reflected to the reader from the art. Thus, again, irony is not the same as satire, which is militant rather than objective. Satire implies a moral or social comparison between what it presents and a standard of normality assumed to be in the reader’s mind. There are forms of satire, such as invective and “flyting,” in which there is relatively little irony. On the other hand, when we try to isolate the ironic as such, we find that it seems to be simply the attitude of the poet as such, a dispassionate construction of hypothesis, with all assertive elements, implied or expressed, eliminated. Irony, as a mode, is born from the low mimetic; it takes life exactly as it finds it. But the ironist, as distinct from the naturalist, describes without “showing” anything, and has no object but his subject. Irony is naturally a sophisticated mode, and the chief difference between sophisticated and naive irony is that the naive ironist calls attention to the fact that he is being ironic, whereas sophisticated irony merely states, and lets the reader add the ironic tone himself. Coleridge, noting an ironic comment in Defoe, points out how Defoe’s subtlety

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could be made crude and obvious simply by over-punctuating the same words with italics, dashes, exclamation points, and other signs of being oneself aware of irony. Tragic irony, then, becomes simply the study of tragic isolation as such, and it thereby drops out the element of the special case, which in some degree is in all the other modes. Its hero does not necessarily have any tragic hamartia or pathetic obsession; he is only somebody who gets isolated from his society. Thus the central principle of tragic irony is that whatever exceptional happens to the hero should be causally out of line with his character. Tragedy is intelligible, not in the sense of having any pat moral to go with it, but in the sense that Aristotle had in mind when he spoke of discovery or recognition as essential to the tragic plot. Tragedy is intelligible because its catastrophe is plausibly related to its situation. Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be. If there is a reason for choosing him for catastrophe, it is an inadequate reason, and raises more objections than it answers. Thus the figure of a typical or random victim begins to crystallize in domestic tragedy as it deepens in ironic tone. We may call this typical victim the pharmakos or scapegoat. We meet a pharmakos figure in Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, in Melville’s Billy Budd, in Hardy’s Tess, in the Septimus of Mrs. Dalloway, in all the stories of persecuted Jews and Negroes, in the stories of the artists whose genius makes them Ishmaels of a bourgeois society. The pharmakos is neither innocent nor guilty. He is innocent in the sense that what happens to him is far greater than anything he has done provokes. He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a world where such injustices are an inescapable part of existence. The two facts do not come together; they remain ironically apart. The pharmakos, in short, is in the situation of Job. Job can defend himself against the charge of having done something that makes his catastrophe morally intelligible; but the success of his defence makes it morally unintelligible. Thus the incongruous and the inevitable, which are combined in tragedy, separate into opposite poles of irony. At one pole is the inevitable irony of human life. What happens to, say, the hero of Kafka’s Trial is not the result of what he has done, but the end of what he is, which is an “all too human” being. The archetype of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence of death. At the other pole is the incongruous

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irony of human life, in which all attempts to transfer guilt to a victim give that victim something of the dignity of innocence. The archetype of the incongruously ironic is Christ, the perfectly innocent victim excluded from human society. Halfway between is the central figure of tragedy, who is human and yet of a heroic size which often has in it the suggestion of divinity. His archetype is Prometheus, the Titan rejected by the gods for befriending the men whom gods call “dying ones.” The Book of Job is not a tragedy of the Promethean type, but a tragic irony in which the dialectic of the divine and the human natures works itself out. By justifying himself as a victim of God, Job tries to make himself into a tragic Promethean figure, but he does not succeed. These references may help to explain something that might otherwise be a puzzling fact about modern literature. Irony descends from the low mimetic: it begins in realism and dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily towards myth, and dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear in it. Our five modes evidently go around in a circle. This reappearance of myth in the ironic is particularly clear in Kafka and in Joyce. In Kafka, whose work, from one point of view, forms a series of commentaries on the Book of Job, the common types of tragic irony, the Jew, the artist, Everyman, and a kind of sombre Chaplin clown, are all found, and they are combined in Joyce’s Shem. However, ironic myth is frequent enough elsewhere, and many features of ironic literature are unintelligible without it. Henry James learned his trade mainly from the realists and naturalists of the nineteenth century, but if we were to judge, for example, the story called The Altar of the Dead purely by low mimetic standards, we should have to call it a tissue of improbable coincidence, inadequate motivation, and inconclusive resolution. When we look at it as ironic myth, a story of how the god of one person is the pharmakos of another, its structure becomes simple and logical. Fictional Modes of the Comic The theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it. The mythical comedy corresponding to the death of the Dionysiac god is Apollonian, the story of how a hero is accepted by a society of gods. In Classical literature the theme of acceptance forms part of the stories of Hercules, Mercury, and other deities who had a probation to go through: in Christian litera-

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ture it becomes the theme of salvation, or, in a more concentrated form, of assumption: the comedy that stands just at the end of Dante’s Commedia. The mode of romantic comedy corresponding to the elegiac is best described as idyllic, and its chief vehicle is the pastoral. Because of the social interest of comedy, the idyllic cannot equal the introversion of the elegiac, but it preserves the theme of escape from society to the extent of idealizing a simplified life in the country or on the frontier (the pastoral of popular modern literature is the Western story). The close association with animal and vegetable nature that we noted in the elegiac recurs in the sheep and pleasant pastures (or the cattle and ranches) of the idyllic, and the same easy connection with myth recurs in the fact that such imagery is used in the Bible for the theme of salvation. The clearest example of high mimetic comedy is the Old Comedy of Aristophanes. The New Comedy of Menander is closer to the low mimetic, and through Plautus and Terence its formulas were handed down to the Renaissance, so that there has always been a strongly low mimetic bias to social comedy. In Aristophanes there is usually a central figure who constructs his (or her) own society in the teeth of strong opposition, driving off one after another all the people who come to prevent or exploit him, and eventually achieving a heroic triumph, complete with mistresses, in which he is sometimes assigned the honours of a reborn god. We notice that just as there is a catharsis of pity and fear in tragedy, so there is a catharsis of the corresponding comic emotions, which are sympathy and ridicule, in Old Comedy. The comic hero will get his triumph whether what he has done is sensible or silly, honest or rascally. Thus Old Comedy, like the tragedy contemporary with it, is a blend of the heroic and the ironic. In some plays this fact is partly concealed by Aristophanes’ strong desire to get his own opinions into the record, but his greatest comedy, The Birds, preserves an exquisite balance. New Comedy usually presents an erotic intrigue between a young man and a young woman which is blocked by some kind of opposition, usually parental, and resolved by a twist in the plot which is the comic form of Aristotle’s discovery, and is more manipulated than its tragic counterpart. At the beginning of the play the forces thwarting the hero are in control of the play’s society, but after a discovery in which the hero becomes wealthy or the heroine respectable, a new society crystallizes on the stage around the hero. The moment that this new society appears is the moment of the comic resolution, and its appearance is usually signalized by some kind of party, whether wedding, banquet, or dance.

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The action of the comedy thus moves towards the incorporation of the hero into the society that he naturally fits. The hero himself is seldom a very interesting person: in conformity with low mimetic decorum, he is ordinary in his virtues, but socially attractive. In Shakespeare and in the kind of romantic comedy that most closely resembles his there is a development of these formulas in a more distinctively high mimetic direction. This is achieved by making the struggle of the repressive and the desirable societies a struggle between two levels of existence, the former like our own world or worse, the latter enchanted and idyllic. The former is the world that admits the justice of Shylock’s bond and suffers under the tyranny of Leontes; the latter is the world of the forest, the fairyland, the pastoral retreat, the liberal court, or the magic island from which romantic comedy usually brings its happy ending. For the reasons given above the domestic comedy of later fiction carries on with much the same conventions that were used in the Renaissance. Domestic comedy is usually based on the Cinderella archetype, on the kind of thing that happens when Pamela’s virtue is rewarded, the incorporation of an individual very like the reader into the society aspired to by both, a society ushered in with a happy rustle of bridal gowns and banknotes. The chief difference between the comedy of the Renaissance and of the realistic period is that the resolution of the latter more frequently involves a social promotion, and, like pathos, tends to be an individual achievement. More sophisticated writers of low mimetic comedy often present the same success story with the moral ambiguities that we have found in Aristophanes. In Balzac or Stendhal a clever and ruthless scoundrel may achieve the same kind of success as the virtuous heroes of Samuel Smiles and Horatio Alger. Thus the comic counterpart of the alazon seems to be the clever, likable, unprincipled picaro of the picaresque novel. In studying ironic comedy we must start with the theme of driving out the pharmakos from the point of view of society. This appeals to the kind of relief we are expected to feel when we see Jonson’s Volpone condemned to the galleys, Shylock stripped of his wealth, or Tartuffe taken off to prison. Such a theme, unless touched very lightly, is difficult to make convincing, for the reasons suggested in connection with ironic tragedy. Insisting on the theme of social revenge on an individual, however rascally, tends to make him look less involved in guilt and the society more so. If a writer of comedy makes too much of excluding one

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of his characters, that character becomes pathetic, the audience’s sympathy switches over to him, and the balance of comic tone is upset. This is particularly true of characters who have been trying to amuse either the actual or the internal audience, and who are the comic counterparts of the tragic hero as artist. The rejection of the entertainer, whether fool, clown, buffoon, or simpleton, can be one of the most terrible ironies known to art, as the rejection of Falstaff shows, and certain scenes in Chaplin. Literature is bounded by history, or factual assertions about events, on one side, and by philosophy or assertions of ideas on the other. In some religious poetry we can see that literature has an upper limit too, the point at which an imaginative vision of an eternal world becomes an experience of it. Here in ironic comedy we begin to see what the lower limit of art is. This is the condition of savagery, the world in which comedy consists of inflicting pain on a helpless victim, and tragedy in enduring it. Ironic comedy brings us to the figure of the scapegoat ritual, the human symbol that concentrates our fears and hates. We pass the boundary of art when this symbol becomes existential, as it does in the black man of a lynching, the Jew of a pogrom, or the old woman of a witch-hunt. The element of play is the barrier that separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an important theme of ironic comedy. Even in laughter itself some kind of deliverance from the unpleasant, even the horrible, seems to be important. We notice this particularly in all forms of art in which a large number of auditors are simultaneously present, as in drama and, still more obviously, in games. We notice too that playing at sacrifice has nothing to do with any historical descent from sacrificial ritual, such as has been suggested for Old Comedy. All the features of such ritual, the king’s son, the mimic death, the executioner, the substituted victim, are far more explicit in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado than they are in Aristophanes. There is certainly no evidence that baseball has descended from a ritual of human sacrifice, but the umpire is quite as much a pharmakos as if it had: he is an abandoned scoundrel, a greater robber than Barabbas; he has the evil eye; the supporters of the losing team scream for his death. But at play, mob emotions are boiled in an open pot, so to speak; in the lynching mob they are in a sealed furnace of what Blake would call moral virtue. The fact that we are now in an ironic phase of literature largely accounts for the popularity of the detective story, the formula of how a man-hunter locates a pharmakos and gets rid of him. The detective story

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begins in the Sherlock Holmes period as an intensification of low mimetic, in the sharpening of attention to details that makes the dullest and most neglected trivia of daily living leap into mysterious and fateful significance. But as we move further away from this we move towards a ritual drama around a corpse in which a wavering finger of social condemnation passes over a group of “suspects” and finally settles on one. The sense of a victim chosen by lot is very strong, for the case against him is only plausibly manipulated. If it were really inevitable we should have tragic irony, as in Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov’s crime is so interwoven with his character that there can be no question of any “whodunit” mystery. In the growing brutality of the crime story (a brutality protected by the convention of the form, as it is conventionally impossible that the man-hunter can be mistaken in believing that one of his suspects is a murderer) it begins to merge with the thriller as one of the forms of melodrama. In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob. We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularization of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. Serious melodrama soon gets entangled with its own pity and fear: the more serious it is, the more likely it is to be looked at ironically by the reader, its pity and fear seen as sentimental drivel and owlish solemnity, respectively. One pole of ironic comedy is the recognition of the absurdity of naive melodrama, or, at least, of the absurdity of its attempt to define the enemy of society as a person outside that society. From there it develops towards the opposite pole, which is true comic irony or satire, and which defines the enemy of society as a spirit within that society. Let us arrange the forms of ironic comedy from this point of view. Cultivated people hiss the villain of melodrama with an air of condescension, making a point of the fact that they cannot take his villainy seriously. We have here a type of irony which exactly corresponds to that of two other major arts of the ironic age, advertising and propaganda. These arts pretend to address themselves seriously to a subliminal audience of cretins, an audience that may not even exist, but which is assumed to be simple-minded enough to accept the statements made about

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the purity of a soap or a government’s motives. The rest of us, realizing that irony never says precisely what it means, take these arts either ironically or as a kind of ironic game. Similarly, we read murder stories with a strong sense of the unreality of the villainy involved. Murder is doubtless a serious crime, but if private murder really were a major threat to our civilization it would not be relaxing to read about it. We may compare the abuse showered on the pimp in Roman comedy, similarly based on the indisputable ground that brothels are immoral. The next step is an ironic comedy addressed to the people who realize that murderous violence is less an attack on a virtuous society by a malignant individual than a symptom of that society’s own viciousness. Such a comedy would be the kind of intellectualized parody of melodramatic formulas represented by, for instance, the novels of Graham Greene. Next comes the ironic comedy directed at the melodramatic spirit itself, an astonishingly persistent tradition in all comedy in which there is a large ironic admixture. One notes a recurring tendency on the part of ironic comedy to ridicule and scold an audience assumed to be hankering after sentiment, solemnity, and the triumph of fidelity and approved moral standards. Finally comes the comedy of manners, the portrayal of a chattering-monkey society devoted to snobbery and slander. In this kind of irony the characters who are opposed to or excluded from the fictional society have the sympathy of the audience. Here we are close to a parody of tragic irony, as we can see in the appalling fate of the relatively harmless hero of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Or we may have a character who, with the sympathy of the author or audience, repudiates such a society to the point of deliberately walking out of it, becoming thereby a kind of pharmakos in reverse. This happens, for instance, at the conclusion of Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves. It is more usual, however, for the artist to present an ironic deadlock in which the hero is regarded as a fool or worse by the fictional society, and yet impresses the real audience more than anything else in that society does. The obvious example, and certainly one of the greatest, is Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but there are many others. The Good Soldier Schweik, Heaven’s My Destination, and The Horse’s Mouth will give some idea of the range of the theme. Thematic Modes To complete this survey, we have to glance briefly at that aspect of literature in which the only characters involved are the writer himself

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and the audience he is addressing. Here the poet has the central role corresponding to the hero, and the realization of his social function is what corresponds to “discovery” in fiction. We have space only for the broadest generalizations about this third series of modes. On the mythical plane there is more legend than evidence, but it is clear that the poet who sings about gods is often considered to be singing as one. His social function is that of an inspired oracle; he is frequently an ecstatic, and we hear strange stories of his powers. Orpheus could draw trees after him; the bards and ollaves3 of the Celtic world could kill their enemies with their satire; the prophets of Israel foretold the future. The spell-muttering magicians of romance represent the next age’s view of such figures. Mohammed’s Koran is the only clear historical instance, at the beginning of the Western period, of the oracular mode in action. In the period of romance, the poet, like the corresponding hero, has become a human being, and the god has retreated to the sky. His function now is primarily to remember. Memory, said Greek myth at the beginning of its historical period, is the mother of the Muses, who inspire the poets, but no longer in the same degree that the god inspires the oracle—though the poets clung to the connection as long as they could. In Homer, in the more primitive Hesiod, in the poets of the heroic age of the North, we can see the kind of thing the poet had to remember. Lists of kings and foreign tribes, myths and genealogies of gods, historical traditions, the proverbs of popular wisdom, taboos, lucky and unlucky days, charms, the deeds of the tribal heroes, were some of the things that came out when the poet unlocked his word-hoard. The medieval minstrel with his repertory of memorized stories and the clerical poet who, like Gower or the author of the Cursor Mundi, tries to get everything he knows into one vast poem, belong in the same category. We meet here the fact that in every age of poetry there is some conception of a total body of vision, an imaginative encyclopedia, let us say, that poets as a whole class are entrusted with. Hence we should expect that each mode would have its own kind of encyclopedic form, which could be attempted by one poet if he were sufficiently learned, or by a group if the culture were sufficiently homogeneous. In the previous age oracular revelation expands into the form of the scripture or sacred book. But in the romantic age the poet remembers what his society needs to know, as in the previous age the god directly revealed it. Hence his encyclopedic knowledge is sacramental, a human analogy of divine knowledge. In the other three modes too we shall find the same conception of an analogy of revelation.

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The age of romantic heroes is largely a nomadic age, and its poets are frequently wanderers. The blind minstrel is traditional in both Greek and Celtic literature; Old English poetry expresses some of the bleakest loneliness in the language; troubadours and Goliardic satirists roam over Europe in the Middle Ages; Dante himself was an exile. Or, if the poet stays where he is, it is poetry that travels; folk tales follow the trade routes, ballads and romances return from the great fairs; or Malory, writing in England, tells his readers what the “French book” says that has come to his hand. Of all fictions, the marvellous journey is the favourite, and it is this theme that underlies the definitive encyclopedic poem of the mode, Dante’s Commedia. Poetry in this phase is an agent of catholicity, whether Hellenic in one age or Christian in another. The high mimetic period brings in a society more strongly established around the court and capital city. The poet now is normally a courtier, in the largest sense; poetry’s analogy of revelation is now more secularized, and placed at the service of prince and nation. The encyclopedic poems of this period, like The Faerie Queene, are heroic epics, usually with a strongly national reference. The poet is thus a public orator or master of decorum, who tends to think of his function in relation to social leadership. With the low mimetic, where fictional forms deal with an individualized society, there is only one thing for an analogy of myth to become, and that is an art of individual creation. The result of this is “Romanticism,” a thematic development which to a considerable extent turns away from contemporary forms of fiction. The qualities necessary to create Hyperion and the qualities necessary to create Pride and Prejudice do not seem to come together; in any case there seems to be no encyclopedic poet of this period who brings them together. In this age the poet himself becomes what the hero was in the age of romance, a withdrawn figure who lives in a higher and more imaginative order of experience than that of nature. The poet in this period is interested in himself, not necessarily out of egotism, but because the basis of his poetic skill is individual, and hence genetic and psychological. He uses biological metaphors: he contrasts the organic with the dead or mechanical; he thinks socially in terms of a biological difference between the genius and the ordinary man. Genius to him is a fertile seed or vital spark among thousands of abortive ones. He confronts nature directly, as an individual, and will not use tradition as a substitute for individual experience. Like the hero of low mimetic

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comedy, the Romantic poet is often socially aggressive: the possession of creative genius confers authority, and its social impact is revolutionary. The poets who succeed the Romantics, the poets of French symbolisme for example, begin with the ironic gesture of turning away from the world of the market-place with its blurred sounds and imprecise meanings; they renounce rhetoric, moral judgments, and all other idols of the tribe, and devote their entire energy to the poet’s literal function as a maker of poems. We said that the ironic writer is influenced by no considerations except craftsmanship, and the poet in the ironic age thinks of himself more as a craftsman than as a creator: he makes the minimum personal claim, consistently with his eiron role. At his best he is a dedicated spirit, a saint or anchorite of poetry. Flaubert, Rilke, Mallarmé, Proust, were all in their very different ways “pure” artists. As the pure artist cannot invoke anything outside the work of art he is creating, the analogy of revelation in the ironic phase is again sacramental, but in a way that Joyce calls epiphanic: the mystery of the universal Word is substantially present in the individual poem. The return of irony to myth that we noted in fiction is paralleled by some tendencies of the ironic craftsman to return to the oracular. This is sometimes accompanied by cyclic theories of history which help to rationalize the return. We have Rimbaud and his “dérèglement de tous les sens” designed to make himself a descendant of the Prometheus who brought the divine fire to man. We have Rilke and his lifetime of tense listening to an oracular voice within him. We have Nietzsche proclaiming the advent of a new divine power in man. We have Yeats telling us that the Western cycle is nearly over and that a new Classical one, with Leda and the swan taking the place of the dove and the virgin, is about to begin. We have Joyce and his Viconian theory of history4 which sees our own age as a frustrated apocalypse, followed instantly by a return to a period before Tristram. These phenomena, while they can be explained in terms of our survey, do not of course amount to anything that would justify us in predicting that the cycle of modes will go around again. If artists continue to work in our society, they will doubtless, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, make it new.5 I should draw more practical morals from my survey, two in particular. First, to try to become more aware of the historical context of the critical assumptions we make. In our day an ironic provincialism, which looks everywhere in literature for complete objectivity, suspension of moral

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judgments, concentration on pure verbal craftsmanship, and parallel virtues, is in the ascendant. A Romantic provincialism, which looks everywhere for genius and evidences of great personality, is more oldfashioned, but it is still around. There is no reason to suppose that either attitude has grasped the whole truth about art. Second, I think we should realize that while one mode constitutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction, any or all of the other four may be present. Much of our sense of the subtlety of great literature comes from this modal counterpoint. Chaucer is a medieval poet specializing mainly in romance, whether secular or sacred. Of his pilgrims, the knight and the parson clearly represent the norms of the society in which he functions as a poet, and, as we have them, The Canterbury Tales are contained by these two figures, who open and close the series. But to overlook Chaucer’s mastery of low mimetic and ironic techniques would be as wrong as to think of him as a modern novelist who got into the Middle Ages by mistake. The tonality of Antony and Cleopatra is high mimetic, the story of the fall of a great leader. But it is easy to look at Mark Antony ironically, as a man enslaved by passion; it is easy to recognize his common humanity with ourselves; it is easy to see in him a romantic adventurer of prodigious courage and endurance betrayed by a witch; there are even hints of a superhuman being whose legs bestride the ocean and whose downfall is a conspiracy of fate, explicable only to a soothsayer. To leave out any of these would over-simplify and belittle the play. Through such an analysis we realize that the two essential facts about a work of art, that it is contemporary with its own age and that it is contemporary with ours, are not opposed but complementary facts.

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16 Art in a New Modulation Summer 1953

Review of Feeling and Form, by Suzanne K. Langer. From The Hudson Review, 6 (Summer 1953): 313–17. Reprinted in NFCL, 111–16. Frye requested Langer’s book for review (Ayre, 240), and the result displays his characteristic combination of rigour and good nature as a reviewer. He clearly appreciates Langer’s skill as a popularizer, as well as her use of the non-academic style he aimed at himself. His doubts are not unexpectedly reserved for her treatment of literature, but he also raises the important problem—invited by her treatment of a wide range of art forms with which he was also familiar—of the unity of all arts, an issue he was pondering in other ways.

This book is described on the title-page as “A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key.” It will doubtless become, like its predecessor, something of a general favourite, as it continues to show that Mrs. Langer is a highly readable popularizer of philosophical ideas, especially the ideas of Cassirer, to whose memory the book is dedicated. The style assumes the privileges of a public character: it is breezy, good-humoured, colloquial, and occasionally swashbuckling. It is a refreshing change from the sort of aesthetics that either begins, like old-fashioned ethics, with some highly provincial legislation about what art ought to do, and then goes on to smear the art that doesn’t do it, or else, in struggling to reach some vast generalization about what art as a whole does do, passes over its infinite variety of moods and experiences. There are two opposed but equally indefensible views about the relation of art to reality. One is the vulgar conception of “imitation” as directly reproducing the outer world or an inner experience. According to this view painting is essentially representation, dancing the direct

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expression of what the dancer really feels, and so on. The other is the conception of art as make-believe or magic which produces a trance-like state by a deliberately raised hallucination. The golden mean of Mrs. Langer’s argument is a conception that she calls semblance or illusion, and identifies both with the German term Schein and with Aristotle’s mimesis. She avoids the latter word because, she says, it is too close to the representational fallacy. One would think that “illusion” was at least as close to the trance fallacy, but Mrs. Langer seems content with it, and distinguishes the trance fallacy as delusion. Thus painting is a spatial art, but it is neither a representation of real space, which is not pictorial, nor does it belong in a separate spatial world which is not real. It is the illusion or semblance of space, or what Mrs. Langer calls “virtual” space. Mrs. Langer goes on to show that the major arts can be classified according to the virtual fields that they occupy. As painting presents virtual space, so music presents virtual time, which, like Wyndham Lewis before her, she links with Bergson’s durée réelle.1 Verbal art, or what she calls poesis, she divides into literature proper and drama. The former is a semblance of the past, or virtual memory, the latter a semblance of the future, virtual act or destiny. Sculpture is the semblance of organic form; architecture gives her more trouble, but is finally called an “ethnic domain.” Dance—this is perhaps the sharpest of her insights—is a field of virtual power: it presents the illusion of human life as force or physical energy, which explains why it is so dominant an art in primitive society, where the mysterious powers of gods or of magic are central data of imaginative experience. The film Mrs. Langer believes to be a new art—she mentions the shadow plays of Turkey and Java, but evidently does not regard them as affiliated—and what it presents is virtual dream, the semblance of apparition. Because of the difference in virtual fields, two arts are never, in work of major importance, united on equal terms: one art absorbs the other, as music in Wagner absorbs poetry. She calls this the “principle of assimilation.” The function of art is to objectify feeling by creating symbols for it. By a symbol Mrs. Langer does not mean something that directly represents a feeling, in the way that a frown represents displeasure, which she calls a symptom. Recognizing a symptom is well within the orbit of the conditioned reflex, as a dog may recognize the symptoms of anger or affection in his master’s voice. The work of art is its own object, standing for itself, and unattached. Just as a name like James or John can be understood as a name apart from the people it may belong to, so a work of art can

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articulate or express a feeling which is a part of our total experience, whether it happens to be exactly the feeling that the artist or his audience has recently been preoccupied with or not. Understanding symbolism on this level is the prerogative of human consciousness, and the work of art is the emotional counterpart of the discursive or logical symbol on which reasoning is based. Art has, therefore, an educational importance parallel to science: it delivers us from the tyranny of inarticulate feeling, and it disciplines our sensibilities just as logic disciplines our thinking. I see no fallacy or inconsistency in the theory itself, which may be more familiar, at least to literary critics, than Mrs. Langer realizes. The development of it, and the resulting shape of the book, have some disappointing features. The main idea is used more as a touchstone than as a central assimilating form: it is brought in to the discussion of each art in turn and used to refute much the same fallacies in its criticism. One misses specific discussion of great works of art, and gets too much general discussion of other critics’ ideas. Sometimes this is effectively done: writers on the dance, for instance, at least the ones she quotes, seem to be a pretty inarticulate lot, and Mrs. Langer shows great tact and sympathy in translating their mooings into something more intelligible. But on the whole she is at her best when she throws the other critics away and works out an idea of her own. For instance, she interprets comedy and tragedy as expressing, respectively, the sense of the unquenchable exuberance of life and the sense of life as a contained pattern enclosed by death. These she calls the rhythms of fortune and of fate. She then seizes on the figure of the buffoon or fool as the central symbol of aggressive vitality in comedy, and the writing immediately takes on a concreteness which is often wanting elsewhere. The least satisfactory part of the book, to me, is the section on literature. Here again she quotes critics, and the reasons for selecting the critics are not easy to follow. Her theory of literature is one that would give a good deal of importance to Proust, but instead of quoting Proust, who is always very precise when he explains what he is trying to do, she quotes some phrases from Clive Bell’s book on Proust that slither around in the mind like greased weasels. She gives a curious picture of contemporary critical problems. Not all literary critics today are as confused about their subject as George Moore or Brander Matthews, and many of the matters discussed—pure poetry, significant form, the communal composition of ballads, the poetic validity of T.S. Eliot’s allusiveness— are pretty dead issues by now: dead because they were never central.

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There is a chapter called “The Great Literary Forms,” but no serious attempt is made in it to discuss the problems of literary genre. She seems ill at ease with the subject, and we find that different questions are apt to get the same answer, and that a rather circular one. Why is direct narration often useful in describing the events of prose fiction? “Because it projects them at once into the experiential mode, and assures their essentially literary form.” Why may a work of non-fiction, such as an essay, be called literary? Because, “whenever it is well done, it meets a standard which is essentially literary, i.e., an artistic standard.” Mrs. Langer has deliberately adopted “the practical rule of treating a problem that belongs to several arts only in connection with the one which exhibits it most perfectly.” That is, she believes in the unity of art, but discusses one art after another, and so what are really unifying principles emerge in different contexts. This puts a considerable strain on the reader: it is all very well to be promised another book in which such principles will be systematically treated, but one would like a few more cross-references in this one. The “magic circle” of the round dance is the same motif as the temenos or marked-off holy ground in architecture, but this point is only casually suggested through a quotation. The principle of the informing cause or “commanding form,” as she calls it, is a major issue in literary criticism today, but here it is discussed only in connection with music. Again, the principle that music deals with virtual time and literature with virtual memory could be used to explain how repetition, of a kind that would be intolerable in poetry by itself, can be a structural principle of music. Some reference to this would, I think, have made her discussion of song and opera considerably clearer. She raises the question of the motif in painting, giving the rosette as her example, but passes over the question of literary motif in legend and myth, saying merely that these are “not art at all, but fantasies.” She speaks of “the gratuitous and silly problem of the spectator’s credulity” in the criticism of drama, but discusses the same problem at some length in connection with prose fiction. As every poet knows, one cannot use a word without being affected by its traditional associations, and as long as “illusion” is used as a central idea about art, it will have the overtones of something opposed to “reality,” and will not cut itself loose from delusion or the acceptance of the unreal. Mrs. Langer says, for instance, “All forces that cannot be scientifically established and measured must be regarded, from the philosophical standpoint, as illusory.” The question involved here is not her taste in

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using the word, but her conception of “art,” which seems to me to have something of what is called misplaced concreteness about it. Conceived as objectified feeling alone, art is seen only as something that interrupts or displaces reality, not as a permanent part of a world constructed by humanity out of reality. The argument is weakened by a persistent attempt to separate art from its own social functions. True, Mrs. Langer says, not only that art is a unity, but “that there are no higher and lower, partial and supplementary arts,” which means that the difference between pure and applied art cannot be established either. And though, speaking of the relation of poetry to discursive writing, she says, “I maintain that the difference is radical,” when she stops maintaining things and looks at her data she is willing enough to admit that prose fiction belongs to literature, that it may use “just the same discursive language we use for conversation,” that it is inseparable from the “great literary order” of non-fiction, and that the transition from fiction to true exposition “may at times be a fluid transition”—in other words there are no boundary lines, and consequently no radical differences. But the main tendency of her argument is to insulate art as a thing by itself. It is in architecture that this is most difficult to do. Mrs. Langer says that utilitarian factors in building, such as heating, are not architectural elements but prudently adds a footnote saying that the architect ought not to ignore them. However that may be, it seems wrong to speak of the Empire State Building as in any sense an “illusion,” and I do not understand the distinction, if she is making one, between a virtual and a real ethnic domain. In short, all the arts show us, architecture most vividly, that there are two orders of reality: the world that nature presents to us, and the world that human society constructs out of it, the world of art, science, religion, culture, and civilization. Architecture is bound up with the idea, not simply of buildings, but of the city. Mrs. Langer says, “a world created as an artistic image is given us to look at, not to live in, and in this respect it is radically unlike the neurotic’s ‘private world.’” But the difference between neurosis and art is the difference between a private and a public world. If we think of such words as culture or civilization, we can see that we do in fact live in the world created as an artistic image. It is because of its clear reference to two orders of nature in human life that Aristotle’s word “mimesis” seems to me a safer guide than even the most cautious use of “illusion” or “semblance.” Reservations about Mrs. Langer’s arguments do not add up to anything like a rejection of them. Feeling and Form was obviously never

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designed to be monumental and definitive, but to explore and search and raise new questions. In this it succeeds admirably: it is a thoroughly likeable and candid book, and as far as its appearance in the contemporary critical scene is concerned, a reviewer has nothing to do but spread out a welcome mat.

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17 Ministry of Angels Autumn 1953

Review of The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays, by Allen Tate (Chicago: Regnery, 1953); The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, by Herbert Read (New York: Pantheon, 1953), and Dante’s Drama of the Mind: A Modern Reading of the Purgatorio, by Francis Fergusson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). From The Hudson Review, 6 (Autumn 1953): 442–9. Reprinted in NFCL, 130–40. Partially reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 24, ed. Sharon R. Gunton (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), 443. In his discussion of all three of these writers Frye is working out ideas of his own about criticism as an intellectual discipline independent of determinisms of whatever sort.

The science of criticism, as distinct from its art, that is, the shape of criticism as a structure of knowledge, is undeveloped. What follows is Newman’s principle, that when a genuine academic subject is not properly defined it creates a vacuum and all its neighbours move in. We have critics assuming that the fundamental principles of criticism are to be found in religion, metaphysics, psychology, or social studies, but not many who are willing to find them in criticism itself. Such an attempt would return us to Arnold’s conception of “culture,” which is really the conception of criticism as the central division of the humanities, flanked by history and philosophy. (Literature and the other arts are, like nature, a field of knowledge, not subjects of study but objects of study.) But developing a science of criticism would not do everything. Berdyaev begins one of his books by pointing out how anxious society is to make the philosopher do something more obviously useful than philosophizing. It is the same in history: there the way to attract attention is to be a

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determinist. We get determinism whenever a writer with a special interest, say in geography or economics or religion, expresses that interest by the rhetorical device of putting his favourite study into a causal relationship with whatever interests him less. Such a method gives one the feeling of explaining one’s subject while one is studying it, thus wasting no time. Criticism today is largely occupied by determinisms of this sort. Mr. Allen Tate is a religious determinist, and apart from his intellectual honesty (he constantly makes a point of giving his own case away), a very astute one. If the reader is a little jaded with the taste of dogmatic tabasco sauce on modern literature, he will have no relief here: he gets a familiar mouthful on the opening page: “The saints tell us that confident expectancy of damnation is a more insidious form of spiritual pride than certainty of salvation.” But Mr. Tate continually refers to his prejudices, and the modern liberal’s attempt to escape from prejudice is nailed into its coffin with three resounding whacks: it is private, mantic, and wilful. Normally, a prejudice in the mind is a major premise which is mostly submerged, like an iceberg. Mr. Tate’s explicit prejudice is more like a loadstone mountain or a siren’s island and is for a view of man which coordinates and limits the faculties of intellect and feeling. Such a view he finds in Catholic Christianity, particularly in the period before Descartes introduced the dualism of the “angel in the machine”; a dualism which splits man into a pure but proud intellect trying to know essences directly, like an angel, and an autonomous feeling trying to gain an equally direct possession of experience. Dante is thus at one poetic pole of Mr. Tate’s critical system; at the other is Poe, the “forlorn demon” of the title, in whom both aspects of the Cartesian dualism coalesce. With one exception (a rather irresponsible discussion of “Is Literary Criticism Possible?”), the essays in his book are excellent. Few critics can write with more sustained brilliance or employ the technical language of criticism with more assurance and dexterity. The incompetent critic has a delicate instinct for avoiding the centre of his subject; Mr. Tate has an infallible instinct for finding it. In discussing Poe he goes straight for Eureka and the “colloquies,” and relates the speculative nihilism in them with the more obvious nihilism in the Usher story.1 In discussing Johnson he puts his finger at once on Johnson’s lack of sense for the dramatic or experiential aspect of literature. Even when his dialectic seems merely ingenious, it still has the brain-softening plausibility that we used to find in the best Marxist criticism. There is no question of finding in Mr. Tate himself what he calls the pride that prevents the complete discovery of

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the subject. Nothing is actually obscured: I get rather a sense of a wrenched and astigmatic intensity of vision. The astigmatism is due to what he calls an “ambitious assumption, about the period in which we live, which I shall not make explicit.” There is an uneasy feeling of unwritten thus-we-see perorations hovering around the conclusions of his essay. I call Mr. Tate a determinist because he says and assumes that literary standards, “in order to be effectively literary, must be more than literary.” That is, they have ultimately to be religious. The theme of his essay on “The Man of Letters in the Modern World” is that the profoundest view of the man of letters is to take him as a lay preacher, revealing the apocalyptic dimensions of the contemporary scene. “There would be no hell for modern man if our men of letters were not calling attention to it.” This determinism is then projected historically as the Great Western Butterslide, the doctrine of a co-ordinated synthesis in medieval culture giving place, at the Renaissance, to a splitting and specializing schizophrenia which has got steadily worse until it has finally landed us all in that Pretty Pass in which we are today.2 His pages are strewn with such remarks as “a society which has once been religious cannot . . . secularize itself,” or “there is no end, yet in sight, to the fragmenting of the western mind,” or “the city of Augustine and Dante, where it was possible for men to find . . . the analogue to the City of God” (“still visible,” faintly, in eighteenth-century America). In this theory the Middle Ages becomes, like the moon in Ariosto, a vast repository of all cultural acquisitions which we have since lost. It has a miraculous supply of everything that we need in our time. For such an Eden we ought to have, somewhere in the Renaissance, a forbidden tree, or at least an ideological clothes-horse on which to tie the fatal apple. This lay figure used to be Bacon, now it is Descartes, or, in more esoteric circles, Ramus. (Mr. Tate, who doesn’t miss much, says, “The demonology which attributes to a few persons the calamities of mankind is perhaps a necessary convention of economy in discourse.” It seems to me necessary only for a deterministic organization of values.) We also need a type of argument that exaggerates to the limit the social and ethical consequences of contemporary beliefs, while taking an almost perversely intellectualized view of medieval beliefs. Dante told Can Grande3 that the aim of his whole poem was practical and moral, which means that his primary purpose in writing the Inferno was to scare the pants off his reader. This need not affect our appreciation of Dante, for we take his realities for fictions, just as we take our own fictions for realities. Still, a

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modern reader might well find Dante’s motivation, in itself, quite as repulsive as the motivation of Berenice’s lover returning from her body with a greatly relieved mind and a fine set of teeth. But Dante has receded into a purely aesthetic distance; Poe, says Mr. Tate, is “our cousin,” but Dante’s cousins have all disappeared into the Wonderful Synthesis. It takes a genuine effort, usually accompanied by a genuine annoyance, to realize that the Great Western Butterslide is a myth, like the Golden Age or the Social Contract. Suppose it were examined as a problem within criticism, and not used as a grindstone for an extracritical axe. I think that then, as we studied medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and later cultures impartially, suspending our value judgments, we should find ourselves revolving around the simple fact that one follows another in time. We should discover, in short, a process of cultural aging, and we should come to think of Western culture as having become, not better or worse or less unified, but simply older. And while aging may be reacted to emotionally as the working of a cruel fate or as a progressive deterioration or as a breakdown caused by a loss of innocence, all these are immature views. The trouble is that the best statement of the problem of cultural aging is in Spengler, and nobody wants Spengler’s maudlin hero-cult, his conscientious Philistinism, or the gloomy Wagnerian whinnies in his sound effects about the dark goings-on of nature and destiny. Still, value judgments founded on a theory of cultural aging, including Spengler’s own, are more or less addled versions of Spengler; and if we are all Spenglerians today, we may as well be clear-sighted ones. From this point of view, trying to find everything we have “since lost” in the Middle Ages is another way of looking for the fountain of youth. But, as Samuel Butler says in Erewhon, there is no way of making an aged art young again; it has to work out its own salvation in fear and trembling. Fear and trembling is at least one thing that we can find in Poe. I imagine that Mr. Tate would concede most of this, because he does not need the historical projection of his argument at all: his real aim is to set the church against the world in a present confrontation. That would still make him a determinist, but a much more difficult one to refute. Sir Herbert Read deals with the Romantic poets and their tradition. He is also a determinist, though a gentler one than Mr. Tate—a psychological determinist this time, with latent political implications. He finds the

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basis of Romanticism in Schelling’s conception of art as the conscious recreation of what appears in nature as organic form. Such a conception immediately drives a wedge between the real thing in art, the living and integrated organism, and the dead artefact. One is a form, the other a superinduced shape. The latter owes its existence to the notion of art as artifice, of poetry as a rhetorical playing with words. The essential feature of dead poetry is predictability, or mechanical regularity. Living poetry is unpredictable, hence irregular, and is the “true voice of feeling”—a phrase quoted from Keats. Wordsworth and Coleridge brought in the “cult of sincerity,” of never being satisfied with anything less than the true voice of feeling, and their tradition was continued by Keats, Hopkins, Pound, Eliot, and others, all of whom are dealt with in separate essays. The real tradition is contrasted with its pinchbeck imitation in Whitman and Lawrence, where there is more talk about sincerity than practice of it. Here the irregular rhythm is not organic, and so in Whitman it is constantly collapsing into a facile Biblical parallelism. (Incidentally, it is a little insular for Sir Herbert to remark that Whitman has had no disciples except Lawrence and Edmund Carpenter.4) Romanticism in poetry is thus an attempt, not to know essences like Mr. Tate’s angels, but to create them, or rather to liberate them. To express the true voice of feeling is in fact one of the central liberating processes of human life, and it arises as part of our heritage of freedom, in opposition to the Classical view of a prefabricated nature and an art which is merely “a grace added to life: a plaything.” (Before long we meet the inevitable unhappy footnote saying that of course in these terms a great deal of Racine is really Romantic, and a great deal of Wordsworth Classical.) In true poetry, the poet and the man must be united in a state of psychological purity, for “all great poetry, as Keats realized, is born of a certain modesty and simplicity of heart.” Through all his sensitive criticism and his very real erudition, Sir Herbert carries a most disarming simplicity of heart himself. His main theme is essentially the same as the problem of ecstasis or “transport” in Longinus, very ably handled in one of Mr. Tate’s essays. The problem is to locate the point at which rhetoric passes into poetry; persuasion, stimulus, and suggestion into the recognition of the true voice of feeling, of what the cult of sincerity produces. Sir Herbert is not careful to distinguish personal from literary sincerity, or to keep in mind the principle that with the poet, as with Machiavelli’s prince, the reality of such virtues is irrelevant: the simulation of them is everything. But

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then he attaches great importance to the biography of the poet, psychologically interpreted. There is a curious argument in his essay “In Defence of Shelley,” to the effect that Shelley was a narcissist suffering from hallucinations, which makes him abnormal, and consequently valuable to us, as the normal is so dull. There is much more said about Shelley’s thought than his poetry, perhaps because there is undoubtedly a good deal of rhetorical playing with words in Shelley. Surely it would be equally possible to argue the question of sincerity the opposite way. In some Elizabethan lyrics, for instance Campion’s When thou must home, it seems to me that it is the completely conventional nature of theme, structure, and technique that sets free the true voice of feeling. There is no organic place for pre-Romantic poetry in Sir Herbert’s book: he merely says: “I assume that in so far as the poetry of the past is sincere, to that extent it is organic in form.” So two themes are mixed together, one the creative process itself, the other the manifestation of that process in the Romantic movement. Now, once more, suppose Sir Herbert’s subject were approached from within criticism, instead of being externally determined by the psychological principle of sincerity. If we take a line of Shakespeare at random: Ay, but to die and go we know not where; [Measure for Measure 3.1.117]

we can see at least three main rhythms in it. One is the running rhythm, the ten syllables of the iambic pentameter; another, more important for this line, is the semantic or prose rhythm. There is also a soliloquizing, oracular rhythm, turning meditatively on its axis around its soundpattern: Ay; but to die . . . and go we know not where . . .

This, we may say, is the “poetic” rhythm as distinct from the “verse” rhythm, and it is essentially irregular and discontinuous, in contrast to running rhythm, which can go on indefinitely. The main technical experiments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were with running rhythm, and established blank verse, various

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stanza-forms, and later the couplet. Prose was still a half-metrical rhetoric. From the “Senecan amble”5 on, a series of technical experiments in prose, carried through mainly by Dryden, Addison, and Swift, set free the distinctive semantic rhythm of prose. Then, with the later eighteenth century, there begins a series of technical experiments designed similarly to set free the distinctive “poetic” or sound pattern rhythm. Long poems were still written in running rhythm, but no new running rhythms were established, except the ones that ran too fast, like the anapests of Swinburne. In short, the technical discoveries of the last century or so, including Hopkins’s sprung rhythm and vers libre, are best seen as discoveries within a genre. Such a view would logically account for a poet who merely baffles Sir Herbert—Byron, who, realizing that the perfection of running rhythm in Pope was a dead end, relapsed into a knittelvers [doggerel] which is also a parody of the conventions of running rhythm. It would also give central importance to Poe, whom Sir Herbert ignores, and Poe’s theory that poetry is essentially discontinuous sound pattern. In this way we could separate the technical problem, confined to one genre and one historical period, from the larger implications of the creative process, and so the former would not become merely a loose allegory of the latter. Mr. Fergusson’s book on the Purgatorio appears not to be deterministic. Surely a book on Dante could not entirely forgo the vision of modern man coming out of the Middle Ages with everything in his pockets and dropping it all on the way, like Hansel and Gretel. Ah, yes: “I suppose it was in the seventeenth century . . . that . . . the lumen naturale of the Middle Ages was finally lost.”6 But this is rare in his book, and he also avoids, more by instinctive good taste than by design, the graduateschool clichés about the Commedia as Thomism set to music. The result is that he has written a charming and eloquent book on the Purgatorio. It is primarily a teacher’s book. Dante’s poetry, like Bach’s music, adopts bewilderingly complex means in order to produce an effect of massive simplicity, and Mr. Fergusson has concentrated on the simplicity. He adopts Dante’s “the exposition of the letter is nought else than the development of the form” as an axiom, and so his form does not emancipate itself from being a running commentary. Some things thereby are necessarily lost: the treatment of recurring symbols, for instance, such as the sirens and especially the mirror, the subject of Mr. Tate’s Dante essay. And perhaps we are referred a bit too

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often to the excellent notes in the Temple Classics edition for the details of the allegory. We get little sense of the incredible skill of Dante’s allegorical counterpoint as it rumbles through the great stretto7 of the closing cantos, at every tercet taking our breath away with its ingenuity, yet inevitably right, and never manipulated. Mr. Fergusson does however catch the sense of suppressed excitement that we feel in these cantos: here we are in the centre of the Commedia, and therefore at the centre of our whole literary experience, and so the memory of other things near the centre, late plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles, the Bible, some moments in Plato and in modern poetry, crowd into our minds, and we glimpse a mass of converging rays of significance, as though there were one great thing that the whole of literature had to say to us. It is a self-effacing book, patiently linking Dante, as a teacher should, both with the “great tradition” coming down from Aristotle and with contemporary thought and his reader’s own experience. He is content to throw out some of his most illuminating remarks parenthetically, almost apologetically, as when he says that Dante’s “will” is closer to what we mean by “libido” than it is to our rationalized conception of will. He shows unobtrusively how Dante, not knowing Greek drama, was still able to pick the essence of the “Dionysiac” out of a couple of bad lines in Lucan, which to me implies that the real “great tradition” is not a curriculum but a habit of imaginative reading. He follows with great clarity and skill the central process of freeing the will through a series of progressive rebirths, until the pilgrim reaches the original unfallen childhood of the Golden Age. He shows how the pilgrim’s climb is at once an effort of will and an effort to relax the will, like the creative process itself, a purification of everything that obscures the free creative spirit, until, as the pilgrim enters the innocent world on top of the mountain, he becomes one with the poet who watches him. Thus—and this I think is the distinctive feature of Mr. Fergusson’s exposition—one of Dante’s themes is the liberation of his own liberal art of poetry. Mr. Fergusson shows, I think correctly, that the Purgatorio illustrates in its development a progression of Dante’s four levels of meaning. (Incomprehensibly he inverts the second and third levels, contradicting Dante’s express statements and the whole medieval tradition. I am not interested in his reasons: I think he has simply made a mistake, one that has to be corrected by the reader before his argument comes into focus.) The crisis of the Purgatorio, then, would be the passage from the allegorical (quid credas) to the moral (quid agas)8 as Dante passes from invisibly directed

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penance to the direct vision of the Word of God. As he goes through the ring of fire he passes Kierkegaard’s “either/or” dilemma, leaving his “aesthetic” dalliance with Casella far behind and moving into the sphere of ethical freedom, in the moment that the poet and the pilgrim begin to become the same man. The relation of quid credas to quid agas is the centre of the Purgatorio, and therefore of Mr. Fergusson’s book. It is also the central theme of Mr. Tate, especially in his opening essay on the relation of communication to communion. It is also in a way the central theme of The True Voice of Feeling, which turns on a parallel distinction of external and internal creation. Sir Herbert is, naturally, bothered by Kierkegaard’s identification of freedom with an ethical activity which rejects the aesthetic. He writes two essays proving that Wordsworth and Coleridge were early existentialists, which is hardly much of a point, though the essays are interesting enough. But Kierkegaard’s “aesthetic” attitude is that of the detached spectator, not the artist: Galileo’s view of man as a spectator of nature makes science equally a part of Bacon’s “idol of the theatre.”9 The “either/or” is between two mental attitudes, not two subjects. One attitude says “this is,” and contemplates whatever it is; the other says “let this be,” and acts creatively. At the end of the Purgatorio, Dante is approaching (the quo tendas [where are you going?] of anagogy) the presence of a God, who, when incarnate in man, spoke in parables rather than propositions, and taught, not a system to be admired, but aphorisms to be recreated in action. Hence Dante does not renounce but emancipates his creative and poetic powers, for “let this be” is the axiom of the poet’s craft as well. Dante thus claims for his poetry, as Mr. Fergusson says, an authority which cannot be overruled by any other aspect of human activity. Like Mr. Tate, I think it is very unlikely that Dante is predicting his personal salvation at the end of the Paradiso, but that he is asserting the salvation of the poetic vision I have no doubt. And that is why I feel that the critic, who follows the poet with a confidence in direct proportion to the poet’s greatness, need not look for his guiding principles in any more authoritative field than his own.

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18 Critics and Criticism January 1954

Review of Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern, ed. R.S. Crane et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). From Shakespeare Quarterly, 5 (January 1954): 78–80. Reprinted as “The Chicago Critics” in RW, 126–31. R.S. Crane was the doyen of the group of neo-Aristotelian literary theorists developing at the University of Chicago. In 1949 Frye had sent Crane a copy of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (no. 8 in this volume), and Crane replied cordially, admiring his daring in suggesting that criticism must become a science (NFF 1991, box 3, file 5). Conversations with Gordon Roper and M.H. Abrams continued to fuel Frye’s interest (D, 288), and he might have spent his 1950–1 sabbatical in Chicago had it not been for the difficulty of finding housing. Crane, whom Frye found “surprisingly friendly” (D, 473) gave the Alexander lectures at Toronto in 1951–2 (see no. 20 in this volume for Frye’s review), and later spent a term teaching in the graduate school.

This book is a collection of essays by a group of critics, who in the main either are or have been associated with the University of Chicago, and who hold certain broad critical principles in common. These principles have their source in Aristotle’s Poetics, and regard the poem as an imitation, in the sense of a made object like a tool, though, unlike a tool, it is constructed primarily for beauty and pleasure rather than usefulness. Words are the material but not the form of a poem: its central form is not a verbal pattern but an imitated action, or what Aristotle called a praxis. Poems are concrete wholes (synola in Aristotle); the whole is the imitated action (mimesis praxeos), and every detail must be considered in relation to that whole. Aristotle distinguished poetics from rhetoric, but later critics, from Horace and Cicero through Quintilian to the Middle Ages, tended to

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think of poems rhetorically as verbal structures to be compared with other verbal structures. The poet thus becomes a kind of orator. This attitude develops in criticism, first, a great interest in tropes and figures of speech, and, second, an interest in the moral and didactic value of poetry. In the Middle Ages this latter aspect of the rhetorical view was expanded into elaborate theories of meaning imported from theology. The rhetorical tradition survives today in “New Criticism,” with its theories of verbal ambiguity and irony, and the allegorical school survives in “myth criticism,” which, like its predecessor, attempts to isolate a subject matter instead of studying a form. These ideas are presented first, negatively, through a series of hostile analyses of the New Critics; second, historically, through a series of essays on the history of criticism from antiquity to the Romantic movement; third, positively, through theoretical and practical criticism by the group itself. The learning and acuteness of the book makes it indispensable for the serious student of criticism, whatever his special field. It is admirable to have so clear and erudite an exposition of Aristotle; it is admirable to have so much philosophical precision brought into the discussion of criticism; it is invaluable to have so much information about the history of criticism brought together in one place. Almost any of the essays in the second part would be worth the price of admission in itself, and many of them cover fields that are not adequately surveyed at all anywhere else. The main thesis is offered as one to supplement, not to replace, current theories of criticism, and as such it may be accepted without reservation. What reservations one has would have to take the form of supplementing their thesis in the reverse direction, showing what may still be valid in the critical positions attacked with such lively polemic. A full consideration of the whole book is out of place here, but the issues involved for the criticism of Shakespeare may be briefly indicated. Students of the Renaissance will perhaps be most immediately interested in the two essays by Mr. Weinberg on Robortello and Castelvetro. What emerges from a careful analysis of their commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics is that they are continuing to think in medieval and rhetorical terms. They are still preoccupied with moral values, with persuasion of an audience to good, and with the oratorical role of the poet. They are thus adapting Aristotle to a radically different critical theory, and many of Castelvetro’s most important critical positions are explicitly anti-Aristotelian. These facts, though to my knowledge never made quite so clear before,

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are in themselves not surprising. We are by now accustomed to learn that in all fields connected with literature and philosophy the continuity with medieval ideas is profounder than the revolt against them and the return to Classical standards which used to be thought distinctive of the Renaissance. We are familiar too with the eclectic attitude of Renaissance humanism; whatever differences a modern philosopher may see between Plato and Aristotle, for example, the Renaissance humanist was usually quite determined to make them both fit into his own intellectual pattern. Thus the second book of The Faerie Queene unites an essentially Aristotelian ethic with an essentially Platonic psychology. This last fact raises a difficulty about the conception which the whole scheme of the book makes necessary, the conception of an opposition between mimetic and didactic forms of literature. The latter, according to these critics, results from the effect on literature of a rhetorical view of it which stresses the morally beneficial. But if we take an English critic of the period not too far away from Castelvetro—Sidney—we see there that he takes for granted the Horatian principle that poetry delights and instructs. From there he develops an easy, flexible, and catholic synthesis of mimetic and didactic standards. The poet for him has a relation to the philosopher as well as to the historian; poetry unites the precept of the one with the example of the other. This view is quite inconsistent with Mr. Olson’s view that mimetic poems “are of a quite different order and are constructed on, and hence have to be judged by, quite different principles from those of works in the second” or didactic class. Sidney may be wrong, though he does not seem to me to be particularly muddled, but he is certainly representative of Elizabethan good taste. So any approach to literature that puts The Faerie Queene and the plays of Shakespeare into separate categories, beyond the difference of genre, is likely to be, in the first place, a historical anachronism. Elizabethan critics thought of the mimetic and didactic as complementary and inseparable aspects of the same thing; and the evidence seems to show that most Elizabethan poets (Sidney being of course a most influential poet) thought so too. And a careful comparison of, say, the sixth book of The Faerie Queene with The Winter’s Tale would, I think, establish the fact that they are actually much closer together than the theory of this book would permit them to be. The critics of this book may have reacted too far against the rhetorical confusion of praxis and lexis, the confusion which reduces, for instance, a stage play to a tissue of verbal ambiguities. They seem to me to have

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fallen into the opposite error (for which, I admit, there is justification in Aristotle) of identifying praxis and mythos, action with events and narrative. A well-constructed imitation of an action, however, has a dianoia or thought-form as well as an event-form, or rather, these are two aspects of the same thing. This dianoia is the total internal idea of the poem, and it exists both in mimetic and didactic poetry. Mr. Olson’s doctrine that didactic poetry is dominated by external ideas applies only to bad or naive didactic writing, sugar-coated moral pills and the like. Dante and Spenser begin with a praxis as much as Shakespeare or Fielding do, and then, with the most prodigious contrapuntal skill, keep several lines of events and ideas continuously related to it. They never allow the external events and ideas to mould the praxis; an allegorical poet who allows that to happen is simply incompetent or not interested in poetry at all. In literature, as in music, the dramatic genre necessitates a considerable simplification of contrapuntal texture. So Shakespeare’s technique differs generically from Spenser’s, but is no more different in kind than the technique of Monteverdi is different in kind from that of Palestrina. The converse of this principle (i.e., that Shakespeare may be more didactic, as Spenser is more mimetic, than the book admits) is involved in the treatment of Shakespeare, who is throughout accepted as the very type of mimetic poet. There are two essays on King Lear, one a review by Mr. Keast of a “New Criticism” treatment, the other an approach by Mr. Maclean in the terms favoured by the group. Mr. Keast has a field day showing how an attempt to relate King Lear to an external structure of ideas reduces the whole play to an illustration of the most melancholy platitudes. Whatever the real merits of the book he is reviewing, it is certainly wrong to approach Shakespeare as though he were a bad didactic poet, trying to “show” that good is better than evil or what not. And it is true that to look for an illustrated philosophy in Shakespeare is like looking for good theatre in the Critique of Pure Reason. But it is not wrong to assume that part of the profundity of Shakespeare is profound thought, a dianoia or inner meaning (not a hidden meaning) which is inseparable from the action but is still a part of that action. The inductive studies of the recurring imagery of King Lear by Wilson Knight and Caroline Spurgeon have, for me at least, gone a long way to illuminate this meaning, and I think a careful comparison of the different contexts in which such words as “nature” and “nothing” appear would do a good deal more. As a positive critical method of approaching Shakespeare, the view-

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point of this book seems to me to be most valuable as a counsel of prudence, urging us to have some sense of proportion about a practising dramatist. In itself, lacking a sense of the quality of poetic thought, it presents a central conception as barren as anything offered by its rivals. There is a whole; it has parts. Mr. Maclean’s essay on King Lear breaks a large part, the theme of madness, into smaller parts, coming down to the line, “Didst thou give all to thy two daughters, and art thou come to this?” and ending with an enormous movie close-up of the word “this.” He has no difficulty in showing that every detail, however small, is a significant and relevant part of the total action. But we still have platitudes, though they are platitudes about the creative process and not about the moral order. “We shall see how Shakespeare uses actions, which are more discernible than emotions, to mark the descent into the pit; here we are concerned with the fact that Shakespeare added ‘thought’ to action and emotion, and ‘thought’ in many ways is more precise than either of the other two. In solving this problem of intelligibility, then, Shakespeare was ‘abundant,’ utilizing the maximum of means. . . .” We are still too close to a critical diagram, and still too far from the play. The virtues of Mr. Maclean’s essay are considerable, but they are virtues which bring him close to the better rhetorical critics. The moral seems to be that one’s critical processes should be as flexible and as little confined to one methodology as possible. The best mental equipment that any critic, whatever his school, can bring to Shakespeare is still none too good.

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19 Myth as Information Summer 1954

Review of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1, by Ernst Cassirer, trans. Ralph Manheim, preface and introduction by Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1954). From The Hudson Review, 7 (Summer 1954): 228–35. Reprinted in NFCL, 67–75. Frye’s brisk setting of the bibliographical scene in the first paragraph shows how well informed he was about Cassirer’s work and thought. Much of the argument of his review, shorn of all references to Cassirer and heavily rewritten, was worked into the concluding pages of the “Fourth Essay” of AC.

The first volume of the English translation of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms has just appeared. As the German edition of this volume was published in 1923, the translation is very belated, and by now will chiefly interest students of philosophy who are not sufficiently concerned with Cassirer or acquainted with German to have consulted the original. This is a restricted range of usefulness, not enlarged by the fact that the real contemporary importance of Cassirer’s thought is displayed not in this book but in the later Essay on Man, written in English and now available in a pocket edition. The Essay on Man is crisper, more concise, more conclusive in the direction of its arguments, and, as befits its American setting, more evangelical. Cassirer’s work as a whole has been pretty thoroughly assimilated since his death in 1945, and the first volume of his magnum opus has now a largely historical importance for anyone who, like the present writer, cannot claim to be a technically competent philosopher. That historical importance is, of course, very considerable. It is hardly too much to say that the bulk of what is distinctive in twentieth-century

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thought, in the nonmathematical division, has been constructed around the word “myth.” The major political philosophies of today, whether democratic, Communist, or Fascist, are still firmly rooted in their nineteenth-century formulations. But when the century opened, the study of myth in psychology by Freud, and in anthropology by Frazer and others, had started a radically new departure in social thinking, and in 1922, the year that Proust died with his great mythical Recherche complete, the appearance of The Waste Land, Ulysses, and the more ectoplasmic Fantasia of the Unconscious1 startled the literary public also into realizing the importance of myth. It was the next year that Cassirer began to bring the problem into systematic philosophy, and in the thirty years since then the word “myth” has continued to produce that uninterrupted flow of talk which is generally called, and sometimes accompanies, a steady advance in thinking. Cassirer appears to have done a good deal to break down the provincialism of the discursive reason in philosophy. Logic is based on language, and is a specialized development of language, but it is by no means the final cause of language. Not only is language itself prelogical, but there is no evidence whatever that man learned to speak primarily because he wanted to speak rationally. The simultaneous and parallel development of the languages of myth and literature shows that there are other kinds of structures to be made out of words. Thinking is one of many things that man does; hence it is a part of a whole, the whole being the “functional unity” of human work in the world. To put logical thought in its place as one of a number of human operations is more realistic than to consult it as an oracle which reveals to man the existence of a systematic and rational order in the objective world. For when reason in the mind discovers rational order in the universe outside it, this discovery is largely a matter of falling in love with its own reflection, like Narcissus. The “philosophy of symbolic forms,” then, is a philosophy which starts by looking at the variety of mental constructions in human life. These include science, mathematics, philosophy, language, myth, and the arts, and in the aggregate are called culture. Each of these constructions is built out of units called symbols, which are usually words or numbers, and which, approximately, owe their content to the objective world and their form to the categories of human consciousness. For further details see Professor Hendel’s lucid introduction, which traces Cassirer’s conception back to the “schema” of Kant. We may also divide these constructions into a logical group and another group which is

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either pre- or extra-logical, and which consists mainly of language, myth, and the arts. Folke Leander, writing in the volume of the Library of Living Philosophers devoted to Cassirer, remarks that Cassirer has not established the relation among these three, any more than he has established that there are in fact three of them, because there is no adequate treatment of aesthetics in his work.2 (The chapter on art in the Essay on Man is largely amiable burble.) It is perhaps worthwhile trying to follow up this suggestion, and to see if we can discover what, on the basis of Cassirer’s general conception of symbolic form, the relation of myth actually is to language on the one hand, and to literature (the only one of the arts which seems to have a direct connection with myth) on the other. The relation of grammar to logic may provide us with a useful analogy. Logic grows out of grammar, the unconscious or potential logic inherent in language, and we often find that the containing forms of conceptual thought are of grammatical origin, the stock example being the subject and predicate of Aristotelian logic. It would be interesting to develop John Stuart Mill’s suggestions about the relations of grammar and logic,3 which are referred to by Cassirer, and are perhaps not as indefensible as he thinks, though they may need restating. One wonders, for instance, about the parallelism between the parts of speech and the elements of thought in our Classical-Western tradition, where nearly all the important languages belong to the Aryan group. There is surely some connection between the noun and the conception of a material world, the verb and the conceptions of spirit, energy, and will, the adjective and universals, the adverb and value, the conjunction and relation, and so forth, that would bear investigating. It is disappointing to find that not even in the Essay on Man is there any reference to the contemporary problems involved in the relation of grammar and logic. Cassirer shows how language begins in spatial mythopoeia and the projection into the outer world of images derived from the human body. He does not show how these metaphors organize our writing and thinking as much as ever today: nearly every time we use a preposition we are using a spatial myth or an unconscious diagram. If a writer says, “But on the other hand there is an additional consideration to be brought forward in support of the opposing argument,” he may be writing normal (if wordy) English, but he is also drawing elaborate geometrical doodles, like an armchair strategist scrawling plans of battle on a tablecloth. Again, the fluid primitive conceptions dealt with by Cassirer, the Polynesian mana, the Iroquois orenda,4 and the like, are

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participial or gerundive conceptions: they belong in a world where energy and matter have not been clearly separated, either in thought or into the verbs and nouns of our own less flexible language-structures. As energy and matter are not clearly separated in nuclear physics either, we might do well to return to such “primitive” words ourselves. The words “atom” and “light,” for example, being nouns, are too material and static to be adequate symbols for what they now mean, and when they pass from the equations of a physicist, into the linguistic apparatus of contemporary social consciousness, the grammatical difficulties in the translation show up clearly. Of course one would have to avoid the scholar’s mate5 in this kind of argument: the fallacy of thinking that we have explained the nature of something by accounting for its origin in something else. Logic may have grown out of grammar, but to grow out of something is in part to outgrow it, and to try to reduce logic to grammar would be as futile as a good many earlier attempts to reduce grammar to logic. For grammar may also be a hampering force in the development of logic, and a major source of logical confusions and pseudo-problems. These confusions extend much further than even the enormous brood of fallacies spawned by paronomasia, or the use of words in a double or manifold sense, which make up the greatest number of such booby traps. Even Cassirer’s major effort in thought illustrates a grammatical problem: he abandoned the search for a systematic or rational unity in human consciousness in favour of recognizing a “functional unity” of a number of various activities that obviously do exist. This had the effect of transferring his conception of reason from the definite to the indefinite article, of saying that reason is a phenomenon of human consciousness, which is indisputably true, instead of saying that human consciousness is rational (or the reason), which involves one in a wholly unnecessary struggle for the exclusive possession of an essence. The other day two students came to me and one said, “I say art is expression; Jim here says it’s communication: which is it?” I said that if he would admit that art may communicate, Jim would probably admit that it may also express, and they could divide the essence peaceably between them. It was the same grammatical pons asinorum on a small scale. It is no wonder, then, that many logicians tend to think of grammar as something of a logical disease. Some of them have maintained that mathematics is the real source of coherence in logic. I have no opinion on this, but as a literary critic I know that as long as logic continues to make a functional use of words, it will

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continue to be involved in all the problems of words, including grammar and rhetoric. When people speaking different languages come into contact, an ideogrammatic structure is built up out of the efforts at communication. The figure “5” is an ideogram, because it means the same number to people who call it “five,” “cinq,” “cinque,” “fünf,” and a dozen other things. Similarly, the purely linguistic associations of English “time” and French “temps” are perceptibly different, as a comparison of the phrases “good time” and “beau temps” shows. But it is quite practicable to translate Proust or Bergson on time into English without serious risk of misunderstanding the meaning. When two languages are in different cultural orbits, like English and Zulu, the ideogrammatic structure is more difficult to build up, but it always seems to be more or less possible. The problems of communication between two people speaking the same language may be at least equally great, because more difficult to become aware of, but even they can be surmounted. This ideogrammatic middle ground between two languages must itself be a symbolic structure, not simply a bilingual dictionary. When we learn a closely related language like French we discover French equivalents for all English words and constructions. But obviously one cannot walk into a Polynesian or Iroquois society and ask, “What are your words for ‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘reality,’ ‘knowledge’?” They may have no such words or concepts, nor can we give them our equivalents for mana and orenda. Yet it is equally obvious, after examining the evidence in Cassirer’s book, that it is possible, with patient and sympathetic study, to find out what is going on in a Polynesian or Iroquois mind, and thereby do something to disentangle one’s own mental processes from the swaddling clothes of their native syntax. But we can only do so by trying to get the “feel,” the sense of a comprehensible and communicable inner structure, in the other language which can be identified with another inner structure growing out of our own language, even if its syntactic setup is entirely different. It is out of such ideogrammatic inner structures, whether produced linguistically between two languages, or psychologically between two people speaking the same language, that the capacity to assimilate language to rational thought develops. The humanist theory of education has always, and rightly, stressed the importance of the conflict of different habits of linguistic expression, specifically of the modern and Classical languages, in the training of the mind. In his Essay on Man Cassirer suggests that the historical origin of scientific and mathematical

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thought may have been a similar linguistic conflict in Mesopotamia between the Sumerian and the Semitic Akkadian languages. It is not so often realized that the relation between grammar and literature is closely parallel to the relation between grammar and logic. Poetry seems to be much more deeply involved in verbalism, because so much of it is untranslatable, and because ambiguity and paronomasia are as much virtues in poetry as they are vices in discursive thought. Yet in reading a poem we make an effort to comprehend the meanings of the words employed in it which is quite separate from the understanding of their dictionary meanings. The question of what a word conventionally means is always qualified, sometimes contradicted, by the other question of what it means in the poem, and the poet, like the philosopher, may protest against a merely conventional understanding of his more precise meaning, his “sens plus pur,” in Mallarmé’s phrase.6 Poetry, as much as discursive or rational writing, grows out of language, yet remains in a state of tension against language. Hence the development of an understanding of literature, as of rational thought, involves the building up of ideogrammatic inner structures like those mentioned above, though the inner structures in this case would not be structures of ideas but of something else. The content or sense of poetry, its aspect as an imitation of nature, is always more or less translatable into another language, or another aspect of the same language. But to render the sense of a poem only is not full communication. What cannot be translated is a complex of elements, of which one is a quality that we may vaguely call word-magic, and which seems to depend on the characteristics of the language employed. Yet one feels that poetry is more communicable than this. Surely the languages of Europe have co-operated to produce a great literary culture in a way that goes far beyond such a mixture of exchangeable sense and competing tintinnabulations. We seem to have missed something. The content of a poem, we say, is translatable. What about the form, which is usually the complementary term to content? Nobody would call wordmagic or anything dependent on linguistic factors the form. Cassirer’s “symbolic form” is neither subjective nor objective: it is intermediate, taking its structure from the mind and its content from the phenomenal world. In the symbolic forms of all the arts this inseparable unity of a mental constructive principle and a reproductive natural content reappears. Painting, for instance, has the imitation of nature as one of its elements, and design, the symmetry and balancing of outlines and

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masses, as the other. Abstract, or more strictly nonrepresentational, painting (which is still imitating nature in the Aristotelian sense) is about as close to the formal pole as we can get; trompe l’oeil puzzles are nearest the imitative pole. For some reason the main emphasis has been well over towards the imitative end in nearly all the theory and most of the practice of Western painting. Music, on the contrary, has always been primarily formal in our tradition, and imitative or “program” music kept within strict bounds. Literature, like painting, has, at least in its criticism, tended to give more attention to its extroverted, nature-imitating aspect. Its formal or constructive principles are still so little understood that there is no adequate terminology to describe them. The word “myth” means different things in different fields: in literary criticism it is gradually settling down to mean the formal or constructive principle of literature. Where there is a fiction, the shaping form, to which every detail in the writing has to be assimilated, is the story or plot, which Aristotle called mythos and declared to be the “soul” of the fiction. In primitive periods such fictions are myths in the sense of anonymous stories about gods; in later ages they become legends and folk tales, then they gradually become more “realistic,” i.e., adapted to a popular demand for plausibility, though they retain the same structural outlines. Profound or “classic” works of art are frequently, almost regularly, marked by a tendency to revert or allude to the archaic and explicit form of the myth in the god-story. When there is no story, or when a theme (Aristotle’s dianoia) is the centre of the action instead of a mythos, the formal principle is a conceptual myth, a structure of ambiguous and emotionally charged ideas or sense data. Myths in this sense are readily translatable: they are, in fact, the communicable ideogrammatic structures of literature. Literature resembles mathematics, and differs from other structures in words, in that its data are hypothetical: mathematician and poet alike say, not “this is so,” but “let this be.” Mathematics appears to be a kind of informing or constructive principle in the natural sciences: it continually gives shape and coherence to them without being itself involved in any kind of external proof or evidence. One wonders whether, in the future, when we shall know so much more about what literature says and how it hangs together than we do now, we shall come to see literary myth as similarly a constructive principle in the social or qualitative sciences, giving shape and coherence to psychology, anthropology, theology, history, and political theory without losing in any one of them its own

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autonomy of hypothesis. Thus it looks now as though Freud’s doctrine of an Oedipus complex were an explanation for the dramatic effectiveness of Oedipus Tyrannos. Perhaps in another few years we shall decide that we have got it the wrong way round: that the dramatic myth of Oedipus informed and gave coherence to Freud’s psychology at this point. Such a reversal of perspective would bring us close to Plato, for whom the purest formulation of dialectic was either mathematical or mythical. The basic structure of myth is the metaphor, which is very similar in form to the equation, being a statement of identity of the “A is B” type. I imagine that the third quarter of the century will see Cassirer’s principles developed in some such direction as this.

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20 Content with the Form October 1954

Review of The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, The Alexander Lectures, 1951–2, by R.S. Crane (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953). From University of Toronto Quarterly, 24 (October 1954): 92– 7. Reprinted in RW, 131–6, and in Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 27, ed. Jean Stein (Detroit: Gale Research, 1984), 71–2. For Frye’s acquaintance with Crane, see the headnote to no. 18 in this volume. Frye attended all of Crane’s five very demanding Alexander lectures, passing some of the time pondering critical ideas of his own that were stimulated by what Crane was saying. His diary for 1952 gives a running account of the lectures and his own day-by-day response (D, 544–8). He was unexpectedly touched by the final one, in which, as he wrote, Crane “threw away the [God-like] invulnerability he’d been assuming and became just one more damn critic” (D, 548). Frye’s analysis of the printed lectures is rigorous but friendly; his conclusion, “all he rules out, in the long run, are quack formulas for discovering the secret of poetry or its ‘real meaning’ in terms of something else” reflects not only Frye’s current preoccupation with the independence of criticism as a field, but his fraternal intellectual relationship with, if not the “Chicago school,” at least Aristotelianism in general.

The Alexander Lectures given by Professor Crane in 1952 form one of the most significant volumes in a distinguished series. For here we have a reasoned statement, in manageable compass, of the doctrines which roused so much controversy when they appeared in Critics and Criticism, but without the polemical tone or the sense of the partisanship of a “school” which confused the response to that book. Mr. Crane here remarks that schools are a sign of competing dogmatisms rather than of co-operative learning, and it is impossible for any reader of this book to

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regard its author as an Aristotelian determinist out to do a hatchet job on the New Critics. The theme of the book is the contrast in method between two kinds of criticism. One approaches a poem to find “what actually was, for its poet, the primary intuition of form which enabled him to synthesize his materials into an ordered whole.” This method is expounded in terms of Aristotle’s Poetics in the second lecture, and in terms of its contemporary application in the fifth. The first, third, and fourth lectures are mainly devoted to the conceptual assumptions underlying certain more a priori approaches. Of these two are today of outstanding importance: the rhetorical and the mythological. In the Poetics Aristotle divides the problems of criticism into a number of headings, of which “diction” (lexis) comes fairly well down in the list. When he reaches diction, he remarks that its theory belongs more properly to rhetoric or elocution. The implied distinction between poetics and rhetoric was blurred by later critics, Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, all of whom thought of poetry as a form of rhetoric, conditioned primarily by rhetorical problems of expression and presentation. Thus the poem appears, first, as a tissue of figures of speech and tropical devices, and secondly, as a species of oratory concerned with effectiveness in the sense of audience response and moral value. This tradition has persisted from Alexandrian times down to the “New Critics” of today, who are essentially rhetorical analysts. The Aristotelian view is that poems are made objects: they are made out of words, it is true, but words are their material and not their form. The Aristotelian says that a poem has a verbal structure; the rhetorician says that it is one. Hence the latter is compelled to start, not with concrete poems, but with an abstract homogeneity called “poetry,” which he has first of all to discriminate from other verbal structures. This leads him to define poetry in a tautological formula of the type: “poetry is some of what non-poetry isn’t.” Then he is forced to proceed deductively, along a second tautology of the type: “as the essential qualities of poetry are á, bB, and , the essentially poetic qualities of the poems x, y, and z can only be á, bB, and .” There is an alternative procedure of looking into poetry for what is analogous to other verbal structures. And as other, or non-poetic, verbal structures are mostly structures of meaning, rhetorical criticism runs into the first fact stated about rhetoric by Aristotle, that it is the antistrophos or answering chorus of dialectic. That is, the rhetorical critic sees in poetry an analogy of meaning, and feels that when he has ex-

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tracted the meaning, however he conceives of meaning, he has isolated the real form of the poem. If the poem happens not to be particularly concerned with meaning, of course, all he gets is a dismal truism, like the topoi or commonplaces of medieval rhetoric. The mythological critic proceeds in the same way, except that he takes poetry to be a symbolic rather than a verbal structure, and hence the analogies he seeks are those to dream, ritual, and myth. In fact all “schools” of criticism use much the same method: a deductive method which begins by asking, “What are we to look for in this poem?” and answers, “For examples illustrating the fact that all (good) poems contain the things that we have agreed to be essential to them, or particularly fascinating about them, on the basis of our definition of poetry.” As the word “contain” shows, this method is interested solely in aspects of the poem’s content or material. The disciple of Brooks or Richards or Empson who looks for irony, paradox, and ambiguity is blood brother to the Victorians who (to adopt a phrase of Mr. Douglas Bush) thought they were reading poetry when they were actually only looking for Great Thoughts.1 And while there is nothing wrong with reading poetry in order to build collections of metaphors or noble sentiments or archetypes or paradoxes, it would be a great impoverishment of the humanities if the inductive, pragmatic study of the whole poem, whose form is specific, peculiar to itself, unpredictable in advance, and revealed by nothing less than the whole poem, should drop out of the centre of criticism. Mr. Crane speaks as though he were presenting a distinctive kind of criticism, recoverable from Aristotle, which has been submerged, practically since Aristotle’s day, by the domination of rhetorical values. We are thus led to expect a fairly specific methodology in the last lecture; yet, on the other hand, we wonder how this can be consistent with his argument that all methodologies can find in poetry only what they have previously determined to look for. Much is claimed for his own method: it is even advertised with guarantees. “We can do all these things,” he says, meaning the things other critics do; “but we can also do more, and as a consequence be able to do these things with greater precision and intelligibility. For we possess what these other methods have conspicuously lacked. . . .” But the principles, as well as the sparse examples from Macbeth and Gray’s Elegy, remain very general in formulation. With the best will in the world it is difficult to see the practical application of, for instance, “the shaping principle of form and emotional ‘power’ without which no poem could come into existence as a beautiful and effective

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whole of a determinate kind,” or “the assumption that the poet’s end— the end which makes him a poet—is simply the perfecting of the poem as a beautiful or intrinsically excellent thing.” (The word “simply,” in this book, acts as a traffic sign indicating the approach of a junction with the Aristotle-Crane route.) As a method of teaching, we are told, it would be (“simply,” again) “the communication to students of a comprehensive scheme of questions to be asked about all the different kinds of literary works they might be studying. . . .” These questions seem to be the same questions with which students are already reluctantly familiar from examination papers (e.g., “What specific technical problems are involved in the composition of Emma, and how does Jane Austen go about solving them?”). Hence to follow Mr. Crane’s method here one “simply” has to be a good teacher—one is reminded of the conferences that solve the plight of humanism by recommending that its professors should try to be a little brighter. And yet, how could it be otherwise? It would be absurd to expect Mr. Crane to come up with some patented new and easy formula. The fact is, I think, that what Mr. Crane is expounding is the norm of critical procedure, and his method is an exhortation to the critic to keep his mind on his job. He is urging the central and primary importance of the unbiased reading of the poem, and of the framing of critical hypotheses about it analogous, in what they stress and subordinate, to the actual proportions of the poem as a “concrete whole.” He says, as clearly as his pythonic sentence structure will allow him to do, that the poem is its own object: that there is no end outside it, morality, truth, religion, or even beauty, to which it is finally to be related. In short, he is defining the aims and methods of the central practical activity of reading, studying, and evaluating poems which every sensible critic bases all his work on, whatever his special interests may be. In revealing the conceptual barrenness, the circular arguing, and the errors of taste and perspective that result from neglecting this central activity, Mr. Crane has not only fully established his own point but performed a real service for all serious critics. I suspect, however, that the dialectic necessity of first defining an abstract “poetry,” deducing a priori characteristics or values, and then making all poems the shadows of a Platonic Form, is in large part illusory—the illusion being not in Mr. Crane’s mind but in the structures of what critics write. As I am included in the mythological group, I suppose my own methods are classed as deductive: actually they are inductive as far as my experience of them

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goes, generalizations shaped from a variety of individual contacts with literature. But I know that when I write them out they look as deductive as Euclid. Similarly, Mr. Crane usually examines the rhetorical critics when they are in a prefatory, harrumphing, what-after-all-do-we-reallymean-by-poetry mood which I think is generally expendable. The textual analysis that follows is their real contribution, and it is as often as not quite independent of such postulates. The main task of I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism, for instance, is surely to free inexperienced readers from exactly the kind of preconceptions that Mr. Crane condemns. And if the rhetorical critic tends to pass over plot construction and “common sense apprehensions of his objects,” he might retort that Mr. Crane’s exposition of the Poetics also passes over the very emphatic statements in it about metaphor as the index of genius, the highest proof of the poet’s mastery, and the one thing he cannot learn from others. The real issue, then, is between criticism based on the central inductive operations of criticism, or what Mr. Blackmur calls “the enabling act of criticism,” and criticism not so based, and consequently held captive by some kind of theory which is sure to be either tautological or tendentious. But this is a straight issue between relevant and irrelevant criticism. If Mr. Crane is unwilling to push the issue so far, that is partly because he has a special job in mind for his “abstract” critics to do. We have seen that the latter often treat poetry as though all of it were didactic: now some poetry is didactic, and for such poetry their methods may be appropriate. Mr. Crane believes that didactic poems, which for him include the Commedia and The Faerie Queene, are of “another order” from mimetic poems, and that his Aristotelian method can be applied only to the latter. I can see a general distinction between fictional and thematic literature, but I cannot understand how Mr. Crane’s way of putting the distinction can be a functional or even a consistent part of his argument. First, it seems to me to rest on an inadequate analysis of didactic poetry. Surely the thesis, or body of ideas, is at least as much material or content in Dante and Spenser as it is in Gray’s Elegy, where the writing seems much more obviously and explicitly didactic than the writing in Yeats, who is classified as didactic. Second, if Mr. Crane says, “a good poem can thus be said to have wholeness both as a mythos and as a logos,” he cannot very well go on to speak of “the most effective fitting of the logos as a whole to the mythos.” Nowhere else in his book does he talk of fitting two whole things together; besides, the difference between a real mythos

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(plot) and a mere sequence of events lies in the inseparably “logical” quality of the mythos itself. So when Mr. Crane speaks of the “formal principle” of the Ode to a Nightingale as “a man in an evolving state of passion interpreted for him by his thought,” and of this again as “something analogous to a plot,” he is really saying that in this poem the mythos and the logos (or dianoia, as I should prefer to call it) are identical, yet he does not seem inclined to call the poem nonmimetic. Third, and most important, the quibbles involved in trying to apply the question, “Is this poem mimetic or didactic?” would soon throw one back on a prior definition of “mimetic poetry,” and so establish in Mr. Crane’s method the very dialectical apparatus he is trying to avoid. The main thing Mr. Crane does is to make a careful comparison of the poetic method of Aristotle with a modern method which sounds at first as though it were a monopoly of Mr. Crane and a few associates, but which, after all the qualifications are in, begins to sound more like the common practice or basic training of intelligent and candid critics everywhere. He does not rule out special critical interests, whether they are in archetypes or verbal texture or the history of ideas; all he rules out, in the long run, are quack formulas for discovering the secret of poetry or its “real meaning” in terms of something else. What he has done, then, if I am right, is to rehabilitate the common practice of criticism, dignify it with a tradition and a theory, and encourage it to feel strong enough to absorb instead of avoiding its more specialized and technical developments. And that is an essential task of enduring importance.

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21 Forming Fours Winter 1954

Review of Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (New York: Pantheon Books for Bollingen Foundation, 1953) and Psychology and Alchemy (New York: Pantheon Books for Bollingen Foundation, 1953), by C.G. Jung. From The Hudson Review, 6 (Winter 1954): 611–19. Reprinted in NFCL, 117–29; in Chinese, in NFSEL, 97–110; and as “Négysek kialakulása,” trans. Anna Fenyvesi, in Idö néküli világ (Szeged, Hungary: Attila Jöszef University, 1988), 30–40. Frye had an easy familiarity with Jung’s writings; there are many references to him in the Diaries, and nine of Jung’s works are among the annotated books in the Frye Collection. As Robert Denham points out, Frye was taking notes on The Psychology of the Unconscious in the 1940s (the notes are NFF 1993, box 3, file 10). In the 1950s he read Psychological Types and The Secret of the Golden Flower, and he thought of writing a paper on Jung and Blake (D, xxxiii–iv, and see 677, n. 21). Frye found his own experience of individuation Jungian in character (D, 94) but kept a critical distance from Jung’s theory of archetypes, which he analyses with easy mastery here, constructing a bridge between two phases of Jung’s thought that the great psychologist had left unbuilt. In February 1960 Mircea Eliade wrote Frye complimenting him on his use and development of Jung in “Forming Fours” and praising the fact that Frye is thinking (Eliade’s emphasis) about Jung, “sans tenir compte de la scolastique Jungienne” (Mircea Eliade to NF, 22 February 1960) (NFF 1990, box 1, file 1). For some time now the Bollingen Foundation has been producing a series of books on symbolism, the unifying theme of which would have puzzled anyone who did not realize that they were mostly Jungian documents. Now, as number 20 in the series, a complete English translation of Jung, in eighteen volumes, is announced, and the first two, volumes 7 and 12, have just appeared. One is a revision of Two Essays on

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Analytical Psychology (the phrase “analytical psychology” means Jung, just as “psychoanalysis” means Freud), and the other, Psychology and Alchemy, is a more systematic and erudite version, with a tremendous bibliography, of the desultory work previously known in English as The Integration of the Personality. Jung’s conception of human personality, or what he calls the psyche, is built on a Freudian foundation of a conscious ego, trying to be rational and moral and adjusted to the demands of society and nature, and a subconscious “shadow” (not far from Freud’s “id”), formed of one’s suppressed or ignored desires. If the ego insists on regarding itself as wholly good and the shadow as wholly evil, the way is open for neurosis and schizophrenia: for a healthy life the ego must come to terms with the shadow and recognize its essential continuity with it. The centre of the psyche then shifts back from the ego to a balancing point between ego and shadow, a point of pragmatic wisdom. The outer and inner worlds then appear as a world of power and a world of love respectively, which the pragmatic wisdom in the centre of the human trinity tries to hold together. The outer psyche now becomes a “persona,” or social mask, and the inner one a “soul,” or focus of love. If the outward formation of the psyche is that of a man, the soul is a female “anima”; if it is a woman, the soul becomes a masculine and rationalizing “animus,” often taking the form of a group. The problem now is to prevent the centre of pragmatic wisdom from becoming absorbed into either persona or anima. If this happens, they will become autonomous “complexes” (a word of Jung’s invention). A dominating persona, or superiority complex, is the natural danger of an extroverted temperament: it may turn one into a stuffed shirt with a bad temper, for the word “hypocrite” is really a synonym of persona, and the bad temper is the revenge of the neglected anima. Introverts (the words introvert and extrovert are also Jung’s) are more in danger of an “inferiority complex,” the anima-dominated life of a social craven. But if persona and anima are kept in balance and each limited to its proper function, the natural result is the release of two deeper powers from the unconscious, which move up to reinforce them. These correspond approximately to the parental figures of Freud’s later essays on the ego and id, and are called by Jung the Great Mother and the magician or old wise man. Here there is still a possibility of becoming absorbed in one function or the other, but on this third level the absorption would make one a leader or spell-binder (“mana-personality”), either of the

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sage type or of the hero type, depending on whether the absorption is inward into the mother or outward into the father (in a woman these directions would be reversed). If the psyche successfully navigates this third crisis, the centre of the personality has finally been transferred from the ego to a “self” which is the real centre. The four “archetypes,” or semi-autonomous personalities which the psyche has partly created and partly evoked, now settle into the four functions of psychic life: thought, feeling, intuition, and sensation. (At least I think they do, but this point comes somewhere in between the two books, and Jung’s argument here may be less symmetrical than my account of it.) The self is now the centre of a circle with four cardinal points, and this fourfold circle appears everywhere in religion, art, and private dreams as the diagram called the “mandala.” A simple Western example is a picture of Christ as the fourfold Word of God, surrounded by the four “beasts” of Revelation, later identified with the four Gospel narrators. The whole process of shifting the centre to the true self Jung calls “individuation,” or sometimes, “transformation.” Of the differences between Jung’s thought and Freud’s, there are two that concern us just now. All modern scientific analysis of the psyche must of course be rooted in therapeutic techniques for helping the mentally ill to function at least normally, whatever normally means. Jung believes however that the ordinary medical analogies of diagnosis, treatment, and cure are not adequate for the psychologist. The physical body nearly always matures in about twenty years, but in most people the psyche remains largely undeveloped throughout life, though possessing within it a force of growth towards the “individuation” which is its peculiar maturity. This growing force within the psyche is what Jung, in contrast to Freud, means by libido, and, being a biological force, it behaves teleologically, just as an acorn behaves as though it intended to become an oak tree. When a psychologist tries to help a neurotic, he is helping to release this power of growth, and he ought to realize that any “cure” is only one stage in the process he has started going. Secondly, the drama of individuation does not take place entirely within the individual. The archetypes come in to the individual from a “collective unconscious,” inherited from our ancestors and extending over present-day society. Hence the dreams and fantasies of the individual should not be interpreted solely in relation to his personal life: they are also individual manifestations of a mythopoeic activity found in everybody; and private analysis should be supplemented by an objective

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study of the analogies between the patient’s mythopoeia and that of the art, folklore, mythology, and romance of human beings generally. In Jung, as in Proust, the study of the psychology of the mind leads to the discovery that men are “titans in time,” and that their creative powers rise from an essentially timeless world. This at once raises the question: if the self is established at the centre of the personality, and a centre implies a circle, what and where is the circumference of that circle, if it is not to be confined to the individual? Of course by hypothesis nobody can establish the boundary of an “unconscious.” But Jung is finally, in contrast to his former attitude, beginning to assert explicitly that “there could just as well be layers above consciousness.” In this context his maturing psychic process latent in the “normal” mind has close analogies with Indian yoga and the Chinese Tao, and his conception of a self which is the opposite of the ego seems to lead logically towards the Hindu Atman or the Buddhist Citta, in which the self becomes fully enlightened by realizing its identity with a total self, an indivisible unity of God, man, and the physical world. This conception is the basis of Aldous Huxley’s “perennial philosophy,”1 the mystic’s axiom “Thou art That.” In Christianity it would correspond to the final integration of man into the body of Christ, Christ being not simply God and the creator of nature but a God who is also Man. Jung gives a good deal of attention to the Oriental analogues to his thought, especially Taoism, but his attitude to Christianity is more devious. The doctrine of an “immortal soul” he rejects, as the soul in his system is the anima, a part of the undeveloped ego which is eventually dissolved into a function of an obviously mortal individual. However, they told me at Sunday School that the Christian view of immortality was based on the conception of a spiritual body, not of a bodiless soul, and Jung may not have got this doctrine quite right. Catholic theology supplies a set of existential or objective counterparts to the archetypes of the unconscious (the Father-God, the Mother Church, the Virgin, and the Son manifest in the world), and this enables the believing Catholic to project his archetypes, and so attain a pragmatic balance between his inner and outer worlds. For all those who feel compelled to regard these personal entities as psychological fictions, the archetypes have to be dealt with in the psyche itself. This is very difficult to do, and the upheavals of mass neurosis in the twentieth century are the result. The Catholic solution is, Jung feels, whether actually true or not, psychologically the easiest and for most people still the best, but

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Jung’s own “individuation” is closer to a visionary tradition which runs through Meister Eckhart and after the Reformation is mainly Protestant, appearing in Paracelsus, Boehme, Blake, and some of the Anabaptists and Quakers. But Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism tend to rest on a simple contrast between a good God and a sinful man, and thus project not the archetypes, but the original tension between ego and shadow which leads to neurosis. The idea of God as the “wholly other,” in which regeneration becomes a kind of drama within the Trinity which man is somehow in but not of, is evidently regarded by Jung as his chief theological opponent. This exposition ignores a few nonfunctional inconsistencies which seem to have an emotional origin. There is, to use his own term, a complex in Jung’s mind that makes him balk like a mule in front of the final acceptance of the totality of the self, the doctrine that everybody is involved in the fate of everybody else, which the uncompromising charity of the great religions invariably insists on. His “collective unconscious” is actually the total mythopoeic power of humanity, and has nothing to do with ancestor cults of “racial differentiation,” or groping around in the windy bowels of Teutonic exclusivism. But the explicit affirmation of this obvious fact seems to stick in his throat like the amen in Macbeth’s, although his intelligence has to proceed exactly as though it had been made anyway. We simply have to step over such passages as a footnote in the Two Essays in which he says he’s not anti-Semitic: he just thinks “it is a quite unpardonable mistake to accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology as generally valid. Nobody would dream of taking Chinese or Indian psychology as binding upon ourselves.” Well, he does, and if by “Jewish psychology” he means Freud, he has certainly accepted plenty of its validity for his own system. When Jung began to supplement the purely analytical interpretation of dreams with a hermeneutic study of the analogies to dreams in myth and romance, the result was a most important study, soon to be republished in this series as volume 5, Symbols of Transformation. It was previously known in English as The Psychology of the Unconscious, although its original title, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, gives a much better idea of its contents. Just as the “individuation process” became the informing principle of his psychology, so the mythopoeic counterpart to it, the hero’s quest, became the informing principle that Jung, with some help from Frobenius,2 perceived in myth, folklore, and literature. The heroic quest has the general shape of a descent into darkness and peril followed

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by a renewal of life. The hero is confronted by a dragon or power of darkness who guards a treasure or threatens a virgin. He is often accompanied by a shadowy companion who seems to be a double of himself, and is given counsel by a magician, an old woman, or a faithful animal, the last being a regular symbol of unconscious powers. The hero kills the dragon, or sometimes, as in the stories of Jonah and the Harrowing of Hell, disappears into its body and returns, often finding, as Beowulf does, that the most dangerous aspect of his enemy is a sinister female principle, whom Jung calls the “terrible mother” and links with the fear of incest and other erotic regressions. In any case the accomplishing of his quest gains him his bride, the dragon’s hoard, or both. The double-edged power of the archetypes for good or evil is reflected in the stock black and white patterns of romantic characters: there is a wise old man and an evil magician, a solicitous mother and a wicked step-mother, a heroine and a siren or temptress, a hero and a traitorous companion. One can see in the quest myth too not simply a psychic allegory but a kind of geotropism as well, as the heroic quest catches the cyclic rhythm of nature, the sun setting and reappearing from the body of a dark monstrous underworld the next day, and, every year, transforming the sterility of winter and raising new life from underground. Thus the salvation of the individual soul, the religious myth of a Messiah or redeeming God, and the renewal of energy in nature all seem to be contained in a single mythopoeic framework. At the same time there is a dialectic in the quest, not a passage from death to revival but a transformation to a new and timeless life, which means that in the final analysis the dragon or enemy of the quest is the cycle of time and nature itself, symbolized by the ouroboros, or serpent with his tail in his mouth.3 The themes and patterns of this book are strikingly similar to those of Frazer’s Golden Bough. I think there is an explanation for the similarity, but I have first to explain my explanation. Literary criticism, as a science, is obviously a social science, but the social sciences are so recent in their development that they have not been clearly separated even yet. Thus The Golden Bough was intended to be a book on anthropology, but it was also a book on literary criticism, and seems to have had far more influence in literature than in its alleged field. Perhaps the reason is that, in extracting a single type of ritual from a great variety of cultures, Frazer has done what the anthropologist, with his primary interest in cultural pattern, cannot do—if I may speak under correction of a science I know

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very little about—but he has also done precisely what the literary critic, with his interest in ritual pattern, wants to see done. Similarly, Jung’s book on libido symbols extracts a single dream type from a great variety of individuals, all except one unanalyzed and many of them not even identified. Again, he has done something which may be largely meaningless to most therapeutic psychologists, but places the book squarely within the orbit of literary criticism. It has thus become, along with The Golden Bough, a cornerstone of archetypal criticism, and it appears to have made more stir among the literary critics who happen to be, like the girls in Finnegans Wake, “jung and easily freudened,” than among psychologists—though again I speak under correction. At any rate Jung seems to be leading Freud’s great discoveries in the direction of a firsthand study of literature, whereas Freudian criticism itself, even Freud’s own brilliant essay on Leonardo, tends to take us away from the works of art into the biography of the artist, and so, like many other forms of research, to neglect real criticism in favour of the peripheral darkness of “more light.” Archetypal criticism is that mode of criticism which treats the poem, not as an imitation of nature, but as an imitation of other poems. It studies conventions and genres, and the kind of recurrent imagery which connects one poem with another. The archetype is thus primarily the communicable symbol, and archetypal criticism deals with literature as a social fact and as a technique of communication. To an Aristotelian critic, poetry exists, as Sidney says, between the example and the precept. The events of a poem are exemplary and general, hence there is a strong element of recurrence in them. The ideas are precepts, or statements of what might be or ought to be, hence there is a strong element of desire in them. These elements of recurrence and desire come into the foreground with archetypal criticism. From this point of view, the narrative aspect of literature is a recurrent act of symbolic communication: in other words a ritual. The narrative content of a poem is studied by the archetypal critic as ritual or imitation of action, and not simply as a mimesis praxeos or imitation of an action. Similarly, the significant content is the conflict of desire and reality which has for its basis the work of the dream. Hence it is inevitable that the archetypal critic would find much of interest in the work done by contemporary anthropology in ritual, and by contemporary psychology in dreams. Archetypes are most easily studied in highly conventionalized literature, which means, for the most part, naive, primitive, or popular litera-

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ture. It attempts to extend the kind of comparative study now made of folk tales and ballads into the rest of literature, and seizes on the primitive and popular formulas in great art: the formulas of Shakespeare’s last period, or the book of Revelation with its fairy tale about a damsel in distress, a hero killing dragons, a wicked witch, and a wonderful city glittering with jewels. We may distinguish two kinds of archetypes: structural or narrative archetypes with a ritual content, and modal or emblematic archetypes with a dream content. The former are most easily studied in drama: not, as a rule, in the drama of the educated audience and the settled theatre, but in naive or spectacular drama: the folk play, the puppet show, the pantomime, the farce, the pageant, and their descendants in masque, comic opera, and commercial movie. Modal archetypes are best studied first in naive romance, which includes the folk tales and fairy tales that are so closely related to dreams of wonderful wishes coming true, and to nightmares of ogres and witches. Frazer’s Golden Bough is, as literary criticism, an essay on the ritual content of naive drama; that is, it reconstructs an archetypal ritual from which the structural and generic principles of drama may be logically derived. It does not matter two pins to the critic whether this ritual ever had any historical existence or not. Frazer’s hypothetical ritual would inevitably have many and striking analogies to actual rituals, and such analogies are part of his argument, but the relation of ritual to drama is a relation of content to form, not of source to derivation. Similarly, the dream content of naive romance is the communicable dream content. It has no relation to psychoanalyzing dead poets, but it would have striking analogies to the fantasies dredged up during psychoanalysis. Jung’s book on libido symbols is, as criticism, an essay on the dream content of naive romance, and Jungian criticism is always most illuminating when it deals with romance, like Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse, an earlier volume in the Bollingen series. And the central dream in Jung is essentially identical with the central ritual in Frazer, though the hero is individual libido in one and social fertility in the other, and his enemies parental regressions in one and the waste land in the other. Soon after the publication of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, an associate in Jung’s field, Herbert Silberer, made a study (known in English as Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism) of an alchemical tract in the Rosicrucian tradition, which he analyzed first psychologically and then in terms of its own cosmological, or, as he called it, anagogic, meaning, and showed that the two interpretations ran parallel. Jung also

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soon discovered in alchemy another mythical parallel to his individuation process, and plunged into a study of alchemical symbolism, both Oriental and European, which has borne fruit in this lavishly illustrated, exhaustively documented study, Psychology and Alchemy. The structure and symbolism of alchemy is here compared, not simply with Jung’s own psychological system, but with the archetypes of the heroic quest as well. It should be said at once that most of its readers will want to hold it up to a mirror, like Jabberwocky. That is, the way that Jung has approached myth, working outwards from his own practice as a doctor, has had the result of turning every mythopoeic structure he has studied into a vast allegory of his own techniques of psychotherapy. It is doubtful that anyone not a hundred per cent Jungian can take the whole of myth, including alchemy, in quite that form, but the parallel mythopoeic structures that emerge from his study are not less rewarding in themselves. Some of these parallels are suggested by the admirably chosen illustrations, even when they are not explicitly dealt with in the text. Alchemy, at least in its fully developed Christian form, was based on the idea of a correspondence between Scripture and Nature, the verbum scriptum and the verbum factum. Its religious basis is Biblical commentary (not the “Church,” as Jung keeps saying). Repeating classical experiments is a normal part of scientific training, and the idea of alchemy was to repeat the original divine experiment of creation: “Lapidis generatio fit ad exemplum generationis mundi,” as one alchemist quoted by Jung remarks. One isolated, first of all, a prima materia, corresponding to the chaos of Genesis; then one extracted from this a spirit of life, called Mercurius and associated with the anima mundi, which contained within itself the potency of all life and was consequently hermaphroditic. This hermaphrodite then became the substance that had to be redeemed or transformed; it changed from the chemical analogy of the Holy Spirit to the analogy of the old Adam or fallen nature (not Adam as first man, which would be the homunculus). As such, this hermaphrodite corresponds to the antagonist of the heroic quest: the dragon or monster, the leviathan, the old man, the serpent or ouroboros, and it is represented by these symbols. From this the principle of complementary opposition was next evolved, associated with various symbolic pairings, male and female, sun and moon, odd and even numbers, red and white. It was often called the marriage of the red king and the white queen. The union or coniunctio of these (often thought of as some form of incest, because they sprang from

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a common parent) shifted the theatre of operations from a hermaphroditic to a female principle, just as in the Bible it is shifted from fallen nature to the church or Bride of Christ. At this stage a third principle, a son or divine child, regularly made his appearance. The final stages are full of associations with the number four, especially the four elements, as the final work of redemption brings with it the power of living in water and fire as well as earth and air—a symbolism familiar to us from a late and not over-profound Masonic treatment of it in The Magic Flute. The philosopher’s stone itself was the chemical or demiurgical analogy (or perhaps rather aspect) of Christ, the elixir being to nature what his blood is to man. The fourfold symbolism is based on the fact that both man and nature have an inside and an outside, a subject and a object. The centre of nature (the gold and jewels hidden in the earth) is eventually to be united to its circumference in the sun, moon, and stars of the heavens; the centre of the spiritual world, the soul of man, is united to its circumference in God. Hence there is a close association between the purifying of the human soul and the transmuting of earth to gold, not literal gold but the fiery quintessential gold of which the heavenly bodies are made. The human body and the vas or alembic vessel of the laboratory thus experience parallel phenomena. The power of Christ is, in Scripture, the teaching that gives man immortality, the fountain of eternal youth; in Nature, it is the healing power or panacea that will restore nature to its original innocence, or the Golden Age. The relation of all this to the actual attempt to transmute base metals into gold was, and still is, the great mystery about alchemy. The unifying conception soon died out, presumably because the alchemists got nowhere with their experiment (although, as we really don’t know what they were trying to do, many of them may, for all we know, have done it), and alchemists broke into straight chemical experimenters on the one hand, and occult philosophers on the other, each group regarding the other as a rabble of self-deluded charlatans. The associations of alchemy were apocalyptic and visionary, but not necessarily heretical, as Jung tends to think: the notion of a redeeming principle of nature as an aspect of Christ is a quite possible inference from the conception of substance which underlies the doctrine of transubstantiation. The parallels between alchemy and the mass, worked out by some of the more zealous allegorists, are perfectly logical granted their premises, and there is no occasion for Jung’s speaking of their “bad taste.” The rejection of transubstantiation by Protestants, however, along with the Protestant mini-

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mizing of the value of works (which would of course include the alchemical opus), had a lot to do with hastening the decay of alchemy. The essential point to remember is that when alchemy loses its chemical connections, it becomes purely a species of typology or allegorical commentary on the Bible. In Jung’s book the symbolic structures of alchemy and the heroic quest are united on the Euclidean principle that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another. The “same thing” is Jung’s own individuation process, whose general resemblance to the great work of alchemy, on its psychological side, is not difficult to demonstrate. But, centuries before Jung was born, the “same thing” to which alchemy and romance were equal was Biblical typology. For the Bible was not only the definitive alchemical myth for alchemists, but the definitive grammar of allegory for allegorical poets. Its central structure is that of quest-romance: it tells the story of a progress from creation to recreation through the heroism of Christ in killing the dragon of death and hell and rescuing his bride the church. Jung would perhaps have made this point clearer if his own literary experience, being German, had not given so central a place to Goethe. For Goethe’s Faust is already a chemist, ready to believe that St. John’s in principio means “nothing but” (one of Jung’s most effective phrases) “Im Anfang war die That.”4 And Goethe himself does not follow the central structure of Biblical typology: hence his treatment of symbolism, while it is brilliant, varied, and ingenious, is not scholarly, as Dante, Spenser, and Blake are scholarly. When we read the quest-myth in the first book of The Faerie Queene, with its elaborate red and white imagery, it seems loaded down with alchemical symbolism, but we don’t need to assume that Spenser knew about alchemy, because we can derive all the symbolism from the Biblical tradition anyway. True, when we meet the hermaphrodite and ouroboros in the temple of Venus in the fourth book, we realize that Spenser did know about alchemy, but by that time we have a better idea of the context of such symbols. As for Blake, there is hardly a page of Psychology and Alchemy without close analogies in the Prophecies. But that does not prove that Blake knew alchemy; it proves that he knew the Bible and how to use it in poetry. With this additional connecting link, we can see that Jung’s book is not a mere specious paralleling of a defunct science and one of several Viennese schools of psychology, but a grammar of literary symbolism which for all serious students of literature is as important as it is endlessly fascinating.

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22 The Language of Poetry February 1955

From Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, no. 4 (February 1955): 82–90. Reprinted in Explorations in Communication, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 43–53; and as “Il linguaggio della poesia” in La communicazione di massa, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1968). Incorporated into the “Second Essay: Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols,” of AC. The young anthropologist Edmund Carpenter arrived on the University of Toronto campus like a meteor in the 1950s. His journal Explorations ran for only seven issues, but famously had a vitalizing effect on local intellectual life. Both he and Frye were campus celebrities, and a debate was arranged, which took place before a standing-room only audience. Frye however reported he took to the young man right away, though he was annoyed by all the fuss. At the time he concluded amiably that “Nobody got hurt, and I think we put on a fair show” (D, 518), but later in life he admitted to Philip Marchand that he found Carpenter extremely aggressive (D, 753, n. 128) and neither of them had really won. In his diary he wrote that he was very glad of the discussion, “because it forced me to clarify an issue I’ve not yet honestly faced—what in hell is an archetype?” (D, 518).

There are two aspects to the form of any work of literary art. In the first place, it is unique, a techne or artefact, to be examined by itself and without immediate reference to other things like it. In the second place, it is one of a class of similar forms. Oedipus Rex is in one sense not like any other tragedy, but it belongs to the class called tragedy. To understand what one tragedy is, therefore, leads us insensibly into the question of what an aspect of literature as a whole is. With this idea of the external relations of a form, two considerations in criticism become important: convention and genre.

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The central principle of orthodox or Aristotelian criticism is that a poem is an imitation, the basis of imitation being, according to the Physics, nature. This principle, though a perfectly sound one, is still a principle which isolates the individual poem. And it is clear that any poem may be examined, not only as an imitation of nature, but as an imitation of other poems. Virgil discovered, according to Pope, that following nature was ultimately the same thing as following Homer. Once we think of a poem in relation to other poems, we begin to develop a criticism based on that aspect of symbolism which relates poems to one another, choosing, as its main field of operations, conventional or recurring images. All art is equally conventionalized, but we do not ordinarily notice this unless we are unaccustomed to the convention. In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented. To demonstrate the debt of A to B may get C his doctorate if A is dead, but may land him in a libel suit if A is alive. This state of things makes it difficult to appraise a literature which includes Chaucer, much of whose poetry is translated or paraphrased from others; Shakespeare, whose plays sometimes follow their sources almost verbatim; and Milton, who asked for nothing better than to copy as much as possible out of the Bible. It is not only the inexperienced reader who looks for a residual originality in such works: most of us tend to think of a poet’s real achievement as distinct from, or even contrasted with, the achievement present in what he stole. But the central greatness of, for instance, Paradise Regained is not the greatness of the rhetorical decorations that Milton added to his source, but the greatness of the theme itself, which Milton passes on to the reader from his source. The new poem, like the new baby, is born into an already existing order, and is typical of the structure of poetry which is ready to receive it. The notion that convention shows a lack of feeling, and that the poet attains “sincerity” (which usually means articulate emotion) by disregarding it, is opposed to all the facts of literary experience and history. A serious study of literature soon shows that the real difference between the original and the imitative poet is that the former is more profoundly imitative. Originality returns to the origins of literature; radicalism returns to its roots. T.S. Eliot’s remark that bad poets imitate and good poets steal1 affords a more balanced view of convention, as it indicates that the poem is specifically involved with other poems, not vaguely with such abstractions as tradition or style. The copyright law makes it

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difficult for a modern novelist to steal anything except his title from the rest of literature: hence it is often only in such titles as For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Sound and the Fury that we can clearly see how much impersonal dignity and richness of association an author gains by the communism of convention. As with other products of divine activity, the father of a poem is much more difficult to identify than the mother. That the mother is always nature, the objective considered as a field of communication, no serious criticism can ever deny. But as long as the father of a poem is assumed to be the poet himself, we fail to distinguish literature from discursive verbal structures. The discursive writer as an act of conscious will, and that conscious will, along with the symbolic system he employs for it, is set over against the body of things he is describing. But the poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, is not the father of his poem; he is at best a midwife, or, more accurately still, the womb of Mother Nature herself: her privates he, so to speak. The true father or shaping spirit of the poem is the form of the poem itself, and this form is a manifestation of the universal spirit of poetry, the “onlie begetter” of Shakespeare’s sonnets who was not Shakespeare himself, much less that depressing ghost Mr. W.H., but Shakespeare’s subject, the master-mistress of his passion. When a poet speaks of the internal spirit which shapes the poem, he is apt to drop the traditional appeal to female Muses and think of himself as in a feminine, or at least receptive, relation to some god or lord, whether Apollo, Dionysus, Eros, Christ, or (as in Milton) the Holy Spirit. Est deus in nobis, Ovid says:2 in modern times we may compare Nietzsche’s remarks about his inspiration in Ecce Homo. The problem of convention is the problem of how art can be communicable. Poetry, taken as a whole, is not simply an aggregate of artefacts imitating nature, but one of the activities of human artifice taken as a whole. If we may use the word “civilization” for this, we may postulate a phase of criticism which looks at poetry as one of the techniques of civilization. It is concerned, therefore, with the social aspect of poetry, with poetry as the focus of a community. The symbol in this phase is the communicable unit, to which I give the name archetype: that is, a typical or recurring image. I mean by an archetype a symbol which connects one poem with another and so helps to unify and integrate our literary experience. By the study of conventions and genres, it attempts to fit poems into the body of poetry as a whole.

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The repetition of certain common images of physical nature like the sea or the forest in a large number of poems cannot in itself be called even “coincidence,” which is the name we give to a piece of design when we cannot find a use for it. But it does indicate a certain unity in the nature that poetry imitates. And when pastoral images are deliberately employed in Lycidas, for instance, merely because they are conventional, we can see that the convention of the pastoral makes us assimilate these images to other parts of literature. Lycidas leads us immediately to the whole pastoral tradition from Theocritus and Virgil down through Spenser and Milton himself to Shelley, Arnold, and Whitman, and extends into the pastoral symbolism of the Bible, of Shakespeare’s forest comedies, and so on endlessly. We can get a whole literary education simply by picking up one conventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature. And if we do not accept this archetypal element in the imagery linking different poems together, it seems to me impossible to get any systematic mental training out of the study of literature alone. The conception of copyright extends to a general unwillingness on the part of authors of the copyright age to have their imagery studied conventionally. In dealing with this period, many archetypes have to be established by critical inspection alone. To give a random example, one very common convention of the nineteenth-century novel is the use of two heroines, one dark and one light. The dark one is as a rule passionate, haughty, plain, foreign or Jewish, and in some way associated with the undesirable or with some kind of forbidden fruit like incest. When the two are involved with the same hero, the plot usually has to get rid of the dark one or make her into a sister if the story is to end happily. Examples include Ivanhoe, The Last of the Mohicans, The Woman in White, Ligeia, Pierre (a tragedy because the hero chooses the dark girl, who is also his sister), The Marble Faun, and countless incidental treatments. A male version forms the symbolic basis of Wuthering Heights. This device is as much convention as Milton’s calling Edward King by a name out of Virgil’s Eclogues, but it shows a confused, or, as we say, “unconscious” approach to conventions. An archetype is not a simple but a variable convention. Archetypes are associative clusters, and include a large number of specific learned associations which are communicable because a large number of people within a culture happen to be familiar with them. When we speak of symbolism in ordinary life we usually think of such learned cultural

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archetypes as the cross or the crown, or of conventional associations, as of white with purity or green with jealousy. Such archetypes differ from signs in being complex variables: as an archetype, green may symbolize hope or vegetable nature or a go sign in traffic or Irish patriotism as easily as jealousy, but the word “green” as a verbal sign always refers to a certain colour. The resistance of modern writers to having their archetypes “spotted,” so to speak, is partly due to a natural anxiety to keep them as versatile as possible, not pinned down exclusively to one interpretation, a practice which would allegorize their work into a set of esoteric signs. At one extreme of literature we have the pure convention, which a poet uses merely because it has often been used before in the same way. This is most frequent in naive poetry, in the fixed epithets and phrasetags of medieval romance and ballad, in the invariable plots and character types of naive drama. At the other extreme we have the pure variable, where there is a deliberate attempt at novelty or unfamiliarity, and consequently a disguising or complicating of archetypes. This last is closely connected with a distrust of communication itself as a function of literature, such as appears in some forms of dadaism. It is clear that archetypes are most easily studied in highly conventionalized literature; that is, for the most part, naive, primitive, and popular literature. In suggesting the possibility of archetypal criticism, then, I am suggesting the possibility of extending the kind of comparative study now made of folk tales and ballads into the rest of literature. This should be more easily conceivable now that it is no longer fashionable to mark off popular and primitive literature from ordinary literature as sharply as we used to do. In the general Aristotelian or neo-Classical view of poetry, as expounded for instance by Sidney, the events of poetry are examples and its ideas precepts. (The vagaries of English make “exemplary” the adjective for both words.) In the exemplary event there is an element of recurrence, something that happens time and again; in the precept, or statement about what ought to be, there is a strong element of desire. These elements of recurrence and desire come into the foreground in archetypal criticism. From this point of view, the narrative aspect of literature is a recurrent act of symbolic communication: in other words a ritual. Narrative (Aristotle’s mythos) is studied by the archetypal critic as ritual or imitation of significant human action as a whole, and not simply as a mimesis praxeos or imitation of an action. Similarly, in archetypal

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criticism the significant content (Aristotle’s dianoia or “thought”) takes the form of the conflict of desire and reality which has for its basis the work of the dream. The union of ritual and dream in a form of verbal communication is usually called myth. The myth accounts for, and makes communicable, the ritual and the dream. Ritual, by itself, cannot account for itself: it is prelogical, preverbal, and in a sense prehuman. Myth is distinctively human, as the most intelligent partridge cannot tell even the absurdest story explaining why it drums in the mating season. Similarly, the dream, by itself, is a system of cryptic allusions to the dreamer’s own life, not fully understood by him, or so far as we know of any real use to him. But in all dreams there is a mythical element which has a power of independent communication, as is obvious, not only in the stock example of Oedipus, but in any collection of folk tales. We may see two aspects of myth: structural or narrative myths with a ritual content, and modal or emblematic myths with a dream content. The former are most easily seen in drama: not so much in the drama of the educated audience and the settled theatre as in naive or spectacular drama: in the folk play, the puppet show, the pantomime, the farce, the pageant, and their descendants in masque, comic opera, commercial movie, and revue. Modal myths are best studied in naive romance, which includes the folk tales and fairy tales that are so closely related to dreams of wonderful wishes coming true, and to nightmares of ogres and witches. The close relation of romance to ritual can be seen in the number of medieval romances that are linked to some part of the calendar, the winter solstice, a May morning, or a saint’s eve. The fact that the archetype is primarily a communicable symbol accounts for the ease with which ballads and folk tales and mimes travel through the world, like so many of their heroes, over all barriers of language and culture. We come back here to the basis of archetypal criticism in primitive and popular literature. By these words I mean possessing the ability to communicate in time and space respectively. Otherwise they mean much the same thing. Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favour with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it; and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive. This sense of the archaic recurs whenever we find great art using popular forms, as Shakespeare does in

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his last period, or as the Bible does when it ends in a fairy tale about a damsel in distress, a hero killing dragons, a wicked witch, and a wonderful city glittering with jewels. In fact archaism is a regular feature of all social uses of archetypes. Soviet Russia is very proud of its production of tractors, but it will be some time before the tractor replaces the sickle on the Soviet flag. As the archetypal critic is concerned with ritual and dream, it is likely that he would find much of interest in the work done by contemporary anthropology in ritual, and by contemporary psychology in dreams. Specifically, the work done on the ritual basis of naive drama in Frazer’s Golden Bough, and the work done on the dream basis of naive romance by Jung and the Jungians, are of most direct value to him. But the three subjects of anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism are not yet clearly separated. The Golden Bough has had perhaps even more influence in literary criticism than in anthropology, and it may yet prove to be really a work of literary criticism. From the literary point of view, The Golden Bough is an essay on the ritual content of naive drama: it reconstructs an archetypal ritual from which the structural and generic principles of drama may be logically, not chronologically, derived. To the critic the archetypal ritual is hypothesis, not history. It is very probable that Frazer’s hypothetical ritual would have many and striking analogies to actual rituals, and collecting such analogies is part of his argument. But an analogy is not necessarily a source, an influence, a cause, or an embryonic form, much less an identity. The literary relation of ritual to drama is a relation of content to form, not of source to derivation. The work of the Classical scholars who have followed Frazer’s lead has produced a general theory of the spectacular or ritual content of Greek drama. But if the ritual pattern is in the plays, the critic need not take sides in the quite separate historical controversy over the ritual origin of Greek drama. It is on the other hand a matter of simple observation that the action of Iphigeneia in Tauris, for example, is concerned with human sacrifice. Ritual, as the content of action, and more particularly of dramatic action, is something continuously latent in the order of words, and is quite independent of direct influence. Rituals of human sacrifice were not common in Victorian England, but the instant Victorian drama becomes primitive and popular, as it does in The Mikado, back comes all Frazer’s apparatus, the king’s son, the mock sacrifice, the analogy with the Sacaea,3 and the rest of it. It comes back because it is still the primitive and popular way of holding an audience’s attention, and the experienced dramatist knows it.

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The prestige of documentary criticism, which deals entirely with sources and historical transmission, has misled archetypal critics into feeling that all ritual elements ought to be traced directly, like the lineage of royalty, as far back as a willing suspension of disbelief will allow. The vast chronological gaps resulting are sometimes bridged by a dubious conspiratorial theory of history involving secrets jealously guarded for centuries by esoteric cults. It is curious that when archetypal critics insist on continuous tradition they almost invariably produce some hypothesis of degeneration from a Golden Age lost in antiquity. Thus the prelude to Thomas Mann’s Joseph series traces back several of our central myths to Atlantis, Atlantis being tolerable perhaps as an archetypal idea, but hardly as a historical one. When archetypal criticism revived in the nineteenth century with a vogue for sun myths, an attempt was made to ridicule it by proving that Napoleon was a sun myth. The ridicule is effective only against the historical distortion of the method. Archetypally, we turn Napoleon into a sun myth whenever we speak of the rise of his career, the zenith of his fame, or the eclipse of his fortunes. Social and cultural history, which is anthropology in an extended sense, will always be a part of the context of criticism, and the more clearly the anthropological and the critical treatments of ritual are distinguished, the more beneficial their influence on each other will be. The same is true of the relation of psychology to criticism. Biography will always be a part of criticism, and the biographer will naturally be interested in his subject’s poetry as a personal document, an interest which may take him into psychology. I am speaking here of the serious studies which are technically competent both in psychology and in criticism, which are aware how much guesswork is involved and how tentative all the conclusions must be. I am not speaking of the silly ones, which simply project the author’s own erotica, in a rationalized clinical disguise, on his victim. Such an approach is easiest and most rewarding with, say, Romantic poets, where the poet’s own mental processes are often part of the theme. With a dramatist, who knows so well that “They who live to please must please to live,” there is greater danger of making an unreal abstraction of the poet from his literary community. Suppose a critic finds that a certain pattern is repeated time and again in the plays of Shakespeare. If Shakespeare is unique or anomalous, or even exceptional, in using this pattern, the reason for his use of it may be at least partly psychological. But if we can find the same pattern in half a dozen of his contemporaries, we clearly have to allow for convention. And if we find it in a dozen drama-

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tists of different ages and cultures, we have to allow for genre, for the structural requirements of drama itself. A psychologist examining a poem will tend to see in it what he sees in the dream, a mixture of latent and manifest content. For the literary critic the manifest content of the poem is its form, hence its latent content becomes simply its actual content or theme, Aristotle’s dianoia. And in archetypal criticism the significant content of a poem is, we said, a dream. We seem to be going around in a circle, but not quite. For the critic, a problem appears which does not exist for a purely psychological analysis, the problem of communicable latent content, of intelligible dream. For the psychologist all dream symbols are private ones, interpreted by the personal life of the dreamer; for the critic there is no such thing as private symbolism, or, if there is, it is his job to make sure that it does not remain so. This problem is already present in Freud’s treatment of Oedipus Rex as a play which owes much of its power to the fact that it dramatizes the Oedipus complex. The dramatic and psychological elements can be linked without any reference to the personal life of Sophocles. The emphasis on impersonal content was developed by the Jungians, where the communicability of archetypes is accounted for by a theory of a collective unconscious—an unnecessary hypothesis in criticism, so far as I can judge. Now the poet, as distinct from the discursive writer, intends to write a poem, not to say something, hence he constructs a verbal pattern with, perhaps, millions of implications in it, of which he cannot be individually conscious. And what is true of the poet’s intention is equally true of the audience’s attention: their conscious awareness can take in only a very few details of the complex of response. This state of things enabled Tennyson, for instance, to be praised for the chastity of his language and read for his powerful erotic sensuousness. It also makes it possible for a contemporary critic to draw on the fullest resources of modern knowledge in explicating a work of art without any real fear of anachronism. For instance, Le Malade Imaginaire is a play about a man who, in seventeenth-century terms, including no doubt Molière’s own terms, was not really sick but just thought he was. A modern critic may object that life is not so simple: that it is perfectly possible for a malade imaginaire to be a malade veritable, and that what is wrong with Argan is an unwillingness to see his children grow up, an infantile regression which his wife—his second wife, incidentally—shows that she understands completely by coddling him and murmuring such phrases as “pauvre petit

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fils.” Such a critic would find the clue to Argan’s whole behaviour in his unguarded remark after the scene with the little girl Louison (the erotic nature of which the critic would also notice): “Il n’y a plus d’enfants.” Such a reading, whether right or wrong, keeps entirely to Molière’s text, and has nothing to do with Molière himself. Nor does it confine itself simply to the meaning of the play, but throws light on its narrative structure as well. The play is generically a comedy; it must therefore end happily; Argan must therefore be brought to see some reason; his wife, whose dramatic function it is to keep him within his obsession, must therefore be exposed as inimical to him. The movement of the play is exactly as logical and coherent as its total meaning, for the reason that they are the same thing, just as a piece of music is the same whether we listen to its performance or study its score. But, archetypally, the plot is a ritual moving through a scapegoat rejection to the prospect of marriage which is the normal end of comedy, and the theme is a dream pattern of irrational desire in conflict with reality. The archetypal is only one of many possible critical approaches, and in the case of a highly civilized comedy of seventeenth-century France it may seem a somewhat peripheral one. But it gives us an insight into the structural principles of literature that we can get in no other way, as well as a clearer understanding of literature as a technique of communication.

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23 The Transferability of Literary Concepts 30–1 December 1955

From The Association of the Princeton Graduate Alumni (Report of the Fifth Conference held at the Graduate College, Princeton University, 30–1 December 1955), 54–60. Reprinted in RW, 136–42. In December 1955, NF participated in a conference at Princeton devoted to the topic of “The Communication of Ideas.” The participants were all distinguished (the dinner speaker was Dean Rusk, then President of the Rockefeller Foundation and eventually Secretary of State), and Frye’s session was chaired by the astronomer Harlow Shapley. The first speaker was John Archibald Wheeler, professor of physics at Princeton, the second the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, from Harvard. All three papers, plus the ensuing discussion, during which NF said very little, were published together.

I should like to throw out a number of speculative suggestions more or less at random. It may be true that ants are highly social organizations, but the only ants I have ever seen were scurrying around without an apparent purpose in life; and possibly it is out of such random scurryings that the social organization emerges. In any case, this humanistic and almost unscheduled pismire has only a few things to suggest which are still very problematical. I am assuming a certain amount of good will, of tolerance for free enquiry, and a clear understanding that I am not staking my scholarly reputation on everything I say. I am in the position of a weather man who looks out the window. I may be doing something unscientific, but at least I am trying to keep some kind of grip on the present situation. In the subject of the transferability of concepts there is one very obvious pitfall, and that is the pitfall which literary critics call the rhetorical

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analogy. We are familiar with the poet who feels that his poem will be more impressive if he calls it a symphony; and we are familiar with the musical composer who feels that his piece will be more impressive if he calls it a tone poem. Those are rhetorical analogies, and they don’t do any harm. But there are also rhetorical analogies which can be a source of considerable danger. For example, the doctrine of progress in the nineteenth century was a staid, respectable, conservative doctrine of history. It was, after all, the only method of accounting for social changes which eliminated the revolutionary impulse. So conservative people believed in progress as well as liberals. And then when an entirely different hypothesis was advanced in biology, the hypothesis of evolution, which dealt with species and with millions of years, the proponents of progress said, “Aha! Science has now proved that there is such a thing as progress,” and promptly attached a biological hypothesis dealing with species to a historical hypothesis that had nothing to do with species. Similarly in the twentieth century, physicists announced what they call the principle of indeterminacy,1 and immediately people pounced on that and said, “Aha! At last science has proved that we can believe in the freedom of the will and the existence of God.” Now these rhetorical analogies are phoney; and the thing that makes them phoney is their motivation. They are obviously interested developments; they are social phenomena but not real concepts. At the same time there are analogies which may be more fruitful. I propose to devote myself to the fourth of Professor Wheeler’s seven sibyls,2 the one he calls analogy. I have always been struck, ever since I began the practice of literary criticism, by a curious analogy between literature and mathematics. Both the poet and the mathematician seem to proceed by postulate and by hypothesis. They are not descriptive, and they are not so much concerned with facts in themselves, except insofar as they apply their structures to something else. That is to say, a sociological novelist is certainly concerned with the truth of his picture of society, but insofar as his is a literary structure, he does not say “this is so,” he says, “let this be.” Sir Philip Sidney said, back in the sixteenth century, “The poet never affirmeth.” He never affirms, he never denies; he merely says, “Let this be,” and we judge the poet in terms of the consistency with which he follows his postulates. If there is a ghost in Hamlet, that merely presents the postulate, “Let there be a ghost in Hamlet.” It has nothing to do with whether ghosts exist or not, or whether Shakespeare or his audience thought they did.

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That was one point in the analogy which struck me. Another thing which struck me was the curious similarity in form between the two units of literature and of mathematics. The unit of poetic expression is the metaphor, and the metaphor, in its radical form, is a statement of identity: “This is that”; “The hero was a lion.” In that statement of identity, which of course is a statement of hypothetical identity (“Let the hero be a lion for my poetic purposes”) you have a unit very similar in its form and structure to the mathematical equation. Now among the sciences there seem to be two kinds of emphasis, according to whether they make a prevailing use of quantities, numbers, and measurements, or whether they use words. It would be saying far too much to say simply that there are numerical and verbal sciences. And yet there are of course differences in emphasis between what we call the natural sciences and what we call the social sciences. Both groups of sciences use words and numbers, yet there seems to be a peculiar affinity between the natural sciences and numbers, quantities, and measurements; and between the social sciences and words. The question then arises, “What is the relation between literature and other structures in words?” And many literary critics have been struck by the difference between literature and other structures in words. In fact many critics have tried to define poetry as simply what everything else in words is not. But these definitions do not work; they are quite unusable to the literary critic: we simply cannot define poetry merely as the opposite of discursive or descriptive verbal structures. I imagine—I know nothing about it—that if you use numbers, quantities, and measurements in a science, you will be involved in all the problems of number and quantity. I certainly know that if you make a functional use of words in theology or metaphysics or any of the verbal sciences, you will be involved in all the problems of words. And from the beginning the problems of words have been divided into three groups: the grammatical, the rhetorical, and the logical. It is logic, of course, that has traditionally held the place of honour: the realization that your statement has meaning only when it is verbally correct. And rhetoric has always been traditionally regarded as a kind of diminution, a kind of popularizing, a watering-down of logical reasoning for the benefit of the masses. In other words you get rhetoric when you have logic tempered by emotion, when you want people to get excited as well as reasonable. That is what Aristotle says about rhetoric, that it is the antistrophos—the answering chorus—of dialectic. And yet

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one wonders. It is true, certainly, that there are qualities which are functional in literature, and which are a nuisance and a handicap in other verbal disciplines. For example, punning, paronomasia as we call it, or ambiguity, using words in a multiple or manifold sense: that kind of thing is a constructive principle in literature and a nuisance everywhere else. The word “wit” in Pope’s Essay on Criticism is used in nine different senses—or at least somebody says so who has counted them: I imagine that twenty-nine or thirty-nine would probably be more nearly correct. Now if you were writing a prose essay on wit, that semantic theme with variations would only produce muddle. But the poet does not try to equate a word with a meaning; the poet attempts to establish the functions or power of words, and consequently his meanings are deliberately variable, ambiguous, and manifold. So the term ambiguous, which is pejorative when applied to descriptive verbal structures, is an essential concept of literature. And yet one is still not satisfied with the assumption that you have rhetoric only when you have logical reasoning watered down for emotional purposes. Recurrently in the history of philosophy you have had attempts on the part of philosophers to try to isolate the rhythm of the proposition: that is, to construct a purely logical verbal pattern. You get, for example, Aristotle’s logical exposition; you get St. Thomas Aquinas’s question, objection, and answer method; you get the quasimathematical patterns of Spinoza; and in our day, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, you have a series of numbered aphorisms. Now all of these are obviously attempts to purify words of their ambiguous and emotional content; and yet they all impress the literary critic as being themselves rhetorical devices. Hence one wonders whether there is not such a thing as conceptual rhetoric as well as emotional rhetoric. Every teacher knows in fact that there is. Every teacher knows that he has got to arrange his words in very careful patterns for purely intellectual reasons, in order to produce in his students the response, “I never thought of it that way before,” or, “Now that you put it that way, I can see it.” And so, as I say, anything which makes a functional use of words will always be involved in all problems of words; and any structure of thought which makes use of words will always be involved in rhetorical problems. So many of our essential concepts reduce themselves to metaphors that one begins to wonder what is the importance of the metaphor in thinking. For example, the phrase “pure science” is an aesthetic metaphor. The word “pure” is not one that you would naturally apply to a

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science; it is a word that you would more naturally apply to a certified virgin. And similarly religious people instinctively and inevitably think of heaven as “up,” which of course is a spatial metaphor; and psychoanalysts with the light of reason and science on their side think of the subconscious mind as “down,” as underneath the consciousness, which of course is another metaphor. And so whenever one looks at any structure of words, one realizes that the descriptive, conceptual, nonpoetic aspect of it relates to its content. But the question arises, “What is the verbal form, the verbal construct that any scientist or philosopher or theologian working in words is employing?” And you will very often find that it is a metaphor, or that it is a word used in several different meanings. That is, you often feel that you could understand a philosopher if you could simply understand one word that he uses: if you could understand what Aristotle means by “nature,” or what Bergson means by “time,” or what Spinoza means by “substance,” you would know his whole philosophy. But what you would have in that case would be a metaphorical key to his philosophy, because you would have a set of hypothetical identifications made with the key words. And think too of the patterns made by diagrams in all structures of words. There’s one in Professor Wheeler’s seventh sibyl, “The High and the Low.” That’s a diagram. And when somebody says, “But on the other hand there is a further consideration to be brought forward in support of the opposing argument,” you realize that he is doing exactly what people used to do in the war when they scrawled lines of battle on a tablecloth: he is drawing up a diagram, with arguments on one side and arguments on the other. In fact every time you use a preposition; every time you say up or down, or on the other hand, or besides, you are using some kind of geometrical metaphor. And hence the question of metaphor also enters the question of understanding. And that brings me to the nub, so to speak, of my present argument, which is that all understanding is in a sense metaphorical understanding, because it is an identification made by two minds of the same concept. In other words, what you mean by X in this context is what I mean by Y. That is the only way in which the dilemma that Professor Kluckhohn referred to, the attempt to reconcile what T.S. Eliot means by culture with what the anthropologist means by culture—that is the only way it can be arrived at, through a series of metaphorical ideograms, in which people with different patterns of association, or sometimes different languages, arrive at a sense of metaphorical identification.

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Now my fifteen minutes are up and I haven’t time to carry this subject into the question to which it most naturally and logically leads, the question of myth, which is, in its original sense, the story of a god, and which consequently in literature becomes a kind of abstract literary pattern. That is, the things that gods do are not qualified by plausibility or credibility, and consequently they form abstract literary patterns. I could explain what I meant by that in more detail if I had more time; but there are certain things that, as we say, happen only in stories; and they are mythical things, things whose credibility we don’t have to discuss. And so in literary criticism the term “myth” tends to mean much the same thing as Aristotle’s mythos or plot; that is to say, a structural organizing pattern of a work of literary art. And in the same way I think we find that other verbal structures as well, when they are completely and thoroughly understood, come out as conceptual myths: that is, structural verbal patterns, of which the original form may be found in poetry. To give an example, Freud in his treatment of the Oedipus complex suggests that the peculiar dramatic power of Sophocles’ Oedipus play is due to the fact that it dramatizes the Oedipus complex. So we feel that here is a datum from psychology which is useful to the literary critic. But perhaps it was the other way round. After all, Sophocles’ play is considerably older than Freud’s discovery. Perhaps the myth of Oedipus really informed and gave structure to some psychological investigations that Freud was carrying out at this point. In the natural sciences, the content is descriptive, and mathematics, as a hypothetical subject, acts as an informing principle in them. In the verbal sciences the content is descriptive. What is their verbal form: what acts as an informing principle in them? I suggest that it is a hypothetical verbal structure, such as we have in literature and the poetic arts. Such a view would take us very close to Plato, who thought of the ultimate acts of apprehension as being either mythical or mathematical. Plato distrusts the role of the poet as a creator and as the carrier of the myth; but that was for political reasons that have been long since junked. I suggest that here is at any rate one suggestion that we might follow up in the effort to restore some kind of continuity to communications in the field of the verbal sciences.

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24 An Indispensable Book Spring 1956

Review of René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), vol. 1, The Later Eighteenth Century, and vol. 2, The Romantic Age. From the original publication in Virginia Quarterly Review, 32 (Spring 1956): 310–15. Title supplied by editor. Reprinted in RW, 142–7. Frye bristled at Welleck’s 1949 review of FS; in his diary he called it “a stupid and ignorant review by a stuffed shirt” (D, 74). However, the two men corresponded occasionally in the 1960s and 70s, and when Frye came to review Welleck’s monumental History he read both volumes attentively, annotating them in detail; his copies are now in NFL. The resulting review is very skilful, recognizing the contribution of an essentially historical mind while expertly suggesting its limits, for example in the passage on Lamb, Coleridge, and Sainte-Beuve. The conclusion, which finds that “In Mr. Wellek’s book there is abundant evidence for the distinction between genuine criticism and the kind of pseudo-criticism that results from premature value judgments,” is a wicked thrust at Welleck’s complaint that in FS Frye “fails in the actual critical task of evaluation and even analysis of poetry as poetry.”1

The first two volumes of Professor René Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism clearly show that the complete work will be one of the essential contributions to scholarship in our time. The comprehensiveness of the scheme, which embraces the history of critical thought in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, with side glances at other countries, is enormous, and the historical knowledge displayed unprecedented, for Mr. Wellek is too modest in referring to Saintsbury’s History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe as a predecessor in this respect. The list of qualities required for such a performance is a formidable one. Positively, one

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needs an erudition that can master every literature in Europe including the Slavonic ones, accuracy in distinguishing historical influences, and a sense of the cosmopolitan nature and social context of literature in every age. Negatively, one needs a great deal of tact in separating criticism from the history of ideas in general, and poetics from aesthetics. Yet the subject cannot be limited pedantically, for developments in poetics are often unintelligible without the social and intellectual trends which suggested them, and many relevant and influential contributions to criticism have been made by such philosophers as Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Kant, who had only an incidental interest in poetic theory. All these qualities and many others Mr. Wellek has, and his book contains everything essential that could reasonably be asked for in a history of this type, including admirable bibliographies. It should be emphasized that the book is not primarily a history of criticism, but a history of critical thought (the author’s own phrase) or poetic theory. There is, of course, a good deal of criticism that is not critical thought, but the empirical testing and appreciating of literature, and it is difficult to treat this historically: here Saintsbury’s more loose-jointed impressionism has an advantage. Mr. Wellek lists the characteristics of empirical criticism, with a touch of doggedness, as “evocation, metaphor, and personal reference.” But when he says of Lamb that “it seems impossible to claim for these marginalia great significance in a history of criticism,” surely most of the impossibility is a historian’s difficulty in fitting Lamb’s exquisite sense of decorum into a history of ideas. Coleridge, of course, bulks very large, as his permanent contribution is almost entirely to poetic theory. Yet, if we define a critic in empirical terms as a person who can look objectively at a page of poetry and see what is good and bad in it, with no itch to use it as a text for a discourse, then Lamb is a serious critic and Coleridge is not one. It will be interesting to see what happens to Sainte-Beuve in the third volume. And just as the book’s subject matter limits it to a specific kind of criticism, so its historical form limits it in a different way. It is the minor people who show up best in histories, either of criticism or of literature in general. Their role is filled by their historical function; they are not streams but aqueducts, and one can see in them where the current of history is going. The most obvious and immediate value of Mr. Wellek’s book is in its treatment of minor figures, especially in the first volume, devoted to the period 1750–1800. In the second, the account of Jeffrey is sharp and concise; the account of Wordsworth is somewhat perfunctory,

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and contains some oddly flat-footed pronouncements (“The disapproval of poetic diction, the idea of imitating rustic speech, the concept of poetry as the overflow of feelings do not particularly appeal to our time and cannot be reconciled with a rational conception of literary theory”). There can be few students of English literature who will not be grateful for the summary of Solger,2 who, like some of the New Critics today, found a metaphysic of irony at the heart of poetry; but the chapter on Goethe makes him sound rather like an incoherent dilettante who could not get beyond an elementary confusion between art and nature. The method of the book is mainly biographical, summarizing one critic’s work after another: a logical enough method, yet one with its own difficulties for a history of critical thought, where there is so large an impersonal and objective factor. It is particularly in the British section of the first volume that one wishes for more of the conventional history of ideas. The struggle of catharsis and ecstasis in that period, the proportioning of Aristotelian imitation and Longinian sublimity, the influence of Burke’s popularizing of the sublime–beautiful distinction, the liberalizing of value judgments represented by Lowth’s book on Hebrew poetry and by Hurd’s and Warton’s appreciation of the fairy way of writing—all these things are in Mr. Wellek’s narrative, but have to be picked out of it by a reader with enough experience in the subject to recognize them. One becomes aware, but sometimes very dimly aware, of certain “archetypal analogies,” as Mr. Abrams3 calls them, organizing categories of poetics taken over from other disciplines. The account of Samuel Johnson brings out admirably his curious distrust of the creative power itself, which makes it obvious that most of the people who chortle about old Sam’s sturdy common sense are really looking for some kind of rationalized Philistinism. But the distrust in its turn derives from the feeling that God is a transcendent Creator, that, as Sir Thomas Browne says, “nature is the art of God,”4 and that consequently man’s art derives from a power of imitating nature which is necessarily subordinate to nature. In the Romantic period the sense of deity shifted to the immanent, in which man through art becomes a partaker of creation, and the metaphors of criticism shift from the physical to the biological. This latter development emerges much more clearly from Mr. Wellek’s account, but not clearly enough to reach Coleridge’s central conception of a poetic “Logos,” which holds together so much of Coleridge’s critical thought— for, bitty and piecy as Coleridge undoubtedly was, he was not so bitty and piecy as Mr. Wellek presents him.

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Mr. Wellek says in his introduction that his choice of method was deliberate, and that “the history of critical terms and ideas is in many instances not yet far enough advanced to give full scope to the ‘history of ideas.’” The remark adorns his tale by pointing its moral, which is the relevance of the history of critical thought to its contemporary developments. Mr. Wellek naturally dismisses the merely ignorant view that the history of criticism can be of no value because real criticism has only begun in our own day. But it is difficult not to feel too that criticism as a structure of knowledge is only beginning to take shape, and that Mr. Wellek has some sympathy with this feeling. His book records a great many keen insights, much enthusiasm for literature, much learned and sincere study of it. But the great men in his book are great poets or philosophers; only in the Schlegels, perhaps, do we sense real greatness in the field of criticism itself. Mr. Wellek himself emphasizes “the deep gulf between theory and practice through the history of literature,” the implication being that the theory did not have enough authority to affect the practice. The study of poetry is a study of classics and models in the heritage of the past; the study of criticism is more like the study of a primitive science, a mixture of mythology, intuition, and absurdity. Hence, if we are to get the full benefit from Mr. Wellek’s book, we must read it with an eye to diagnosis as well as to instruction. What emerges, from this point of view, is that criticism has been bedeviled mainly by what may be called, in the language of Finnegans Wake, “value-jumpment.” In his accounts of the various critics Mr. Wellek pays a great deal of attention to their specific evaluations of poets, and almost everyone makes evaluations which seem to us quite obviously manipulated. They invent theories and then force their value judgments to illustrate the theory, or like something and invent a theory to rationalize the preference. English critics dislike the French because they are at war with them; therefore French literature is no good. German Romantics are devoted to the aesthetic virtues of Christianity; therefore Calderón is very good. Hegel has a theory of the unification of form and content in art; therefore “the animal fable, the parable, the proverb, the apologue, the riddle, the epigram, and didactic and descriptive poetry” are all condemned, presumably in advance, as non-art. Schopenhauer has a metaphysic of pessimism, and so writes very well about tragedy and tries to ignore comedy. Coleridge prefers “imagination” to “fancy” and discovers that all the poets he likes best are imaginative rather than fanciful—although The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as The Road to

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Xanadu proves, are fanciful in terms of his own definition. Herder likes “folk poetry,” and discovers that all the poets he likes are folk poets. It is a matter for special commendation when an occasional critic (such as Adam Müller) shows some genuine tolerance and humility. If we learn anything from the history of criticism, it is that the critic does not judge poetry; he is judged by poetry. Patient subjection of the ego to literary experience, recognition of blind spots in one’s taste, an instinct for giving the poet the benefit of the critic’s doubts, are all part of a critic’s basic training. Out of a vast consensus of patient criticism certain values or sanctions finally begin to take shape. Opinions may differ about Shelley, but no one regards him as less important than Rogers; Donne may wane in influence, but can never again be ignored. When value judgments are founded on the study of literature, we get genuine criticism. When anyone attempts to found the study of literature on value judgments, we get the history of taste, a series of fashions and whims, rationalizings of prejudice and custom, poets or genres ranked in a hierarchy according to some prefabricated generalization. In this area one can be consistent only by being pedantic or provincial. In Mr. Wellek’s book there is abundant evidence for the distinction between genuine criticism and the kind of pseudo-criticism that results from premature value judgments, and I suggest that in this distinction lies the contemporary relevance which he has tried to give to his indispensable book.

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25 “Preface” and “Introduction: Lexis and Melos” 4 September 1956

From Preface and Introduction to Sound and Poetry: English Institute Essays, 1956, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), v–vi and ix–xxvii. Reprinted in Literatur und Musik: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komiparatistischen Grenzgebietes (Berlin: Eric Schmidt Verlag, 1984), 169–79 and as “Ongakuteki shi to rizumu,” trans. Akiko Masuda and Minoru Yoshida, in the Bulletin of Tokyo Gakuen Women’s Junior College 9 (1971): 143–5. Introduction incorporated into AC. Frye gave the paper on which this Introduction was based at the English Institute’s conference on music and poetry in September 1956. It incorporates a good deal of material from his “Music in Poetry” of 1942 (see no. 3 in this volume), which posed Frye a flattering problem in endnote 1. The English Institute met each autumn in New York and still meets annually at Harvard; Frye was one of the trustees in the 1970s. It was an important precursor of the numerous semiindependent seminars spawned by the turn to theory in the 1980s. The direction of that turn is illustrated in the list of Frye’s fellow paper-givers when he first appeared at the conference in 1948: among them were Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Ruth Wallerstein; when he gave a paper in 1975, “Myth and Fact in the Bible,” they were Edward Said, Victor Turner, and Hayden White (NFF 1988, box 11, file E4). Frye himself was the subject of an English Institute conference in 1965; he deliberately did not attend that meeting, but produced a response to the papers, which appeared in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), forthcoming in the Collected Works in “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975, currently in preparation for publication by Eva Kushner and Jean O’Grady. See Introduction.

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This book includes the papers presented at two conferences of the English Institute. The editor’s introduction1 and the three following papers were read at the 1956 conference on “Music and Poetry,” directed by Mr. Sternfeld of Dartmouth College (now of Oxford University). The next three papers were read at the 1955 conference on “Sound and Meaning in Poetry,” directed by Mr. Victor M. Hamm of Marquette University. A fourth paper in the same conference, “Prosody and Musical Analysis,” by Mr. Hollander of Harvard University, may be found in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1956. In Mr. Sternfeld’s paper, the only one which employs quotations not in the public domain, the passages from Ulysses and Dubliners are quoted with the permission of Random House, Inc., the poems from Yeats with the permission of the Macmillan Company, and the passages from Finnegans Wake with the permission of Viking Press, Inc. The page references in his quotations are to the editions listed here. Although this book is technically a collection of essays, the reader will find it a well unified and logically developed volume. The unity comes, not from formal agreement—no one who has ever attended an English Institute conference would expect or want such agreement—but from the unconscious logic of scholarship itself, which has produced—to extend the musical metaphors of the opening papers—a set of six variations on a central theme. The editor’s introduction, though originally one of the papers contributed, is now best read as an attempt to indicate something of the scope and importance of that theme, as worked out from six scholarly points of view: those of musical composition, of musicological criticism, of musicological history, of rhetoric, of rhetorical analysis, and of linguistics. To say that the editor is indebted to his six colleagues for making such a book possible would be a most proper academic understatement. Introduction: Lexis and Melos Ever since Lessing in the Laokoön warned against the dangers of illegitimate analogies among the arts, critics have tended to think that all such analogies are suspect—a most lame and impotent conclusion. It is of course clear that many of the superficial analogies are either misleading or pointless. To describe one art in terms of another is a stock rhetorical device of little importance. We are familiar with the poet who feels that

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his poem will look more impressive if he calls it a symphony, and with the composer who feels that his piece will gain in suggestiveness if he calls it a tone poem. Such literary titles as Triple Fugue or Christmas Oratorio are flourishes of the same kind; Point Counter Point and Four Quartets may be more deeply significant, but the nature of the significance has yet to be established. Some musical forms certainly can be imitated in words up to a point: it is quite practicable to write a story, as Thomas Mann did, in some kind of literary analogy to the sonata form, and the variation structure suggests a number of literary analogues, ranging from The Ring and the Book to Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Such imitations are by no means a recent invention. That wonderful thirteenth-century contest of wryteling and gogeling, The Owl and the Nightingale, has much of what would later be called divisions on a ground in its structure, and a later tour de force, Crashaw’s Musicks Duell, imitates the baroque aria with instrumental accompaniment which was its musical contemporary. Joyce, for all his detachment about Wagner, uses the Wagnerian leitmotiv in the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses, and could perhaps never have worked out the techniques of Finnegans Wake without some Wagnerian influence. But it is difficult to know what to say about such imitations beyond observing the fact that they exist. The same may be said of other relationships which seem to me genuinely significant, such as the relation of allegory to counterpoint. For the important but little investigated question of how the rhythm of music may suggest rhythms of verse, I refer you to Mr. Sternfeld’s paper and to his Goethe and Music (1954), which is not only a fascinating book in itself, but what our friends in the social sciences would call a pilot study. Melos, lexis, and opsis; music, diction, and spectacle, are three of the six aspects of poetry listed by Aristotle. In drama, which is what Aristotle had chiefly in mind, the relation of melos and opsis to poetry is easily dealt with: melos means actual music and opsis the actual scenic effect. I am concerned here with a slightly different question, the question of what affinities to music may be discerned in the features that poetry shares with music—sound and rhythm. I recognize two types of poetic melos in this sense of the term. My first objective is to establish an intelligible meaning for the term “musical” in literary criticism. By “musical” I mean a quality in literature denoting a substantial analogy to, and in many cases an actual influence from, the art of music. It is perhaps worth mentioning, at the risk of being obvious, that this is not what the word ordinarily means to the literary critic. To him it usually means “sounding nice.” Tennyson, for instance,

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is hailed by many of his critics as musical; Browning is frequently called unmusical, as I understand he was by Tennyson. Yet it would be hard to find a poet who was less likely to be influenced by music than Tennyson, or a poet who took a more constant and intelligent interest in the art than Browning. The term musical as ordinarily used is a value term meaning that the poet has produced a pleasant variety of vowel sounds and h[]as managed to avoid the more unpronounceable clusters of consonants that abound in modern English. If he does this, he is musical, whether or not he knows a whole note from a half rest. The reasons for this curious semantic development are full of interest. One of them takes us back to the literary metaphor about music that we see in the words “harmony” and “concord.” Harmony in its nonmusical sense means a stable and permanent relationship, and in this sense of the word there is no harmony in music at all: music is not a sequence of harmonies, but a sequence of discords ending in a harmony. Music does not attain literary harmony until it reaches its final tonic chord and is all over: until then, even the tonic chord in root position would still be made discordant by the form of the music, which demands more music to complete its resolution. Browning’s “Why rush the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?” is, unlike most of Browning’s allusions to music, an unmusical literary man’s comment. If we prize harmony we should not start any music going at all, for every piece of music is a disturbance of an underlying concord. Milton’s remark about contrapuntal music in L’Allegro as: “Untwisting all the chains that tie / The hidden soul of harmony,” is a much more genuinely accurate one. In literature one often sees the literary meaning of harmony attached to the music of the unfallen world. In At a Solemn Musick Milton tells us how the “disproportioned chime” of sin broke the “perfect diapason” of the state of good, to which we are to return in heaven. This conception of “perfect diapason” is all very well as a literary metaphor, but when translated into music it opens up the discouraging prospect of spending the whole of eternity screaming the chord of C major. Music itself, when it depicts ethereal bliss, generally does so in elementary diatonic chords: Haydn’s The Heavens are Telling, Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, Beethoven’s Glory of God in Nature, assure us that in heaven all tears are wiped from human eyes and all dominant sevenths promptly resolved. On the other hand, the Representation of Chaos with which Haydn’s Creation begins tells us much more about the resources of music itself: like Milton’s Satan, it shows us that human art is considerably enriched by the disproportioned

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chime of sin. Milton himself admits that there is beautiful music in hell, which from his account must be very like Wagner. Such a concession to literary symbolism is a special rhetorical effect in music, a quite legitimate one, and a very ancient one. Plato’s ideas of music are connected with it, and some later historical developments are studied in Mr. Hollander’s paper. A once famous poem called The Lost Chord depicts an organist discovering and then losing a wonderful chord which “seemed the harmonious echo / To our discordant life,” yet which musically speaking must have been a highly complicated discord, otherwise the sufferer could have found it again easily enough. This poem perfectly illustrates the confusion between the musical and the euphonious in literary criticism, as well as the persistent literary notion, found even in Browning’s line quoted above, that music is concerned primarily with beauty of sound, especially as exemplified by concords. This is like saying that pictures are concerned primarily with pretty colours, especially the unmodified colours squeezed directly out of the tube. Music, of course, is concerned not with beauty of sound but with organization of sound, and beauty has to do with the form of the organization. A musical discord is not an unpleasant sound; it is a sound which throws the ear forward to the next beat: it is a sign of musical energy, not of musical incompetence. Applying such a principle to poetry, we should say that when we find sharp barking accents, long cumulative rhythms sweeping lines into paragraphs, crabbed and obscure language, mouthfuls of consonants, the spluttering rumble of long words, and the bite and grip of heavily stressed monosyllables, we are most likely to be reading a poet who is being influenced by music. Influenced, that is, by the music that we know, with its dance rhythm, discordant texture, and stress accent. The same principle suggests that the other use of the term “musical” to mean a careful balancing of vowels and a dreamy sensuous flow of sound actually applies to poetry that is unmusical, that is, which shows no influence from the art of music. Here is a passage from Tennyson’s Oenone: O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. I waited underneath the dawning hills, Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark, And dewy dark aloft the mountain pine: Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,

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And here is a passage from Browning’s The Flight of the Duchess: I could favour you with sundry touches Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess Heightened the mellowness of her cheek’s yellowness (To get on faster) until at last her Cheek grew to be one master-plaster Of mucus and fucus from mere use of ceruse: In short, she grew from scalp to udder Just the object to make you shudder. [ll. 825–32]

Tennyson has tried to minimize the sense of movement, and it is hardly possible to read him too slowly; Browning has a stress accent, and goes at something like a metronome beat. Both passages repeat sounds very obtrusively, but the repetitions in Tennyson slow down the advance of ideas and narrative, compel the rhythm to return on itself, and elaborate what is essentially a pattern of varied and contrasting sound. The repetitions in Browning are intended to sharpen the accentuation of the beat and to increase the speed. Browning does not want a sound pattern; he wants a cumulative rhythm. The words that Browning puts in parentheses (“To get on faster”) are essentially a musical direction. Such musical directions are rare in poetry, but they do occur: the mezzo-forte direction for Lycidas, “Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string,” is an example. Browning, therefore, is a musical poet, as his interest in music and in writing poems on musical subjects naturally suggest that he would be. Tennyson’s poem is unmusical, which of course is not a pejorative term: it is unmusical for the same reason that it is a poor example of prose: it belongs to a different category. We should not be surprised to find what in fact is often true—that great unmusical poets develop a compensating interest in poetic opsis or visual imagery. The chief characteristics of musical poetry are continuity and stress accent. Simple alliteration, as we have it in Beowulf, is musical in tendency; involved patterns of alliteration, as we have them in The Faerie Queene, are not. Run-on lines, and rhymes that sharpen the accent, like the rhymes in Browning, are musical; the rhythm and rhyme that tend to

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make the single line a unit in itself are unmusical. We notice that two of our most musical poets, Campion and Milton, opposed rhyme, at least in theory; and Milton’s remark, in the Preface to Paradise Lost, that one of the features of “true musical delight” in poetry is “the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another,” is one of the few technically accurate uses of the term musical in literary criticism. As we can see in such musical poems as Browning’s Heretic’s Tragedy or Burns’s Jolly Beggars, musical verse is well adapted for the grotesque and the horrible; it is also eminently suitable for invective and abuse, for tangled and elliptical processes of thought, and for light verse of all kinds, from nursery rhymes to doggerel histories. In longer musical poems, such as Crashaw’s hymns or Smart’s Song to David, we often see passages of anaphora which resemble the sequential repetitions of music. In the emphatic use of thematic words, such as “life” and “death” at the beginning and the end of Crashaw’s first St. Teresa ode, we may perhaps even see some analogy to musical tonality. Naturally the most difficult musical poems to identify as such are the slow movements, and the attempts of musical poets to give continuity to slow movement, such as the insistent beating short line in Browning’s Love among the Ruins, have a particular technical interest. It is not surprising that many musical poets, like many composers, tend to get rather fidgety in a slow rhythm: Skelton is a good example. Musical rhythm also has a natural affinity with poetic drama. Shakespeare’s versification becomes steadily more musical as it goes on, this being the principle employed for dating his plays on internal evidence. The same distinctions apply equally to prose: if we are looking for musical prose, we should not turn to the mellifluous writers, to Jeremy Taylor or Walter Pater, but to Rabelais, Burton, Sterne, and, of course, James Joyce. The actual knowledge of music by musical writers is by no means invariable, nor should we expect it to be so: we should expect poets to learn techniques from their own art. But it is frequent enough to be statistically significant. Many studies of the relation of music to poetry, such as Sidney Lanier’s, are weakened by a tendency to base the relation on assonance and on ordinary metrical prosody. Most of our prosody consists of a translation into terms of stress of patterns that in their original Classical context were quantitative, and while Classical poetry undoubtedly had close affinities with music, it was not the kind of music that poets of the last five centuries or so have been listening to. To read poetry which is

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musical in our sense we need a principle of accentual scansion, a regular recurrence of beats with a variable number of syllables between the beats. This corresponds to the general rhythm of the music in the Western tradition, where there is a regular stress accent with a variable number of notes in each measure. Musical poetry is considerably older than this kind of music, and the principle of accentual scansion is the dominant one in Old English poetry, where we have a four-beat line that seems to be inherent in the structure of the language, and continues in most nursery rhymes and ballads. The four-three-four-three quatrain of the ballads is actually a continuous four-beat rhythm, with a rest at the end of every other line. This principle of the rest, or the beat coming at a point of actual silence, was already established in Old English. All through the development of iambic pentameter, one can still hear, especially in blank verse, the old four-stress line in the accentuation: To be, or not to be, that is the question; Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or take up arms against a sea of troubles . . . [Hamlet, 3.1.66–9] Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat . . . [Paradise Lost, bk. 1, ll. 1–5]

The general principle involved here is that when iambic pentameter is moving fairly fast, four-stress lines predominate. In the period of the stopped couplet the rhythm is slower and there are fewer four-stress lines, but they are still very frequent, and come back with any variation of the metre, such as a feminine caesura: “A little learning is a dangerous thing . . .” or “Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d . . .” In Spenser and Keats there are still fewer, indicating that both poets belong to the tradition of unmusical opsis to which Tennyson also belongs. We notice in The Faerie Queene, for example, not only the recurrent alexandrine but a number of six-stress pentameters: “The builder oak, sole king of forests all . . .” Also in Lamia: “Fair Hermes, crown’d with feathers, fluttering light . . .” To have more than six accents is impracticable in a pentameter line except for some special rhetorical effect, as in the famous line in Paradise

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Lost (bk. 2, l. 621) quoted by Mr. Oras, where there are eight.2 We notice that the slower the rhythm is, the more stressed monosyllables there are, and in so heavily stressed a language as English, the longer Latin words have the effect of lightening the rhythm by a series of unstressed syllables. The reductio ad absurdum of heavily stressed monosyllables is the horrible example in the Essay on Criticism: “When ten low words oft creep in one dull line.” We note that poets in the opsis tradition tend increasingly to a strongly native vocabulary, where stressed monosyllables predominate: something of this comes into the fact that Keats found Milton so uncongenial an influence as compared with Spenser and Chatterton. In William Morris’s Earthly Paradise there are many lines nearly as monosyllabic and motionless as the one Pope gives. On the other hand, almost any page of Shakespeare will show what thunderous power a monosyllabic line may have in a more musical texture. Fewer than four stresses is also impracticable for a pentameter line. In most lines that look like three-stress lines, such as the second line of Endymion, we have usually to allow for rests—in this case there is one at the beginning of the line: “[rest] Its loveliness increases: it will never . . .” In Chaucer we have the curious example of an unmusical poet who has had an important musical influence. His basis is metrical rather than accentual scansion, but as the secret of his metre was lost he began to sound more like the accentual rim-ram-ruf poets he ridiculed, and that is the nature of his influence in The Shepheards Calender and elsewhere. Even before this happened, the confusion brought about by changes in pronunciation in the fifteenth century instantly re-established the fourstress accentual line. Lydgate, for instance, makes sense as a poet only when his alleged pentameters are read, not metrically, as we should read Chaucer, but accentually, with four main stresses to a line. One may not know the details of Lydgate’s pronunciation, or precisely what syllables he would have elided or stressed differently, but possibly neither Lydgate nor his audience was entirely clear on such matters either, and a pattern of accentual rhythm is the obvious way of getting around such difficulties, as with accentual rhythm the number of syllables may vary within flexible limits. The Scottish Chaucerians, as far as their rhythm is concerned, are Scottish Lydgatians. Dunbar is an intensely musical poet whose experiments often take the form of a kind of syncopated jazz or ragtime, for which English, with its heavy pounding accentuation, is so well adapted that even normally unmusical poets may be attracted to it. The ragtime

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tradition survives through Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast and Poe’s Raven and Bells to Vachel Lindsay and Sweeney Agonistes. Syncopation is an unmistakable mark of musical poetry: Hopkins’s sprung rhythm is a musical idea, whereas speeded-up metrical rhythms, such as Swinburne’s roller-coaster anapests, are unmusical. An unmusical poet might conceivably have caught the movement of Browning’s ride from Ghent to Aix, but only a musical poet could have been interested enough in the stumbling rhythm of a procession scrambling up a hillside to write the Grammarian’s Funeral. In Skelton, who is so close to the popular rhythms of nursery rhyme, we still have predominantly a four-stress line, though in the opening of Philip Sparowe, a lively allegro march rhythm, there is an unusually large number of rests and accented beats coming together. It is clear in any case that when Coleridge announced with Christabel an entirely new principle of versification, a four-beat line with a variable number of syllables, the principle was about as new as such things generally are in literature. So far, I have observed very few departures from this four-beat common time in English: Mr. Eliot speaks of the rhythm of The Cocktail Party as a three-beat line, but I usually hear four beats, and so apparently do most of the actors. Tudor tendencies, apart from drama, were mainly towards metrical regularity and away from musical influence, as we can see in Spenser, who begins with accentual experiments but abandons them later for an elaborate unmusical stanza. Spenser’s development is the reverse of Milton’s, who begins with stanzas and quickly turns to more continuous forms, notably the enjambed paragraph. The great dry recitativoes of Samson Agonistes are, as Hopkins said, perhaps our greatest achievement in musical poetry so far. Milton’s chief musical contemporaries were Crashaw and Cowley. For most of his great religious poems Crashaw uses a free fantasia or ode form, which he often calls a hymn. The organization of these hymns is strongly musical, and they require a very fluent line which can lengthen or shorten at will, a pushing enjambement, and a fortissimo climax at the end. Cowley’s Pindaric was evidently intended as a still freer development of the Crashaw hymn, in which rhythm and meaning could coincide. The Augustan tradition again moved away from music, and Samuel Johnson’s attitude to poetry is a consistently antimusical one. In opposition to Milton’s statement that in musical poetry the sense has to be variously drawn out from one line into another, Johnson says: “The musick of the English heroic line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together: this co-

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operation can be obtained only by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another, as a distinct system of sounds.” An abortive musical development began with Smart, Blake, and Burns—there are some fascinating comments on the musical resources of poetry in Smart’s Jubilate Agno—but Romanticism was for the most part unmusical. On the other hand, if we have understood what musical poetry tries to do, we should have more sympathy with what Wordsworth, without any knowledge of music, was trying to do in The Idiot Boy and Peter Bell, and perhaps also with what Southey was trying to do in Thalaba. Many post-Christabel experiments can be reduced to a four-beat accentual line. Meredith’s Love in the Valley is based on such a line, very similar in its rhythm to much of Lydgate. The four-stress line of Hiawatha, whatever its Finnish origin, fits English very snugly, which perhaps explains why it is one of the easiest poems in the language to parody. The general tendency of free verse is unmusical. When rhythm is variable there is no point in a run-on line, and we notice that in Whitman the end of each line is marked by a strong pause, which means that Whitman’s rhythm has little in common with the continuous rhythm of music. Imagism, as its name indicates, threw a strong emphasis on opsis, and began an almost consciously antimusical development. Eliot’s 1936 essay on Milton, where he put Milton and Joyce, quite correctly, into the musical tradition and then surrounded that tradition with deprecatory value judgments, is the culmination of this movement. But even before this Eliot’s growing interest in drama had begun to convert him to a more musical point of view. Pound, too, is a much more musical poet than the quality of his influence would lead us to expect, and he has been able to absorb at least two strongly musical influences, Browning and the Old English alliterative line. The influence of Auden, whose Oxford Book of Light Verse is full (it comes close to being an anthology) of musical poetry, has also been thrown largely on the musical side. So far I have been speaking of melos as an influence on poetry from music as we know it, music organized by stress accent and dance rhythm. There is however another type of melos, and one which more naturally comes to mind when we think of the musical element in literature. This is the melody and rhythm of lexis itself, the melos produced by the rising and falling inflections and the pattern of emphasis in the spoken word. More attention has been paid to this than to the influence of music on poetry, but its study is badly handicapped by the fact that no satisfactory notation has yet been devised for it. When it comes to reproducing the

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melody and rhythm of speech, typography is helpless and the notation of ordinary music worse than useless, because, with its rigorous framework of an enharmonic scale and its equal divisions of time values, it is actively misleading. The patterns of the voice traced by an oscillograph are much closer to what a proper notation would be. When we listen to a reading of Dylan Thomas, say the reading of Peacock’s Song of Dinas Vawr, which is in the Harvard collection, we are struck by the slowness of the reading. The words have it all their own way here: they organize the rhythm, and are not subordinated to a continuous stress beat. Next we are struck by the importance of two features which are traditional in poetry but have little place in music as such. One is an approximately regular pattern of pitch accent, which has been replaced by stress accent in music. The other is an emphasis on the varying sonority of vowels, which in Classical poetry would take the regular form of a quantitative metre. The equivalent of quantity in English might better be described as quality, the sense that some kind of irregular patterning of vowel sounds is present. These elements of pitch accent and quality of assonance are a part of chanting, and singing and chanting are, in modern times, radically different methods of associating melos and lexis. When a poem is set to music and sung, its rhythm is taken over by music. When it is chanted, all musical elements are subordinated to the words. We notice that poets who, like Yeats, want their poems chanted are precisely those who are most suspicious of musical settings. Thus the contrast between musical and unmusical poets partly resolves itself into a contrast between two conceptions of melos: one which reflects the external influence of the autonomous art of music, and one which incorporates certain musical elements into a verbal structure. Poe’s Poetic Principle, for example, makes statements about the role of music in poetry which make up in strength what they lack in precision, but Poe is talking about the second kind of melos, the kind which has nothing directly to do with music, and usually produces unmusical poetry. Of such are the problems of criticism. There are, of course, differences of degree in the absorption of words by music in musical settings. The madrigal, where the words are tossed about from voice to voice, represents an extreme limit in the subservience of poetry, and the dislike of poets for this trituration of their rhythm can be seen in the support they gave to the development of the seventeenth-century monodic forms. Henry Lawes went further than most composers of his day in approximating the rhythms of music and poetry,

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and so won the applause of Milton: “Thou honourest verse,” Milton says. In the nineteenth century the admiration expressed by many symbolist writers for Wagner was in part based on the notion—if so erroneous a notion can be said to be a base—that Wagner was trying to give the literary elements equal prominence with the music. The modern convention in song writing also prescribes close attention to the rhythm of the words. Nevertheless music remains music, and poetry poetry, each a world of its own. It is probable that Greek poetry and Greek music met together in a kind of no-man’s-land of tonal magic in which musical and poetic elements were barely distinguishable. One can find something of the same thing as late as Aucassin et Nicolette. But ever since music became a fully autonomous art, this central area has disappeared, and in modern combinations of music and poetry one art regularly absorbs the other. That is why the two kinds of melos in poetry afford such a striking contrast in technique. There are tendencies today, ranging from the strong verbal emphasis in folk song to what is called Sprechgesang, which may modify this situation, but it still exists. The chanting of verse tends to give it a hieratic quality, removing it from the language of common speech, and it thereby increases the exhilaration of poetry, bringing it nearer to the sphere of the heroic. In drama this stylizing of speech takes the form of declamation, which is also appropriate to heroic themes. Declamation is also a feature of rhetoric and oratory, where again we can see literary analogues of musical elements: oratory, for instance, resembles music and differs from ordinary speech in its use of patterns of repetition. How much oratory depends on melos can be realized if we walk along a residential street Sunday morning listening to the radios in the houses. The words may not be audible, but one can generally distinguish, from the cadences alone, the sermon, the prayer, the commercial, and the newscast. This suggests that the sound patterns of ordinary rhetoric are reducible to a few basic formulas, some of them nearly as invariable as the rise and fall that the sharp ear of Mark Twain caught in a clergyman’s reading and recorded in Tom Sawyer. The sound patterns of poetry are of course very complex: a recent issue of the Kenyon Review has demonstrated how complex they can be. Ten competent readers of one poem will produce ten different but equally valid sound patterns. It seems to me that the only way to introduce order into such a subject is to begin by distinguishing the different rhythms which form the basis of reading. Let us take a line of poetry at random,

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say the opening line of Claudio’s great speech in Measure for Measure: “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where” [3.1.131]. Here we have, in the first place, the metrical or prosodic rhythm, an iambic pentameter with the first foot reversed. Second, we have the accentual rhythm, in this case a four-stress line. Third, we have the semantic or prose rhythm, the rhythm of sense, which in this case corresponds very closely to the accentual rhythm. Fourth, we have the mimetic rhythm which results from the actor’s attempt to catch the mode of speech of a man in imminent fear of death. Mimetic rhythm is of course most important in drama, but it is found in other genres too, as a reader must at least imitate the mood of the piece he is reading. Onomatopoeia is a by-product of mimetic rhythm. Fifth, we have an oracular, meditative, soliloquizing rhythm emerging from the coincidences of the sound pattern, or what we have called the quality of assonance: Ay; but to die . . . and go we know not where.

This rhythm is not very prominent in drama, but in lyric, especially free verse lyrics in short lines, like the poems of Cummings, it is one of the predominant rhythms. Each of these rhythms has its own pattern of stress and pitch, and the particular blend of them that any reader will make will depend on his sensitivity to some as compared with others. The study of the complex sound patterns of poetry has greatly lagged behind the study of the complex patterns of meaning, largely because of the lack of a notation already mentioned. The study of complex meaning, or ambiguity, has enriched our appreciation of poetry, and at the same time, in the form of semantics, it has helped us to see through the illegitimate use of ambiguity in rhetoric, the employing of weasel words with a strong emotional impact and a shifting meaning. Similarly, the study of the sound patterns of poetry and drama would both increase our understanding of literature and help us to take a more clinical view of the hee-hawing of demagoguery, whether evangelical or political. In any case it would help to prevent poetry from becoming bogged down in books, and would do much to restore to it its primitive gift of charm.

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26 The Ulysses Theme and Tragic Themes in Western Literature Spring 1957

Review of The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, by W.B. Stanford (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), and Tragic Themes in Western Literature, ed. Cleanth Brooks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). From Comparative Literature, 9 (Spring 1957): 180–2. Frye had heard of Cleanth Brooks as early as 1949 from Victoria graduate David Knight, who had gone to Yale for graduate work. In 1950 a diary entry remarks that Brooks “belongs to a group called the ‘New Critics’ who are supposed to ignore historical criticism & concentrate on texture, whatever texture is” (D, 288). The two critics later became friends, and Frye stayed with the Brookses when he lectured at Yale in 1958 (NFF 1993, box 5, file 4).

Mr. Stanford’s book deals with the character of Ulysses as presented by Homer and with the later treatments of it from Pindar and the Greek tragedians down through Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Calderón, and Tennyson (to name only a few of dozens mentioned) to Joyce and the modern Greek poet Kazantzakis. The book is remarkable not only for its thorough scholarship but for an excellent style, at once incisive and sensitive, which illuminates very sharply both the unity and the variety in the Ulysses figure as it goes down the ages. It is weakest in its critical treatment of the later works: what is actually said about Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce, and others is often oversimplified or even perfunctory. In compensation there is a tight grip on the historical logic of the story, as all the bewildering later metamorphoses of the character are traced back to suggestions in Homer’s original portrayal. The Homeric Ulysses is a leader, as distinct from an institutionalized ruler or an uncomplicated warrior like Ajax. He differs from the other

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heroes not in being less heroic but in being more wide awake to his real situation, refusing to conventionalize his behaviour into the stock patterns of simple heroism. He has pre-eminently the sense of prudence, is willing to disguise himself or do menial tasks to gain his end, is unwilling to take foolhardy risks, and is eloquent in a purely functional way, his eloquence being designed only to persuade at the moment. He has both the ruthlessness and the eager curiosity that go with the exuberance of leadership, and the inscrutability of a man whom we only see meeting specific situations. He has therefore all the moral ambivalence of a man of action; we do not think of him primarily as a good or bad man, but as having the complex of qualities that one needs to get through certain difficulties. His wisdom is practical and not speculative, a sense of the concrete that makes him more intelligible to women, including Athena, than to men. His greater realism and common sense, which comes out in such things as his remarks on the necessity of eating, remarks that are rather shocking to conventional heroism, indicate a quality in him that is somewhat alien, socially and perhaps even racially, to his environment. He is, after all, the grandson of Autolycus, and, like the Corsican Napoleon in France or the German Catherine in Russia, he dominates his society all the better for being detached from it. Yet in his irreducible complexity, his acceptance of all normal human needs, such as food, sex, knowledge, and social approval, he is not so much a type of man as an enlarged portrait of Everyman himself, with all the qualities of human nature that seem indefensible morally and yet are regarded by the gods as somehow worth redeeming. Thus Plato showed him as wishing to be an ordinary man in his next reincarnation, a hint picked up and expanded by Joyce. Thus some of the later Christian allegorists, though not working with Homer’s text, saw in him a type of the natural man; something of this comes into Calderón’s treatment of him. “Few characters in history or mythology,” the author remarks, “can have been regarded in the same epoch as being both a type of villainous treachery and an analogue of the Incarnate Son of God.” But the natural man is in a sense both. The same association of Ulysses with man under the law or wrath accounts for a recurrent feeling that there is something Semitic or ewiger Jude1 about Ulysses, another hint that Joyce seized on. Such is Homer’s Ulysses as Mr. Stanford presents him. Of Homer’s followers, Shakespeare certainly succeeded in recovering something of the full ambiguity of the original, and for this the author does not give him quite enough credit. Most other treatments of Ulysses are partial,

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simplified, and tend to reduce him to an invariable moral type. His versatility, for instance, is often generalized into mere wiliness or cunning, in order to make it more accessible to moral judgment. He gets involved, largely by virtue of his dispute with Ajax, in the second half of a topos of courage and prudence, a commonplace still doing duty as late as Giraudoux’s La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, where Hector replaces Ajax. In his resourcefulness Ulysses is a figure of comedy rather than tragedy; his affinities are with the tricky slave whose shrewd counsel brings about the successful stratagem. Hence he appears frequently in satyr plays; but in tragedies, where the dramatic interest is focused on the hero of defeat, his self-possession makes him a rather calculating spectator of the action. The unpleasant Ulysses of Euripides’ Hecuba reflects, the author suggests, the current political debasing of leadership into demagoguery; it certainly reflects the sympathy with the underdog which usually replaces the loss of the sense of buoyant leadership in society. In general Ulysses fared better in ethics than in literature; thus Seneca, the author reminds us, admired him as a Stoic philosopher and vilified him as a dramatist. With the Romans and the glorifying of the Trojans, Ulysses’ reputation declined still further, and Christianity, with its strong sense of the futility of all human ruses to escape divine wrath, conferred on him the somber tragic hubris that we see in Dante’s figure. Even in the Renaissance, with its renewed sense of the importance of leadership, the elements in the polytropos complex2 of Homer remained for the most part still unravelled. In later centuries we have a “Classical” Ulysses who is a prudent or crafty statesman, and a “Romantic” Ulysses who is a lonely Byronic wanderer, like Tennyson’s, and who, in striking contrast to Homer’s hero, wants to go anywhere but home. In Joyce this second theme is attached to a second character, Stephen, leaving the main Ulysses figure Bloom with the centripetal, home-seeking tendency of the original. In Kazantzakis’s Odyssey there is a more ambitious combining of the wanderer and statesman themes that expands Ulysses into a representative of the spirit of modern man as he builds one form of civilization after another. The Kazantzakis poem is unknown to the present reviewer; from Mr. Stanford’s account it sounds like an inordinately pretentious philosophical melodrama of the Peer Gynt variety. It is a fascinating story that Mr. Stanford has to tell, and one that will enlarge the literary perspective of any reader. The chief moral perhaps is habent sua fata libelli; tradition itself plays a creative role in literature.3 The author is careful to distinguish facts of history from facts of literary

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tradition, and to give the latter their rightful place. The unity of the Homeric poems, for instance, is unquestionably a fact of literary tradition. At the very end of the book, in his last footnote, he suggests that the character of Ulysses may be one of the “archetypes” dealt with by the school of Jung, which locates them in the collective unconscious of the total human mind. It certainly is an archetype in the only sense in which a literary critic needs the term: a theme which carries centuries of literary development with it, and yet in each age is as fresh as ever, and as infinitely suggestive of new modes of treatment. Tragic Themes in Western Literature is a series of public lectures given by professors of the Yale faculty on tragedies and tragic writers. The successful public lecture is something of a tour de force of range finding; one has to stress the values which the specialist and nonspecialist both feel to be fundamental. This book is an excellent series of public lectures, and makes a readable collection of essays, most of them perhaps not critically of any more lasting importance. That the book hangs together as well as it does is due chiefly to the immense cohesive force of the conception “tragedy” itself, which can bring out all sorts of coincidences in technique and characterization even in a series of largely independent studies. Three of the lecturers, Chauncey B. Tinker on Samson Agonistes, Richard B. Sewall on The Brothers Karamazov, and Konstantin Reichardt on Rosmersholm, stay within the normal lecturing area of summary and general comment. Henri Peyre’s study of Phèdre, apart from a somewhat centrifugal introduction, does a remarkable job of putting Racine into the perspective of Western culture, bringing out among other things a curious and significant link between Racine and Dostoevsky. Bernard Knox’s sensitive and closely reasoned critique of Oedipus Tyrannus, which I think the best essay in the book, makes a most suggestive unity out of a series of sharp observations on the imagery and diction of the play. One profound comment is worth pondering: “The relation between the prophecy and Oedipus’ actions is not of cause and effect. It is the relation suggested by the metaphor, the relation of two independent entities which are equated.” Maynard Mack makes a similar kind of analysis of Hamlet, pointing out the central importance of the words “show,” “act,” and “play,” and thus indicating that the sense of bewildering puzzle that everyone feels in Hamlet is not the result of failure, as a rash essay of Eliot suggests, but deliberately contrived; the whole play carries on the mood of the opening scene, which “creates a world where uncertainties are of the essence.” Louis L. Martz, speaking mainly of Murder in the Cathedral

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and Saint Joan, is more concerned than the others with tragedy as a genre, and raises the question whether a character without hamartia can be a tragic hero, or heroine. He decides, very sensibly, that the term “tragedy” relates to a varied group and not to an archetypal model: “not a scale of value, but a spectrum of various qualities.”

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27 Nature and Homer Summer–Autumn 1958

From FI, 39–51. Originally published in Texas Quarterly, 1 (Summer–Autumn 1958): 192–204. Reprinted in Modern Literary Criticism, 1900–1970, ed. Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 224– 31. Texas Quarterly (1958–78) published articles across a broad spectrum of the arts and sciences. This issue had the general title “Historiomancy: RearView Writing and the American Prospect,” and among those who also appeared in it were the photographer and novelist Wright Morris, Allen W. Dulles, then head of the CIA, Russian political exile Alexander Kerensky, and poets Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley.

In the first part of the Essay on Criticism Pope deals with a critical principle and a group of critical facts. The principle is that a work of art is an imitation of nature. The facts are dealt with by being reduced to the principle. The method of arguing is typically youthful, even granting that Pope was an incredibly precocious youth. It is a fact that a poet observes certain literary conventions, but these are really nature methodized. It is a fact that a poet works with a specific mental quality which Pope calls wit, but then wit is really nature to advantage dressed. Above all, it is a fact that a poem is an imitation of other poems. It is possible that Virgil imitated nature; it is certain that he imitated Homer. This obtrusively stubborn fact has to be hammered down a little before it is on a level with the principle: When first young Maro in his youthful mind A work t’ outlast immortal Rome designed, Perhaps he seemed above the critic’s law,

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And but from Nature’s fountains scorned to draw: But when t’ examine ev’ry part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. [pt. 1, ll. 130–5]

The traditional view of the relation of art to nature, as enunciated by Aristotle, broadened by the late Classical rhetoricians, and developed by Christianity, preserves a distinction that is much less clear in Pope. In this view there are two levels of nature. The lower one is the ordinary physical world, which is theologically “fallen”; the upper is a divinely sanctioned order, existing in Eden before the fall, and mirrored in the Classical and Boethian myth of the Golden Age. To this upper world we may attain by means of education, obedience to law, and the habit of virtue; or, as the Elizabethans said, by adding nurture to nature. The upper world is the world of “art,” and though art may be represented by a bewildering variety of things, such as magic in The Tempest or the grafting of a tree in The Winter’s Tale, still it usually includes what we mean by art, and poetry, for all its Renaissance defenders, is one of the most important of the educational and regenerative agents that lead us up to the world of art. When Sidney says, “(Nature’s) world is brazen; the poets only deliver a golden,” he means by nature the ordinary or fallen world. When he says that art “doth grow in effect a second nature” he is saying that the upper level is also within the natural order. As Burke was to say later, “art is man’s nature.” The educated and virtuous man is as natural as the animal, but he lives in a world of specifically human nature, where moral goodness is natural. Thus in Comus the Lady brushes off Comus’s argument that her chastity is unnatural by saying that nature “Means her provision only to the good.” This conception of art as not “artificial” in the modern sense but as identical with nature conceived as a morally intelligible order is the basis of Pope’s reductive argument—the art itself is nature, as Polixenes says in The Winter’s Tale. The two levels are further subdivided into four. The lower level has in its basement the world of sin and moral corruption, which is strictly speaking unnatural, though it often appears to be an intensification of ordinary nature, as it does in Comus. The ordinary physical world above it, the nature of animals and plants, is morally neutral, and hence not a resting place for man. Man is in this nature but not of it; he must either go downward into sin or upward into his proper human world. The upper level has above it a supernatural order, which operates in this one as the economy of grace, providence, and salvation. The supernatural world is

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often associated, as in the Nativity Ode, with the world above the moon, the starry spheres that suffer no change or decay. Of course even this is still nature, and its relation to the world of God’s actual presence symbolic only, but the symbolizing of the higher by the lower “heaven” has been traditional throughout the Christian period. The last stanza of Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantoes is a familiar English example. The four worlds may also be thought of as concentric, as they are in Dante, where hell is at the centre of the earth, paradise is in the surrounding world of the planets, and purgatory, the world of moral education in which we move upward to our original unfallen nature in Eden, fills a space between the ordinary world and paradise. Thus, in its medieval and Renaissance formulation, art, including poetry, belongs in a world of its own, a world which is, from one point of view at least, bigger than ordinary nature, and contains and comprehends it on all sides. If Dante’s Eden revolved, like the moon, it would form a sphere containing the inhabited world. Bigger is a physical metaphor, and it was certainly easier to conceive the metaphor when the Ptolemaic universe provided the physical analogies for it that Dante’s poem affords. In Pope’s anxiety to reduce everything to nature we can see the later tendency to think of art as a specialized development or by-product of nature, sitting precariously in the middle of nature and trying to draw support from its surroundings. As it seems even more self-evident to us than it did to Pope that nature is “bigger” than the world of art, we must return to the fundamental distinction on which all literary criticism has, at least historically, been founded. In Plato’s Republic there are four levels too, of a different though significantly related kind. There are two major divisions, the ideal or intelligible world and the physical or objective world. On the upper level of the intelligible world, there is nous, the knowledge of reality in which the subjective form, or human soul, is united with the objective form or idea. Below it is dianoia, knowledge about reality, of the kind given us by mathematics. Below this, in the upper level of the lower division, is pistis, or knowledge of the physical world, the knowledge of bodies which the human body is equipped to receive, and at the bottom is eikasia, or opinion, knowledge about the physical world, whose relation to pistis corresponds to the relation of dianoia to nous. The first three levels correspond roughly to the analogy between reason, will, and appetite in the mind and the ruler, guard, and artisan in the just state on which the whole scheme of the Republic turns. Eikasia corresponds to the work of

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the artist who imitates the physical world, and, though not necessarily erroneous in itself, it is a potential source of error, and is unnecessary in a just state. The equation of art and eikasia is implicit only in the Republic, as Socrates evidently intends his argument about poets to be tentative, or perhaps paradoxical. Let the poets and their defenders, he says, refute it if they can, and we shall listen to them with respect. Plato himself, in other dialogues, gives the art he approves of a much higher rating, and Plato’s influence has been strongest on such critics as Shelley who have claimed the maximum for their art. But the art Plato approves of is hardly, in his terms, an imitation of nature at all, and if we are to keep the conception of imitation the only answer to the argument in the Republic is the one that Aristotle’s Poetics first made possible. The relation of art to nature is not an external relation of reproduction to model, but an internal relation of form to content. Art does not reflect nature; it contains nature, for the essence of content is to be contained. Hence art, no less than mathematics, is, in Plato’s terminology, a mode of (at least) dianoia, not of eikasia. Of course nature is the environment as well as the content of art, and in that respect will always be external to it. That is why the figure of the mirror has been so frequently employed to illustrate the relationship. But the indispensable axiom that, as long as we are talking about art, nature is inside art as its content, not outside it as its model, was written once for all into the critic’s handbook by Longinus when he identified the “sublime,” not with size, but with the mental capacity that appreciates the vastness of nature and, in the stock but expressive phrase, “takes it in.” Thus art is, unlike Alice, as natural as life, but twice as large: What is it they saw, those godlike writers who in their work aim at what is greatest and overlook precision in every detail? This, among other things: that nature judged man to be no lowly or ignoble creature when she brought us into this life and into the whole universe as into a great celebration, to be spectators of her whole performance and most ambitious actors. She implanted at once into our souls an invincible love for all that is great and more divine than ourselves. That is why the whole universe gives insufficient scope to man’s power of contemplation and reflection, but his thoughts often pass beyond the boundaries of the surrounding world.1

We are not concerned here with the later versions of the relation of art to nature, but only with the critical confusions caused by the notion that

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art is somehow formed by its content. The terms “nature,” “life,” “reality,” “experience,” are all interchangeable in the primitive language of criticism: they are all synonyms for content. Hence life or experience cannot be the formal cause of art; the impulse to give a literary shape to something can only come from previous contact with literature. The forms of literature cannot exist outside literature, and a writer’s technical ability, his power to construct a literary form, depends more on his literary scholarship than on any other factor—a point of some importance for universities that teach writing courses. Of course experience may turn up something with an accidental resemblance to literary form— in fact literary criticism badly needs a term corresponding to “picturesque,” such as the “literatesque” suggested by Bagehot. Failing such a term, we express the idea very vaguely: if a man is killed in the street by a car, it is a horrifying experience to see, but it is not a “tragedy” any more than it is a novel or an epic. Every writer is constantly on the lookout for experiences that seem to have a story or poem in them, but the story or poem is not in them; it is in the writer’s grasp of the literary tradition and his power of assimilating experience to it. When Henry James was asked about the part played by experience in writing, he could only say that one should be the kind of writer on whom no experience is lost, that is, a writer with enough technical knowledge of literature to be constantly absorbing his experience into literary forms and conventions. Such a maxim hardly sounds controversial, yet much bewilderment has been caused by using terms of content as metaphors for form. If we are examining the sketch books of two artists and find that B appeals to us much more than A, we may say: A is dead and lifeless; B’s drawings are full of life: or, A is dull and uninspired; B has the fire of imagination in him: or, A thinks only of his drawing; B is looking at the subject. But all these are secondary and rationalized ways of saying “B draws better.” If he draws better, his command of drawing is the primary fact, not his relation to life or imagination or nature, all of which are haphazard guesses about him. Critics who stress the imitation of nature usually have a strong respect for tradition: critics who stress the “original,” like Edward Young, usually prefer to speak of the poet as inspired or creative. But no matter how we think of the poetic process, its end is to produce a new member of a class of things called poems or novels or plays which is already in existence. The parents of a new baby are proud of its novelty; they may even speak of it as unique; but the source of their pride is the fact that it is

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a recognizable human being, and conforms to a prescribed convention. The same principle holds when a new work of art is called “original.” In literature, as in life, the unconventionally new is a monstrosity, as critics from Horace onward have constantly insisted. Such terms as “original” and “inspired” are value judgments, and as my position on the role of value judgments has been a good deal discussed and often misunderstood, I may summarize it here in four points. (1) Every value judgment contains within it an antecedent categorical judgment, as we obviously cannot tell how good a thing is until we know what it is. (2) Inadequate value judgments nearly always owe their inadequacy to an insufficient knowledge of what the categories of literature are. (3) Categorical judgments are based on a knowledge that can be learned and which should constantly increase; value judgments are based on a skill derived only from such knowledge as we already have. (4) Therefore, knowledge, or scholarship, has priority to value judgments, constantly corrects their perspective, and always has the power of veto over them, whereas subordinating knowledge to value judgments leads to impossible pedantries. Rymer’s value judgment of Othello as nothing but a bloody farce is not bad criticism; it is logical criticism based on narrow scholarship. It seems to be difficult for the modern mind to take in the conception of a formal cause which follows most of its effects. The efficient cause of a poem may be the poet; its material cause may be nature, life, reality, experience, or whatever is being shaped. But its formal cause, the literary shape itself, is inside poetry, poetry being, not a simple aggregate of poems, but a body of forms and categories to which every new poem attaches itself somewhere. The difficulty in understanding this is, of course, increased by the law of copyright and the false analogy it suggests between writing and other forms of marketing. In Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, already glanced at, we can see a hazy mercantile analogy taking shape between the original writer and the entrepreneur, and between the plagiary and the mere worker. When Young comes to the unshakable fact of the imitation of earlier poems by poets, he draws a distinction (of rhetorical origin, going back to Longinus) between the poem and its author: the true original, he says, imitates not the Iliad but Homer, the poem being assumed to be the by-product of a personality. But a poet’s personality is either unconnected with his work or part of its convention. Two Romantic poets with very remarkable personalities were Byron and Landor. Landor’s personality is not integral with his poetry: it is so different as to have suggested Yeats’s theory

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of the mask or the poetic personality as the opposite of the actual one, and his personality has consequently survived only as a biographical curiosity. With Byron the personality is, so to speak, built in to the poetry, which means that Byron’s personality has poetic importance because it conforms to a literary convention. This coincidence of a poetic personality with a fictional archetype is as old as Homer (for the legendary blind bard comes apparently from Homer’s own Demodocus) and new enough to account for the cult of Scott Fitzgerald in our day. Another form of the confusion between literary and personal experience is easier to recognize, though its sources are harder to identify: the confusion between literary and personal sincerity. If a poet is really in love, his Muse may well desert him; if he is a Courtly Love poet writing sonnets to an aging and irascible duchess informing her that he is her devoted slave for life, that her eyes have struck him irremediably with Cupid’s dart, that he must die unless she accords him grace—all of which means, in terms of personal sincerity, that he wants a job tutoring her children—he may break out into passionate eloquence. It is not the experience of love but practice in writing love sonnets that releases the floods of poetic emotion. Every so often Shakespeare criticism is invaded by eager amateurs proving that Shakespeare must have been a lawyer or soldier to speak with such authority about law or soldiering: there are probably books somewhere proving that he must have been a murderer to have written Macbeth, or that he must have gone to Italy incognito and spent years as a Renaissance prince to understand so well the psychology of royalty. Here again what is in itself an elementary fallacy often operates under cover in more sophisticated criticism. For instance: one of the main sources of the confusion is the fact that the profession of personal sincerity is itself a literary convention. A Courtly Love poet may be as second-hand in inspiration as you please, but the one thing he is sure to transcribe from his sources is the statement that while most of his predecessors have got their emotions out of books, he really means what he says. The first sonnet of Astrophel and Stella ends with the famous line: “Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write,” which means, as a biographical fact, that Sidney has been looking into Petrarch. In the fifteenth sonnet Sidney ridicules his inferiors thus: You that poor Petrarch’s deceased woes With new-born sighs and den’zened wit do sing: You take wrong ways . . .

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But he is in a position to say this, not because he is doing something different, but because he is doing the same thing better. All this we may readily concede, as Courtly Love conventions are remote enough from us to be recognized as conventions. But when Wordsworth informs us in the prefaces and poems of the Lyrical Ballads that he is letting nature and experience be his teacher he is using precisely the same convention of professing personal sincerity that Sidney is using. He may have believed it himself; so may Sidney; there is no reason why so much higher a proportion of his readers should have believed him. Personal sincerity in the poet is like virtue in Machiavelli’s prince: the reality of it is of no consequence; the appearance of it may be. Because works of literature form a verbal society, and because the forms of literature can only be derived from other literary forms, literature is allusive, not externally or incidentally allusive, but substantially and integrally so. To start with a simple example: G.K. Chesterton’s poem The Donkey, after describing the grotesque appearance and miserable life of the animal, ends with the quatrain: Fools! For I also had my hour, One far fierce hour and sweet; There was a shouting round my ears, And palms before my feet.2

The allusion to the first Palm Sunday is not incidental to the poem: it is the whole point of the poem: it is, once again, its formal cause. The Bible is, of course, central to many things in our experience besides literature, but a purely literary allusion may play an informing role equally well, as an allusion to Agamemnon does at the end of Eliot’s Sweeney among the Nightingales or in Yeats’s Leda. Agamemnon is one of the founding fathers of our literary society: that is why an allusion to him has the tremendous evocative authority of our whole literary tradition behind it. It is possible to carry the same principle a step further. When Byron writes: The mountain looks on Marathon, And Marathon looks on the sea [The Isles of Greece, ll. 7–8]

we are reminded of Longinus and his comment on a speech of Demosthenes, that the orator “turns what is essentially an argument into

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a supremely great and passionate passage” by a reference to Marathon. It is true that both Demosthenes and Byron are talking about the freedom of Greece; but Marathon carries this evocative ring to us because it is a battle of literary importance. As events become history, they disappear into books, and are absorbed into the conventions of books. As time goes on, and historical tradition becomes more tenuous, only the events with conventional poetic associations can carry the thrilling magic of a great name. When Lincoln said of the heroes of Gettysburg, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here,” he was using one of the oldest literary conventions in the business, the so-called topos of modesty, which is even older than the profession of sincerity. He was rhetorically right in using it, and yet what he said is not really true: it is almost impossible to remember the names and dates of battles unless there is some literary reason for doing so, and if the name “Gettysburg” evokes strong feelings when it is as far away from us as we are from Marathon, it will do so only because of whatever literary tradition may have begun with Lincoln’s speech. I do not deny the reality of the sense of the unexpected, the shocking or radically novel, about the original writer, but the difference between the original and the derivative writer does need restating, on the basis of the fact that the original writer is derivative at a deeper level. There are many aspects to the subject of originality in literature, but I have space to deal with only one. There are no primitives today, and no way of tracing the origin of the impulse to put things into literary form. Everyone, however, lives in continuous contact with words. Much of this contact is with words used descriptively, i.e., to convey information, or what passes as such. But there is a residual contact with words used for entertainment in the broadest sense. For literary people a good deal or most of this contact is with literature, in the conventional modes of books and plays. For people with no consistent literary taste it takes various subliterary forms: reading the comics, watching television, staying up with detective stories, listening to funny stories, gossiping, and the like. And however thickly covered up with commercial formulas such experience may be today, it is continuous with the popular literary experience of the past. By popular literature I mean roughly the imaginative verbal experience of those with no specifically literary training or interest. The popular in this sense is the contemporary primitive, and it tends to become primitive with the pass-

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ing of time. Much of it is rubbish, though occasionally a very good work of literature may become popular in the sense of affording a key to imaginative experience for the untrained: Huckleberry Finn and some of Dickens’s novels are nineteenth-century examples. In simpler societies popular literature consists largely of ballads, myths, folk tales, and similar forms which persist in recognizable disguises to our own day, especially in the nursery rhymes and fairy tales of childhood. Literature often becomes superficially or inorganically conventional. This usually happens when it follows the narrowing dialectic of a cultural elite belonging to a class which is culturally ascendant but is losing its social effectiveness. The drama of the late Caroline private theatre tended to narrow its appeal in this way, until a social revolution that seemed oddly to coincide with an inner collapse of vitality swept it out in 1642. The original writer in such a situation is likely to do something that will be decried by this elite as vulgar, and hailed by a later generation as turning from literary convention to experience. Thus at the end of the eighteenth century, with so many poets ringing the changes on what Cowper calls Philomela’s “mechanick woe,” Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads are a breath of fresh air. Hence our readiness to accept Wordsworth’s statement that he is ignoring bookish models and making a direct contact with life. As usual, this account is oversimplified. What Blake and Wordsworth also did was to set up a new series of literary echoes: keepsake poems, broadside ballads, moralizing tales for children, were suddenly shown to have an undreamed-of potentiality in their trite formulas. It is difficult to think of any new and startling development in literature that has not bestowed glass slippers and pumpkin coaches on some subliterary Cinderella. The most obvious example is Elizabethan popular drama, the flower and fruit of what ran to seed with Carlell and Glapthorne.3 However great the difference in value between King Lear and King Cambyses, it is hardly likely that Shakespeare would have got as far as King Lear if he had not been shrewd enough to see literary possibilities in King Cambyses that more highbrow contemporaries did not see. The same practical shrewdness is evident in his exploiting of the formulas of primitive romance and commedia dell’arte improvisations in his last period. The same principle affects many aspects of modern literature. I am not thinking so much of, say, Yeats’s interest in the legends and superstitions

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of the Irish peasantry, which is a usual enough type of interest in popular literary experience: I am thinking rather of the exploiting of a squalid lower-middle-class subculture in Ulysses, of Yeats’s own use of an equally dingy type of occult literature, of the newspaper verse idioms in Auden, of the way in which experimental drama has been affected by primitive and archaic types of popular drama from Sweeney Agonistes to Waiting for Godot, the latter being of course a frozen vaudeville act. Graham Greene has spoken with great contempt of “books to read while you wait for the bus,” but such “entertainments” as Brighton Rock and The Ministry of Fear are literary developments of precisely the formulas of such books. Wherever we turn in literature it is the same story: every fresh contact with “life” involves also a reshaping of literary convention. Wordsworth’s attempt “to choose incidents and situations from common life . . . as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men” echoes the similar attempt with which Spenser in the Shepheards Calender revitalized Tudor poetry, described by E.K. as bringing “great grace, and, as one would say, auctoritie to the verse.” Let us compare two passages from representative poems of the turn of this century, one from a lyric in [A.E. Housman’s] A Shropshire Lad and the other from John Davidson’s Thirty Bob a Week: “Rest you so from trouble sore, Fear the heat o’ the sun no more, Nor the snowing winter wild, Now you labour not with child. “Empty vessel, garment cast, We that wore you long shall last. —Another night, another day.” So my bones within me say. [The Immortal Part, ll. 29–36]

I step into my heart and there I meet A god-almighty devil singing small, Who would like to shout and whistle in the street, And squelch the passers flat against the wall; If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take, He would take it, ask for more, and eat it all.

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And I meet a sort of simpleton beside, The kind that life is always giving beans; With thirty bob a week to keep a bride He fell in love and married in his teens: At thirty bob he stuck; but he knows it isn’t luck: He knows the seas are deeper than tureens. [ll. 43–54]

The first reaction of a student coming upon these two poems might well be to say that the Housman poem was exquisite and the Davidson one noisy and sentimental doggerel. His second reaction might well be to swing to the opposite extreme and say that one is mere literature and the other a transcription from life, so shattering in its impact as to make it impossible for us to think of Housman as a serious poet at all by comparison. His next duty is to get the assumptions behind these value judgments sorted out in his mind. Housman’s poetry is steeped in conventions that are themselves deeply absorbed in the literary tradition, conventions ranging from the ballad to the sentimental nineteenthcentury lyric, and including a deliberate echo of Shakespeare. The Davidson poem uses the idiom and rhythm of a music-hall song to express the kind of life that the music hall indirectly reflects. Housman is deliberately erudite in his use of convention; Davidson deliberately the reverse; but they are equally conventional. By that time, the student will be experienced enough in criticism to have stopped wanting to make comparative value judgments. There is no question of finding a primitive or popular core of literary experience in every work of literature: I am dealing here only with the special case in which literature may give, to a hasty observer, the illusion of turning away from books to “life.” In our age, as in every age of literature, there are certain assumptions held by our cultural elite that need to be examined with detachment and catholicity of taste. In the Renaissance it was assumed that epic and tragedy were the aristocrats of literary forms, and that major poets would normally devote themselves to these genres. The assumption produced many dull epics and pedantic tragedies, but it also encouraged the genius of Spenser and Milton, of Marlowe and not impossibly of Shakespeare. At the same time we keep a sharp eye out for such diversifiers of literary experience as Donne and Marvell, or, to go further afield, as Deloney, Dorothy Osborne, or Samuel Pepys. In our day it is assumed that the “creative” writer devotes himself

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to poetry, fiction, and drama, and a great deal of the creative energy of our writing will undoubtedly run through these genres. To press the assumption too far, to assume not only that all “creative” writers would work in these genres but that all who do work in them are creative people, would be ascribing an inherently creative quality to the genres themselves, which is clearly nonsense. It is possible that a substantial proportion of our genuinely “creative” writers may work in such peripheral genres as journalism, popular science, criticism, comic strips, or biography. If so, they will not be turning from literature to life, but exploring different literary conventions. The opposite extreme from elite standards is the anti-intellectual fallacy of sentimentalizing subliterary experience in itself. All of us, even the most highbrow, spend much time in the subliterary world; all of us derive many surreptitious pleasures from it; but this world is, from the point of view of actual literature, mainly a babbling chaos, waiting for the creative word to brood over it and bring it to literary life. In itself it is made up of the most rigidly stylized conventions: the primitive, like the decadent, is inorganically conventional, and what it suggests to the artist is not new content, but new possibilities in the treatment of convention. In short, it is not the world of ordinary life or raw experience, but a suburban literary world. The critic, once he understands this, may derive much pleasure and profit from attempting to unify his literary experience on all levels, without confusing his value judgments. If he has a passion for detective stories, he may study the way in which the readability of this genre is increased by the rigidity of its conventions: it is almost a literary development of an important genre of subliterary experience, the word-puzzle. If he has a special fondness for P.G. Wodehouse, he may discover not only that Wodehouse is the most conventionalized of modern comic writers, but that the conventions used are identical with those of Plautus. If he is moved in spite of himself by a sentimental movie or magazine story, he may recognize the same devices that move him on a different level in Pericles or The Winter’s Tale. Wherever he goes in his imaginative verbal experience, the conventions of literature contain the experience; their formal laws hold everywhere; and from this point of view there is no difference between the scholarly and the popular in the world of words. Nature and Homer are, we find, the same.

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28 Sir James Frazer 1959

From Architects of Modern Thought, 3rd and 4th series (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1959), 22–32. Reprinted as “Symbolism of the Unconscious” in NFCL, 84–94; as “Simbolizam nesvesnog,” trans. Ksenija Todorovi , in Knji evnost 38 (May 1983): 765–77; and as “A tudatalatti szimbolikája,” trans. Katalin Fejér, in Idö nélküli világ (Szeged, Hungary: Attila Jöszef University, 1988), 10–18. Frye first encountered Frazer’s The Golden Bough in the Old Testament course he took as a theology student at Emmanuel College in 1934–5. He wrote to Helen Kemp that it produced “a whole new world opening out . . . that sort of thing is the very life-blood of art, and the historical basis of art” (NFHK, 355). In his 1958 CBC talk he observes that “It would take a good many months of hard work, without distractions, to read completely through Frazer,” and in the 1930s and ’40s that is more or less what he tried to do. He read the abridgment too, and recommends it below. His annotated copies of the ten volumes of The Golden Bough, the three volumes of Folk-lore in the Old Testament, and the abridgment, are in NFL. This essay is particularly interesting for the teacherly attention Frye pays to Frazer’s historical context, underpinned by his experience lecturing in Toronto’s course in nineteenth-century thought.

If you spend much time in libraries, you will probably have seen long rows of dark green books with gold lettering, published by Macmillan and bearing the name of Frazer. Fifteen of them have the running title of The Golden Bough. Then there’s Folklore in the Old Testament, three volumes. Totemism and Exogamy, four volumes. An edition of Pausanias, the traveller who wrote a description of Greece about A.D. 200, six volumes. The Worship of Nature, two volumes. The Fear of the Dead in Primitive

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Religion, three volumes. The Belief in Immortality, three volumes. These are the biggest lots, but there are many more: editions of Addison’s essays and Cowper’s letters, two volumes each; editions of several other Classical authors; a book of extracts from the Bible; lectures, essays, fugitive pieces. It would take a good many months of hard work, without distractions, to read completely through Frazer. The man who produced all this was the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, born in Glasgow in 1854. He was two years older than Bernard Shaw, and not unlike Shaw in physical type: lean and wiry, with a pointed beard and glittering blue eyes. His father wanted him to study law, and in England that’s a good profession to choose if you want to do other things. He did qualify as a barrister, but he spent his whole working life in universities, mainly as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, emerging at intervals to collect honorary degrees and decorations. He got a knighthood, the Order of Merit, the Legion of Honour, and a shower of doctorates. He was naturally shy and retiring, said to have been a poor speaker unless he had a script, and, like many shy people, bristly and somewhat intolerant in conversation. Apparently it was Lady Frazer who managed him and helped get him his degrees. She wrote books too, mostly translations from the French. Frazer died in 1941, at eighty-seven, the victim of a Nazi bomb, and Lady Frazer with him. He was a fine Classical scholar who grew up in the later Victorian period, after Darwin had changed the whole direction of science. Anthropology was a new and exciting subject, and for Frazer it threw a flood of light on his Classical studies. The Greeks and Romans had been primitives once too, and many things had survived in their religion that were very like the things being reported from the African jungles and the Australian bush. The Biblical scholar Robertson Smith had studied primitive Arabian tribes to discover the sort of religion that’s concealed in the earliest layers of the Old Testament. He had also worked on a theory that had a great influence on Frazer: that in primitive societies ritual precedes myth: people act out their beliefs first and think up reasons for them afterward. Then again, German scholars following the Grimm brothers, especially a scholar named Mannhardt,1 were turning up curious customs in the German countryside that seemed to be filling in the outlines of a nature cult centuries older than Christianity. Scholars were taking much the same view of primitive man that primitive man was supposed to take of his own life, as a kind of dream in which everything was charged with a mysterious fascination, and they pounced eagerly on anything that had to do with “folk.”

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Frazer was a professor of social anthropology, yet he never to my knowledge did any real field work, and never came much closer than the Cambridge library to primitive societies. He certainly doesn’t sound like a man who had any first-hand knowledge of primitive life, or ever wanted to have any. He speaks, for instance, of something being familiar “to the crude intelligence not only of the savage, but of ignorant and dullwitted people everywhere.” The Golden Bough is really a work of Classical scholarship that uses a very large amount of illustrative material from anthropology and folklore. In the course of his Classical reading Frazer came across a custom in Roman life that puzzled him, and as he pondered it, the work of Robertson Smith on the Bible and of Mannhardt in Germany began to suggest hundreds of parallels of it; and finally the puzzling Roman custom became the key to a vast amount of ritual, myth, folklore, superstition, and religious belief all over the world. So it was that his essay on The Golden Bough, which first appeared in 1890, had expanded to three volumes by 1900, and into twelve, in the usual format, by 1915—a book of about four thousand pages. The length of the book is the result of the enormous mass of material collected as evidence: if you know only the one-volume abridgement he made in 1922, you haven’t really missed much of the main argument. He was a disciple of Darwin in believing that if you were going to be properly scientific, for every statement you had to choke your reader with examples and illustrations, and his text walks over a thick pile carpet of footnotes from Greek and Latin literature, from the Old Testament, which Frazer read in Hebrew, from monographs and periodicals in English, French, German, Italian, and Dutch. Near Rome, in the time of the Caesars, there was a grove sacred to the goddess Diana, in which there was a runaway slave who was called the priest of the grove and the King of the Wood. When he got there he found his predecessor in charge, and what he had to do was to break a branch off a certain tree, then attack and kill his predecessor. Then he was King of the Wood until some other runaway slave did the same thing to him. Why was there such a custom? That was the question that started Frazer off on the twelve-volume journey that another anthropologist, Malinowski, has called “the greatest scientific Odyssey in modern humanism.”2 Frazer begins by explaining that magic is the belief that you can affect things either by imitating them or by getting hold of part of them. If you have an enemy, magic suggests that you imitate killing him, say by sticking pins in a wax image of him, or that you get something belonging to him, like a lock of his hair, and then injure that. Primitive tribes take a

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magical view of their leader or king. As long as he’s strong and virile, the tribe will hold together and their food supply will be steady: if he gets old and feeble, so will the crops. So magic reasons that a king ought to be killed when his strength fails. It sounds like a funny way of preserving his strength, but the idea is to transfer it to his successor and distribute what’s left over to the tribe. Magic assumes that you can get the qualities of something by eating it; so if you want the magic strength of the king you eat his body and drink his blood. Out of this pattern of ritual a great number of religions have developed, mostly around the Mediterranean Sea. The central figure is a god conceived in the form of a young man, who represents the fertility of the seasons in general and of the crops in particular. Hence his body and blood become identified with the two chief products of the crops, bread and wine. At the centre of this religion is a ritual representing the death and rebirth of the god, usually lasting three days. The god was called Adonis in Syria, Attis in Asia Minor, Osiris in Egypt, Dionysus in Greece, Balder in the North. There are also a great number of folk customs surviving among the European peasantry that feature similar figures like the King and Queen of the May. Originally, Frazer thinks, these gods or mythical figures were represented by human beings who were sacrificed, and in peasant customs, even in children’s games, there are many mock executions that at one time weren’t mock at all. An immense number of side issues are explored and problems solved, or at any rate fascinating guesses made, in every field of mythology and folklore. There is the “scapegoat” ritual, for instance, where an old man or woman who represents death and sterility is killed or driven away. There is the symbolism springing from the use of a temporary or mock king to serve as a substitute for the real one: he has a brief reign and is then executed, and this figure survives in all the Lords of Misrule and Kings of the Carnival in medieval Europe, besides being involved in the mockery of Jesus in the Passion. There is the connection which gives Frazer his title between the branch broken off by the King of the Wood and the golden bough that Aeneas broke off before he could visit hell in Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil compares the golden bough to the mistletoe, and Frazer thinks it was the mistletoe, regarded as sacred in the ancient cultus of Europe. Some of the side issues spill over into other books. The most important of them is the question of totemism, the identifying of a tribe with a certain animal or plant which is ceremonially eaten at stated times, and

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which for complicated reasons has been of great importance in developing the structure of primitive societies. Frazer’s four volumes on Totemism and Exogamy (which means the rule that a man must marry outside his totem clan) are still an important source-book for this subject. His other books are mostly in the form of compilations. As a teacher who made hosts of readers familiar with the conceptions of anthropology, Frazer is very important; as a scholar who could apply literary and scientific knowledge to the same problem, he is equally so. But as an architect of modern thought he has to stand or fall by The Golden Bough. I am not competent to discuss The Golden Bough as anthropology, because I’m a literary critic, and I don’t know any more about anthropology than the next man. Before you ask whatever possessed the CBC to get me to talk about Frazer, I should say that The Golden Bough seems to be at present more a book for literary critics than for anthropologists. It is, after all, a study of comparative symbolism, and one would expect that to appeal most to artists, poets, critics, and students of certain aspects of religion. When it first appeared, The Golden Bough was called an example of the Covent Garden school of anthropology, meaning that it was full of vegetation, Covent Garden being a market. There doesn’t seem to be much of a Covent Garden school of anthropology left. I’ve just checked through several textbooks on anthropology to see what they said about Frazer. They were respectful enough about him as a pioneer, but it would have taken a Geiger counter to find much influence of The Golden Bough in them. Of course there’s a lot of fashion in such matters, but there’s also a real problem involved. Frazer often refers to what he calls the “comparative method.” In his early years tremendous strides had been made in biology through comparative anatomy. Those were the days when there were stories about scientists who could reconstruct a whole skeleton of an unknown animal from one piece of tailbone. In the comparative study of languages, too, a fascinating new world had opened up. But to make valid comparisons you have to know what your primary categories are. If you are studying natural history, no matter how fascinated you may be by anything that has eight legs, you can’t just lump together an octopus and a spider and a string quartet. Now it is the anthropologist’s business, as I understand it, to study individual cultures: those are his primary categories. So when Frazer compares rituals all over the world without telling us anything about the societies they fit into, he is not doing what many anthropologists, at least at present, have much interest in doing. At the same time he

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is doing precisely what the student of symbolism, looking for the recurrence of a certain symbolic theme through all the world’s cultures, primitive and civilized, wants to see done. To appreciate The Golden Bough for what it is we have to see it as a kind of grammar of the human imagination. Its value is in its central idea: every fact in it could be questioned or reassessed without affecting that value. We don’t have to assume that once upon a time everybody everywhere used to eat their kings, and then gradually evolved slightly less repulsive customs. Frazer’s ritual is to be thought of as something latent in the human imagination: it may have been acted out literally sometimes, but it is fundamentally a hypothesis that explains features in rituals, not necessarily the original ritual from which all others have derived. The Golden Bough isn’t really about what people did in a remote and savage past; it is about what the human imagination does when it tries to express itself about the greatest mysteries, the mysteries of life and death and afterlife. It is a study, in other words, of unconscious symbolism on its social side, and it corresponds to and complements the work that Freud and Jung and others have done in psychology on unconscious symbolism on its individual side, in dreams and the like. It is extraordinary how closely Frazer’s patterns fit the psychological ones. Frazer’s dying gods are very like the libido figures of Freudian dreams; the old men and women of Frazer’s scapegoat rituals correspond to Freud’s parental imagos; the temporary Kings of the Carnival are the social forms of what Freud has studied in the mind as the mechanism of wit. A ritual, in magic, is done for practical purposes, to make the crops grow, to baffle enemies, to bring rain or sunshine or children. In religion, a ritual expresses certain beliefs and hopes and theories about supernatural beings. The practical results of magic don’t work out; religious beliefs disappear or change in the twilight of the gods. But when deprived of both faith and works, the ritual becomes what it really is, something made by the imagination, and a potential work of art. As that, it can grow into drama or romance or fiction or symbolic poetry. Poetry, said Aristotle, is an imitation of nature, and the structures of literature grow out of the patterns that the human mind sees in or imposes on nature, of which the most important are the rhythms of recurrence, the day, the month, the four seasons of the year. Poets can get from Frazer a new sense of what their own images mean, and critics can learn more from him about how the human imagination has responded to nature than from any other modern writer.

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For the student of religion, The Golden Bough is of immense value in showing the positive importance of myth. Up to Frazer’s time, interest in religion was confined mainly to theology or to history, and myth was felt to be just something that wasn’t true—something all the other religions had. But now we can see more clearly how religion can appeal to the imagination as well as to faith or reason. Frazer’s god-eating ritual is a kind of primitive parody of Christianity, and shows us how magic and superstition, even in their weirdest forms, can be seen as gropings towards a genuine religious understanding. In Oxford, Frazer used to be referred to as “the Cambridge fellow who can write,” and it is certainly true that he can write. He can take a great inert mass of evidence and with a few selective touches make it into a lively narrative that keeps you turning the pages into the small hours. Of course people who can’t write are not only apt to be jealous of people who can, but often believe quite sincerely that anybody who is readable must be superficial. That is why you get so many sniffy remarks about Frazer’s “highly imaginative” or “picturesque” style in books that are a lot harder to get through than his are. But no matter what happens to the subjects he dealt with, Frazer will always be read, because he can be. There are other aspects of his style I don’t care so much for. He’s fond of relapsing into fine writing, and when he does he goes in for a kind of languid elegance that reminds one of a heroine of a Victorian novel about to expire with refinement and tight corsets. But for sheer power to organize material he ranks in the first class, with Gibbon or Macaulay, and a more recent encyclopedic writer, Toynbee, has learned a lot from him. I would not say that Frazer was a great thinker. Like Darwin, he got hold of one tremendous intuition and spent his life documenting it, but apart from that he had rather a commonplace mind. People often believe that if a man spends his time among books he will lose contact with life: actually this very seldom happens, but it is true that Frazer looks at the world through a study window. In all his work I have found only one specific expression of interest in the events of his own day, a letter urging the union of England and France, and even that was published twenty years after it was written. He gives the impression of a Victorian liberal of a somewhat vague and sentimental kind. The theory of evolution popularized the idea that man had developed from lower forms of life, and it was easy to extend that to a theory of progress, to seeing man as still developing out of savagery into higher and higher civilization. A lot

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of people still think that biological evolution and historical progress are the same thing, and that one is the scientific proof of the other. Frazer thought so too, and he never doubts that man has gone steadily up an escalator from ape-man through savagery to twentieth-century Cambridge. Now Frazer’s “comparative method” is one that puts together myths from the ancient world, customs from contemporary primitive societies, and survivals of ancient beliefs in our own day. Such a method obviously hasn’t anything historical about it, and can hardly justify him in making any historical statements. But still there is a historical framework to his book that is provided by his Darwinian escalator. All human societies, he believes, belong at certain points on this escalator, from the lowest, like the African bushmen, to the highest, like us. Societies that are on the same level will behave in pretty well the same way, no matter how far apart they are. This is the principle he relies on when he compares rituals that are vastly remote in time and space. In the final pages of The Golden Bough Frazer ties this theory up. He suggests that there have been three ages of man: an age of magic, an age of religion, and an age of science, the last one just beginning. Magic, Frazer says, is psychologically much the same thing as science. The magician’s aim, like the scientist’s, is a practical and secular aim: he believes that nature obeys fixed laws, and he tries to turn those laws to his own advantage. The difference between magic and science is not in attitude, but in the fact that magic is wrong about natural law and science right. Because the magician’s notions of nature are crude, magic doesn’t work and so man turns from magic to religion, which for Frazer is a belief in mysterious external powers that man thinks he can either placate or get on his side. It is our job now to outgrow religion—Frazer isn’t very explicit about this, but that is clearly what he means—and enter on an age of science, or true magic. In a series of lectures called Psyche’s Task he says that many of the fundamentals of civilization today, respect for government, for private property, for marriage, and for human life, grew out of primitive superstition, and all we have to do is to separate the superstition in them from their rational sense. One thinks of G.K. Chesterton’s remark about the Victorians who saw the whole of human history in the form of one of their own three-volume novels, sure that they were the third volume and that history was turning out well because it was turning out with them. I imagine that not many scholars today would endorse Frazer’s view that magic has always and everywhere preceded religion: it seems clear that magic and religion

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start off together. If there is any intermediate stage between magic and science, it isn’t religion, which is quite distinct from both, but such things as alchemy and astrology. Also there is a lot in magic—its dependence on tradition and authority, its secrecy, its emotional and dramatic elements— that make it something very different from any kind of rationalism, however crude. And if magic is just wrong science, surely primitive societies have and apply a lot of very sound knowledge of nature which is scientific according to Frazer’s definition—if they didn’t they would starve to death. As for the happy ending of this three-volume novel, outgrowing religion and becoming reasonable and scientific about everything doesn’t sound like much of a program for the world in 1958. One person that Frazer seems to have had absolutely no use for was Freud, in spite of the fact that Freud based one of his books, Totem and Taboo, on Frazer’s work. Maybe this was just prudery, but why should a man handling Frazer’s kind of material be prudish? The answer seems clearly to be that Freud’s discoveries about what is going on inside civilized man today make one feel a lot more doubtful about this being an age of reason. For Frazer, it was fine for savages to be brutal and incestuous, but for well-dressed people in the nineteenth century to be full of brutal and incestuous impulses was a reflection on progress. True, Frazer often warns us that our civilization is a very thin veneer on top of what is really savagery and superstition still. But by this he appears to mean that outside the cities and universities there is a countryside full of people who want to sow their fields at the new moon and sacrifice a cat to make the crops grow. It never seems to occur to him that there might be things just as silly and more dangerous in civilization and progress themselves. It seems a curious trick of fate that made Frazer the influence he is today. He was an old-fashioned agnostic who revolutionized our understanding of religion. He was a devotee of what he thought was a rigorous scientific method who profoundly affected the imagery of modern poetry. He was a believer in progress through reason who has told us more than any other man, except perhaps the Freud he disapproved of, about the symbolism of the unconscious. In a way he’s not so much an architect of modern thought as of modern feeling and imagination. But one of the great discoveries of modern thought is that feeling and imagination are inseparably a part of thought, that logic is only one of many forms of symbolism. And that is a discovery Frazer helped to make.

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29 1

Interior Monologue of M. Teste Spring 1959

Review of The Art of Poetry, by Paul Valéry, trans. Denise Folliot with an introduction by T.S. Eliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958). From The Hudson Review, 12 (Spring 1959): 124–9. Reprinted in NFCL, 188–96. Frye was knowledgeable about Valéry’s poetry; in January 1950 he argued with John Wood and George Laidlaw, both members of Victoria’s French department, “over what they called the cult of unintelligibility in modern poetry. They disgorged all the usual clichés & assumed that the strong liking I expressed for Valéry’s Cimitière Marin was either hypocritical or imaginary. (As a matter of fact it was largely both, but that wasn’t their business.) I don’t know why people of first-class critical ability just don’t seem to be attracted to French when it’s such a magnificent literature” (D, 245). Frye continued to refer to Valéry in his Notebooks, chiefly to La Jeune Parque, but his assessment here of the difference between Valéry the poet and Valéry the critic is shrewd and uncompromising.

The second volume of a projected complete translation of Paul Valéry in the Bollingen Series is a collection of Valéry’s essays on the theory of criticism. In any such collection there is bound to be a good deal of repetition, but it is instructive to see how few ideas Valéry really had on the subject. The earliest essay, dated 1889, checks off the standard objects of symboliste devotion like beads on a rosary: the “extremely original theory of Edgar Poe,” the leitmotiv in Wagner, the symbol (referred to vaguely as possible), the analogy of music, the technique of oblique suggestion. Even what sounds more distinctive of Valéry, the remark that the poet “is a cool scientist, almost an algebraist, in the service of a subtle dreamer,” is reconstructed from Poe, who did his subtle dreaming in The Raven and his algebra in The Philosophy of Composition. The latest

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essay is the preface to the translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, done in the year of the poet’s death in 1945. But the form of the present book is, somewhat accidentally, one of Valéry’s favourite forms: variations on a single theme. There are traditionally two main centres of emphasis in the theory of criticism, sometimes described by the words poesis and poema. The former, or Longinian, centre is primarily an interest in the psychological process of poetry, and in the rhetorical relation (often arrived at by indirection) set up between poet and reader. The latter, or Aristotelian, centre is primarily an interest in the aesthetic product, and is based on a specific aesthetic judgment, detached by catharsis from moral anxieties and emotional perturbations. Any complete theory of criticism needs both, but in a complete theory the aesthetic judgment takes precedence, for the Longinian interest is in enthusiasm, or what “carries us away,” in other words in what uncritical feelings we may trust to afterwards. Europa needs to know whether the agent of her rapture is a god in disguise or merely a remarkably undiscriminating brute. Of course scholarship, in its turn, has priority over judgment, but that is not our concern here. Valéry is a Longinian critic, concerned with the poetic process. As T.S. Eliot points out in his very useful introduction, he has no sustained theoretical interest in any poetry except his own, not because he is egocentric, but because he is the only poet whose processes he can watch. And as he is a very good poet, the prior aesthetic judgment is taken care of. The book has a typically Longinian opening: Valéry begins, not, like Aristotle, with what poetry is and what species it has, but with the reader in a receptive mood. There are two contexts, he tells us, to which the term poetry belongs. One is the context of the “poetic,” a vague sense, in the mind of the reader, of the enormous significance that could be given to words and of their power, when properly handled, of expressing the reader’s feelings. The other is poetry in the technical sense, as the specific supply to this general demand. The better the poem, the more precisely and inevitably it expresses the inarticulate need for articulation. Longinian too is Valéry’s conception of inspiration as meaning, not a state of mind that the poet is in, but a state of mind that he induces in his reader. The reader feels permeated with a sense of significance not coming from himself, so he projects this on the poet, and assumes that the poet is a kind of medium for some hypothetical creative spirit. But while it is true that “poetry and the arts have sensibility as beginning and end,” the process of creating it may involve any amount of purely con-

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scious and voluntary effort, as in revision or the following out of a complex metrical form. It is probably an advantage to a medium to be slightly stupid, but it is difficult to see what advantage stupidity can be to a poet, or what use the uncritical inhaling of some kind of oracular nitrous oxide would be to someone who has to work out a sestina or a canzone. There are superficial resemblances between the poem and the dream, but the poet and the dreamer are even more distinct for Valéry than for Keats: nobody is so wide awake or consciously alert as the person who has to observe a dream. While Valéry is primarily concerned with the theoretical element in poetry, he is not, like Longinus, concerned with direct rhetoric or oratory, but with its opposite, the indirect disinterested rhetoric of verbal elaboration. Whenever we read anything we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward, from the words themselves to their remembered conventional meanings. The other is inward, and is directed towards building up a unified apprehension of the structure of words itself. Where the outward direction is the primary one, we have signal language. Here words are used for the sake of what they mean, and when the meaning is grasped there is no further need for the words. Meaning here, Valéry says, results from the “rapid passage over words,” like a hand passed quickly through a flame. “Shut the door”: as soon as the door is shut, the words vanish, having fulfilled their function. Even a long book, if written simply to give information, survives only as a convenience of reference, or until it is superseded by fuller information. But where the inward direction is the primary one, we have poetry, a structure of words made for its own sake. Poetry does not tend to disappear when its meaning is grasped, but to repeat itself in the same form, whereas repetition in signal language merely means a failure in response. (E.g.: “Shut the door.” “What’s that?” “I said, shut the door.”) The difference between poetic and signal language may be compared to the difference between dancing and walking. Walking is purposeful, and its end or fulfilment is determined externally, when we get to where we’re going. Dancing is movement for its own sake, and its end is determined only by the logic of its form. The presence of signal meaning in words makes poetry an unusually complex art. In music, for example, there is no signal meaning at all, or if there is nobody understands it. The chord of C major does not “mean” anything except in a musical context, and “program” music is mainly

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humorous in reference, the source of the humour being precisely the ineptness of music for descriptive meaning. Music, or the world of significant sound, turns its back sharply on the world of aural impressions or noise. A noise in the middle of a concert, or the sound of a violin in a city street, is an interruption from another order of things. Similarly mathematics, considered as an art, gets along with a minimum of signal meaning. The conception pi does not mean anything except another mathematical formulation of it. In ordinary experience the shortest distance between two points may not be a straight line, as the shortest way to get to the other side of a wall is around by the door, but geometry knows nothing of such existential untidiness. The poet, however, has to use the same dissolving words that we use for ordinary speech, where we are attending not to them but to what they point to. “Shut the door” is signal language, and in one of the most terrifying moments in literature, the close of the second act of King Lear, the operative phrase is only “shut up your doors.” It is almost as though the art of painting consisted in making collages out of old dollar bills. One has to make a special conscious effort to recognize, in poetry, a significant and organized world of words (“poetic universe,” as Valéry calls it) corresponding to the world of significant sound in music or significant measurement in mathematics. Hence poetry is esoteric, in the sense that poetic meaning is a contrast to ordinary or signal verbal meaning. It is no more esoteric than music or mathematics, but the necessity of discarding our accustomed habits of response to words in poetry creates a peculiar psychological barrier. The distinction between inward and outward meaning, and its corollary, that verbal structures can be divided into those made for their own sake and those made to serve other purposes, is, almost certainly, the basis of all practical criticism. It is, however, a distinction between the literary and the nonliterary verbal structure. Having made the distinction, Valéry muddles it again by calling the literary structure “poetry” and the nonliterary one “prose,” thus confusing it with the technical distinction in rhythm between prose and verse. But while it is true that prose is, unlike verse, used for nonliterary purposes, the enormous bulk of literary prose makes nonsense of any attempt to equate prose with the extraliterary. (One may add for completeness, though the point is of minor importance, that nonliterary verse is also possible, as in mnemonic rhymes of the “Thirty days hath September” type.) Valéry is often forced by his own confusion of terms to treat literary prose as something to be

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explained away. True, he does not particularly like prose, and his references even to Flaubert and Proust are somewhat disparaging. In the most systematic statement of his theory, the essay called “Remarks on Poetry,” he draws a distinction between the pure poetic universe and the mimesis of actual life in prose fiction that illustrates the essential affinity of prose with signal language. But his statements would apply equally well to many other genres. The basis of Valéry’s theory is in Poe: it would be difficult to get closer to Poe than Valéry does when he says, “What we call a poem is in practice composed of fragments of pure poetry embedded in the substance of a discourse.” This means among other things that the difficult part of writing a poem of any length is the problem of poetic continuity. Poetic necessity, he says, can reside only in form, and “form demands a continuity of felicitous expression.” But, like Poe, Valéry regards the standard narrative and didactic conventions of continuity as nonpoetic. Of Lucretius he remarks that the attention given to following the ideas competes with the attention given to the poetry, and that “the De Rerum Natura is here in conflict with the nature of things.” He reverts over and over to the limited degree of tolerance that poetry has for conceptual language, to the equal importance of sound and sense in the poetic process, to the necessity of subordinating thought in poetry. “An intimate alliance of sound and sense . . . can be obtained only at the expense of something— that is, thought.” The poetic process of putting words into patterns can never coincide entirely with the conceptual process of putting ideas into words. No one could agree less than Valéry would with Kafka’s remark that writing is an art of causality. “The sequence of our feelings has no longer a chronological order, but a kind of intrinsic, instantaneous order, which is revealed step by step.” A causal or sequential writer, such as a novelist, is faced with a Leibnitzian problem of making actual the best of a number of possibilities, but Valéry tells us that when he reads continuous prose he tends to reconstruct some of the other possibilities. For an Aristotelian critic tragedy is often the central form of poetic experience, but Valéry’s remarks on tragedy are aimless and uncomprehending, and end in the reflection that “the tragic genre is completely opposed to producing in the soul the most elevated state that art can create there: the contemplative state.” Similarly with narrative: he speaks of “the prosiness, even the platitudes, inevitable when any story is put into verse,” and, in his delightful essay on La Fontaine’s Adonis, he sums up his whole attitude

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by saying: “in poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.” Valéry is, as we have noticed, deeply concerned with the reader, and feels that what has value only for oneself has no value. But he will have nothing do with persuasive or confronting rhetoric: he abhors all forms of proselytism, and considers it rather vulgar even to be “right” in any difference of opinion. We soon realize that by “poetry” Valéry means his own kind of poetry, that is, symbolisme, and what symbolisme is able to absorb from the poetic tradition in general. The germ of truth in this identification is the fact that the different genres of literature may (up to a point) be arranged in the order of their distance from signal meaning. Literary prose is relatively close to it; narrative and didactic verse within sight of it; but symbolisme stands at the greatest possible distance from it, and does its best to turn its back on it. But, as with all selective traditions, even symbolisme breaks down, or up, into a group of conflicting heresies. The tradition of Laforgue and Corbière, from which Eliot derives, is, as Eliot points out, quite different; so is the disintegrative tradition that derives from Rimbaud and Jarry. Valéry as critic is simply the disciple of Mallarmé (his relation to Poe is through Mallarmé), and it is Mallarmé’s great idea of the poetic universe (le Verbe) that informs all his criticism. As the poetic universe, towards which the poet turns, is in the opposite direction from the market place, it would be convenient if there were an absolute “poetic diction,” a language peculiar to poetry and used only for it, as there is a language of sounds used only in music. “All literature which has passed a certain age reveals a tendency to create a poetic language apart from ordinary speech.” For poetic language ought to be “the language of the gods,” or at least a language of magic or charm, spoken only within a spellbound closed circle. Such poetic diction as we have, however, falls very far short of being a “Paradise of Language,” and so various correlatives or equivalents for a separate language emerge. Among these are the conventions of form, such as the sonnet and the chant royal, or the rules governing the rhyming and cadencing of alexandrines. There is a theory of games in poetry as there is in economics, and poetry, like chess, makes a virtue of arbitrary rules, or at least of “considered arbitrariness.” Such rules have the great virtue of interfering with the half-automatic flow of “natural” or nonpoetic speech. Poetry as close to verbal organization and as far from signal meaning as possible is what Valéry means by “pure poetry.” As long as words are employed in poetry at all, of course, pure poetry cannot exist, except as

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an ideal. But its ideal existence is very important, for it means that the creative activity of the poet is not hitched to his ego. The poet uses all the resources of skill and intelligence in the interests of an impossible demand for integrity, not in the interests of self-expression. The pure poem is really the perfect poem, and “Perfection eliminates the person of the author.” The minor artist impresses us as a sensitive and cultivated person; the major artist is simply speaking with the voice of his art. When we hear a musical sound in the middle of ordinary noise, we hear something that reminds us, not of any specific piece of music, but of music itself and the whole range of its possibilities. That is why Valéry speaks of the “musical universe.” Every poem, similarly, is a manifestation of poetry, or a total order of words. As Valéry remarks in a patriotic address, it is obvious that the greatest French poet is France. “I make one mighty poet from all our poets, forming a single being,” he says in the same context.2 The sense that the background of every poem is the whole order of poetic experience is constantly present in Valéry, but is nowhere developed, partly because Valéry’s sense of tradition is so limited. Consequently the question of poetic meaning, of the poem’s significance, not in terms of ordinary meaning, but as a phase of poetic experience, is left in the air. The relation of a poem to poetry as a whole raises the question of the structural principles of poetry, and in particular the problems of convention and genre. Valéry largely ignores the problem of genre, and is curiously selective in his approach to convention. Conventions of external form and of metre he accepts; conventions of narrative and of poetic concepts (topoi) he rejects out of hand; conventions of theme and imagery leave him with nothing to say, although he observes them in practice. He speaks of the content of a poem as its myth, and Le Cimetière Marin and La Jeune Parque are clearly mythopoeic poems, and conventionally mythopoeic at that. Yet he seems to have no interest in discussing their myths or images—in short, he is not concerned to give any suggestion of what these very difficult poems are about. His attitude to a critical explication of Le Cimetière Marin by someone else is one of delighted surprise that a poem of his should really have meant all that. We naturally feel that it is not a poet’s business to explain what his poems mean, even granting that “meaning” here is poetic meaning, or structural analysis. But the fact that we feel this way is significant in determining the role of the poet as critic. Valéry takes a rather sardonic view of the academic study of literature, and writes with much pun-

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gency about its unreality, the pointlessness of all the “interpretations” of poets that cancel each other out. As he says: “these simulacra of thoughts take on a kind of existence and provide reason and substance for a mass of combinations of a certain scholarly originality. A Boileau is thus ingeniously discovered in Victor Hugo, a Romantic in Corneille, a “psychologist” or a realist in Racine. All these things are neither true nor false—in fact they could not possibly be either.” The inference is that it is the poets themselves who are the trustworthy critics: of Victor Hugo Valéry makes the unlikely remark that “Hugo, like all true poets, is a critic of the first rank.” Yet if the present volume proves anything, it proves that all a poet can do as critic is to tell us those things of which he has special knowledge, and which belong to autobiography rather than criticism. Meaning in poetry, like inspiration, is a conception that relates primarily to the reader, not the writer. In the kind of poetry that Valéry writes this means a highly trained or critical reader. For Valéry’s is a post-Kantian type of poetry in which the theme or organizing form of the poem remains invisible to the poet himself, and everything in the poem is an epiphany or manifestation of some aspect of it. The poet himself knows that everything he has written belongs in his poem; he does not necessarily know why. If we are to take Valéry seriously as a poet, we cannot afford to take him too seriously as a critic.

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30 World Enough without Time Autumn 1959

Review of Man and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, vol. 3 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), and Mircea Eliade’s Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1958), Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), and Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958). From The Hudson Review, 12 (Autumn 1959): 423–31. Reprinted in NFCL, 95–106; reprinted as “Idö nélküli világ,” trans. Anikó Buzsáki, in Idö nélküli világ (Szeged, Hungary: Attila Jöszef University, 1988), 19–29. Frye kept and annotated all the books reviewed here, and his carefully annotated volumes of the Eranos Foundation’s yearly publications are also in NFL. When the foundation invited him to participate in the 1980s he responded that “I have admired the work that this conference has done for some time” but regretted that his travel schedule made it impossible for him to accept (NF to Rudolf Ritsema, 24 July 1984, NFF 1988, box 38, file 7). His review of Mircea Eliade’s book elicited an admiring letter from that critic, saying that he particularly appreciated Frye’s “finale” about the literary importance of Eliade’s researches and “morphologie religieuse” (NFF 1990, box 1, file 1). Frye cites Eliade appreciatively in his notebooks (see for example RT, 184).

For some twenty-five years a group of scholars have met each summer on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Italy to hold a conference in a field that might loosely be described as comparative religion, though what gets compared is, more precisely, the morphology of symbolism. This annual conference has been given the name Eranos: its papers are published in

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Eranos Jahrbücher, and three selections of them have appeared in English. The third, Man and Time, is assembled mainly from the 1951 session. The general direction of Eranos is Jungian, and structures of symbolism are seen as emanating from a collective unconscious through a consciousness which has accepted the Jungian shift from a rational ego, opposed to the unconscious, to an individual in rapport with it. The latter is able to manifest the unconscious in the form of the archetypes, or psychological symbols, which it uses to express itself, in contrast to the logical and discursive structures of rational consciousness. It must be great fun to attend these Eranos conferences; the published papers have much of value in them, and no one can reasonably deny that Jung is one of the seminal thinkers of our time. This is, however, an age of charismatic leaders in culture and thought as well as in action, and such a leader has two types of followers: the centrifugal ones who find his ideas useful and apply them in their own work, and the centripetal ones who keep revolving around the Master expounding his message for our times. The disastrous effects of making Marx into an intellectual charismatic leader are now patent to the free world; and in Marxism today one finds a good deal of straightforward science mixed up with inspirational harangues on the relation of dialectic materialism to the theory of atomic structure, or the consistency of neo-Lamarckian genetics with MarxismLeninism. (You argue that both are in accord with modern science, and things equal to the same thing, etc.) And in Man and Time, too, there is a good deal of the same type of thing produced by what might be called Jungian commissars. Thus the opening paper, on “Art and Time,” by Erich Neumann, hardly contains a single genuine statement about either art or time: it is an elegy on the dilemma of modern man and the crisis of the human spirit and the collapse of the aggressive consciousness in the modern psyche and the rise of the Terrible Mother and all the rest of the Jungian topoi, with an occasional gesture in the direction of modern artists asserting that their work illustrates and proves all this. The difference between such homiletic and that of, say, Max Nordau’s Degeneration in the last century is that the rhetorical tone has shifted from the paternal and indignant to the maternal and solicitous, and that the references are less concrete, if less wrong-headed. Of any positive problem about art and time, such as the treatment of time in Proust or Finnegans Wake or the Eliot Quartets or Auden’s For the Time Being, or their counterparts in Continental literature (Rilke gets quoted, but not for anything he said about time) we hear nothing. It is an occupational disease of preachers,

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whether of the pulpit, the soapbox, or the lectern, to proclaim the superiority of their anxieties to all phases of human culture that are not equally obsessed by them, and there is a failure in urbanity here which seems to me more significant than it looks: we shall keep it in mind as we proceed. Two other lay sermons, Helmuth Plessner’s “On the Relation of Time to Death” and G. van der Leeuw’s “Primordial Time and Final Time,” are sufficiently described by their titles. There are also two papers on time in science. One, Adolf Portmann’s “Time in the Life of the Organism,” talks mainly about what we used to call instinct in the birds and the bees, and about “the hallowed character of lunar animals,” including women, who respond organically to a lunar cycle. A much more elaborate paper, Max Knoll’s “Transformations of Science in our Age,” lines up parallels between Jungian psychology and modern science. There is, for example, a principle of indeterminacy in Heisenberg’s version of the quantum theory, and a “relation of uncertainty” between conscious and unconscious in Jungian psychology, because even Jungians don’t claim to know all about the unconscious. There are more interesting things in this paper, but some of the analogies are unnerving. It is characteristic of disciples that they are never quite up to date: it takes all the running they can do to keep in the same place. Actually the Master has announced a new theme for this discussion, the theme of “synchronicity,” or coincidence. A really staggering coincidence has about it, Jung says, a strong quality of the numinous. We feel simultaneously that there must be some explanation, and that any explanation would be useless to us because it couldn’t fit into our customary thinking apparatus. In fact we may almost define a coincidence as a piece of design that we can’t use. However, many structures of thought, from astrology and other forms of divination to certain types of mysticism, have been based on the conception of synchronicity. The conception is one way of trying to impose pattern on the pure flux of our ordinary experience of time, the Heraclitean river into which no one steps twice. Its postulate is that of a pre-established harmony, in contrast to the postulate of causality which underlies science, which is based on our ordinary experience of sequential time, and which we struggle vainly to apply to coincidence when we try to “explain” it. Jung’s treatment of this theme is brief and somewhat inconclusive: for example, he considers no type of causation except the efficient cause of ordinary scientific method which always precedes its effect. A formal cause or Aristotelian telos might have more relevance to the idea. Still, it’s a good speculative rubber bone to chew on, and forms a

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basis for the really significant part of Man and Time: a series of scholarly essays on the conceptions of time found in various religions and cultures. Among them is a paper on “Time and Eternity in Indian Thought” by Mircea Eliade, a scholar of Romanian origin now in Chicago, whose books are rapidly appearing in English translations. Five of them, listed at the beginning of this review, are on my desk. They might be described as essays towards a grammar of the symbolism of religion. By “religion” I mean religion considered as a universal human cultural phenomenon, as distinct from “a” religion, which is a specific and exclusive institution, almost always claiming to result from a specific and exclusive revelation. “Religion” in this sense might be called a way of life that expresses a search for identification. As such, it does not need a personal God, for it may identify man simply with his own society through a symbol of solidarity, as in totemism or Communism. The religious tendency seeks the existential, usually some functioning institution that responds to faith and commands loyalty. In any period of crisis or uncertainty the need for some sort of identification becomes very strong, and a great variety of objects of it are proposed, all of them advertised with much the same formula: “we’re in a bad state; this is what will help.” But while the pitch, so to speak, is usually thrown into discursive language, the effective appeal is through symbolism and myth, hence all studies of “comparative religion” tend to become comparisons of mythology rather than doctrine. The conception of a grammar of religious symbolism has haunted scholars for centuries, and has had an even greater fascination for poets. Poets in fact are so keen about it that they will use the most fantastic books purporting to provide one, as a glance into the background of Goethe, Victor Hugo, and Yeats, to name three at random, will soon show. There are many reasons for this interest: the central one is that poetry, as distinct from discursive language, uses the language of identification, based as it is on the metaphor, which is a relation of identity. In Christianity many important doctrines, such as the divinity of Christ or the real presence or the Trinity, can only be expressed grammatically by metaphor. There is thus a strong natural alliance between the language of poetry (and the imaginative language of works of culture generally), and the aim of the religious impulse, which in the long run can find no other speech than that of the poetic symbol. Renaissance poets used Classical mythology as a counterpoint to Christianity, making use of mythological handbooks which tried to relate the two. Romantic poets

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used similar handbooks, and poets who came of age around 1900 used everything from elementary anthropology to Blavatskian theosophy. But of course the great landmark in such studies was The Golden Bough, ostensibly a work of anthropology, but actually a piece of Classical scholarship with anthropological illustrations. It was promptly seized on as a work of literary criticism, which it was: its influence on modern literature is familiar, but the reasons for it may be less so. The Golden Bough suggested what Christian apologists back to the first century had been suggesting: that at the core of primitive religion, the world over, was a parody of the Christian sacrament. A divine king, regarded either as a god or as the chosen son of the tribe’s god, is killed at the height of his vigour; his flesh is eaten, his blood drunk, and so his divinity passes into the tribe and unites them in one body. In an agricultural tribe his flesh and blood would be identified with the harvest and the vintage, the bread and the wine. It was not really necessary to Frazer’s argument to assume that his grisly rite ever had anything more than a sporadic historical existence. Its real existence is as a symbolic key to a great number of actual rituals which express some aspect of it, ranging from cults of human sacrifice to May Day games. In a way it was unfortunate that it should have been Frazer, with his naive Victorian evolutionism and his top-lofty attitude to primitive thinking, who got the tremendous intuition of this book. His escalator philosophy of progress, from magic through religion to science, made him think of his symbolic pattern as immemorially archaic, instead of something constantly latent in the human mind. For The Golden Bough is really a study of unconscious social symbolism as expressed in ritual, and hence it is closely linked, as Freud immediately recognized, to Freudian psychology, which studies unconscious individual symbolism as expressed in dream. On this point the differences between Freud and Jung are not particularly significant, and the Jungian interest in similar patterns is reflected in the Eranos papers. Mr. Eliade’s books take this interest a step farther. Frazer’s book made great use of what Frazer called, using capitals, the Comparative Method. For many anthropologists his use of it was overenthusiastic and premature, because they were trying to relate such phenomena as vegetation myths to the cultures that produced them, instead of comparing them with each other. That was another reason why The Golden Bough’s main influence was in literature and comparative religion rather than anthropology. Mr. Eliade clearly feels that, his own interest being in comparative religion, it is possible to revert to

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nineteenth-century comparative methods now that anthropology and psychology have developed their own structures and are less in danger of being twisted out of shape by an alien interest. He says in his introduction to The Sacred and the Profane: “There is always the risk of falling back into the errors of the nineteenth century, believing with Tylor1 or Frazer that the reaction of the human mind to natural phenomena is uniform ... But the important thing for our purpose is to bring out the specific characteristics of the religious experience, rather than to show its numerous variations and the differences caused by history.” In other words, he is going back to the method of Tylor and Frazer with slightly more cautiousness, and with the object of showing a uniformity in general religious symbolism which reappears as a unity in the symbolic structures of the higher religions, more particularly Christianity. Patterns in Comparative Religion is a remarkable introduction to the grammar of comparative symbolism. It suggests that in fact there is such a thing as a universal natural theology, of the type that Tylor called animism. Eliade thinks of this animism, however, not as chronologically prior to all other religions, as Tylor did, but as latent in all religious structures and the key to most of their imagery. He begins with the skygod, which, following Father Schmidt and Dumézil,2 he regards as a practically universal conception. This sky-god is regularly the supreme or original god, though in the course of time intermediate figures begin to occupy the foreground of mythology, and he becomes a dieu fainéant without a cult, only appealed to as a last and desperate resort. We then move on to the imaginative conceptions that have been constructed out of the different aspects of nature: solar and vegetation cycles, where Frazer’s work is incorporated; symbolism of trees, stones, and water; sacred places and sacred time. There is a particularly interesting chapter on “The Moon and its Mystique,” which derives an extraordinary number of imaginative patterns from the moon, notably the three-day rhythm of death, disappearance, and rebirth that turns up so often in religion. At the heart of this animistic symbolism is the theme of death and rebirth, the theme that is studied in The Golden Bough in terms of social ritual, and in Jung’s Symbols of Transformation and elsewhere in terms of individual dream. The divine king is magically identified with the powers of nature, hence his death and revival is identified with the passing of the natural cycle through darkness, cold, and sterility to a new life. The king revives in two ways: within the tribe, making one body out of them, and by having his divinity transferred to a successor: the successor is

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thus not thought of as a different person, but as a continuation of the same power in a revitalized form. The Jungian quest is similar; the ego descends into the underworld of the unconscious, struggles with the powers of darkness and chaos it finds there, and returns as an “individual,” with the same life revitalized. Eliade’s other books deal chiefly with this central pattern of symbolism, and their central conception is that a renewal in time is normally thought of as a renewal of time. In Cosmos and History Eliade works out a pattern often referred to in Man and Time, which I assume develops out of Gunkel’s classic Schöpfung und Chaos, with some influence from Otto’s Idea of the Holy and perhaps some from Kierkegaard’s Repetition.3 According to this book, religion is normally characterized by a revolt against living in time. Life in time, with all its failures and errors, its frustrations and sins, its loose ends, unfulfilled purposes, and postponed decisions, with the inevitability of death and the hopelessness of salvaging much if anything from the temporal flux, is intolerable even to the secular imagination, to say nothing of the religious one, once the anaesthetic of youth wears off. Hence the frequency of the feeling “from now on things are going to be different,” the spasmodic resolutions, often made at the new year, to impose a consistent pattern of action on time. Religion meets this feeling by postulating a mythical period, usually before time began, when the essential patterns of significant action known as rituals were laid down by divine command. Hence overriding one’s confused existence in time is a sacramental pattern of regularly repeated rituals or significant acts, carried out exactly in accordance with instructions issued “once upon a time,” or in illo tempore as Eliade says. These rituals follow the cycle of nature and incorporate its symbolism, at the centre of which is the scapegoat, the symbol of the old life now to be banished forever. As religion develops, primordial time often develops a corresponding final time, an apocalypse or Last Judgment when time regains its original timelessness. In the higher religions this sacramental pattern tends to absorb increasingly the secular life. Of the higher religions, Judaism and Christianity at least have an intermediate revelation placed squarely in the middle of time itself. In Christianity the historical revolt against time was made by the Incarnation, and is continued in the sacramental life of the church. In the latter the sense of history as a nightmare from which one keeps trying to awake, as Stephen says in Ulysses, is finally annihilated. The great contemporary rival of Christianity, Communism, bases most of its imaginative appeal on its promise to abolish history, or the

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record of class struggles, and lead mankind into a superhistorical era. In our ordinary experience of time we are dragged from a past that no longer exists towards a future that does not yet exist through a present that never quite exists. The hope of the religious impulse, whether it is committed to a God or not, is to live in a real present, a pure duration that is difficult to characterize except through some kind of paradox. Birth and Rebirth studies the symbolism of the rite de passage as we find it in various rituals and religious doctrines, with particular emphasis on the aboriginal Australian variety. The ritual of initiation usually takes the form of a mimic death and resurrection, and the death is usually symbolized as being swallowed by a monster, or, less concretely, taken down into a dark and labyrinthine world, exposed to threatening beings, and the like. From this the initiate returns as newly born, an infant in relation to another stage of being. The ritual death has about it the symbolism of a reduction to a world of chaos, where ordinary social life disappears into what often takes the form of a carnival or period of sexual licence. In the higher religions the same pattern reappears as baptism (descent to the world of water) or as a death to the world which brings a renewed life in a pure present, where we no longer take thought for the morrow. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, a work of formidable scholarship, pursues the same symbolism into one of the higher religions, the Indian experimental mysticism known as yoga. In yoga, and in Hindu thought generally, the anxiety engendered by living in time is called karma, thought of as a process of causality that follows one through death to endless rebirths. The discipline of yoga requires, first, that the physical world should be reduced to chaos (maya or illusion), and that the initiate should die to the world by regarding not only his body but his ordinary consciousness as part of that chaos. The process of dying to the world is carried to extraordinary lengths, and includes suspension of breath and immobilization of both body and mind. Then, through an equally thoroughgoing discipline of meditation, a new and timeless consciousness is established which is a pure present (jivan-mukta), and unites one to reality or nirvana. The word “freedom” in Mr. Eliade’s title reflects the yoga doctrine that freedom and immortality are really the same conception, and can be found only in surmounting the world of time. It is obvious that such studies as Eliade’s have an immediate relevance to literary criticism—so immediate that a critic who ignores this kind of work altogether is risking his competence in his own field. It is impossible to deal adequately with contemporary literature without some un-

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derstanding of cyclical and initiatory symbolism. The sense that life in time is imaginatively intolerable is the basis of literary existentialism, and the free act, especially the act that asserts its freedom in the face of death, has the same quality of triumph over time in existentialist literature that the initiatory rite has in the Australian bush. The initiatory rite and its symbolism recur in every work of fiction that leaves the hero wiser than it finds him, or endeavours to leave the reader so. We soon realize too that on this point there is no difference between contemporary and traditional literature, as such symbolic patterns have been organizing literature from the beginning. The symbolism of descent into chaos is as prominent in King Lear as The Waste Land, and sea monsters were swallowing maidens for thousands of years before Dylan Thomas’s longlegged bait. The study of yoga recalls the growth in popularity of Oriental themes in modern literature. This growth, unlike the development of Classical mythology centuries earlier, seems less a matter of supplementing Christian symbolism with another line of imagery than of replacing it with analogous patterns. The reason for the replacement is apparently to avoid misleading associations. The statement “the practice of the dharma releases one from the law of karma and leads to nirvana” does not differ greatly in substance from the statement “if you’re good you’ll stop being bad and will get into a better state of mind,” but it gives less of a feeling of being sent back to Sunday school. Still, there are some genuine affinities between the sense of spiritual autonomy in Hinduism and Buddhism and certain types of Western individualism: one feels the appropriateness of Thoreau’s reading the Bhagavadgita on the Merrimac river. The techniques of Zen Buddhism, aimed at immobilizing the mind through paradox, have much in common with yoga (one would like to see Mr. Eliade do a parallel study of Zen), and again one feels that the use made of Zen in Kerouac and others has a real point, often ignored or misunderstood. The “beat” writers are trying to identify the genuine proletariat, the body of those who are excluded from the benefits of society and have sense enough to realize it. For such a proletariat the road to freedom is not through organizing a revolution to seize power from the squares and become squares in their turn, but through breaking the current of social energy by drifting, bumming, playing jazz, taking dope, or what not, and entering the world of the pure present through the break. The beat philosophy may be wrong—that is, it may be crazy itself instead of merely making use of craziness—but its symbolism is a contemporary cultural force to be reckoned with.

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Mr. Eliade has little interest in literature, and it is perhaps unreasonable to expect him to extend his already enormous erudition to include it. We are merely told in Cosmos and History that Eliot and Joyce use the myth of repetition, and in Birth and Rebirth that Eliot and Joyce use initiatory patterns of symbolism. But in The Sacred and the Profane it seems clear that the absence of literary parallels is not a simple omission but a deliberate exclusion. Here Mr. Eliade reverts to his theme of the sacred universe, as expressed by the primitive mind, and applied to the sacred object, the tree or stone surrounded with a sense of the numinous; the sacred place, whether an enclosed “holy ground” or a temple or city situated at the centre of the world midway between heaven and hell; sacred or mythical time, of the sacramental kind already discussed, and the sanctification of life that results from all this. The sacred mind is contrasted with the profane mind of enlightened, conscious, historyabsorbed modern man, who simply doesn’t see any sacred significance in anything anywhere, who feels “he will not be truly free until he has killed the last god,” and whose literature is full of “camouflaged” myths designed only to “kill time.” The Sacred and the Profane is not exactly a preachy book, but it comes the nearest of the five to setting out the author’s own views, and it displays the same kind of almost frightening insensitivity to culture that we noted at the beginning as characteristic of preachers of anxiety. For surely the contrast is not simply between the sacred and the profane, but also between the projected and the contained. Sacred trees and stones, cities at the navel of the earth, a primordial time of the gods, are all projections, and it would be the silliest kind of self-hypnosis to try to talk ourselves into accepting such projections again. The difference between superstition and religion, which seems to disappear from Mr. Eliade’s argument, is that in religion such feelings are transferred from the physical to the spiritual world, from outer time and space to inner experience. The development of culture, especially literature, which cuts off the projecting of the imagination by appealing directly to the sense of imaginative coherence itself, is of immense help in the development of a higher religion, and is probably essential to it. It is not merely that science has destroyed the sense of sacredness in time and space, but that poetry has recovered it for the world to which it really belongs. As for killing the last god, any god who can die is better dead, and I see no reason for thinking that myths are more camouflaged in modern movies than they are in Old Testament history. Mr. Eliade is very far from being a Jungian disciple, but he shows a similar desire to oversimplify our present situation into a

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dilemma, and a similar impatience with the effort of literature to turn away from crisis and commitment and devote itself to purifying the imaginative dialect of the tribe. It is a curious irony, revealing much about the general dither of our time, that such work as his should be primarily of literary importance.

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31 Literature as Possession 23 November 1959

From the text of an address delivered at Kenyon on 23 November 1959 in the 1959–60 series known as the President’s Lectures. Published in Kenyon Alumni Bulletin, January–March 1960, 5–9. Expanded, this talk provided the basis for the second lecture of WTC.

I should like to ask your indulgence for a number of critical conceptions which have been in my mind for some time. They are still tentative and unformed, and I shall try them out on Kenyon College as a centre traditionally hospitable to new ideas. The point at which one starts is that words are used for at least three purposes: for ordinary speech, for discursive writing, and for literature. One of the oldest and most reliable jokes in the field of the humanities is the delight of Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme (act 2, sc. 4) at discovering that he had been speaking prose all his life. And yet, you know, Monsieur Jourdain was quite wrong. He had not been speaking prose all his life, and I think we get our conceptions of the use of words badly fouled up if we start by assuming that prose is the language of ordinary speech. Prose is ordinary speech in its Sunday clothes, ordinary speech on its best behaviour. Prose is the ordinary speech of highly educated people who have learned to cast their ideas into the form of sentences with subjects and predicates and objects and things like that. Ordinary speech in itself is a discontinuous and heavily accented rhetoric with a great deal of repetition in it. Such rhetoric can be heard very clearly in the speech of children. There’s a great deal of chanting in the speech of a child—or whining, depending on the temperament of the child—and ordinary speech, as we have it in the speech of relatively

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uneducated people, is easily seen to fall into rhythmical patterns which are equidistant from prose and verse. This rhythm of ordinary speech is one that literature has taken a long time to get really interested in. If you are lost in a strange city and ask somebody with an IQ of about 60 for directions, you will not get prose. You’ll get pure Gertrude Stein: a discontinuous and repetitive rhetoric that keeps on saying the same thing over and over with a dissociative emphasis. Such ordinary speech is a verbal chaos or potency of utterance, and it may be conventionalized in either of two directions. It may be conventionalized by giving it a regularly recurring rhythm—that is what produces verse. Or it may be conventionalized logically by making the sentence the dominating rhythm—that is what gives you prose. Of the two, the conventionalization of verse is by far the more direct and simple. That explains why, in the history of every literature, verse always comes before prose. You can have verse in the most primitive societies; you cannot have prose except in developed and sophisticated ones. This fact would be incomprehensible on the assumption that prose was really the language of ordinary speech. So far, I have spoken of verse, prose, and ordinary speech. I have not yet used the term “poetry.” The trouble with the word “poetry” is that there seems no way of making it an accurate critical term. Poetry in Aristotle means literature, but Aristotle goes on to say that the form of art which consists in imitating by means of words is “to this day” without a name. And to this day—twenty-five hundred years later—the statement is still true. In ordinary speech, the word “poetry” is restricted to verbal compositions which are not obviously in prose. Tom Jones, though everyone would admit it to be literature, could not be called a poem except by an abuse of language. “Poetry” has become a vague and meaningless term which is practically a reduplication of “verse,” and we shall be on much clearer ground, I think, if we simply use the terms verse and prose. Prose, then, is the language not of ordinary speech but of discursive or logical thought (including, of course, the pseudological) or of the literary imitation of logical thought. For the language of discursive thought may be imitated for literary purposes within literature. In pure prose we have an expository and continuous rhythm in which the dominating form is the sentence, all the things which we regard as the ornaments of verse, such as rhyme or alliteration or metrical rhythm, being kept to a minimum or abolished altogether. Here, for example, are two sentences from Darwin’s Origin of Species:

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The great and inherited development of the udders in cows and goats, in countries where they are habitually milked, in comparison with these organs in other countries, is probably another instance of the effects of use. Not one of our domestic animals can be named which has not in some country drooping ears; and the view which has been suggested that the drooping is due to the disuse of the muscles of the ear, from the animal’s being seldom alarmed, seems probable.1

That is pure prose, prose used for expository and continuous purposes, and without a primarily literary intention. There is, it is true, a bit of alliteration in it—“the drooping is due to the disuse”—but we are confident that the alliteration is accidental. If we felt it was deliberate we should be annoyed with Darwin. And yet this passage does not lack either rhythm or readability. It has its own literary virtues: it is solidly built in a Victorian style and in that convention it serves its purposes admirably. Here, on the other hand, is a passage from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: The mystic sacrifices were performed during three nights, on the banks of the Tiber; and the Campus Martius resounded with music and dances, and was illuminated with innumerable lamps and torches. . . . A chorus of twenty-seven youths, and as many virgins, of noble families, and whose parents were both alive, implored the propitious gods in favor of the present, and for the hope of the rising generation; requesting in religious hymns, that, according to the faith of their ancient oracles, they would still maintain the virtue, the felicity, and the empire of the Roman people.2

Here, besides the historian’s information about the secular games of Philip, we are aware of recurring tricks of style: a habit of doubling words, of arranging subordinate clauses in what seem almost metrical units, and of a continuous use of antithesis. These tricks of style in Gibbon mean that Gibbon is making a more self-conscious bid for literary fame than Darwin is. He is writing his book with an eye to its literary merit, and he hopes to be remembered as a stylist after the particular historical information he has given us has been superseded. He is not concentrating on the particular facts and statements that he is making; he is concentrating rather on the kind of thing that is happening. He is asking you, in other words, to develop a meditative interest in the decline and fall of the greatest empire of the ancient world.

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In the more general, more typical, more recurring pattern of Gibbon’s, the prose style moves a little closer to literature. One step further would take us into oratory. Oratory and rhetoric in general move away from normal expository prose and tend to fall into patterns of repetition, as we see in the great passages of the great speeches, such as Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg or the 1940 Churchill speeches. Here is a sample from Samuel Johnson’s letter to Chesterfield: “The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed until I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.”3 That solemn, almost metrical repetition of the same kind of clause unit is a mark of oratorical style. As we move along this progression of prose forms, we notice that prose is being increasingly influenced by metre and by phenomena derived from verse. We take one step more and we find ourselves in the area known in the history of literature as euphuism. Euphuism was a fashion in the early Elizabethan period of giving to prose all the tricks and resources normally associated with verse, such as rhyme and alliteration and antithesis and metrical balance. Here is a euphuistic sentence from Robert Greene’s Card of Fancy: “This loathsome life of Gwydonius was such a cutting corrasive [sic] to his father’s careful conscience and such a hapless clog to his heavy heart, that no joy could make him enjoy any joy, no mirth could make him merry, no prosperity could make him pleasant, but abandoning all delight and avoiding all company, he spent his doleful days in dumps and dolours.”4 There are several things that I should like you to notice about euphuism. In the first place, it is about as far removed from what we ordinarily think of as prose as anything could well be, because all the tricks of verse are employed in it. The modern prose writer would do his best to eliminate such features. In the second place, we are getting away from the continuous exposition of prose style, and to a more discontinuous form. When you read a euphuistic romance, you notice how hard it is to get a story told in this kind of language. What happens is that the story breaks down into a series of harangues. The particular passage which I read leads up to a harangue: “he spent his doleful days in dumps and dolour which he uttered in these words”—and then there follows a lament, also in euphuism, and finally the writer resorts to an epistolary form in which the hero and heroine write letters to each other. The story keeps breaking up into discontinuous units. Euphuism is, as you may remember from Shakespeare’s Henry IV,

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extremely easy to parody, and yet in Euphuism there is something which is really self-parody. The reader is being shut out of the euphuistic story by the tricks of style; the writer is not taking the reader into his confidence. The writer is not saying, “Listen to what I have to tell you”; he is presenting us with this barricade of alliteration and rhyme and the rest of it. Euphuism was only a temporary vogue which soon went out of fashion, but it keeps recurring in the history of prose. If you examine closely the prose style of someone like Walter Pater or James Branch Cabell, you will see that the tendency to euphuism is one of the permanent features of literature, and so is more important than its position in history seems to indicate. We now come to the question of verse and of what is, in English at least, pure verse. When verse is pure—that is to say, when it is equidistant from prose and from the rhythms of ordinary speech—it is, like pure prose, a continuous form, developing a steady, predictable rhythm which keeps going indefinitely. That is the form which you find in the classical epic, or in English literature in the heroic couplet: Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused, or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!5

There is no point at which the writing leans over towards prose or leans away from it. You hear at once the full ring of the rhyming couplet, and you know immediately what kind of thing to expect. In Pope’s couplets there is a sense of constantly fulfilled expectation, a sense which is, of course, the opposite of obviousness. You never know what Pope is going to say, but you know the units within which he is going to say it. That sense of constantly fulfilled, inevitable expression in a predictable pattern is something that you get from eighteenth-century poetry and eighteenth-century music alike, and it makes the heroic couplet the nearest thing to pure verse in English. When you turn to blank verse you notice a considerable change. Blank verse has no ringing rhyme to help it out, and consequently blank verse

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that stays close to its metrical pattern becomes intolerable singsong. Blank verse is the easiest metre in English to write accurately and the most difficult to write well. To write blank verse properly you have to avoid a fixed metrical pattern, and what happens in that case is that the prose rhythm becomes much more obvious. That is, the secondary rhythm of the sentence begins to wind itself into the rhythm of blank verse, so that what you are listening to is a syncopated mixture of iambic pentameter with a prose or sentence rhythm, a semantic rhythm. It’s the fight of those two against each other that makes much of the complexity of great blank verse writing. In late Jacobean drama the metrical centre of gravity, so to speak, is somewhere halfway between blank verse and prose, and can easily move from one to the other, depending on the requirements of decorum. But you get a stage further when you turn from blank verse to the kind of writing in which there is a fundamentally prose rhythm and yet the devices of rhyme and metre are retained—as, for example, in Byron’s Don Juan or in Hudibras. The verse has become so strongly influenced by prose that the characteristic or conventional features of verse take the form of parody. The rhymes in Hudibras or in Don Juan are deliberately comic or parody rhymes. The metrical features of such writing stand out against the prose rhythm and make a kind of ironic counterpoint to it. That is what you have in all intentional doggerel: in everything which the Germans call Knittelvers,6 in Hudibras or in Don Juan, in W.S. Gilbert and Ogden Nash. In all these, you have something which is curiously like euphuism in many ways. There is again a sense of paradox and of parody, and a type of writing which makes for discontinuity. The writers of the Byron and Hudibras school are digressive writers—the digression is part of the fun. So we have found in literature that the pure forms are continuous and the mixed forms are discontinuous; the pure forms are serious, either in exposition or in narration or action, and the mixed forms to some extent humorous, moving in an atmosphere of parody and paradox. Now we come to the rhythm of ordinary speech. The rhythm of ordinary speech is an associational rhythm, and its unit is neither the metrical line nor the prose sentence. It is a kind of thought-breath—that’s the best phrase I can find for it—and in its pure form it has developed late in literature with the stream of consciousness novelists and other writers of our own time. The associational rhythm in earlier literature is closely assimilated to ordinary verse and prose forms.

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Here again the pure form is a continuous one. You’ll find its continuity most clearly, I suppose, in Finnegans Wake or in some of the works of Gertrude Stein. And there you can see how the associative rhythm runs its own course in its units of thought-breath, which may be very slow or very fast but always has its own unmistakable rhythm. In earlier literature it is frequently employed to represent the speech of uneducated or confused people: the speech of Mistress Quickly, or the nurse in Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare, is associative in its rhythm, and so is the speech of Mrs. Nickleby or above all Alfred Jingle in Dickens. Wyndham Lewis makes quite a point of the resemblance between Dickens’s Jingle and the rhythm in Joyce, although of course the value judgments that he draws from this resemblance are nonsense. We have next to consider the influence of this associational rhythm on both verse and prose. When it influences verse, it increases the number and variety of sound patterns. Instead of a steady continuous recurring metre you have, for example, a stanza form, as in Spenser or in the Pearl poet of the fourteenth century, where there is a complicated rhyme scheme. The rhyme scheme is reinforced with inner rimes and assonances and with alliteration, making for a hypnotic pattern of sound repetition which is particularly appropriate to dream verse, such as Spenser and the Pearl poet are frequently writing. In this lovely madrigal from The Faerie Queene I think you have a good example of verse influenced by an associational rhythm which has complicated the sound pattern. It picks up in the alexandrine of the stanza before: Wrath, jealousy, grief, love; this squire have laid thus low.

And goes on: Wrath, jealousy, grief, love do thus expel: Wrath is a fire, and jealousy a weed, Grief is a flood, and love a monster fell; The fire of sparks, the weed of little seed, The flood of drops, the monster Filth did breed: But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay; The sparks soon quench, the springing seed outweed, The drops dry up, and filth wiped clean away: So shall wrath, jealousy, grief, love die and decay.7

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That particular stanza was being quoted in the rhetoric books even before the poem itself was published, and it represents an intricate arrangement of vowels and consonants, of alliteration and rhyme and inter-rhyme and assonance, which is contemporary with euphuism. In Edgar Allan Poe and in Hopkins also we are in an associational area. If you think of the line in Poe, “The viol, the violet, and the vine,”8 which Ernest Dowson declared to be the most beautiful line in English poetry, you can see that this influence takes us again towards parody and paradox. I have no doubt that buried in the middle of Finnegans Wake somewhere there is some such word as “vinolent,” which would include the associations of the “viol, the violet, and the vine.” On the other hand, the associative rhythm may become verse, as it does in nursery rhymes. Normally it builds itself up into verse forms by means of a catalogue: “This is the house that Jack built,” and so on, with a steady incremental repetition. In poets who are much influenced by the associational rhythm, such as Whitman, you can see the fondness for catalogues and all the devices which go with associative writing. Here is the opening of a poem by Amy Lowell on lilacs: Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, Lilac in me because I am New England ...9

You can see that imagism, whatever the imagist theory was, is a form of verse strongly influenced by the hypnotic repetition of an associative rhythm. Similarly, you can get a close association between associational rhythm and prose rhythm. Here is a passage from Bernard Shaw: After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember);

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so that you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton.10

Now that, as compared with Darwin, is a prose strongly influenced by an associational rhythm. You notice the convention of the ordinary conversation with the reader. You notice the easy use of parenthesis. You notice the unforced repetition of certain words and ideas. An intensification of these features would pull you into the writer’s own private world—as it does in Sterne, for example, notably in the famous opening page of the Sentimental Journey. In the opening of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, you have a rhythm which is as close to pure association as it could be and still remain within the category of prose: It is spring: moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble-streets silent and the hunched, courters’-and- rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishing-boat-bobbing sea.

Dylan Thomas is not starting anything essentially new in this. Here for example is a passage from one of Donne’s Meditations—it’s a prayer, and that fact, as we shall see, is rather significant— Thou callest Gennezareth, which was but a Lake, and not salt, a Sea; so thou callest the Mediterranean Sea, still the great Sea, because the inhabitants saw no other Sea; they that dwelt there, thought a Lake, a Sea, and the others thought a little Sea, the greatest, and we that know not the afflictions of others, call our own the heaviest.11

In these mixed forms again you’ll notice that a new kind of interest is building up. It is not only the atmosphere of paradox and parody that I’ve mentioned; it is not only the feeling of discontinuity; but it is the kind of rhythm, particularly in this Donne extract, which suggests the rhythm of something like meditation. In meditation you are constantly circling around a central idea, and the verbal way of expressing that is by an incessant, almost an obsessive, repetition of the same words or ideas. Further, a piece of continuous prose looks at first sight as though it were a dictatorial form: the author has got the stage and is going to hold it until you finish the book. But actually it is not; it is a democratic form. The author is holding on to your

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coat button, and while you are reading a continuous work in prose there is a kind of equality assumed between you and the writer. The very fact that he wants to express himself in a continuous form puts him to some extent on your level. If the writer wants to suggest a kind of aloofness, if he wants to suggest that it is your business to come to him and not his business to come to you; if he wants to suggest that there are riches or reserves in his mind which what he is writing gives you only an occasional hint of, then he will naturally turn to a more discontinuous form, and he’ll write in a series of aphorisms. The effect of the discontinuous prose form, the series of aphorisms with breaks in between, is to suggest, along with a greater aloofness on the part of the writer, a feeling that this is something that you must stop and meditate on, aphorism by aphorism; you enter into the writer’s mind, and the discontinuity of the form illustrates your different relation to him. I need refer only to the fondness of philosophers for this form. They’ve been writing in aphorisms ever since the time of Heraclitus and Pythagoras, and are still doing it. You notice that philosophical writers such as Coleridge have a great difficulty with what Coleridge calls “the continuous propaedeutic form.”12 Coleridge found a psychological block in his mind when it came to writing a long continuous piece of prose: he was a writer who thought naturally in aphorisms. The intensification of the meditative aphorism brings us into the area of religious writing. Certain texts, verses, phrases which are subjects of meditation are commonplace in all religions. You notice that some writers, such as Yeats, are strongly attracted to the use of recurring phrases. Yeats picks up a phrase of Mallarmé, for example: “We’re near the trembling of the veil of the temple”; he picks up the phrase of Axël: “As for living, our servants will do that for us”; and so he sets the critic eagerly sniffing along the trail of the influence of Mallarmé or Axël on Yeats.13 Of course there isn’t any influence of Mallarmé or Axël on Yeats beyond those two phrases: what is influencing Yeats is the meditative phrase. Of the great religious teachers of mankind, such as Jesus or Buddha, it seems significant to say that they do not write; or at any rate, as with LaoTse in China, they write the absolute minimum. When they do write, they write in a series of detached aphorisms. One feels too the appropriateness of the fact that the literary form of the Gospel should be a discontinuous series of epiphanic moments. This discontinuous form seems to me to express also the fact that

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literature, or a great deal of literature, is being possessed by the person who uses it. The discontinuity of the educated man, which is shown by his power to quote from or allude to what he has read, indicates that at that point literature is disappearing from a systematic course of study into somebody’s personal life. It is the existence of literature in a personal life which is expressed in style by aphorisms or by some form of paradoxical statement. The devices of euphuism also turn up in the ordinary proverb—“a stitch in time saves nine,” which is an assonance; “all is not gold that glitters,” which is an alliteration—and the use of these proverbs as objects of meditation shows how close we are in this area to the mixed forms which partake of the characteristics of discontinuity, of paradox, and of aloofness. I have time only very briefly to sum up what I think all this is driving at. The basis of judgment in literature is an aesthetic judgment in which all moral, social, religious, philosophical, political anxieties are, for the moment, laid to rest. It takes a good deal of mental discipline to be able to make a pure aesthetic judgment, to look at a poem and see that it is good or bad, without reacting to the content in it, without making a judgment along the lines of one’s prejudices or one’s commitments in the world. As everyone who has taught undergraduates is well aware, the sense that there is something pagan and irresponsible about an aesthetic judgment is by no means confined to “puritans.” There have been many great critics, such as Coleridge or Ruskin, or their followers like G.K. Chesterton and others, who seem to be incapable of making an aesthetic judgment. They make no statement about literature not coloured by anxieties of some kind. On the other hand, such critics as Edgar Allan Poe and his followers up to Clive Bell and beyond, seem to take the aesthetic judgment as an end in itself and to regard literary experience as one detached aesthetic judgment after another, generally expressed by some kind of physical reaction. If you shiver all over, if the hair on your head stands up, or if like the witch in Macbeth your thumbs prick, then you know it’s poetry. It is of course true that you still remain engaged, you still are a person with commitments, and there is a point in one’s study of literature at which those engagements or commitments become absorbed into the possession of literature. One must be aware of how to make an aesthetic judgment first of all. Once one has made it, and thereby avoided the stock response, one still has to deal with all the radiations of the human being into religion and politics and the other things we’re connected

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with. And so the question arises of what standards in literature are applicable to the actual possession of literature, when it becomes really a part of yourself. This point was raised by I.A. Richards in Practical Criticism, in the chapter called “Poetry and Belief.” He suggests a number of standards which he feels are the essential ones. He lists them as man’s loneliness, the facts of birth and of death, the immensity of the universe, man’s place in the perspective of time and the enormity of his ignorance. This list of course has a strongly stoical sound, and for that reason T.S. Eliot in the last lecture of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism had a lot of fun with it, but I don’t know that Eliot or anyone else has actually grappled with this particular question since Richards raised it: the question of what are the standards beyond the foreground aesthetic standards of literature. About that I have only two things to say. One is that I think they have something to do with what in my own writings or researches into literature is called apocalyptic symbolism—that is, the vision of freedom and equality in religious terms, where those perceptions, because they are religious, have become infinite and eternal, and not simply plausible. The other is that the possession of literature is something which at a certain point has to be transformed into a state of mind in which literature possesses you, in which it is a regenerating influence into which you enter, in which you participate, and which at the same time keeps moving you on more and more towards some kind of vision, and the fact that you are moving towards it is the important thing.

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32 New Directions from Old 1960

From FI, 52–66. Originally chapter 7 of Myth and Myth-Making, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York: George Braziller, 1960; Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 115–31. Reprinted in The Making of Myth, ed. Richard Ohmann (New York: Putnam, 1962), 66–82. Henry Murray had been asked to organize a symposium on myth for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which took place in May 1958. An issue of Daedalus (Spring 1959) resulted. Frye’s essay was one of several that were added at the point where the Daedalus essays were being turned into a book. In a mid-1960s notebook Frye was reminded of what he called “my myth paper” as he pondered several “last works”—Peacock’s Gryll Grange, Woolf’s Between the Acts, and Morris’s The Sundering Flood— that seemed to cluster around Shakespeare’s romances and the Purgatorio (Notebook 19, TBN, 42).

In his essay on Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka, Paul Valéry speaks of cosmology as one of the oldest of literary arts.1 Not many people have clearly understood that cosmology is a literary form, not a religious or scientific one. It is true of course that religion and science have regularly been confused with, or more accurately confused by, cosmological structures. In the Middle Ages the Ptolemaic universe had close associations with contemporary theology and science as well as with poetry. But as science depends on experiment and religion on experience, neither is committed to a specific cosmology, or to any cosmology at all. Science blew up the Ptolemaic universe, and Christianity, after feeling itself cautiously all over, discovered that it had survived the explosion. The situation is very different in poetry. It is a gross error to study the cosmology of the Commedia or Paradise Lost as extraneous obsolete science, for the cosmol-

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ogy of these poems is not simply a part of their subject matter, but inseparably a part of their total form, the framework of their imagery. Dante’s love of symmetry, of which so many critics speak, is not a personal predilection, but an essential part of his poetic craftsmanship. Even in times when science gives little encouragement for it, poetry shows a tendency to return to the older cosmological structures, as Poe’s Eureka itself shows. In chemistry the periodical table of elements may have replaced the old tetrad of fire, air, water, and earth, but it is the traditional four that reappear in the Eliot Quartets. The universe of Dylan Thomas’s Altarwise by owl-light sonnets is still geocentric and astrological; the structure of Finnegans Wake is held together by occult correspondence; no reputable scientist has had the influence on the poetry of the last century that Swedenborg or Blavatsky has had. Critics have often remarked on the archaic, even the atavistic, tendencies of poets, and nowhere are these tendencies better illustrated than in the reckless cosmological doodling that may be traced in poetry from Dante’s Convivio to Yeats’s Vision. A principle of some importance is involved here, nothing less in fact than the whole question of poetic thought, as distinct from other kinds of thought. Either Peacock’s thesis2 is correct, that poets are a barbaric survival in a scientific age that has outgrown them, or there are requirements in poetic thinking that have never been carefully studied by critics. The graduate-school cliché that Dante’s Commedia is the metaphysical system of St. Thomas translated into imagery is a melancholy example of how helpless criticism is to deal with one of its own subjects. We are all familiar with the Aristotelian argument about the relation of poetry to action. Action, or praxis, is the world of events; and history, in the broadest sense, may be called a verbal imitation of action, or events put into the form of words. The historian imitates action directly: he makes specific statements about what happened, and is judged by the truth of what he says. What really happened is the external model of his pattern of words, and he is judged by the adequacy with which his words reproduce that model. The poet, in dramas and epics at least, also imitates actions in words, like the historian. But the poet makes no specific statements of fact, and hence is not judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says. The poet has no external model for his imitation, and is judged by the integrity or consistency of his verbal structure. The reason is that he imitates the universal, not the particular; he is concerned not with what happened

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but with what happens. His subject matter is the kind of thing that does happen, in other words the typical or recurring element in action. There is thus a close analogy between the poet’s subject matter and those significant actions that men engage in simply because they are typical and recurring, the actions that we call rituals. The verbal imitation of ritual is myth, and the typical action of poetry is the plot, or what Aristotle calls mythos, so that for the literary critic the Aristotelian term mythos and the English word “myth” are much the same thing. Such plots, because they describe typical actions, naturally fall into typical forms. One of these is the tragic plot, with its desis and lysis, its peripety and catastrophe, as charted in the Poetics. Another is the comic plot with its happy ending; another is the romance plot with its adventures and its final quest; another is the ironic plot, usually a parody of romance. The poet finds increasingly that he can deal with history only to the extent that history supplies him with, or affords a pretext for, the comic, tragic, romantic, or ironic myths that he actually uses. We notice that when a historian’s scheme gets to a certain point of comprehensiveness it becomes mythical in shape, and so approaches the poetic in its structure. There are romantic historical myths based on a quest or pilgrimage to a City of God or a classless society; there are comic historical myths of progress through evolution or revolution; there are tragic myths of decline and fall, like the works of Gibbon and Spengler; there are ironic myths of recurrence or casual catastrophe. It is not necessary, of course, for such a myth to be a universal theory of history, but merely for it to be exemplified in whatever history is using it. A Canadian historian, F.H. Underhill, writing on Toynbee, has employed the term “metahistory” for such works. We notice that metahistory, though it usually tends to very long and erudite books, is far more popular than regular history: in fact metahistory is really the form in which most history reaches the general public. It is only the metahistorian, whether Spengler or Toynbee or H.G. Wells or a religious writer using history as his source of exempla, who has much chance of becoming a bestseller. We notice also that the historian proper tends to confine his verbal imitations of action to human events. His instinct is to look always for the human cause; he avoids the miraculous or the providential; he may assess various nonhuman factors such as climate, but he keeps them in his “background.” The poet, of course, is under no such limitation. Gods and ghosts may be quite as important characters for him as human

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beings; actions may be caused by hubris or nemesis, and the “pathetic fallacy” may be an essential part of his design. Here again metahistory resembles poetry. Metahistorical themes often assume an analogy, or even an identity, with natural processes. Spengler’s Decline of the West is based on the analogy of historical cultures and vegetable life; Toynbee’s “withdrawal and return” theme turns on the analogy of the natural cycle; most theories of progress during the last century have claimed some kind of kinship with evolution. All deterministic histories, whether the determining force is economics or geography or the Providence of God, are based on an analogy between history and something else, and so are metahistorical. The historian works inductively, collecting his facts and trying to avoid any informing patterns except those that he sees, or is honestly convinced he sees, in the facts themselves. The poet, like the metahistorian, works deductively. If he is going to write a tragedy, his decision to impose a tragic pattern on his subject is prior, in importance at least, to his decision to choose a specific historical or legendary or contemporary theme. The remark of Menander that so impressed Matthew Arnold,3 that his new play was finished and he had only to write it, is typical of the way the poet’s mind works. No fact, however interesting, no image, however vivid, no phrase, however striking, no combination of sounds, however resonant, is of any use to a poet unless it fits: unless it appears to spring inevitably out of its context. A historian in the position of Menander, ready to write his book, would say that he had finished his research and had only to put it into shape. He works towards his unifying form, as the poet works from it. The informing pattern of the historian’s book, which is his mythos or plot, is secondary, just as detail to a poet is secondary. Hence the first thing that strikes us about the relation of the poet to the historian is their opposition. In a sense the historical is the opposite of the mythical, and to tell a historian that what gives shape to his book is a myth would sound to him vaguely insulting. Most historians would prefer to believe, with Bacon, that poetry is “feigned history,” or, at least, that history is one thing and poetry another, and that all metahistory is a bastard combination of two things that will not really combine. But metahistory is too large and flourishing a growth to be so easily weeded out, and such oversimplifying would eliminate Tacitus and Thucydides equally with Buckle and Spengler. It would be better to recognize that metahistory has two poles, one in history proper and the other in poetry. Historians, up to

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a point, know what the province of history is and what its dependable methods are; but literary critics know so little of the province or methods of either poetry or criticism that it is natural for the historian to feel that one pole of metahistory is real and the other imaginary, and that whatever is poetic in a historical work destroys its value as history. This is to assume that poetry is simply a form of permissible lying, but that is an assumption which critics have never done much to refute. Because of its concern with the universal rather than the particular, poetry, Aristotle says, is more philosophical than history. Aristotle never followed up this remark, to the extent at least of working out the relation of poetry to conceptual thought. Perhaps, however, we can reconstruct it along lines similar to his discussion of the relation of poetry to action. We may think, then, of literature as an area of verbal imitation midway between events and ideas, or, as Sir Philip Sidney calls them, examples and precepts. Poetry faces, in one direction, the world of praxis or action, a world of events occurring in time. In the opposite direction, it faces the world of theoria, of images and ideas, the conceptual or visualizable world spread out in space, or mental space. This world may be imitated in a variety of ways, most commonly in words, though composers, painters, mathematicians, and others do not think primarily in words. Still, there is a large area of discursive writing, or works of science and philosophy, which makes up the primary verbal imitation of thought. The discursive writer puts ideas and images into words directly. Like the historian, he makes specific statements, or predications; and, like the historian, he is judged by the truth of what he says, or by the adequacy of his verbal reproduction of his external model. The poet, similarly, is concerned, not with specific or particular predications, but with typical or recurring ones: “What oft was thought,” in other words. The truism, the sententious axiom, the proverb, the topos or rhetorical commonplace, the irresistibly quotable phrase—such things are the very life-blood of poetry. The poet seeks the new expression, not the new content, and when we find profound or great thoughts in poetry we are usually finding a statement of a common human situation wittily or inevitably expressed. “The course of true love never did run smooth” is from a Shakespearean comedy (MND 1.1.134), and such sententious comments have been a conventional feature of comedy at least since Menander, whose stock of them was raided by St. Paul.4 The pleasure we get from quoting such axioms is derived from the versatility with which they fit a great variety of situations with an unexpected appositeness.

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There are serious works on theology and economics that use a quotation from Alice in Wonderland as a motto for each chapter.5 Again, the poet has more in common with the constructive elements in thought, and less in common with its descriptive elements. Versified science, whether obsolete or up to date, as we have it in various encyclopedic poems from medieval times onward, never seems able to get beyond a certain point of poetic merit. It is not that the poets are unskilful, but that there is something wrong with the organizing form of the poem. The unifying theme of the Ormulum or The Pastime of Pleasure is not itself poetic in outline. We may compare the versified historical chronicles of Robert of Gloucester or William Warner, in which we also retain only a languid literary interest, and for the same reason. Poetry seems to have a good deal more affinity with speculative systems, which from Lucretius to The Testament of Beauty have consistently shown a more poetic shape. It looks as though there were something of the same kind of affinity between poetry and metaphysics that there is between poetry and metahistory. Of late years we have become much more impressed with the element of construct in metaphysical systems, with the feature in them that seems most closely to resemble the poetic. There are logicians who regard metaphysics as bastard logic, just as there are historians who regard metahistory as bastard history. Everything is most properly symmetrical. The only defect in the symmetry is that metaphysics seems to work mainly with abstractions, and poetry has a limited tolerance for abstractions. Poetry is, in Milton’s words, more simple, sensuous, and passionate than philosophy. Poetry seeks the image rather than the idea, and even when it deals with ideas it tends to seek the latent basis of concrete imagery in the idea. A discursive nineteenth-century writer will talk of progress and advance in history without noticing, or deliberately ignoring, the fact that his idea has been suggested by the invention of the railway. Tennyson will say “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change,” getting his mechanical facts wrong, as poets will, but hitting his conceptual target straight in its sensational bull’s-eye. Literary criticism finds a good deal of difficulty in dealing with such works as Sartor Resartus, which appear to employ philosophical concepts and seem to be stating propositions, and yet are clearly something else than actual philosophy. Sartor Resartus takes the structure of German Romantic philosophy and extracts from it a central metaphor in which the phenomenal is to the noumenal world as clothing is to the naked body: something which conceals it, and yet, by enabling it to appear in public, paradoxically reveals it as well.

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The “ideas” the poets use, therefore, are not actual propositions, but thought-forms or conceptual myths, usually dealing with images rather than abstractions, and hence normally unified by metaphor, or imagephrasing, rather than by logic. The mechanical or diagrammatic image referred to above is a clear example of the poetic element in thought. We sometimes get explicit diagrams in philosophical thought, such as Plato’s divided line and Aristotle’s middle way, but the great chain of being is more typically a poetic conceptual myth, because it is a device for classifying images. The chain is only one of a great variety of mechanical models in poetic thought, some of them preceding by centuries the machines that embody them. There are the wheels of fate and fortune, mirrors (the word “reflection” indicates how deeply rooted the conceptual world is in the mechanism of the eye), internal combustion or vital spark metaphors, the geared machinery of so much nineteenth-century scientism, the thermostat and feedback metaphors which, since at least Burke’s time and certainly long before “cybernetics,” have organized most democratic political thought. Just as we are initially aware of an opposition between the historical and the mythical, so we are initially aware of an opposition between the scientific and the systematic. The scientist starts out empirically, and tries to avoid hampering himself with such gigantic constructs as “universe” or “substance.” Similarly, the idea “God,” taken as a scientific hypothesis, has never been anything but a nuisance to science. God himself, in the Book of Job, is represented as warning man of this when he points out to Job that the conception “creation,” as an objective fact, is not and never can be contained by human experience. Such constructive concepts are at least metaphysical, and metaphysics, as its etymology indicates, comes after physical science. In theology the deductive tendency has completely taken over, as there can hardly be such a thing as empirical theology. The next step brings us to poetic mythology, the concrete, sensational, figurative, anthropomorphic basis out of which the informing concepts of discursive thought come. as completely taken over, as there can hardly be such a thing as empirical theology. II In its use of images and symbols, as in its use of ideas, poetry seeks the typical and recurring. That is one reason why throughout the history of poetry the basis for organizing the imagery of the physical world has been the natural cycle. The sequence of seasons, times of day, periods of

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life and death, have helped to provide for literature the combination of movement and order, of change and regularity, that is needed in all the arts. Hence the importance, in poetic symbolism, of the mythical figure known as the dying god, whether Adonis or Proserpine or their innumerable allotropic forms, who represents the cycle of nature. Again, for poets, the physical world has usually been not only a cyclical world but a “middle earth,” situated between an upper and a lower world.6 These two worlds reflect in their form the heavens and hells of the religions contemporary with the poet, and are normally thought of as abodes of unchanging being, not as cyclical. The upper world is reached by some form of ascent, and is a world of gods or happy souls. The most frequent images of ascent are the mountain, the tower, the winding staircase or ladder, or a tree of cosmological dimensions. The upper world is often symbolized by the heavenly bodies, of which the one nearest us is the moon. The lower world, reached by descent through a cave or under water, is more oracular and sinister, and as a rule is or includes a place of torment and punishment. It follows that there would be two points of particular significance in poetic symbolism. One is the point, usually the top of a mountain just below the moon, where the upper world and this one come into alignment, where we look up to the heavenly world and down on the turning cycle of nature. The other is the point, usually in a mysterious labyrinthine cave, where the lower world and this one come into alignment, where we look down to a world of pain and up to the turning cycle of nature. This upward perspective sees the same world, though from the opposite pole, as the downward perspective in the vision of ascent, and hence the same cyclical symbols may be employed for it. The definitive literary example of the journey of ascent is in the last half-dozen cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio. Here Dante, climbing a mountain in the form of a winding stair, purges himself of his last sin at the end of canto 26, and then finds that he has recovered his lost youth, not his individual but his generic youth as a child of Adam, and hence is in the garden of Eden, the Golden Age of Classical mythology, a lower paradise directly below the moon, where paradise proper begins. This point is as far up as Virgil can go, and after Virgil leaves Dante the great apocalyptic vision of the Word and the church begins. We are told in canto 28 that Eden is a locus amoenus, a place of perpetually temperate climate, from which the seeds of vegetable life in the world below proceed, and to which they return—in other words Eden is at the apex of the

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natural cycle. In Eden Dante sees the maiden Matilda, who, he says in the same canto, makes him remember where and what Proserpine was, when her mother lost her and she lost the spring flowers. Earlier, in canto 27, the dying god’s conventional emblem, the red or purple flower, is dropped into the imagery with a reference to Pyramus and Thisbe. As a garden is a place of trees, the tree itself is, like the mountain-top, a natural symbol of the vision of ascent, and enters Dante’s vision, first in canto 29 in the form of the seven candlesticks, which look like golden trees at a distance, and later in canto 32 as the tree of knowledge, which turns purple in colour. The gardens of Adonis episode in book 3 of The Faerie Queene is a familiar English example of locus amoenus symbolism. The gardens of Adonis are spoken of as a “Paradise,” and are, again, a place of seed from which the forms of life in the cycle of nature proceed, and to which they return. In Spenser we have the dying god Adonis, the purple flower amaranthus (associated with Sidney, whose fatal thigh-wound made him a favourite historical embodiment of Adonis), and a grove of myrtle trees on top of a mountain. One of Spenser’s earliest and acutest critics, Henry Reynolds, suggests, in the easy-going fashion of his time, an etymological connection between Adonis and Eden, but Spenser does not make any explicit link between this garden and Eden, which is the kingdom of Una’s parents in book 1. Nor does he explicitly locate the gardens at the apex of the cyclical world just below the moon, though he does speak of Adonis as “eterne in mutabilitie,” which reminds us of the Mutabilitie Cantoes and of the dispute between Mutability and Jove, held in the sphere of the moon at the boundary of Jove’s world. In this poem the evidence brought forward by Mutability in her favour, which consists of various aspects of the natural cycle, proves Jove’s case instead, because it is evidence of a principle of stability in flux. In any case the upper location of the Gardens of Adonis seems to be in Milton’s mind when in Comus he introduces the Attendant Spirit as coming from the Gardens of Adonis, which according to the opening line are “Before the starry threshold of Jove’s Court.” Milton also places Eden on a mountain-top, protected by a “verdurous wall,” and the world into which Adam is exiled is spoken of as a “subjected plain.” In Biblical typology the relation between Eden and the wilderness of Adam’s exile is closely parallel to the relation between the Promised Land and the wilderness of the law. Here again the Promised land is thought of as being “above” the wilderness, its capital being Jerusalem,

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the centre of the world and the city on the mountain, “whither the tribes go up.” The same kind of language enters the prophetic visions: Ezekiel’s wilderness vision of dry bones is in a valley, while the panorama of the restored Jerusalem with which the prophecy concludes begins with the prophet seated “upon a very high mountain.” In Paradise Regained Christ’s temptation in the wilderness is really a descent into hell, or the domain of Satan, terminated by his successful stand on the pinnacle of Jerusalem, which prefigures his later conquest of the lower world of death and hell, much as Satan prefigures his own success in Eden when he sits “like a cormorant,” in the tree of life, the highest point in the garden. Christ’s victory over Satan also, Milton says, “raised” Eden in the wilderness. The forty days of the temptation are commemorated in Lent, which is immediately followed in the calendar by Easter; they also correspond to the forty years of wilderness wandering under the law, which was terminated by the conquest of the Promised Land by Joshua, who has the same name as Jesus (cf. Paradise Lost, bk. 12, ll. 307–14). T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday is a poem founded on Dante’s Purgatorio which at the same time glances at these Biblical and liturgical typologies. The central image of the poem is the winding stair of Dante’s mountain, which leads to a paradisal garden. Overtones of Israel in the wilderness (“This is the land. We have our inheritance”), of Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, and of course of Lent, are also present. As the poet is preoccupied with ascent, we get only fitful glimpses of the natural cycle on the way up: “a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit,” “hawthorn blossom,” and a “broadbacked figure drest in blue and green,” the last reappearing in a subdued form as a silent “garden god” in the locus amoenus above. In the final section the poet returns from the universal past to the individual past, from “the violet and the violet” of the garden to a nostalgia symbolized among other things by “lost lilacs.” In view of the explicit and avowed debt of this poem to the Purgatorio, the parallels in imagery may not seem very significant. It is all the more interesting to compare the treatment of the “winding stair” image in Yeats, as there, whatever influence from Dante there may be, the attitude taken towards the ascent is radically different. Two of Yeats’s poems, A Dialogue of Self and Soul and Vacillation, turn on a debate between a “soul” who wants only to ascend the stair to some ineffable communion beyond, and a “self” or “heart” who is fascinated by the downward vision into nature, even to the point of accepting rebirth in its cycle. In the former poem the “self” focuses its gaze on the dying-god symbol of the

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Japanese ceremonial sword wrapped in silk embroidered with flowers of “heart’s purple.” In Vacillation the symbol of ascent and separation from the cycle, the uncorrupted body of the saint, is contrasted with the cycle itself of death and corruption and rebirth, represented by the lion and honeycomb of Samson’s riddle. Here, however, it is the symbol of the tree, associated with “Attis’ image” and somewhat like Dante’s candlestick vision, “half all glittering flame and half all green,” that dominates the poem, and that seems to combine in itself the images of ascent and cycle. Similarly in Among School Children the contrast between the nun and the mother, the “bronze repose” of direct ascent and the cyclical “honey of generation,” is resolved in the image of the chestnut tree. There are other examples of the green world at the top of the natural cycle in modern poetry. Wallace Stevens, for instance, gives us a very clear description of it in Credences of Summer: It is the natural tower of all the world, The point of survey, green’s green apogee, But a tower more precious than the view beyond, A point of survey squatting like a throne, Axis of everything.

But in the twentieth century, on the whole, images of descent are, so to speak, in the ascendant. These derive mainly from the sixth book of the Aeneid, and its progenitor in the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Here also one is confronted with two levels, a lower world of unending pain, the world of Tantalus and Sisyphus and Ixion, and an upper world more closely connected with the natural cycle. In Virgil there is a most elaborate development of cyclical and rebirth symbolism, introducing speculations of a type that are rarely encountered again in Western poetry before at least Romantic times. In the vision of descent, where we enter a world of darkness and mystery, there is more emphasis on initiation, on learning the proper rites, on acquiring effective talismans like the golden bough. The main figures have a strongly parental aura about them: in Virgil the prophet of the future of Rome is Aeneas’ father, and the maternal figure is represented by the Sibyl. In Homer, Odysseus’ mother appears, and the figure corresponding to Virgil’s Sibyl is Circe, whom Homer calls potnia, which means something like reverend. At the top of the winding stair one normally attains direct knowledge or vision, but the reward of descent is usually oracular or esoteric knowl-

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edge, concealed or forbidden to most people, often the knowledge of the future. In romance, where descent themes are very common, the hero often has to kill or pacify a dragon who guards a secret hoard of wealth or wisdom. The descent is also often portrayed as a mimic, temporary or actual death of the hero; or he may be swallowed by the dragon, so that his descent is into the monster’s belly. In medieval treatments of the Christian story some of these themes reappear. Between his death on the cross and his resurrection Jesus descends into hell, often portrayed, especially in fresco, as the body of a huge dragon or shark, which he enters by the mouth, like his prototype Jonah. Again there are two levels in the lower world: hell proper, a world of endless torment, and the upper limbo which is “harrowed,” and from which the redeemed, among whom the parental figures Adam and Eve have an honoured place, return to the upper world. The monster’s open mouth recurs in AshWednesday as “the toothed gullet of an agèd shark,” and as the symbol of the “blue rocks” or Symplegades, whose clashing together has similar overtones. For obvious reasons, visions of descent in medieval and Renaissance poetry are usually infernal visions, based on Virgil but ignoring his interest in rebirth. Only with Romantic poetry do we begin to get once more the oracular or quest descent, where the hero gets something more from his descent than a tragic tale or an inspection of torments. In Keats’s Endymion there are adventures in both upward and downward directions, the upward ones being mainly quests for beauty and the downward ones quests for truth. The gardens of Adonis in this poem seem to be down rather than up, as they do at the conclusion of Blake’s Book of Thel, though in that conclusion there is a sudden reversal of perspective. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is a more striking example of a cosmology in which the beneficial comes from below, and the sinister from above. The contrast here with the cosmology of Dante and Milton is so striking that it deserves more examination. In Dante, in Spenser, in Milton, the foreground of symbols and images seems to be portrayed against a background of roughly four levels of existence. I need a word for this background, and am strongly tempted to steal “topocosm” from Theodor H. Gaster’s Thespis, though he uses it in a quite different sense. The top level is the place of the presence of God, the empyreal heaven, which operates in this world as the order of grace and Providence. The next level is that of human nature properly speaking,

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represented by the garden of Eden or the Golden Age before the fall, and now a world to be regained internally by moral and intellectual effort. Third is the level of physical nature, morally neutral but theologically fallen, which man is born into but can never adjust to, and fourth is the level of sin, death, and corruption, which since the fall has permeated the third level too. Throughout this period it was traditional to symbolize the top level by the starry spheres, the spiritual by the physical heaven. Dante’s upper paradise is located in the planetary spheres, and in Milton’s Nativity Ode the music of the spheres, symbol of the understanding of unfallen man, is in counterpoint to the chorus of descending angels. After the rise of Copernican astronomy and Newtonian physics, the starry sky becomes a less natural and a more perfunctory and literary metaphor for the spiritual world. The stars look increasingly less like vehicles of angelic intelligences, and come to suggest rather a mechanical and mindless revolution. This shift of perspective is of course already present in a famous passage in Pascal,7 but it does not make its full impact on poetry until much later. A deity at home in such a world would seem stupid or malignant, at best a kind of self-hypnotized Pangloss. Hence the variety of stupid sky-gods in Romantic poetry: Blake’s Urizen, Shelley’s Jupiter, Byron’s Arimanes, Hardy’s Immanent Will, perhaps the God of the Prologue to Faust. Blake, the closest of this group to the orthodox Christian tradition, points out that there is more Scriptural evidence for Satan as a sky-god than for Jesus.8 Even more significant for poetic symbolism is the sense of the mechanical complications of starry movement as the projection or reflection of something mechanical and malignant in human nature. In other words, the Frankenstein theme of actualizing human death-impulses in some form of fateful mechanism has a strong natural connection with the sky or “outer space,” and in modern science fiction is regularly attached to it. At the same time poets in the Romantic period tend to think of nature less as a structure or system, set over against the conscious mind as an object, and more as a body of organisms from which the human organism proceeds, nature being the underlying source of humanity, as the seed is of the plant. Hence with Romanticism another “topocosm,” almost the reverse of the traditional one, begins to take shape. On top is the bleak and frightening world of outer space. Next comes the level of ordinary human experience, with all its anomalies and injustices. Below, in the only place left for any locus amoenus, is the buried original form of society, now concealed

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under the historical layers of civilization. With a modern Christian poet this would be the old unfallen world, or its equivalent: thus in Auden’s For the Time Being the “garden” world is hidden within or concealed by the “wilderness” of ordinary life. With a poet closer to Rousseau this buried society would be the primitive society of nature and reason, the sleeping beauty that a revolutionary act of sufficient courage would awaken. On the fourth level, corresponding to the traditional hell or world of death, is the mysterious reservoir of power and life out of which both nature and humanity proceed. This world is morally ambivalent, being too archaic for distinctions of good and evil, and so retains some of the sinister qualities of its predecessor. Hence the insistence in Romantic culture of the ambivalent nature of “genius,” or an unusual degree of natural creative power, which may destroy the poet’s personality or drive him to various forms of evil or suffering, as in the Byronic hero, the poète maudit, the compulsive sinner of contemporary Christian and existential fiction, and other varieties of Romantic agony. Against this “topocosm” the action of Prometheus Unbound seems logical enough. In the sky is Jupiter, the projection of human superstition with its tendency to deify a mechanical and subhuman order. Below is the martyred Prometheus; below him Mother Earth (in whose domain is included the world of death, which has a mysterious but recurring connection with the locus amoenus in Shelley), and at the bottom of the whole action is the oracular cave of Demogorgon, who calls himself Eternity, and from whom the power proceeds that rejuvenates Earth, liberates Prometheus, and annihilates Jupiter.9 The Romantic “topocosm,” like its predecessor, is, for the poet, simply a way of arranging metaphors, and does not in itself imply any particular attitudes or beliefs or conceptions. The traditional infernal journey naturally persists: Eliot’s Waste Land and the first of Pound’s Cantos are closely related examples, the former having many Aeneid echoes and the latter being based on the Odyssey. In Pound the characteristic parental figure is Aphrodite, called “venerendam,” an echo of Homer’s potnia, who bears the “golden bough of Argicida,” in other words of Hermes the psychopomp. In Eliot the parallel figure to this combination of Hermes and Aphrodite is the hermaphroditic Tiresias, the seer who was the object of Odysseus’ descent. The “topocosm” of Dante was closely related to contemporary religious and scientific constructs, and to a much lesser degree the same is true of the post-Romantic one. We get our “up” metaphors from the

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traditional forms: everything that is uplifting or aspiring about the spiritual quest, such as the wings of angels or the ascension of Christ or the phrase “lift up your hearts,” is derived from the metaphorical association of God and the sky. Even as late as the nineteenth century, progress and evolution were still going up as well as on. In the last century or so there has been a considerable increase in the use of approving “down” metaphors: to get “down” to bedrock or brass tacks or the basic facts is now the sign of a proper empirical procedure. Descent myths are also deeply involved in the social sciences, especially psychology, where we have a subconscious or unconscious mind assumed, by a spatial metaphor, to be underneath the consciousness, and into this mind we descend in quest of parental figures. The Virgilian inspiration of modern scientific mythology is not hard to see: the golden bough of the sixth book of the Aeneid supplies the title and theme for Frazer, and the famous line spoken by Juno in the seventh, that if she cannot prevail on the high gods she will stir up hell (fletere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo), is the apt motto of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. But now that politics and science at least are beginning to focus once more on the moon,10 it is possible that a new construct will be formed, and a new table of metaphors organize the imagery of our poets.

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33 The Well-Tempered Critic (I) March 1961

From Acta Victoriana, 85 (March 1961): i–xii. A slightly earlier version of chapter 1 of WTC, adapted to the audience of Victoria College students. In places where the endnotes would duplicate material the main references will be found in the later version, no. 34 in this volume. Close comparison between this version and the one in WTC (fairly heavily revised) illuminates Frye’s skill in addressing a given audience as well as demonstrating his methods in revision.

We are told that in the early days of keyboard instruments it was customary to tune one scale, usually C major, perfectly, so that whatever was written in that key, or in closely related keys, would sound beautiful and harmonious. But this system restricted the number of keys a composer could use, for a key as remote as, say, G sharp minor would, at least to a professional ear, sound like a tree full of starlings. So a compromise was reached: it was pretended that the octave could be divided evenly into twelve semitones, and that C sharp and D flat, for instance, were exactly the same note. These assumptions were not true, but they were practical. They enabled a composer to use all twenty-four keys, as Bach’s WellTempered Clavichord twice demonstrates, and even the ears that could notice the difference were approximately satisfied. It seems to me that there is a parable in this for literary critics. The scholar, as distinct from the critic, is confined to a relatively small area of literature: he edits Lydgate and becomes known as a Lydgate man, or, if sufficiently distinguished, the Lydgate man. That is, he tunes his own scales as accurately as possible, and on all subjects closely related to Lydgate his utterance is beautiful and harmonious. But it is quite possi-

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ble for even a good scholar to be an ill-tempered critic, in the musical sense. For the study of literature lacks any real co-ordinating critical principles. Our university teachers, as scholars, have been trained in a graduate school: as critics, they are largely self-educated. They may never have been confronted with a “survey” of literature which really surveyed anything except chronology, or “tradition,” as it is often called. Usually they do a fair job of educating themselves, for after all they must teach, and teaching in the universities is also a self-educating process. But one wonders if there is a way to make the study of criticism one of composition rather than only of improvising. For some years I have been in search of the co-ordinating principles that would make it possible for a student of literature to be trained in criticism as well as in scholarship: to specialize, say, in Chaucer and still be able to modulate to the key of Dostoevsky or Plato, to understand that literature is a coherent order of words and not what Pope calls a wild heap of wit.1 Such an enlarged perspective may result in some oversimplifying, but, as in equal temperament, there is much to be said for compromise. A few things have become clearer to me as I have proceeded. Of these, one of the most important to me has been the realization that the problems of literary criticism and literary education are inseparable. Those of you who have heard the Armstrong lecturer2 of last year, Professor I.A. Richards, will remember his remark that he had abandoned literary criticism for the teaching of reading in primary schools. He had not abandoned criticism, however; he had merely recognized that the critic’s more comprehensive approach to literary problems immediately divides in two. One group of problems is purely critical, and relates to the study of literature as a whole. The other group is rhetorical: it is concerned with society’s use of the arts of words, with the general social level of reading, writing, and speaking. Its direction is towards what interests the critic as a reader, seeing what his students do with what he gives them, and what happens, or fails to happen, to society as a result of his contribution to it. In what follows I shall be proceeding in this direction, trying to take a comprehensive view of the sounds that arise from society rather than from literature. It is a well-known principle of thought that the most elementary problems are the hardest, not only to solve, but even to see. The other day an inspector of elementary schools said to me: “In grade four nearly all the children are enthusiastic about poetry: in the adult world hardly anyone bothers to read it. What happens?” This question struck me as a perver-

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sion of nature: everybody knows that literary critics are supposed to ask searching questions of educators, not the other way round. The conviction that I ought to be asking the question, however, did not supply me with an answer. There are any number of automatic or cliché answers, ranging from “Schoolteachers kill the child’s interest in poetry by analyzing it” to “Modern poetry is out of touch with modern life,” but such pseudo-statements, however consoling, get us nowhere. While I do not have an answer, I can at least see the place at which the answer must start. Here again an educational problem is bound up with a critical one. Very early in our education we are made familiar with the distinction between verse and prose. The conviction gradually forces itself on us that prose is what is called effective communication and that verse is an ingenious but fundamentally perverse way of distorting ordinary prose statements. The conviction does not come to us from school so much as from the general pressure of our cultural environment. Embedded in it is the purely critical assumption that prose is the language of ordinary speech. This is an assumption of very long standing: one of the most reliable jokes in literature concerns the delight of M. Jourdain, in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme (act 2, sc. 4), at discovering that he had been speaking prose all his life. But M. Jourdain had not been speaking prose all his life, and prose is not the language of ordinary speech. In the history of literature we notice that developed techniques of verse invariably precede, by many centuries, developed techniques of prose. Primitive societies may produce highly complex verse; rarely do they produce anything but infantile prose. How could this happen if prose were really the language of ordinary speech? The language of ordinary speech is called prose only because it is not distinguished from prose. Actual prose is the expression or imitation of directed thinking or controlled description in words, and its unit is the sentence. Prose, therefore, is not ordinary speech, but ordinary speech on its best behaviour, in its Sunday clothes, aware of an audience and with its relation to that audience prepared beforehand. It is the habitual language only of fully articulate people who have mastered its difficult idiom. And even they will avoid stilted speech, or “talking like a book,” as we say, and when they do, their speech rhythm shows the influence of something that is not prose. If we listen to children talking, we do not hear prose: we hear a heavily accented speech rhythm with a great deal of chanting in it, or whining, depending on the mood of the child. If we are lost in a strange town and

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ask someone for directions, we do not get prose: we get Gertrude Stein, a speech rhythm that is prolix and repetitive, and in which the verbal unit is no more a prose sentence than it is a sonnet. The teenager issuing mating calls over a telephone is not speaking prose, although the speech rhythm he does use is as formalized as prayer, which it somewhat resembles. The lady screaming amiabilities at a crowded cocktail party is not allowed to speak prose, for her hearers are not listening for sentences, but for a single rise and fall of the voice. The other day a student came to consult me about a failure in English, and what he said, as I recorded immediately after he had left, was this: Y’know, I couldn’t figure what happened, cause, jeez, well, I figured, y’know, I had that stuff cold—I mean, like I say, I’d gone over the stuff an’ I figured I knew it, and—well, geez, I do’ know.

I submit that this is not prose, and I suspect he had failed because he had not understood the difficulties of translating his speech into prose. Ordinary speech is concerned mainly with putting into words what is loosely called the stream of consciousness: the daydreaming, remembering, worrying, associating, brooding, and mooning that continually flows through the mind and which we often speak of, even more loosely, as thought. Thus ordinary speech is concerned mainly with self-expression. Whether from immaturity, preoccupation, or the absence of a hearer, it is imperfectly aware of an audience. Full awareness of an audience makes speech rhetorical, and rhetoric means a conventionalized rhythm. The irregular rhythm of ordinary speech may be conventionalized in two ways. One way is to impose a pattern of regular recurrence on it; the other is to impose the logical and semantic pattern of the sentence. We have verse when the arrangement of words is dominated by recurrent rhythm and sound, prose when it is dominated by the syntactical relation of subject and predicate. Of the two, verse is much the simpler and more primitive type, which accounts for its being historically earlier than prose. One can see in ordinary speech, however, a unit of rhythm peculiar to it, a short phrase that contains the central word or idea aimed at, but is largely innocent of syntax. It is much more repetitive than prose, as it is in the process of working out an idea, and the repetitions are largely rhythmical filler, like the nonsense words of popular poetry, which derive from them. In pursuit of its main theme it follows the paths of

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private association, which gives it a somewhat meandering course. Because of the prominence of private association in it, I shall call the rhythm of ordinary speech the associative rhythm. Traditionally, the associative rhythm has been used in tragedy to represent insanity, as in the heath scenes of King Lear, and in comedy to represent the speech of the uneducated or the mentally confused. Mrs. Quickly and Juliet’s nurse are Shakespearean examples. But it is only within the last century or so, with the rise of mimetic fiction, that literature has made any systematic effort to explore the rhythms of ordinary or of inner speech. Such effort practically begins, for English literature, with the entry of Alfred Jingle into the Pickwick Papers and his account of the stage coach and the low archway: Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look ’round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking!3

Jingle begins the series of associative speakers that includes the Bloom and Molly Bloom of Joyce’s Ulysses. Bloom’s interior monologue falls into a series of asyntactic phrases, like Jingle’s speech. Here, however, a further distinction arises. When an author represents a character as speaking or thinking in this way, the author is aware of his audience even if his character is not; consequently he will impose on the speech of that character a third type of conventionalization. Jingle and Bloom are literary comic humours, not people drawn from life, and their monologues are more regularized in rhythm than those of any people resembling them in life would be. There are, then, three primary rhythms of verbal expression. First, there is the rhythm of prose, of which the unit is the sentence. Second, there is the regularly recurring rhythm of verse. All verse is poetry; it does not follow that all poetry is verse. Third, there is an associative rhythm, found in ordinary speech and in various places in literature, in which the unit is the short phrase. All three rhythms are involved in all writing, but one is normally the dominating or organizing rhythm. Each rhythm by itself is continuous, as we see in the prose treatise, the verse epic, and such associative monologues as Finnegans Wake or Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable.

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Ideally, our literary education should begin, not with prose, but with such things as “this little pig went to market”—with verse rhythm reinforced by physical assault. The infant who gets bounced on somebody’s knee to the rhythm of a nursery rhyme is beginning to develop a response to poetry in the place where it ought to start. For verse is closely related to dance and song; it is also closely related to the child’s own speech, which is full of chanting and singing, as well as of primitive verse forms like the war-cry and the taunt-song. At school the study of verse is supplemented by the study of prose, and a good prose style in both speech and writing is what is aimed at. But poetry is always the central powerhouse of a literary education. It contributes, first, the sense of rhythmical energy, the surge and thunder of epic and the sinewy and springing dialogue of Shakespearean drama. It contributes too, as the obverse of this, the sense of leisure, of expert timing and the swing and fall of cadences, which no device for learning to read quickly and off the top of one’s head can ever replace. Then there is the sense of wit and heightened intelligence, resulting from seeing disciplined words marching along in metrical patterns and in their inevitably right order. And there is the sense of concreteness that we can get only from the poet’s use of metaphor and of visualized imagery. Literary education of this kind, its rhythm and leisure slowly soaking into the body and its wit and concreteness into the mind, can do something to develop a speaking and writing prose style that comes out of the depths of personality and is a genuine expression of it. Now let us turn from what literary education might be to what it is. The present field worker has recently collected some examples of associative speech, mostly from the hall outside this room. Here is perhaps the best shaped of them: So she was all dolled up in this navy blue job, and was she looking crummy! She had this new guy with her, not her regular guy, so I went up and I said what’s doin’, and boy did she gimme a dirty look!

This student is, as I ascertained, “taking” English, but English is not taking her: fifteen years of schooling have failed to make any impression on her speech habits. She represents an educational problem, but not one

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that the school or university can directly solve, because the only effective improvement would be through social snobbery. If, as in England, habits of speech were built into the social structure: if it were taken for granted that the lower classes spoke one way and the middle classes another, the speech of middle-class females would certainly conform to a middleclass pattern from infancy onward. That would not necessarily make their speech more beautiful: it would simply make it easier to distinguish from the speech of prostitutes. But Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion could hardly be written in North America, for the social facts it deals with are very different here. Canadians speak American: apart from one or two private schools, our political connection with Great Britain has had no effect on our language except to confuse our spelling. Canadian imperialists occasionally complain about the Americanization of our life, but the complaints themselves are always uttered in American tones. A standard grammatical form of English prose is taught at school, and the student learns to read it after a fashion, but it does not follow that he learns to speak it habitually. Learning to speak in this country is often associated with “cultivating an accent,” and it is generally agreed that anyone who does that is a sissy, a snob, a square, or whatever other abusive term is in vogue at the moment. The result is that in all the attention put on techniques of teaching students to read, ordinary speech is largely left to original sin. I am not however speaking of accent, or of the actual production of the sounds of speech. Those who use debased speech usually make noises ugly enough to be consistent with it, and one may often feel that if the beaver is a fitting emblem of Canadian industry, the great bronzed grackle is perhaps more appropriate for Canadian eloquence. I am speaking rather of the kind of verbal framework that one must develop if one is to convey ideas or communicate any sense of personality. The schools, of course, will be of little help if they have been corrupted by project methods and other antiverbal perversities. If a standard language is taught in school without conviction, it is unlikely to make much positive impression on the language spoken during recess. I say positive impression, because so much of the colloquial language spoken in our society is a curious mixture of associative monologue and childhood resentments. I often revert to a little scene that made a considerable impression on me once: in a grocery store, where the clerk was showing me two things much alike, he remarked, “It doesn’t make any

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difference,” then looked me full in the face and instantly corrected himself to, “It don’t make no difference.” This second form was an improvement on the first, having a higher degree of what literary critics call texture. It meant (a) it doesn’t make any difference, (b) you look to me like a schoolteacher, and nobody’s going to catch me talking like one of them. In these days of universal education nobody uses a substandard expression of which he has not heard the standard form in school. If he says, “It don’t make no difference,” it is not because he does not know the accepted form, but because he does know it. His speech is not ungrammatical; it is antigrammatical. Such unconscious resentment as may be involved is not directed against a higher social class: it is directed against eggheads or longhairs or however the people are described who take their education seriously. The language taught at school is taught only there, which is why it is associated with teachers and schoolrooms. No major business is engaged in selling speech, and the example of good speakers is not reinforced by advertising, with its judicious mixture of flattery and threats. The students whose speech I have recorded would have suffered agonies of humiliation if their clothes had made the impression on the eye that their speech made on the ear. But they would doubtless regard it as the very madness of pedantry to expect them to speak standard English out of school hours. The standard English of schoolrooms is prose, and being prose it can be analyzed grammatically, hence the body of grammatical “rules” which so many students associate with correct English. When anyone starts reflecting, as I am doing, on ordinary habits of speech, it is usually assumed that it is the correctness of one’s grammar that is being impugned. But while standard speech is grammatical, it would be silly to judge it solely by its conformity to some alleged grammatical model. For one thing, the strain of constructing prose sentences is clearly marked even in the speech of the most articulate people. That is to say, the point I want to make is, that all of us use sort of filler phrases to conceal our nervousness, or something, in working out our, you know, sentence structure. Standard English cannot be learned without the study of formal grammar. The little learning of linguistics which prompted some “educators” a few years ago to try to get rid of grammar proved to be a very dangerous thing indeed. Further, those who know language know its logical distinctions and subtle nuances, and have a duty to insist on

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their usefulness. The notion that the teacher of language has nothing to do but follow “usage” is like the notion that a scientist in a weather bureau has nothing to do but look out the window. But still grammar is the servant and not the master of language, and speech, like handwriting, should be allowed to find its own rhythm and character. The hazy general notion that illiteracy is an inability to read and write, and that an education which teaches everybody to read and write has overcome illiteracy, is clearly nonsense. We cannot study or teach reading and writing effectively and at the same time allow the spoken word to maunder and natter at will. I fully agree with everything that has been said about the futility of teaching dead languages in school. Except for some aspects of scholarly research, dead languages have no place in education. But I would not make the simple-minded and ill-considered identification of dead languages with the Classical languages. A dead language is a language that one learns to read but never thinks of as spoken. What shows that it is dead is the third factor, the writing of the language. The professor of Latin does not think of Latin as a dead language except when he is marking students’ proses.4 Similarly, a student who has learned to read English prose, and continues to speak only associative jargon, will, when he tries to write English, find himself struggling with a language much more effectively dead than Julius Caesar. Good writing must be based on good speech; it will never come alive if it is based on reading alone. Many people are puzzled by the fact that only the most disciplined writers are ever simple writers. Ordinary writing is not simple, even in the sense of reproducing the associative speech patterns that I have quoted earlier. Writing that did that would achieve, if not simplicity, at least a kind of startling nakedness. Such writing is to be found in examination papers that do not make the minimum grade: here is an example at random, from a student who was asked to compare Chaucer’s Chanticleer with one of the characters in the General Prologue: The discription of the cock is like that of the Prioress, for we are told lots about her appearance, just as of the cock. The discription is general, typical of a Prioress, just as the discription is typical of a cock. We are told that she also could sing good, just as the cock. We know she was beautiful and care much about her manners. This is funny, for a prioress should not be concerned with such, but should pay more attention to her religion. It is

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funny. The discription of the cock being beautiful is also funny, especially the part about his nails compaired to a lilly. He is interested in love, having seven hens, and so is the Prioress . . .

Everybody in a university has marked bushels of such offerings: my only purpose in quoting it is to call attention to the rhythm, which is the murmuring, repetitive, asyntactic phrasing of the rhythm of association. But associative speakers are largely unaware of their own speech habits, and unless they are as naive as this student, they do not use them as a basis for writing. Now if we write in a way that we never speak, the first thing that disappears is the rhythm. It is hardly possible to give any swing or bounce to words unless they come out of our own bodies and are, like dancing or singing, an expression of physical as well as mental energy. The second thing that disappears is the colour. It is hardly possible to use vivid language unless one is seeing the imagery for oneself: even abstract words, if they are genuinely possessed by the person using them, will still retain something of the concrete metaphor that they originally had. The third thing that disappears is the sense of personality, which only a basis in personal speech can ever supply. These are all, we have said, the results of a literary education centred in poetry. It is natural enough that associative speakers, for whom even English prose is a dead language, should regard English poetry with the baffled stare of a stranger accosted by a lunatic. I feel, therefore, that there is a close connection among three aspects of language in our society: first, the associative squirrel-chatter that one hears on streets and in college halls; second, the poetic illiteracy which usually accompanies it; and third, the dead, senseless, sentenceless, written pseudo-prose that surrounds us on all sides like a boa constrictor, which is said to cover its victims with slime before strangling them. The sentence is logical, communicable, and periodic: it is difficult to use unless one has something to say and means what one says. We notice that associative speakers have a great aversion to the definiteness and full close of the sentence: if they produce a sentence by accident, they will add unnecessary words to the end as an apology for having uttered it, like. When such speakers take pen in hand, ink does not flow, but merely congeals like glue. On my desk is the report of a conference transmitted by that sobering register of the spoken word, the tape recorder. The question at issue is

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the teaching of American literature in foreign countries: Huckleberry Finn has been suggested, and the speaker is, I think, warning us that it contains the word “ain’t”: Now, I’m rather more inclined to stick my neck out on things of this sort, therefore, I’m sticking my neck out farther than a lot of people here would, in saying that I would also not see any objection to including such a supposedly substandard term as ain’t in the sense of am not, is not, are not at a relatively early level of work for teaching English, but in this case with a specific indication that this is an extremely frequent form which the learner is very likely to hear in any part of the English speaking world but that he had better be careful about using it himself unless he has more of a feel for the situations in which it is permissible and those in which it “ain’t.”

This kind of style, once one gets more of a feel for it, is easy to recognize as the quiz programme or buzz session style. Its unit is not the sentence, but the number of words that it is possible to emit before someone else breaks in. A discussion based on such a speech cannot achieve conversation, but only distributed monologue. Such a style is, of course, entirely devoid of either rhythm or colour, but, being spoken, is not entirely devoid of personality. For that, let us turn to a literary critic: The method is comprehensive, in the second place, by virtue of the devices it affords for discriminating a posteriori an indefinite number of different poetic forms or principles of construction and for dealing differentially with the common elements these involve, in terms not merely of their material content or technical configuration but of the functions they can be made to serve, directly or indirectly, in the constitution of different kinds of poetic wholes; with the result that, when the method is properly used, it permits a far wider range of relevant differentiations in the discussion not only of poems but of poetic devices and materials than any method in which such a functional treatment of elements has no place.5

The only thing that could have produced this sentence is a positive will to abdicate the personality, a frenzy of academic self-deprecation. It is not a healthy tendency, for, as Kierkegaard reminds us, the impersonal (in this context) is essentially demoralizing.6 Elsewhere on my desk, which is a very untidy one, I find the following:

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In matters of curriculum, textbooks, or methods of study, variety is the spice of education and decentralization can be even more readily provided than under the small unit system because the resultant stability of teaching personnel means that the central authorities no longer have to keep so tight a grip upon a shifting texture of educational personnel.

The changing repetitions and the huddle of mixed metaphors at the end indicate that the author is writing in his sleep, and there is the usual absence of rhythm and colour. But here we notice something else: the cliché or ready-made phrase (“variety is the spice of education”) is beginning to make itself felt as a unit of thought and expression. A brilliant student of mine in Honours English7 recently found herself at a conference of people who write (and talk) like this, wondering what the English language had ever done to them that they should want to treat it so. She came back muttering a sentence that had, understandably, got stuck in her mind: “Jobwise, are we structured for this activation?” What is striking about this sentence is that it consists entirely of readymade vogue or jargon words. The cliché is no longer an occasional resource: it has taken over as the only form of expression, and consequently as the only form of thought. A century ago Flaubert explored, with horrified fascination, the cultural life of Bouvard and Pécuchet, whose intellects moved entirely within the orbit of what he drew up as a supplement to his research, the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. But Bouvard and Pecuchet were still a long way from the verbal automatism, a language based entirely on the conditioned reflex, that we have reached with this sentence. The similar jargon used in Marxist countries looks more philosophical at first glance, but it comes from the same part of the nervous system. III Our present subject is rhetoric, or the social aspect of the use of language, and rhetoric from the beginning has been divided into three levels, high, middle, and low. These levels were originally suggested by the three classes of society, and are illustrated both in speech and in literature. In literature, for example, Milton employs the low style in some of his prose pamphlets when he is abusing somebody; the middle style in Paradise Regained, which is a quietly meditative poem; and the high style when

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dealing with Satan, the prince of darkness being a gentleman. The same levels continue to exist in both literature and language even when they no longer correspond directly to the facts of society. Ignoring the problem of high style for the moment, we can see clearly enough what the middle style in modern speech is: it is the ordinary speaking style of the articulate person, and its basis is a relaxed and informal prose, that is, prose influenced by an associative rhythm. There is also, in North America, a “low,” a colloquial or familiar style, the style that Mencken calls the vulgate.8 It is often thought of as merely substandard or illiterate speech, but it perhaps should be regarded simply as a separate rhetorical style, appropriate for some situations and not for others. With all its antigrammatical forms, it has its own vocabulary, its own syntax, its own rhythm, its own imagery and humour. It is as capable as any other style of literary expression, as Huckleberry Finn, despite its addiction to ain’t, abundantly proves. These are both genuine styles, and are quite distinct from the bastard styles we have been discussing, which are parodies of them. At the risk of sounding like a Methodist parson, which is what I am, I find that I am unable to take the next step without raising a moral distinction. Genuine speech is the expression of a genuine personality. Because it takes pains to make itself intelligible, it assumes that the hearer is a genuine personality too—in other words, wherever it is spoken it creates a community. Bastard speech is not the voice of the genuine self: it is more typically the voice of what I shall call the ego. The ego has no interest in communication, but only in expression. What it says is always a monologue, though if engaged with others, it resigns itself to a temporary stop, so that the other person’s monologue may have its turn to flow. But while it seeks only expression, the ego is not the genuine individual, consequently it has nothing distinctive to express. It can express only the generic: food, sex, possessions, gossip, aggressiveness, and resentments. Its natural affinity is for the readymade phrase, the cliché, because it tends to address itself to the reflexes of its hearer, not to his intelligence. I am not suggesting that society can do without a great deal of automatic babble on ready-made subjects: I am merely saying that we limit the aspects of our personality that we can express with words if we devote ourselves entirely to such verbal quackery. If we ask what is the natural way to talk, the answer is that it depends on which nature is being appealed to. Edmund Burke remarked that art

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is man’s nature, that it is natural to man to be in a state of cultivation,9 and the remark has behind it the authority of our whole cultural and religious tradition. What is true of nature is also true of freedom. The half-baked Rousseauism in which most of us have been brought up has given us a subconscious notion that the free act is the untrained act. But of course freedom has nothing to do with lack of training. We are not free to move until we have learned to walk; we are not free to express ourselves musically until we have learned music; we are not capable of free thought unless we can think. Similarly, free speech cannot have anything to do with the mumbling and grousing of the ego. Free speech is cultivated and precise speech: even among university students not all are capable of it or would know if they lost it. A group of individuals, who retain the power and desire of genuine communication, forms a society or community. An aggregate of egos is a mob. A mob can only respond to reflex and cliché; it can only express itself, directly or through a spokesman, in reflex and cliché. A mob always implies some object of resentment, and political leaders who speak for the mob aspect of their society develop a special kind of tantrum style, a style constructed almost entirely out of unexamined clichés. Examples may be heard in the United Nations every day. What is disturbing about the prevalence of bad language in our society is that bad language, if it is the only idiom habitually at command, is really mob language. What is high style? This is one of the oldest questions in rhetoric: it would almost be possible to translate the title of Longinus’ treatise, Peri Hypsous, written in the second century, by this question. As Longinus recognized, the question has two answers, one for literature and one for speech, or rhetoric. In literature it is correct to translate Longinus’ title as “On the Sublime,” and discuss the great passages in Shakespeare or Milton. In rhetoric high style is something else: something more like the voice of the individual reminding us of our real selves, and of our duty as members of a society and not of a mob. To go at once to the highest example of high style, the sentences of the Sermon on the Mount have nothing in them of the speech-maker’s art: they seem to be coming from inside ourselves, as though the soul itself were remembering what it had been told so long ago. High style in this sense is ordinary style—it can even be “low” style—but in an exceptional situation. In our society it is heard whenever a speaker, like Lincoln at Gettysburg, is honestly struggling to express what his society, as a society, is trying to be and do. It is

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even more unmistakably heard, as we should expect, in the voice of an individual facing a mob, or some incarnation of the mob spirit, in the death speeches of Vanzetti and Louis Riel,10 in the dignity with which a New Orleans mother explained her reasons for sending her white child to an unsegregated school.11 How, marvelled the reporters, did a woman who left school in grade six learn to talk like the Declaration of Independence? It was the authority of high style in action, moving, not on the middle level of thought, but on the higher level of imagination and social vision. The mob’s version of high style is advertising, the verbal art of prodding the reflexes of the ego, and telling it, in a voice choking with emotion, what our vision of society should inspire us to do: to go instantly down to the store and demand this product, accepting no substitutes. As long as society retains its freedom, such advertising is largely harmless, because everybody knows that it is only a kind of ironic game. As soon as society loses its freedom, mob high style becomes what is usually called propaganda, and the moral effects become much more pernicious. The attempt to find a well-tempered criticism in education has led us deep into the structure of society. The teacher of language is popularly supposed to be concerned only with what is called good grammar, which he regards with great reverence for mysterious cultural reasons. I have tried to suggest that the subject is a little more serious than that. In the first place, except in the nonverbal arts, like mathematics or music, there are no wordless thoughts, nor can any genuine ideas be expressed in undeveloped speech or writing. The associative style can only reproduce the associative process: it can never express thought, much less imagination. What it can express, and most effectively, is hatred, arrogance, and fear. In the second place, at a time when most of us feel rather helpless about how much we can do in the world, free speech is the one aspect of a genuine society that we all hold in our hands, or mouths. Some of us are afraid of science, but we have far less to fear from science than from a misuse of words. What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life; and when we listen to and with him the writers of the past are voices that not only still speak, but speak through us.

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34 The Well-Tempered Critic (II) March 1961

Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in March of 1961 for the PageBarbour Foundation, expanded and revised (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). For the first version of chapter 1, see “The Well-Tempered Critic (I),” no. 33 in this volume. For the germs of chapter 2, see “Literature as Possession,” no. 31 in this volume. Frye provided some endnotes, with the following parenthetical comment: “These notes are designed only to correct some over-allusiveness in the text: many of them may be superfluous” and noted that the quotations from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers had been modernized. This is, in fact, one of Frye’s more heavily annotated books. Reprinted in paperback, with the same text but a slightly smaller page size, by Indiana University Press in 1965, and in Canada by Fitzhenry and Whiteside in 1983. Indiana University Press also issued a paperback edition (printed in Canada) in 1983. A typescript, with printer’s annotations, is in NFF, 1988, box 22, file 3. Also reprinted as Il critico ben temperato, trans. Amleto Lorenzini and Mario Manzari (Milan: Longanesi, 1974) and as Yoi hihyoka, trans. Michico Watanabe (Tokyo: Yashio shuppansha, 1980); Fulai Wenlun Sanzhong: Xiangxiangli de Xiuyang, Chuangzhao yu Zai Chuangzhao, Wenlian de Pipingjai [Three of Frye’s Critical Monographs (The Educated Imagination, The Well-Tempered Critic, Creation and Recreation)] trans. Xu Kun et al., rev. and prefaced, and annotated by Wu Chizhe (Hot-Hot: University of Inner Mongolia Press, 2003). Ayre (280) comments on the frustration with the lectures themselves felt by a few informed Frye-watchers at the time, curious because of Frye’s ordinarily alert sense of how to address a given audience. The revision into book chapters resolved some of these problems, and WTC, while not as vivacious, forms an important prologue to The Educated Imagination. However, Frye would later stress to his Italian translator that the two were separate books, written several years apart for different audiences.1

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This book consists of the lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in March, 1961, for the Page-Barbour Foundation, with some expansion and revision. I am indebted to my friends and hosts at the University of Virginia, especially Professor Arthur Stocker, for many kindnesses. For the convenience of the reader, I have altered the lecture format into a sequence of chapters. These chapters, like the lectures which they originally were, are intended to fit inside one another, like the boxes of Silenus.2 The first picks up a common problem in the teaching of English and pursues it to a point at which it is seen to be an aspect of a technical problem in the theory of literary criticism. The second attempts to work out the implications of this theory, and the third is concerned with the implications of critical theory itself, thus returning to the social and educational area in which the discussion began. Readers of my Anatomy of Criticism will notice that the second chapter attempts to reshape, in a slightly simpler form, some of the distinctions made in the Fourth Essay of that book. Some of my reviewers felt that I had dismissed Arnold’s “touchstone” technique too brusquely, though what I had intended to dismiss was not the technique itself, but a social and moral motivation for it which seemed to me to have a misleading influence on criticism. In my discussion of “high style” I make some effort to indicate what I think the importance of Arnold’s conception to be. Chapter 1 The Moral of Manner I We are told that in the early days of keyboard instruments it was customary to tune one scale, usually C major, perfectly, so that whatever was written in that key, or in closely related keys, would sound beautiful and harmonious. But this system restricted the number of keys a composer could use; for a key as remote from C major as, say, G sharp minor, would, at least to a professional ear, sound like a tree full of starlings. So a compromise was reached: it was pretended that the octave could be divided evenly into twelve semitones, and that C sharp and D flat, for instance, were the same note. These assumptions were not exactly true, but they were practical. They enabled a composer to use all twenty-four

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keys, as Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavichord twice demonstrates, and even the ears that could notice the difference were approximately satisfied. It seems to me that there is a parable in this for literary critics. Literary criticism is an outgrowth of literary scholarship: it has the same kind of interest but extends over a much wider field. The scholar, as distinct from the critic, is confined to a relatively small area of literature: he edits Lydgate and becomes known as a Lydgate man, or, if sufficiently distinguished, the Lydgate man. He tunes his own scale as accurately as possible, and on all subjects closely related to Lydgate his utterance is beautiful and harmonious. But it is possible for even a good scholar to be an ill-tempered critic, in the musical sense, because the study of literature lacks any real co-ordinating critical principles. Our university teachers, as scholars, have been trained in a graduate school: as critics, they are largely self-educated. They may never have been confronted with a “survey” of literature which really surveyed anything except chronology, or “tradition,” as it is often called. Usually they do a fair job of educating themselves, for after all they must teach, and teaching in the universities is also a self-educating process. But one wonders if there is a way to make the study of criticism one of composition rather than only of improvisation. For some years I have been in search of the co-ordinating principles that would make it possible for a student of literature to be trained in criticism as well as in scholarship: to specialize, say, in Chaucer and still be able to modulate to the key of Dostoevsky or Plato, to understand that literature is a coherent order of words and not what Pope calls a wild heap of wit.3 Such an enlarged perspective may result in some oversimplifying, but, as in equal temperament, there is much to be said for compromise. A few things have become clearer to me as I have proceeded. Of these, one of the most important to me has been the realization that the problems of literary criticism and literary education are inseparable. For the critic’s more comprehensive approach to literary problems immediately divides in two. One group of problems is purely critical, and relates to the study of literature as a whole. The other group is cultural, in Arnold’s sense, and is concerned with society’s use of the art of words, with the general social level of reading, writing, and speaking. Its direction is towards what interests the critic as a teacher, seeing what his students do with what he gives them, or simply towards what interests him as a social being, seeing what happens, or fails to happen, in society as a result of his contribution to it. I shall begin by trying to

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locate one or two of the links between criticism and education, leaving the more technical literary questions for the next chapter. It is a well-known principle of thought that the most elementary problems are the hardest, not only to solve, but even to see. The other day an inspector of elementary schools said to me: “In grade four nearly all the children are enthusiastic about poetry: in the adult world hardly anyone bothers to read it. What happens?” This question struck me as a perversion of nature: everybody knows that literary critics are supposed to ask searching questions of educators, not the other way round. The conviction that I ought to be asking the question, however, clearly would not supply me with an answer. There are any number of automatic or cliché answers, ranging from “Schoolteachers kill the child’s interest in poetry by analyzing it” to “Modern poetry is out of touch with modern life”; but such pseudo-statements, however consoling, get us nowhere. While I do not have an answer, I can at least see the place at which the answer must start. Here again an educational problem is bound up with a critical one. Very early in our education we are made familiar with the distinction between verse and prose. The conviction gradually forces itself on us that when we mean what we say we write prose, and that verse is an ingenious but fundamentally perverse way of distorting ordinary prose statements. The conviction does not come to us from school so much as from the general pressure of our social environment. Embedded in it is the purely critical assumption that prose is the language of ordinary speech. This is an assumption of very long standing: one of the most reliable jokes in literature concerns the delight of M. Jourdain, in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (act 2, sc. 4) at discovering that he had been speaking prose all his life. But M. Jourdain had not been speaking prose all his life, and prose is not the language of ordinary speech. In the history of literature we notice that developed techniques of verse normally precede, sometimes by centuries, developed techniques of prose. How could this happen if prose were really the language of ordinary speech? The language of ordinary speech is called prose only because it is not distinguished from prose. Actual prose is the expression or imitation of directed thinking or controlled description in words, and its unit is the sentence. It does not follow that all prose is descriptive or thoughtful, much less logical, but only that prose imitates, in its rhythm and structure, the verbal expression of a conscious and rational mind. Prose, therefore, is not ordinary speech, but ordinary speech on its best behaviour, in its Sunday clothes, aware of an audience and with its relation to

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that audience prepared beforehand. It is the habitual language only of fully articulate people who have mastered its difficult idiom. And even they will avoid stilted speech, or “talking like a book,” as we say, and when they do, their speech rhythm shows the influence of something that is not prose. If we listen to children talking, we do not hear prose: we hear a heavily accented speech rhythm with a great deal of chanting in it, or whining, depending on the mood of the child. If we are lost in a strange town and ask someone for directions, we do not get prose: we get pure Gertrude Stein, a speech rhythm that is prolix and repetitive, and in which the verbal unit is no more a prose sentence than it is a villanelle. The teenager issuing mating calls over a telephone is not speaking prose, although the speech rhythm he uses is as formalized as prayer, which it somewhat resembles. The lady screaming amiabilities at a crowded cocktail party is not allowed to speak prose, for her hearers are not listening for sentences, but for a single rise and fall of the voice. The other day a student came to consult me about a failure in English, and what he said, as I recorded immediately after he left, was this: Y’know, I couldn’ figure what happened, cause, jeez, well, I figured, y’know, I had that stuff cold—I mean, like I say, I’d gone over the stuff an’ I figured I knew it, and—well, jeez, I do’ know.

I submit that this is not prose, and I suspect he had failed because he had not understood the difficulties of translating his speech into prose. He was, of course, “taking” English. But English was not taking him: fifteen years of schooling had failed to make any impression on his speech habits. He represents an educational problem, but not one that school or university can directly solve, because the only effective improvement would be through social snobbery. If, as at least formerly in England, habits of speech were built into the social structure: if it were taken for granted that the lower classes spoke one way and the middle classes another, middle-class speech would certainly conform to a middle-class pattern from infancy onwards. But Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion could hardly be written in North America, for the social facts it deals with are very different here. Ordinary speech is concerned mainly with putting into words what is loosely called the stream of consciousness: the daydreaming, remembering, worrying, associating, brooding, and mooning that continually flows through the mind and which, with Walter Mitty,4 we often speak of as

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thought. Thus ordinary speech is concerned mainly with self-expression. Whether from immaturity, preoccupation, or the absence of a hearer, it is imperfectly aware of an audience. Full awareness of an audience makes speech rhetorical, and rhetoric means a conventionalized rhythm. The irregular rhythm of ordinary speech may be conventionalized in two ways. One way is to impose a pattern of recurrence on it; the other is to impose the logical and semantic pattern of the sentence. We have verse when the arrangement of words is dominated by recurrent rhythm and sound, prose when it is dominated by the syntactical relation of subject and predicate. Of the two, verse is much the simpler and more primitive type, which accounts for its being historically earlier than prose. One can see in ordinary speech, however, a unit of rhythm peculiar to it, a short phrase that contains the central word or idea aimed at, but is largely innocent of syntax. It is much more repetitive than prose, as it is in the process of working out an idea, and the repetitions are largely rhythmical filler, like the nonsense words of popular poetry, which derive from them. In pursuit of its main theme it follows the paths of private association, which gives it a somewhat meandering course. Because of the prominence of private association in it, I shall call the rhythm of ordinary speech the associative rhythm. Traditionally, the associative rhythm has been used in tragedy to represent insanity, as in some speeches in King Lear, and in comedy to represent the speech of the uneducated or the mentally confused. Mrs. Quickly and Juliet’s nurse are Shakespearean examples. But it is only within the last century or so, with the rise of mimetic fiction, that literature has made any systematic effort to explore the rhythms of ordinary or of inner speech. Such effort practically begins, for English literature, with the entry of Alfred Jingle into the Pickwick Papers and his account of the stage coach and the low archway: Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in— head of a family off—shocking, shocking!

Jingle begins the series of associative speakers that includes the Bloom and Molly Bloom of Joyce’s Ulysses. Wyndham Lewis, in Time and Western Man, has noted the connection between Jingle and Bloom, although the inferences he draws from the connection are pseudocritical. Bloom’s interior monologue falls into a series of asyntactic phrases, like Jingle’s

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speech, except that the rhythm is a little slower and stodgier, as befits the speaker’s physical type: Confession. Everyone wants to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears. Husband learn to his surprise. God’s little joke. Then out she comes. Repentance skin deep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. Hail Mary and Holy Mary.5

Here, however, a further distinction arises. When an author represents a character as speaking or thinking in this way, the author is aware of his audience even if his character is not; consequently he will impose on the speech of that character a third type of conventionalization. Jingle and Bloom are literary comic humours,6 not people drawn from life, and their monologues are more regularized in rhythm than those of any people resembling them in life would be. There are, then, three primary rhythms of verbal expression. First, there is the rhythm of prose, of which the unit is the sentence. Second, there is an associative rhythm, found in ordinary speech and in various places in literature, in which the unit is a short phrase of irregular length and primitive syntax. Third, there is the rhythm of a regularly repeated pattern of accent or metre, often accompanied by other recurring features, like rhyme or alliteration. This regularly recurring type of rhythm is what I mean by verse. “Poetry,” however indispensable a word in literary criticism, can hardly be used in the technical sense of a verbal structure possessing a regular, recurrent, and in general predictable rhythm. All verse is “poetry” as that word is generally used, except when “poetry” implies a value judgment. It does not follow that all poetry is verse. Any jingle or doggerel that approximately scans is verse in my sense, however unpoetic: no free verse, such as Whitman’s, is verse in my sense, however important as poetry. All three rhythms are involved in all writing, but one is normally the dominating or organizing rhythm. II Ideally, our literary education should begin, not with prose, but with such things as “this little pig went to market”—with verse rhythm rein-

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forced by physical assault. The infant who gets bounced on somebody’s knee to the rhythm of “Ride a cock horse” does not need a footnote telling him that Banbury Cross is twenty miles northeast of Oxford. He does not need the information that “cross” and “horse” make (at least in the pronunciation he is most likely to hear) not a rhyme but an assonance. He does not need the value judgment that the repetition of “horse” in the first two lines indicates a rather thick ear on the part of the composer. All he needs is to get bounced. If he is, he is beginning to develop a response to poetry in the place where it ought to start. For verse is closely related to dance and song; it is also closely related to the child’s own speech, which is full of chanting and singing, as well as of primitive verse forms like the war-cry and the taunt-song. At school the study of verse is supplemented by the study of prose, and a good prose style in both speech and writing is supposed to be aimed at. But poetry, the main body of which is verse, is always the central powerhouse of a literary education. It contributes, first, the sense of rhythmical energy, the surge and thunder of epic and the sinewy and springing dialogue of Shakespearean drama. It contributes too, as the obverse of this, the sense of leisure, of expert timing of the swing and fall of cadences. Then there is the sense of wit and heightened intelligence, resulting from seeing disciplined words marching along in metrical patterns and in their inevitably right order. And there is the sense of concreteness that we can get only from the poet’s use of metaphor and of visualized imagery. Literary education of this kind, its rhythm and leisure slowly soaking into the body and its wit and concreteness into the mind, can do something to develop a speaking and writing prose style that comes out of the depths of personality and is a genuine expression of it. As education proceeds, the student finds himself surrounded with what purports to be prose, and naturally gives this rhythm more of his attention. Prose becomes the language of information, and it becomes increasingly also the language of information about poetry, which now tends to recede as a direct experience of words. As a result of colliding with The Lady of the Lake in grade nine, I shall associate Scott with unmetrical footnotes all my life: The stag at eve had drunk his fill Where danced the moon on Monan’s, one, rill: And deep his midnight lair had made In lone Glenartney’s, two, hazel shade.

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I am not disapproving the practice of writing footnotes to the proper names in verse, that being one of the ways by which I make my own living. What I regret is the growth of a tendency to find the footnote easier to read, and which in universities takes the form of dealing with a course in literature by reading books about poetry and skipping the quotations. The process, however, is by no means merely one of transferring literary experience from poetry to prose. What more frequently happens is that, faced with the enormous mass of verbiage on all sides, and having to come to terms with the constant sense of panic that this inspires, the student is taught, or develops by himself, a technique of reading everything quickly and off the top of his head. He no longer responds to the rhythm of the sentence, or to any rhythm at all, but reads with a mechanical express-train efficiency, dealing only with what that kind of efficiency can handle—the main ideas, the gist of the argument, the general point of view, and the like. This means that the process of reading is, like the rhythms of undeveloped speech, becoming purely associative. It is appropriate for a committee’s report, or similar expendable document, where there is one essential sentence on page forty-two and the reader wants only to get some notion of its context; but it is inadequate for prose, and impossible for poetry. Meanwhile, in all the attention put on techniques of teaching students to read, ordinary speech is largely left to original sin. A standard grammatical form of English prose is taught at school, and the student learns to read it after a fashion, but it does not follow that he learns to speak it habitually. Learning to speak on this continent is often associated with “cultivating an accent,” and it is generally agreed that anyone who does that is a sissy, a snob, a square, or whatever other abusive term is in vogue at the moment. I am not myself speaking of accent, or of the actual production of the sounds of speech, which is a social convention only. I am speaking of the kind of oral verbal framework that one must develop if one is to convey ideas or communicate any sense of personality. Prose is founded on the sentence, and the sentence is, at least in form, logical, communicable, and periodic: it is difficult to use unless one has something to say and means what one says. We notice that associative speakers have a great aversion to the definiteness and full close of the sentence: if they produce a sentence by accident, they will add unnecessary words to the end as an apology for having uttered it, like. On my desk is the report of a conference transmitted by that sobering register of the spoken word, the tape recorder. The question at issue is

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the teaching of American literature in foreign countries: Huckleberry Finn has been suggested, and the speaker is, I think, warning us that it contains the word “ain’t”: Now, I’m rather more inclined to stick my neck out on things of this sort, therefore, I’m sticking my neck farther than a lot of people here would, in saying that I would also not see any objection to including such a supposedly substandard term as ain’t in the sense of am not, is not, are not at a relatively early level of work for teaching English, but in this case with a specific indication that this is an extremely frequent form which the learner is very likely to hear in any part of the English speaking world but that he had better be careful about using it himself unless he has more of a feel for the situations in which it is permissible and those in which it “ain’t.”

This kind of style, once one gets more of a feel for it, is easy to recognize as the quiz program or buzz session style. Its unit is not the sentence, but the number of words that it is possible to emit before someone else breaks in. A discussion based on such a speech rhythm cannot achieve conversation, but only distributed monologue. The schools, of course, will be of little help if they have been corrupted by project methods7 and other antiverbal perversities. If a standard language is taught in school without conviction, it is unlikely to make much positive impression on the language spoken during recess. I say positive impression, because there does seem to be a negative one. Much of the colloquial language spoken in our society is a curious mixture of associative monologue and childhood resentments. I often revert to a little scene that made a considerable impression on me once: in a grocery store, where the clerk was showing me two things much alike, he remarked, “It doesn’t make any difference,” then looked me full in the face and instantly corrected himself to, “It don’t make no difference.” This second form was an improvement on the first, having a higher degree of what literary critics call texture. It meant (a) it doesn’t make any difference (b) you look to me like a schoolteacher, and nobody’s going to catch me talking like one of them. If he said, “It don’t make no difference,” it was not because he did not know the accepted form, but because he did know it. His speech was not ungrammatical; it was antigrammatical. Whatever unconscious resentment may be involved in such rhetoric is not directed against a higher social class: it is directed against eggheads or longhairs or however the people are described who take their educa-

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tion seriously. The language taught at school is taught only there, which is why it is associated with teachers and schoolrooms. It would never have occurred to the student whose ragged speech I have quoted to be anything but clean and well dressed. But no major business is engaged in selling speech, and the example of good speakers is not reinforced by advertising, with its judicious mixture of flattery and threats. The standard English of schoolrooms is prose, and being prose it can be analyzed grammatically, hence the body of grammatical “rules” which so many students associate with correct English. When anyone starts reflecting, as I am doing, on ordinary habits of speech, it is usually assumed that it is the correctness of one’s grammar that is being impugned. But while standard speech is grammatical, it would be silly to judge it solely by its conformity to some alleged grammatical model. For one thing, the strain of constructing prose sentences is clearly marked even in the speech of the most articulate people. That is to say, the point I want to make is, all of us use, sort of, filler phrases to conceal our nervousness, or something, in working out our, you know, sentence structure. Standard English cannot be learned without the study of formal grammar. The little learning of linguistics which prompted some “educators” a few years ago to try to get rid of grammar proved to be a very dangerous thing indeed. Further, those who know language know its logical distinctions and subtle nuances, and have a duty to insist on their usefulness. The notion that the teacher of language has nothing to do but follow “usage” is one of the more miserable forms of academic self-deprecation. But still grammar is the servant and not the master of language, and speech, like handwriting, has to be allowed to find its own rhythm and character. The hazy general notion that illiteracy is the technical inability to read and write, and that an education which teaches everybody to read and write has overcome illiteracy, is clearly nonsense. One may fully agree with everything that has been said about the futility of teaching dead languages at school. Except for some aspects of scholarly research, dead languages have no place in education. But this does not commit us to making the simple-minded and ill-considered identification of dead languages with the Classical languages. A dead language is a language that one learns to read but never thinks of as spoken. What shows that it is dead is the third factor, the writing of the language. The professor of Latin does not think of Latin as a dead language except when he is marking students’ proses.8 Similarly, a student who has learned to read

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English prose, and continues to speak only associative jargon, will, when he tries to write English, find himself struggling with a language much more effectively dead than Julius Caesar. Good writing must be based on good speech; it will never come alive if it is based on reading alone. Many people are puzzled by the fact that only the most disciplined writers are simple writers. Undeveloped writing is not simple, even in the sense of reproducing the associative speech patterns that I have quoted earlier. Writing that did that would achieve, if not simplicity, at least a kind of startling nakedness. Such writing is to be found in examination papers, of the sort that exclude their authors from a university education. Here is an example at random, from a student who was asked to compare Chaucer’s Chanticleer with one of the characters in the General Prologue: The discription of the cock is like that of the Prioress, for we are told lots about her appearance, just as of the cock. The discription is general, typical of a Prioress, just as the discription is typical of a cock. We are told that she also could sing good, just as the cock. We know she was beautiful and care much about her manners. This is funny, for a prioress should not be concerned with such, but should pay more attention to her religion. It is funny. The discription of the cock being beautiful is also funny, especially the part about his nails compaired to a lilly. He is interested in love, having seven hens, and so is the Prioress . . .

Everybody engaged in teaching has marked bushels of such offerings: my only purpose in quoting it is to call attention to the murmuring, repetitive, asyntactic phrasing of the rhythm of association. But associative speakers are largely unaware of their own speech habits, and unless they are as naive as this student, they do not use them as a basis for writing. Now if we write in a way that we never speak, the first thing that disappears is the rhythm. It is hardly possible to give any spring or bounce to words unless they come out of our own bodies and are, like dancing or singing, an expression of physical as well as mental energy. The second thing that disappears is the colour. It is hardly possible to use vivid language unless one is seeing the imagery for oneself: even abstract words, if they are genuinely possessed by the person using them, will still retain something of the concrete metaphor that they originally had. The third thing that disappears is the sense of personality, which only a basis in personal speech can ever supply. These are all, we have said, the

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results of a literary education centred in poetry. It is natural that associative speakers, for whom even English prose is a dead language, should regard English poetry with the baffled stare of a stranger accosted by a lunatic. I suspect that much of the difficulty complained of in contemporary poetry is really due to its use of simple and concrete language. I feel, therefore, that there is a close connection among three aspects of language in our society. First is the associative squirrel-chatter that one hears on streets, and even in college halls, jerking along apologetically or defiantly in a series of unshaped phrases, using slang or vogue words for emphasis and punctuation. Second is the poetic illiteracy which regards anything in verse as a verbal puzzle, not even a puzzle to be worked out, but a disdainful and inscrutable puzzle without an answer. Third is the dead, senseless, sentenceless, written pseudo-prose that surrounds us like a boa constrictor, which is said to cover its victims with slime before strangling them. This last, under the names of jargon, gobbledygook, and the like, has often enough been recognized as a disease of contemporary language and ridiculed or deplored as such. Two features of pseudo-prose seem to me of particular importance. One is that colourless and rhythmless writing is designed to obliterate the sense of personality: we write this way when we want to speak with some kind of impersonal or anonymous voice. It is not a healthy tendency, for, as Kierkegaard reminds us, the impersonal (in this context) is essentially demoralizing.9 The other is its underlying assumption that the idea is substantial and that the words which express the idea are incidental. This is a fallacy developed from the habit of associative reading. The words used are the form of which the ideas are the content, and until the words have been found, the idea does not fully exist. It seems to me that the fallacy of the substantial idea has a great deal to do with the bewildering woolliness of so much discursive writing today where (as in literary criticism, philosophy, and much of the social sciences) the essential conceptions are verbal rather than mathematical, as mathematical language is doubtless used more accurately. Elsewhere on my desk, which is a very untidy one, I find the following: In matters of curriculum, textbooks, or methods of study, variety is the spice of education and decentralization can be even more readily provided than under the small unit system because the resultant stability of teaching personnel means that the central authorities no longer have to keep so tight a grip upon a shifting texture of educational personnel.

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The clanging repetition of “personnel” and the huddle of mixed metaphors at the end indicate that the author is writing in his sleep, and there is the usual absence of rhythm and colour. But here we notice something else: the cliché or ready-made phrase (“variety is the spice of education”) is beginning to make itself felt as a unit of thought and expression. A student of mine recently found herself at a conference of people who write (and talk) like this, and came back muttering a sentence that had, understandably, got stuck in her mind: “Jobwise, are we structured for this activation?” What is striking about this sentence is that it consists entirely of ready-made vogue or jargon words. The cliché is no longer an occasional resource: it has taken over as the only form of expression, and consequently as the only form of thought. A century ago Flaubert explored, with horrified fascination, the cultural life of Bouvard and Pécuchet, whose intellects moved entirely within the orbit of what he drew up as a supplement to his research, the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. But Bouvard and Pécuchet were still a long way from the verbal automatism, a language based on the conditioned reflex, that we have reached with this sentence. The similar jargon used in Marxist countries looks more philosophical, at first glance, but it comes from the same part of the nervous system. III Our present subject is rhetoric, or the social aspect of the use of language, and rhetoric from the beginning has been divided into three levels, high, middle, and low. These levels were originally suggested by the three classes of society, and are illustrated both in speech and in literature. In literature, for example, Milton employs the low style in some of his prose pamphlets when he is abusing somebody (e.g., Colasterion); the middle style in Paradise Regained, which is a quietly reflective poem; and the high style when dealing with Satan, the prince of darkness being a gentleman. At present we are concerned with ordinary speech: the literary aspect of the problem will confront us next. I should like to suggest another way of looking at these traditional rhetorical terms, a way which does not use the misleading analogy of social classes, and which also tries to avoid some of the metaphors lurking in the words “high” and “low.” In ordinary speech we can see clearly enough what the middle style is: it is what in Greek is called koine, the ordinary speaking style of the articulate person, and its basis is a

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relaxed and informal prose, that is, prose influenced by an associative rhythm. It is the language of what ordinarily passes for thought and rational discussion, or for feelings that are communicable and in proportion to their objects. There is also, in North America, a “low,” a colloquial or familiar style, which is in the general area of what Mencken calls the vulgate.10 This is often thought of as merely substandard or illiterate speech, but perhaps it should be regarded simply as a separate rhetorical style, appropriate for some situations and not for others. With all its antigrammatical forms, it has its own vocabulary, its own syntax, its own rhythm, its own imagery and humour. It is as capable as any other style of literary expression, as Huckleberry Finn, despite its addiction to ain’t, abundantly proves. These are both genuine styles, and are quite distinct from the bastard styles we have been discussing, the pseudo-prose and the squirrel-chatter which are parodies of middle and low styles respectively. I find that I am unable to take the next step without raising a moral distinction. Genuine speech is the expression of a genuine personality. Because it takes pains to make itself intelligible, it assumes that the hearer is a genuine personality too—in other words, wherever it is spoken it creates a community. Bastard speech is not the voice of the genuine self: it is more typically the voice of what I shall here call the ego. The ego has no interest in communication, but only in expression. What it says is always a monologue, though if engaged with others, it resigns itself to a temporary stop, so that the other person’s monologue may have its turn to flow. But while it seeks only expression, the ego is not the genuine individual, consequently it has nothing distinctive to express. It can express only the generic: food, sex, possessions, gossip, aggressiveness, and resentments. Its natural affinity is for the ready-made phrase, the cliché, because it tends to address itself to the reflexes of its hearer, not to his intelligence or emotions. I am not suggesting that society can do without a great deal of automatic babble on ready-made subjects: I am merely saying that we limit the aspects of our personality that we can express with words if we devote ourselves entirely to such verbal quackery. If we ask what is the natural way to talk, the answer is that it depends on which nature is being appealed to. Edmund Burke remarked that art is man’s nature, that it is natural to man to be in a state of cultivation,11 and the remark has behind it the authority of our whole cultural and religious tradition. What is true of nature is also true of freedom. The half-baked Rousseauism in which most of us have been brought up has

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given us a subconscious notion that the free act is the untrained act. But of course freedom has nothing to do with lack of training. We are not free to move until we have learned to walk; we are not free to express ourselves musically until we have learned music; we are not capable of free thought unless we can think. Similarly, free speech cannot have anything to do with the mumbling and grousing of the ego. Free speech is cultivated and precise speech, which means that there are far too many people who are neither capable of it nor would know if they lost it. A group of individuals, who retain the power and desire of genuine communication, is a society. An aggregate of egos is a mob. A mob can only respond to reflex and cliché; it can only express itself, directly or through a spokesman, in reflex and cliché. A mob always implies some object of resentment, and political leaders who speak for the mob aspect of their society develop a special kind of tantrum style, a style constructed almost entirely out of unexamined clichés. Examples may be heard in the United Nations every day. What is disturbing about the prevalence of bad language in our society is that bad language, if it is the only idiom habitually at command, is really mob language. What is high style? This is one of the oldest questions in criticism: it would almost be possible to translate the title of Longinus’ treatise, Peri Hypsous, written near the beginning of the Christian era, by this question. As Longinus recognized, the question has, once again, at least two answers, one for literature and another for ordinary speech. In literature it may be correct to translate Longinus’ title as “On the Sublime,” and use great passages in Shakespeare or Milton for examples. We shall discuss this problem next. In ordinary speech high style is something else. I should say that it emerges whenever the middle style rises from communication to community, and achieves a vision of society which draws speaker and hearers together into a closer bond. It is the voice of the genuine individual reminding us of our genuine selves, and of our role as members of a society, in contrast to a mob. Such style has a peculiar quality of penetration about it: it elicits a shock of recognition, as it is called, which is the proof of its genuineness. High style in this sense is emphatically not the high-flown style: all ornate language in rhetoric belongs to the middle style, the language of society engaged in routine verbal ritual. Genuine high style is ordinary style, or even low style, in an exceptional situation which gives it exceptional authority. To go at once to the highest example of high style, the sentences of the Sermon on the Mount have nothing in them of the speech-maker’s art: they seem to be

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coming from inside ourselves, as though the soul itself were remembering what it had been told so long ago. High style in ordinary speech is heard whenever a speaker is honestly struggling to express what his society, as a society, is trying to be and do. It is even more unmistakably heard, as we should expect, in the voice of an individual facing a mob, or some incarnation of the mob spirit, in the death speech of Vanzetti,12 in Joseph Welch’s annihilating rebuke of McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings, in the dignity with which a New Orleans mother explained her reasons for sending her white child to an unsegregated school.13 All these represent in different ways the authority of high style in action, moving, not on the middle level of thought, but on the higher level of imagination and social vision. The mob’s version of high style is advertising, the verbal art of penetrating the mind by prodding the reflexes of the ego. As long as society retains any freedom, such advertising may be largely harmless, because everybody knows that it is only a kind of ironic game. As soon as society loses its freedom, mob high style is taken over by the new masters, to become what is usually called propaganda. Then, of course, the moral effects become much more pernicious. Both advertising and propaganda, however, represent the conscious or unconscious pressure on a genuine society to force it into a mass society, which can only be done by debasing the arts. The attempt to find a well-tempered criticism in education has led us deep into the structure of society. The teacher of language is popularly supposed to be concerned only with what is called “good grammar,” which he regards with great reverence for mysterious cultural reasons. The present argument tries to suggest that the subject is a little more serious than that. Except in the nonverbal arts, like mathematics or music, there are no wordless thoughts, nor can any genuine ideas be expressed in undeveloped speech or writing. The undeveloped associative rhythm can only reproduce the associative process: by itself it can never express thought, much less imagination. What it can express, and most effectively, is hatred, arrogance, and fear. This makes it a considerable danger at a time when, though some of us are afraid of science, we have so much less to fear from science than from a misuse of words. However uninhibited, it is not free speech, and at a time when most of us feel rather helpless about how much we can do in the world, free speech is the one aspect of a genuine society that we all hold in our hands, or mouths. What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an

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elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former. If free speech is cultivated speech, we should think of free speech, not merely as an uninhibited reaction to the social order, a release of the querulous ego, but as the verbal response to human situations, a response which establishes a context of freedom. The subliterary associative response is antisocial; the cliché or accepted idea response is a symptom of social stagnation; the free response, when verbal, is one participating in the lucidity of prose and the energy of verse. The subject known in English-speaking countries as English has at least three dimensions of existence. It is, in the first place, the language of verbal understanding, the normal means of understanding anything that is not mathematical. Secondly, it is the mother tongue, the means of participating in our own society. Thirdly, it is a division of one of the major arts. The mother tongue is the concern of the practical sense that must take the world as it finds it, and keep the reason and the emotions in balance. Literature is addressed to the imagination, which is concerned, not with the environment directly, but with the world that we construct out of our environment. It is also traditional in literary criticism to distinguish three levels on which words operate. There is the level of speculative reason or knowledge of nature (quid credas), the level on which we recognize reality and try to give verbal expression to that recognition. Above this is the practical reason (quid agas), which determines a choice of action, where the relevant categories are those of freedom and compulsion. Further above is a vision of the nature and destiny of man and the human situation (quo tendas).14 Whether we associate this top level with religion or not, it is the universe of words, the total structure of man’s verbal imagination, the world growing out of the human mind like a plant out of a seed, the imaginatively conceivable human world, paradise with its excluded demons. When Raphael is talking to Adam in Paradise Lost, Adam’s natural curiosity impels him to ask whether the other planets are inhabited. Raphael’s reply, which covers an inordinate amount of book 8, is an epitome of all bad teaching. Some may say this and some on the other hand may say that; there is much to be said on both sides; there are many books that discuss the matter (though they have not yet been written); the whole subject is very difficult, perhaps insoluble; Adam doesn’t need

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to know the answer anyway because it won’t be on his examination—in short, it seems clear that Raphael does not know either and lacks the courage to say so. Yet there is something to be said for this affable and evasive angelic doctor. Adam’s question is asked on the level of speculative or natural knowledge; Raphael is concerned with the higher practical reason which man uses in making decisions affecting his own freedom. Reason, Milton said in Areopagitica, is but choosing,15 a remark which so impressed Milton’s God that he does Milton the honour of quoting it in book 3. Raphael, like many today, feels that there is danger when natural or scientific knowledge outruns the moral maturity which keeps us in control of it. In front of Adam is a crucial test which will determine whether he is to remain free or throw his freedom away, a test for which he must concentrate on the Word of God within undistracted by the works of God without. To prepare him for this test, Raphael brings him knowledge of practical reason in the only form in which such knowledge is appropriate to a free man: the form of parable, addressed to what we should call the imagination. He tells Adam the story of the fall of Satan, and leaves Adam to make what use he will of the story. Adam, facing his crisis like a practical man, which means having little practical reason and less imagination, finds the story extremely remote compared to the warm and naked beauty of Eve. He falls “against his better knowledge,” which means in effect his literary knowledge, and proves incapable of making the turn from life to literature that would have preserved him in the properly cultivated world of paradise. Paradise thus disappears as an outward environment, but it revives within the mind, as a vision evoked by the Word which had created it in the first place. Hence Satan was wrong or irrelevant when he said “Space may produce new worlds.”16 The only new worlds for man are those which the free and disciplined use of words can help to create. Chapter 2 Manual of Style I In discussing ordinary speech, we identified three primary verbal rhythms: the verse rhythm dominated by recurring beat, the prose rhythm dominated by the sentence with its subject-predicate relation, and the associative rhythm dominated by the short and irregular phrase. Of these, the

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verse rhythm belongs, now, entirely to literature, and the prose rhythm both to literature and to ordinary speech. The associative rhythm belongs, in its pure form, to undeveloped ordinary speech or to the representing of such speech in fiction or drama; but in a conventionalized form, it can also become a third type of literary rhythm. We have now to study the literary roles of these three rhythms, keeping our eye on the literary aspect of the question of high, middle, and low styles that was raised in connection with ordinary speech. There are many other rhythms in literature besides these three, and if these three really are the primary ones, then the other rhythms are combinations of them, prose influenced by verse, verse influenced by prose, prose or verse influenced in either direction by the associative rhythm. The primary rhythms in themselves are intensely continuous, as we can see in the verse epic, the prose treatise, and such associative monologues as Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. We should expect to find the more discontinuous types of rhythm that predominate in, say, free verse or lyric among these secondary or mixed forms. We are now committed to a survey of the six possible combinations of rhythm, the subject having never to my knowledge been studied synoptically. Verse, in contrast to prose, employs a number of special devices to mark its repetition, such as rhyme and alliteration. In any normal form of continuous verse the number of such devices is restricted. Homer and Virgil use a quantitative metrical system, a scheme which excludes rhyme. Old English poetry uses an alliterative and accentual system which also excludes rhyme; or at least when rhyme occurs, as occasionally in such late poems as The Phoenix, it gives an effect of breakdown. Dryden and Pope use rhyme; consequently they avoid alliteration, except for parody, as in Pope’s “Great Cibber’s brazen, brainless brothers stand.”17 In normal prose, on the other hand, no such features appear at all, unless by accident. In prose the emphasis falls on the syntactical relations of words, hence the prose writer seeks variety of sound, and the sharp clash of rhyme or alliteration in prose is rejected by the ear at once. Let us begin with normal prose, the language of exposition and description which can be used for either literary or nonliterary purposes. Here is a passage from Darwin’s Origin of Species: The great and inherited development of the udders in cows and goats, in countries where they are habitually milked, in comparison with these organs in other countries, is probably another instance of the effects of use.

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Not one of our domestic animals can be named which has not in some country drooping ears; and the view which has been suggested, that the drooping is due to the disuse of the muscles of the ear, from the animal’s being seldom alarmed, seems probable.18

I have chosen this passage partly because it is prose at some distance from an associative rhythm. It is, in other words, emphatically written prose: anyone who talked like this would be thought pedantic. Still, it is solidly built in a Victorian model, and does not lack either rhythm or readability. Its rhythm is based on the sentence, and it is readable because that rhythm is consistent. We notice a bit of alliteration in it (“the drooping is due to the disuse”), and the alliteration gives a touch of a slightly more vigorous stress accent. The touch is welcome: Darwin has not tried to avoid it, and such a feature, if it appeared in dull or incompetent prose, would not have such a function. Yet we are confident that it is purely “accidental”: if we felt it was deliberate we should be annoyed with Darwin. There is an associative trace with the repetition in “probable”: this is not good prose style, but again it is unconscious, and so helps to assure us that we are proceeding with the right kind of scientific caution. Now let us take a passage from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Every circumstance of the secular games was skilfully adapted to inspire the superstitious mind with deep and solemn reverence. The long interval between them exceeded the term of human life; and as none of the spectators had already seen them, none could flatter themselves with the expectation of beholding them a second time. The mystic sacrifices were performed, during three nights, on the banks of the Tiber; and the Campus Martius resounded with music and dances, and was illuminated with innumerable lamps and torches . . . . A chorus of twenty-seven youths, and as many virgins, of noble families, and whose parents were both alive, implored the propitious gods in favour of the present, and for the hope of the rising generation; requesting, in religious hymns, that, according to the faith of their ancient oracles, they would still maintain the virtue, the felicity, and the empire of the Roman people.19

This is still expository prose, designed to convey information. But here we are aware of deliberate tricks of style, such as the doubling of adjec-

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tives and the antithetical balancing of clauses. If we feel annoyed with these devices, we should avoid reading Gibbon: they are his conventions, inseparable from his kind of readability. Gibbon is writing not direct prose but consciously rhetorical prose; or, as we say, he is a “stylist.” The stylizing of his sentences indicates a more self-conscious bid for literary fame. He expects to be read for entertainment, in the genuine sense, as well as instruction, and he expects this quality to keep him alive after his work as a historian has been superseded. As part of this he is asking us to develop a meditative interest in the theme of the decline of the world’s greatest ancient empire. It is the meditative quality in his work that makes his book a permanent possession of literature and not simply a contribution to scholarship: a quality of wisdom and insight rather than merely of learning, and one which may range in the mood of its expression from solemnity to irony. This meditative quality manifests itself in prose sentences with a distinctive roll in them which is unmistakably metrical. If we stop a sentence of Darwin’s in the middle, we feel chiefly that certain words are needed to complete the sense: if we stop a sentence of Gibbon’s in the middle, we feel that there is also a rhythmical space to be filled up, as we should if we interrupted the reading of verse. The rhetorical quality of Gibbon’s prose puts him close to oratory, and in oratory, though the controlling form is still prose, the chief appeal is to the emotions or the imagination, so that the meditative element is considerably increased. There is a corresponding increase in the metrical influence, especially in the repetitive passages that form the climaxes of so many orations. In (for instance) the Gettysburg address and in Churchill’s 1940 speeches, we see how the sentence rhythm breaks up into balanced clauses, or, in moments of emotional climax, into a series of phrase units, with a recurring accentual pattern that brings it close to verse. We remember Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people, for the people,” and Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight in the hills.” Here is a similar example from Samuel Johnson’s letter to Chesterfield: The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed until I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.20

In more than one sense these are “measured” words. We noticed a similar phrase unit in the monologues of Jingle and Bloom, but these are

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quite different in effect, because rhetorical, fully aware of a present and an invisible audience. It is possible, of course, to have a more introverted prose rhetoric with the same kind of rhythm, where the author pretends to be talking to himself but is actually working out a stylistic or rhetorical exercise, as in Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial or Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying. Oratory and metrical rhythm are as evident in Browne’s great meditation on death as they are in a contemporary baroque prose form, the oraison funèbre of Bossuet: The spirits put off their malice with their bodies, and Caesar and Pompey accord in Latin Hell, yet Ajax in Homer endures not a conference with Ulysses; and Deiphobus appears all mangled in Virgil’s Ghosts, yet we meet with perfect shadows among the wounded ghosts of Homer.21

Oratory, then, and rhetorical prose generally, is one of our secondary or mixed forms, a form of prose which shows a considerable influence from verse. One important influence on English rhetorical prose, Biblical parallelism, is a Hebrew verse form reproduced in prose. But suppose, now, that a more restless and experimental writer were to take a further step, and produce an extreme form of prose, as strongly affected by the characteristics of verse as it could be and still remain prose. This would give us what is known as euphuism, a form of prose in which all the rhetorical devices of verse, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and a half-metrical balancing of phrases and clauses, are employed. Such a prose would contain all the features that a normal prose writer would do his best to eliminate. Here is a euphuistic sentence from Robert Greene’s Card of Fancy: This loathsome life of Gwydonius, was such a cutting corrasive [sic] to his father’s careful conscience, and such a hapless clog to his heavy heart, that no joy could make him enjoy any joy, no mirth could make him merry, no prosperity could make him pleasant, but abandoning all delight, and avoiding all company, he spent his doleful days in dumps and dolours, which he uttered in these words.22

We are not surprised to learn that euphuism is of rhetorical origin, deriving partly from sermons, and a euphuistic story, true to its rhetorical ancestry, tends to keep breaking down into a series of harangues. The passage just quoted, as its final phrase indicates, leads up to a harangue, and in Greene’s story the hero and heroine eventually settle down to

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writing letters at each other, each letter a rhetorical exercise. Thus the increase of meditative and rhetorical elements in metrical prose tends to make for discontinuity. We noticed that “primary” forms of prose and verse, like the treatise and the epic, are continuous. One either reads or does not read the Origin of Species; but the Decline and Fall, with its greater meditative and literary interest, one can read more discontinuously, stopping here and there or going back, if one is familiar with it, to certain passages. In euphuism the discontinuity has begun to affect the structure. Along with discontinuity there comes a certain sense of paradox. Euphuism, as we remember from Falstaff,23 is easy to parody, but in euphuism itself there is a curious quality that is really a kind of selfparody. Its ingenuity makes it witty, and the wit may be conscious or, at times, unconscious: one wonders which it is in Lyly’s “which I cannot without blushing behold, or without blubbering utter.”24 Euphuism was an experimental style, and so had its vogue and then quickly went out of fashion, as experimental styles usually do. But what euphuism represents, the ornamenting of a prose rhythm with as many of the features of verse as possible, is a permanent technical resource of style, and will reappear whenever occasion seems to call for it. Here, handled with great tact and skill, is a passage of modern euphuism: the familiar opening of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

When oratorical prose is pushed to the limit of euphuism, an associative element begins to make itself felt in the writing. But here we discover a whole area of associative rhythm which we have not yet touched on. It is clear that associative speech, if sufficiently confused and off its guard, will often produce the unconscious wit of malapropism, a nice derangement of epitaphs.25 One step further takes us into the poetic process itself, the largely subconscious free association of words by sound out of which the schemata of poetry develop. In euphuism, where the underlying rhythm is that of prose, such associations are not subconscious but are deliberately added ornament, and this deliberate quality is the reason for the sense of self-parody in euphuism, as though, on Freudian

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principles, a normally suppressed mental process were made humorous by being openly displayed. Let us now reverse our direction, starting with a “normal” form of verse, a continuous verse which is equidistant from prose and from an associative rhythm, and see what happens to it as it falls under the influence of a secondary prose rhythm. The heroic couplet is perhaps the clearest example of such normal verse in English. In Pope, for instance, the writing always makes prose sense, but there is no point at which it either leans over towards prose or leans away from it. We hear at once the full ring of the rhyming couplet, and we know immediately what kind of thing to expect. There is a sense of constantly fulfilled expectation, a sense which is the opposite of obviousness. We do not know what Pope is going to say, but we know the units within which he is going to say it. There may be greater poetry than Pope’s, but Pope represents, in English, the perfect expression of what is here meant by verse. We also notice in Pope the general principle that the effect of perfected verse, of words moving along in obviously disciplined metrical patterns, is that of epigrammatic wit. When the rhyme disappears, as it does in blank verse, we take a step nearer to prose, and we find ourselves listening to a syncopated mixture of iambic pentameter and a prose semantic rhythm. The fight of these two rhythms against each other makes up much of the complexity of great blank verse writing. In some poets, including in their very different ways Milton, Keats, and Tennyson, the giving up of rhyme is counterbalanced by an elaborate pattern of assonance. Such a pattern cannot be reduced to a definite scheme like a couplet rhyme, but its presence is clear enough, and so is its absence in most of, say, Wordsworth and Browning. In the blank verse of these latter poets we find most clearly displayed another secondary or mixed form, verse so strongly affected by prose as to make it often difficult to tell, listening to it read aloud, whether we are listening to verse or to prose. This is the usual rhythmical basis of what is called the conversational style in poetry, a style which is not that of ordinary speech, but a specialized literary imitation of it: sermoni propriora, in a Horatian phrase applied by Coleridge to one of his poems.26 Again, such imitation may approach parody, as it does in the famous pedestrianisms of Wordsworth, e.g., “My drift, I fear, is scarcely obvious”27—although this line, which survived all the revisions of the Prelude, is a more calculated effect than it looks. In both Wordsworth and Browning there is a revolt against traditional snobbery in poetic lan-

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guage which gives point to an occasional artful sinking. We shall return to this question later. The usefulness of a conversational mixed rhythm for poetic drama is obvious, and in drama, where rhetorical differences between the speeches of different characters are so important, a discontinuous element in the writing becomes functional. We may now take the next step corresponding to euphuism, where we have a verse pattern as close to prose as it can be and still remain verse: where the prose element in the diction and syntax is so strong that the features of verse still remaining give the effect of continuous parody. This is the area of intentional doggerel, close to what in German is called knittelvers, though that term is more specific.28 Here are the opening lines of Donne’s Fourth Satire: Well; I may now receive, and die. My sin Indeed is great, but yet I have been in A purgatory, such as fear’d hell is A recreation to and scarce map of this.

No one hearing these lines read aloud would take them for heroic couplet. The rhymes are so weak that they vanish in the reading, and the strong syncopation destroys all suggestion of an iambic metre. We call the result intentional doggerel, because, as in real doggerel, the effective rhythm is prose and the features of rhyme and metre become grotesque. Such doggerel was, by the rules of Renaissance rhetoric, appropriate for satire, and there is no question of Donne’s not bothering to write his verse properly. More commonly, however, we find not the disappearing but the obtrusive rhyme, the effect of which is nearly always comic in English. Examples in Butler’s Hudibras, in Byron’s Don Juan, in Browning, Gilbert, and Ogden Nash come readily to mind. Here again, as with euphuism, we are moving in an atmosphere of parody and paradox, and also of discontinuity. Works of intentional doggerel are usually satires, and digression and constant change of theme and mood are part of the structure of satire. Again we are approaching the creative process, the associative babble out of which poetry comes, but, as with euphuism, are approaching it deliberately and in reverse, as it were. What makes intentional doggerel funny is its implied parody of real doggerel, or incompetent attempts at verse: the struggle for rhymes, even to the mispronouncing of words, the dragging in of ideas for the sake of a rhyme, the distorting

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of syntax in squeezing words into metre. Again, as in euphuism, a normally subconscious process becomes witty by being transferred to consciousness. Thus Ogden Nash on the cobra: This creature fills its mouth with venum And walks upon its duodenum. He who attempts to tease the cobra Is soon a wiser he, and sobra.29

II We have now, after examining the influence of prose and verse rhythms on each other, identified two common “secondary” rhythms, those of rhetorical prose and of conversational verse, as well as two more extreme, experimental, or “tertiary” rhythms, euphuism and satiric doggerel. The two secondary forms have little in common: verse influenced by prose is quite different in effect from prose influenced by verse. One of the most striking contrasts is that of speed: the influx of verse rhythm into prose, which makes prose oratorical, slows down the speed; the influx of prose into verse, which makes verse conversational, increases the speed. The two tertiary forms, on the other hand, have a good deal in common. We have now to try to see what forms result when the associative rhythm influences, or is influenced by, prose and verse. We shall start with the influence of verse on a predominantly associative rhythm. Here we face a new difficulty. The associative rhythm in itself is subliterary, and it seldom appears without some kind of verse or prose disguise. In genuinely simple societies there is a communal associative rhythm, of a type that survives in college yells and other crowd chants, and takes the form of simple patterns of repetition, including the device of the catalogue, which is one of the clearest signs of associative influence. Communal associative rhythms are so close to verse that we seldom meet them except after they have crystallized into verse, but incremental repetition and the use of refrains and nonsense words in ballads and folk songs show the associative strain in their ancestry. The nursery rhyme “This is the house that Jack built,” and such catalogue songs as “The twelve days of Christmas” are examples of preverse association.

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But from about 1750 on, literature becomes introspective and sophisticated enough to begin to make more use of the associative rhythm. What is called “free verse” is another secondary or mixed form, an associative rhythm strongly influenced by verse. Free verse is usually a series of phrases with no fixed metrical pattern, the influence of verse being shown in the fact that the phrases are rhythmically separated from one another, not connected by syntax as in prose. Such an associative phrase rhythm can be heard (with a bit of necessary typographical rearrangement) very clearly in Ossian: The wan cold moon rose in the east. Sleep descended on the youths. Their blue helmets glitter to the beam; The fading fire decays. But sleep did not rest on the king: He rose in the midst of his arms, And slowly ascended the hill To behold the flame of Sarno’s tower.30

In free verse the older forms of associative repetition soon reappear: we notice, for example, the fondness of Whitman and other free verse poets for the catalogue. The free verse imagists of the 1920s issued manifestos saying that poetry should be objective, visual, concentrated, precise, hard, clear, and rendering particulars exactly. As with a good deal of poetry written to a theory, the theory was a compensation for the practice: what imagism mainly produced was precisely the opposite, an associative hypnotic chant based on various devices of repetition. John Gould Fletcher’s “colour symphonies” are clear examples.31 In such catalogue poetry as this from Amy Lowell we have perhaps reached the “tertiary” form in this direction, associative writing which is as close to verse as it can be without actually becoming verse: Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, Lilac in me because I am New England . . . [Lilacs, ll. 95–102]

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When we come the other way, starting with normal verse and studying the influence of the associative rhythm on it, we are in the more familiar territory of the lyric. We noticed that some poets, including Milton and Keats, if they drop rhyme, remain within the orbit of normal verse by virtue of an indefinable but easily recognized sound pattern. Such a sound pattern, however, introduces a slight element of discontinuity, in the form of the “great line.” To encounter such a line as “Far into chaos and the world unborn” in Paradise Lost (bk. 7, l. 220) is an invitation to the sensitive reader to stop and meditate, to memorize the line and remember it later in other contexts than those of the poem. Such lines are sibylline or “touchstone” lines. What is more relevant here, their rhythm is a little further from prose and a little closer to the more withdrawn and introspective rhythm of association. In lyrical poetry, where the normal unit is the stanza, we have a more discontinuous structure, and one which allows of a larger number of the standard poetic devices. Alliteration, inter-rhyming, assonance, and refrain can all be added to lyric much more easily than to continuous verse. Lyric, therefore, is another secondary or mixed form, a form of verse, but more strongly influenced by the associative rhythm than continuous verse. Perhaps the clearest way to illustrate its characteristics will be to take the deliberately paradoxical example of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, where these characteristics appear in the context of an epic. The Spenserian stanza has a most complex rhyme scheme, and the sense of rhythmical discontinuity that such a stanza provides is emphasized by an alexandrine at the end, which rounds off each stanza and brings the forward movement to a full stop. Plainly, one is not intended to keep one’s finger wet ready to turn the pages of The Faerie Queene to see how the story comes out. One is expected to move along meditatively, lost in reverie, responding to the associative element in the alliteration and other patterns of repetition with which Spenser thickens his texture:32 Stout Priamond, but not so strong to strike, Strong Diamond, but not so stout a knight, But Triamond was stout and strong alike: On horseback used Triamond to fight And Priamond on foot had more delight, But horse and foot knew Diamond to wield: With curtaxe used Diamond to smite, And Triamond to handle spear and shield, But spear and curtaxe both us’d Priamond in field.

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Here is a form of verse in which associative patterns are becoming almost obsessive: that is, it brings us near the limit of associative influence on verse, to an extreme or “tertiary” mixed form like those of euphuism, intentional doggerel, and Amy Lowell’s rhapsodic rhythm. There is no name for this form: perhaps we could call it echolalia. Echolalia in Spenser is particularly effective for temptation scenes, like those of Acrasia and Despair: a very clear example is this five-part madrigal in the description of the Bower of Bliss, the five parts being named in the alexandrine of the previous stanza: “Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree”: The joyous birds shrouded in cheerful shade, Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet; Th’ angelical soft trembling voices made To th’ instruments divine respondence meet: The silver sounding instruments did meet With the bass murmur of the water’s fall: The waters fall with difference discreet, Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call: The gentle warbling wind low answered to all.

A stanza of a similar type (2.4.35) was quoted in a contemporary rhetoric book before The Faerie Queene itself was published. The purpose of a deliberate rhetorical exercise in such a scene is not simply to cast a spell but to suggest the paradox of something which does cast a spell and yet remains evil. We notice the identical rhyme “meet” in the above stanza, probably the only word in the language that would have been meet for such a purpose. Identical rhymes usually give the effect of a clashing or blurring of sound, and we find similar blurrings in the drowsy narcotic scenes in Spenser which mark the assimilation of the stanzaic epic to the dreamy romance. The assonance of “noise” and “annoy” is as correct in the description of the cave of Morpheus as it would be incorrect elsewhere: No other noise, nor peoples’ troublous cries, As still are wont t’annoy the walled town Might there be heard . . .33

It is a general principle of rhetoric that dream states are expressed by intensified sound patterns, as in Pearl or Kubla Khan. In other poets too

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we find repetitions of sound that would simply be blemishes in a less associative type of verse but are in order when we are close to reverie, as in Collins’s Ode to Evening: With brede ethereal wove O’erhang his wavy bed

or in the last line of Keats’s Ode to Melancholy: And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Dream poetry has a curious bifocal quality to it: the ingenuity involved in its elaborations is like the ingenuity of the dream itself. It seems charming, in the original sense of the word, as long as we are bound by its spell, but when we escape from that spell into full consciousness we see the elaboration as witty ingenuity. Thus in Poe, who naturally comes to mind when we think of associative poetry, we find rhetorical devices so obtrusive that it is difficult not to analyze them in detail, as Poe did himself. Once again, as with euphuism and satiric doggerel, we are in a world of discontinuity, paradox, and verbal wit. Poe’s critical theory is a theory of the essential discontinuity of all poetry: The Bells and The Raven are dreamlike poems which are yet close to light verse, and the line from The City in the Sea, “The viol, the violet, and the vine,” is pure Finnegans Wake punning. Ernest Dowson is said to have called this line the ideal of a line of verse, which is probably correct. That is, to be looking for the ideal line in whatever language shows a strongly associative tendency, which only a line as associative as this is likely to satisfy. Similarly with Swinburne: We shift and bedeck and bedrape us, Thou art noble and nude and antique; Libitina thy mother, Priapus Thy father, a Tuscan and Greek. We play with light loves in the portal, And wince and relent and refrain; Loves die, and we know thee immortal, Our Lady of Pain.34

This is not exactly satiric doggerel, for the context is solemn, and it is not incompetent doggerel, for Swinburne is too competent a poet. Like Poe’s

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The Bells and The Raven, it is dreamlike and witty at once, a kind of verbal blues or pensive jazz. Echolalia is common in religious verse, for a reason that will not surprise us by now: repetition of sound increases the sense of meditation, or concentrating the mind on a single object or idea. Here the two states of dreaming and waking consciousness focus into one, the state of vision, or its auditory equivalent. In Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, and Eliot,35 we find moods which express intense religious emotion through paradoxical wit, which latter seems a part of the emotion and not some thing “yoked by violence,” in Johnson’s phrase,36 to it. Examples are familiar: there are Donne’s intricate conceits about the dying of death and the corners of the round earth, Herbert’s visual conceits of poems in the shape of altars or wings, and a curious tendency to jingle and sound clash, ranging from Donne’s pun on his own name, “When thou hast done, thou hast not done,” to such phrases as “it tosses up our losses,” or “words, after speech, reach” in Eliot’s Quartets.37 A more elaborate example, Hopkins’s “Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,”38 associates the paradoxes of incarnation and redemption with (among half a dozen other allusions) the identity of substance in matchwood and diamond, the incongruity of which is further emphasized by the sound clashes. Such simultaneous use of reverence and joke in religious verse goes back to the puns of the Old Testament and the ambivalence of the ancient oracles. Associative rhythms move towards prose in much the same way that they move towards verse. Criticism does not appear to have any such term as “free prose” to describe an associative rhythm influenced, but not quite organized, by the sentence. But that free prose exists is clear enough, and in fact it develops much earlier than free verse. We find some free prose in personal letters, where the tendency to associative monologue is so strong that convention has had to devise a great number of ways for getting a letter stopped. We must close now and do something else; we are in good health and hope you are the same; and we finally reach yours sincerely like a liner being towed into port. But the letter is still a form of communication, and free prose is more obvious in diaries, especially diaries kept by people of no great literary pretensions who are not thinking of publication. The seventeenth-century Yankee Samuel Sewall kept a diary of this sort, and it is easy to see not only an associative style but an associative habit of mind as, on a voyage across the Atlantic, he records random impressions one after

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another, not in the more causal sequence that prose would demand: Tuesday Nov. 27, sail East-South-East, and sometimes East and North. Ait my wives Pastry, the remembrance of whom is ready to cut me to the heart. The Lord pardon and help me . . . Friday, Dec. 7th, very fair day: sail N. East. Breakfast on one of my wives Plum Cakes. Read Dr. Preston Saints Support of sorrowful Sinners. One of the Geese dyes yesterday, or to day. Mrs. Baxter is better . . .39

In literature free prose is particularly congenial to prose satire, with its disintegrating approach to form and logical connection. We find it in Rabelais, and even Swift, at the very summit of English prose, seems to collapse with relief into the associative baby talk of the Journal to Stella. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is a tremendous masterpiece of free prose, where quotations, references, allusions, titles of books, Latin tags, short sharp phrases, long lists, and catalogues are all swept up in one vast exuberant associative wave. In Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where nuances of gesture and posture are as important as the dialogue, the quick darting rhythm is intensely associative. When Corporal Trim is inspired to a speech on mortality, the style is anything but oratorical, for Sterne has too many other things to watch: Are we not, continued Trim, looking still at Susannah—are we not like a flower of the field—a tear of pride stole in betwixt every two tears of humiliation—else no tongue could have described Susannah’s affliction—is not all flesh grass?—’Tis clay,—’tis dirt.—They all looked directly at the scullion,—the scullion had just been scouring a fish-kettle.—It was not fair.— —What is the finest face that ever man looked at!—I could hear Trim talk so for ever, cried Susannah,—what is it! (Susannah laid her hand upon Trim’s shoulder)—but corruption?—Susannah took it off.40

A glance at Sterne’s expressive punctuation and his almost continuous use of the dash, which he puts even with a period, shows that the rhythmical unit of his writing is not the sentence. In free prose the punctuation is the main clue to the speed at which the associative process is assumed to be travelling. The slow-moving meditations of Bloom in Ulysses are punctuated by periods; Sterne, and Jingle in Dickens, rely on the dash; Burton, still faster, uses mainly the comma, and the uninhibited

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rush through the mind of Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses has no punctuation at all, giving the whole book the musical feature of a presto finale. After Sterne, whose revolution in prose was comparable to that of his contemporary Ossian in verse, associative and prose rhythms mingle in fiction, particularly in “stream-of-consciousness” fiction, where either rhythm may take the lead. We also have more extreme forms of free prose, with echolalia and repetition of sound and of thematic words, of a kind, again, often appropriate to a religious setting. Prayer in particular, where the writer is turning his back on his audience, and where his state of mind is one of fixed concentration, often develops such extreme forms. Thus from Donne’s Meditations: . . . thou callest Gennezareth, which was but a Lake, and not salt, a Sea; so thou callest the Mediterranean Sea, still the great Sea, because the inhabitants saw no other Sea; they that dwelt there, thought a Lake, a Sea, and the others thought a little Sea, the greatest . . .41

Let us now return to normal prose and study the associative influence on it. We began this survey with a passage of formal or “written” prose standing at some distance from the associative rhythm. In such prose as Darwin’s the sentence rhythm is very clear, to the point of being obtrusive. Here, in contrast, is a passage from Bernard Shaw: After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton.42

We notice the tone of ordinary conversation with the reader, the easy use of parenthesis, the unforced repetition of certain words and ideas. All these are features of associative writing, and hence bring the prose closer to normal articulate speech. A piece of continuous prose, whatever its tone, looks at first sight like a dictatorial form, in which there is a one-sided and undisturbed monologue proceeding from the author. Looking more carefully, however, we can see that in adopting an expository form the author is really putting

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himself on a level with his reader, with whom the continuity of his rhythm keeps him in a point-for-point relation. If a writer wishes to suggest a kind of aloofness; if he wishes to suggest that it is the reader’s business to come to him and not his business to come to the reader; if he wishes to suggest that there are riches in his mind which his actual writing gives no more than a hint of, he will have to adopt a different kind of prose style. Such a style would be discontinuous, breaking up a straightforward exposition into a sequence of aphorisms, usually with typographical breaks in between. The use of discontinuous aphorisms suggests to the reader that here is something he must stop and meditate on, aphorism by aphorism, that he must enter into the writer’s mind instead of merely following his discourse. What one says is surrounded by silence, as though a hidden context of mental activity lay behind every formulated sentence. And here, at last, the more technical and stylistic problems of this chapter begin to connect with the social and educational problems of the previous one. This discontinuous aphoristic style has been in all ages and cultures the standard rhetoric of wisdom. There are different levels of it, just as there are different levels of wisdom, and on the upper levels we can see the lower ones as relatively commonplace. Perhaps we should reverse the words “upper” and “lower,” because the usual metaphors contrast the deep with the shallow, the profound with the superficial. On the shallowest levels we find clichés, formulations that may once have represented mental activity but are now only substitutes for it, automatic responses that give those who are not thinking the illusion of thought. Next come the accepted ideas, the Bouvard-and-Pécuchet instinct to be justified by faith in rumour. Next are the proverbs which express the inherited wisdom of simple and therefore deeply conservative societies. Proverbs have been central to verbal culture since the days of ancient Egypt, and, as we can see from the proverbial books of the Old Testament, they revolve around a conception of wisdom as the tried and tested way of behaviour, in contrast to the folly which seizes on an old fallacy as a new discovery. Proverbial philosophy is closer to literature than to actual philosophy, because the poet or literary artist seeks, not the unexplored idea, but the inevitable expression of the familiar idea. The difference in level between shallow platitude and profound aphorism makes for a good deal of parody in this region of literature. Modern wit would be considerably impoverished if it did not have clichés and accepted ideas to make fun of or reverse. Any comedy of Oscar Wilde

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will furnish a great number of such inverted clichés, and, on a more intense imaginative plane, Blake’s Proverbs of Hell43 are parodied reversals of popular commonplaces of the “nothing in excess” or “you travel most safely by the middle road” variety. This feature of parodied commonplace may be very old: the real form of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible appears to be a collection of stock proverbs subjected to analysis in the light of the author’s conception of the real meaning of wisdom as the ability to see through “vanity.” The particular type of aphorism we call the epigram is characterized by a wit which operates by oversimplifying its subject, usually by assimilating it to some grammatical feature of expression, such as analogy or antithesis or pun. In Emerson’s comment on critics, “The borer on our peach trees bores that she may deposit an egg: but the borer into theories and institutions and books bores that he may bore,”44 it is pun. In Shaw’s “The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery,”45 it is antithesis. In Blake’s “Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity,”46 it is analogy. Naturally philosophers themselves, being lovers of wisdom, are much attached to the discontinuous aphoristic form. Not only did Western philosophy itself grow out of the aphoristic forms used by the great preSocratics, but the tradition continues at least in Bacon and Spinoza, and in our day in Wittgenstein. Here the more purely philosophical concern shows itself in the attention given to sequence and logical progression. The literary interest tends to detach the aphorism from its context. Humanistic education ransacked the great writers for sententiae or adagia, profound, witty, or inspiring comments on the human situation. The sententious approach to literature is still the popular one, accounting for the wide appeal of such poems as Kipling’s If or Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, and even the cultivated man’s ability to frame his own conceptions is regularly accompanied by the ability to quote, to find parallel expressions in his cultural heritage. The proverb is a counsel of action, and popular proverbs are normally counsels of prudent action, designed for those who are without great advantages of birth or wealth, and so need signposts indicating the safest roads. But the connection of the proverb with action, the fact that in it quid credas is also quid agas, makes the aphoristic style the inevitable form of rhetoric for religion also. It is the appropriate form for the sermons of religious teachers, including Jesus and Buddha, of whom it seems for

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some reason significant to say that they do not write. Here the aphorisms are related to a total vision of life (quo tendas) and so become more than pragmatically moral. As the philosopher’s bent is revealed in the importance he attaches to sequence and logical progression when he uses aphorisms, so the religious bent is existential. The aphorisms are formulated at certain times of the teacher’s life, to answer a question, to comment on an incident, to articulate a moment of significance. In modern literature, an important by-product of the aphoristic tradition is a form of oracular writing which for some reason is more common in French and German literature than in English, represented by, among others, Paul Fort, St. John Perse, René Char, and Rimbaud’s Saison en Enfer. This is classified, no doubt rightly, as poetry, but its rhythmical basis is an aphoristic and associative form of prose. The use of prose rather than verse as the rhythmical basis for such writing as the Saison en Enfer has an inherently paradoxical quality in it which indicates that it is one of our “tertiary” forms. Just as extreme realism or trompe l’oeil in painting seems to acquire, when pursued far enough, the unnatural glittering clarity of hallucination, so it is prose, the rhythm of ordinary consciousness, which provides the corresponding quality in literature. The closely related Also Sprach Zarathustra shows the connection of the literary form with religious and prophetic rhetoric. The more extreme and experimental aphoristic prose becomes, the more elusive and paradoxical the meaning. We finally reach a point at which the associative influence is so strong that the appearance of prose has an effect of parody similar to what we noticed in other tertiary forms. One of René Char’s aphorisms, for instance, is simply “Devoirs infernaux,” though the English translation, “What I have to do is hell,” rescues it for prose.47 Here we are close to the koan of Zen Buddhism or the mantra of Hinduism, where a baffling and paradoxical verbal formula is proposed as a subject for meditation. Such techniques have for their object the attempt to break down or through the whole structure of verbal articulation, and we are reminded of Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les sens.”48 But usually with poets such enigmatic phrases seem to have some connection with the creative process. Yeats is a good example: Mallarmé’s phrase about the trembling of the veil of the temple and the oracle that emerges from the darkness of Axël about our servants doing our living for us49 have sent many a critic off on a quite mistaken quest for the “influence” of Mallarmé and Axël on Yeats.

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We have distinguished the problems of ordinary speech from those of literature, but the same distinction creates a difference of emphasis in literature itself. Poets have always disagreed about the relation of literature to ordinary speech. One view, represented in our day by Valéry, is that literature as compared with music is under a great disadvantage in not having a separate verbal language. The sounds of violins and pianos are in a different world from the sounds of ordinary life, but the poet, using the same words that everyone else uses, is in the position of a composer who has to make his symphony out of street noises. Hence, for Valéry, what is usually called poetic diction has a functional role in literature, as it attempts to set up a language within a language which is especially designed for poetry. The opposite tendency is represented by Wordsworth’s familiar preface,50 where we are told that poetry should avoid all special diction and employ the language really used by men. These two tendencies51 in literature we may call the hieratic and the demotic. The hieratic tendency seeks out formal elaborations of verse and prose. The hieratic poet finds, with Valéry, that the kind of poetry he wants to write depends, like chess, on complex and arbitrary rules, and he experiments with patterns of rhythm, rhyme, and assonance, as well as with mythological and other forms of specifically poetic imagery. The demotic tendency is to minimize the difference between literature and speech, to seek out the associative or prose rhythms that are used in speech and reproduce them in literature. With this distinction in mind, let us sum up what we have said about literary rhythms and go back to the problem we were led to in the last chapter, the problem of what is meant by the traditional distinction of low, middle, and high styles. This time we are approaching the question as a technical problem in literary criticism, though we have given reasons for thinking that it is of considerably more than technical importance. In demotic literature the “low” style is, in general, the literary use of colloquial and familiar speech. Wordsworth’s preface, with its references to humble and rustic life, emphasizes the affinity of his style with certain social classes, and expresses a defiance of the traditional snobbery which on social grounds instinctively says, with the cronies of Tony Lumpkin, “Damn anything that’s low.” 52 Coleridge’s famous criticism of Wordsworth supplies a link essential to our argument but missing in

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Wordsworth’s, that ordinary speech is one thing and the literary use of it another.53 The moral considerations advanced in the previous chapter about the use of associative rhythms in ordinary speech clearly have no relevance to a deliberate and conscious employment of such rhythms for literary purposes. Wordsworth’s approach to low style is normally connected with his literary development of ballad and broadside conventions. When he is writing in his own person, as in The Prelude, he keeps as a rule to middle style. In some writers the use of middle style freezes into a rigid decorum, where passages for which a familiar or colloquial language would be appropriate seem to pose a kind of dilemma, with the writer having to choose between euphemism and bathos. Even Wordsworth runs into this difficulty occasionally in The Excursion. In a good deal of fiction and drama, especially in the nineteenth century, the difference between genteel and vulgar idiom, or between low-style dialogue and the author’s middle-style narrative and description, may be so sharp as to divide the work into different languages. Whitman’s Song of Myself is an example of a work which is theoretically in low style, but is actually in middle style with a number of deliberate colloquialisms inserted to provide a lower tone. At other times the author may assimilate his own style to that of internal characters, as Hemingway does; or, as in Huckleberry Finn, tell a story through the spoken idiom of one character; or, as on the famous opening page of A Sentimental Journey, take or pretend to take the reader at once into his intimate personal life. Low demotic style is also found in intentional doggerel, from Hudibras to Sweeney Agonistes. One very sophisticated and difficult form of low demotic has a particular relevance to our present argument. This is the attempt in fiction to isolate and catch the steady stream of querulous, neurotic, compulsive babble coming from what we have called the ego, that is, a consciousness imprisoned in the restrictive self, and which, being conscious, knows that it is imprisoned. The voice of this ego is first heard, to my knowledge (so far as anything can be first in literature), in the book of Dostoevsky whose title is usually translated as Notes from Underground. A fine contemporary expression of it is Samuel Beckett’s trilogy, known in English as Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. As the voice of the ego is the voice of tedium itself, it is something of a tour de force to make it interesting to a reader, and so it is usually presented indirectly or in symbol. In Forster’s A Passage to India, for instance, it is symbolized by the echo in the Marabar caves, described as “Something very old and

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very small . . . Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity—the undying worm itself—the serpent of eternity made of maggots.”54 Low hieratic style, on the other hand, takes us into the area of creative association, the babble of echoing sounds out of which poetry eventually comes, and which are reproduced, sometimes with deliberate or conscious wit, in the experimental or “tertiary” forms we have been discussing: euphuism, echolalia, and the like. In prose satire, from Rabelais on, we often meet associative passages in macaronic or other experimental forms of language. Here again, as with low demotic, the author may employ the style himself or represent it dramatically through characters. It is rare to find, at least before the twentieth century, an author employing it himself, except in very special cases, Smart’s Jubilate Agno being one of the most notable in English. The greatest dramatic example of it is certainly Finnegans Wake, an extraordinary monument of associative writing, and a kind of encyclopedia of experimental styles. “Low” style, we see, does have about it, on its demotic side, some of its traditional associations with the speech of uneducated or inarticulate people. But if the term is to be of any real use in criticism, we have to think of “low” style as concerned primarily with words in process, language which for one reason or another deliberately falls short of or bypasses conventionally articulate communication. It is heavily influenced by the associative rhythm because, as we saw in the previous chapter, the associative rhythm represents the process of bringing ideas into articulation, in contrast to prose or verse, which normally represent a finished product. Low style is also the area of free verse and free prose, where we consent to a suspending of conventional rules in order to gain the advantages of experiment, verisimilitude, or a deeper exploration of society or the writer’s mind. Without it, literature would tend to become identified with conventional rhetorics. Middle demotic style needs no comment: what is meant by it here, the ordinary language of communication which is at once plain and cultivated, should be clear enough by now. Its normal medium is expository prose or narrative or didactic verse. Middle hieratic is the ordinary formal language of poetic expression. Much of it consists of what Hopkins, in one of his brilliant early letters, calls “Parnassian”55—the consciously literary style that a poet develops and gets to use out of habit. Such a style may go wrong in trying to deal with familiar or commonplace events for which a demotic style would be more appropriate, as in the description of fish-selling in Tennyson’s Enoch Arden that was noted by

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Bagehot as over-ornate.56 This is one of the occupational hazards of hieratic style, and one that we are sensitive to in this demotic age, just as earlier ages were sensitive to the low or “mean.” Deliberately rhetorical prose, of the type already discussed, belongs here too. Middle style represents literature as an art of conventional communication, so that its rhetoric tends to become either habitual or transparent, or both, and it expresses itself primarily in a sense of structure. For structure is what our attention is focused on as soon as we become accustomed to a style or do not notice it. Perhaps the most concentrated of all middle-style techniques is that represented by the formulaic epic and its development in the Homeric poems. Blake once suggested that there were no epigrams in Homer:57 this may be an overstatement, but it is true that in Homer expression is subordinated to theme and structure to a degree unapproached in more self-conscious literature. The combining and recombining of conventional metrical units makes possible a repetitive intensity that in modern art can be matched only in certain qualities of music. The last line of the Iliad: “Thus they buried Hector, tamer of horses,” is one of the most deeply impressive lines in literature, simply because it is the last line of the Iliad. The units out of which it is constructed are epic commonplaces, just as the last measure of a Mozart or Beethoven symphony might be a simple perfect cadence, identical with the last measure of nothing by nobody. As we listen to demotic language, we are constantly, if unconsciously, making judgments along a certain scale of impression. At the bottom of the scale we have: this is commonplace; everybody knows that; we’ve heard it all before. Next come: this logically follows; yes, I see that. Occasionally, however, something emerges that seems to have a magic circle drawn around it, expressing something in us as well as in itself, which halts the progress of an argument and demands meditation. Whenever we have this feeling we are, or think we are, in the presence of high demotic style. Here we have reached the pinnacle of the ladder of sententiae which we discussed a few pages back. For high demotic style is essentially aphoristic, whether it is in verse or prose. It deals, almost necessarily, with the traditional and the familiar, and with those moments of response to what we feel most deeply in ourselves, whether love, loyalty, or reverence. There is thus an ethical factor in high demotic style which the term “sublime” expresses. Such points of concentration do not differ in kind from middle or low style,

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and hence do not violate the context from which they emerge. They are of relatively short duration, as they do not depend on sequence or connection. What they do depend on is the active participation of the reader or hearer: they are points which the reader recognizes as appropriate for the focusing of his own consciousness. They are moments when the normal detachment that separates reader from writer gives way to the reader’s feeling that he has not simply understood the writer, but has entered into some kind of common ground or order with him. Questions of how the simplicity of high style differs from commonplace, of how the genuine differs from the pinchbeck, of what obligation it is that compels our active participation, and the like, have been discussed at least since Longinus. High style is essentially discontinuous, and nothing is written throughout in high demotic style except sacred writings, which owe their continuous height to social acceptance. Such acceptance expands the random remarks and local allusions of the original into statements of universal significance. Because of social acceptance, Paul’s views on the headgear of women in Corinth or the method of appointing elders in Galatia have acquired a tremendous resonance in Christian churches,58 and the disagreements of Engels and Dühring, or Lenin’s advice on the tactics of a strike,59 have gained a similar universally authoritative quality in Communist countries. The literary form of religious revelation, such as the Mosaic law or the Koran, is also discontinuous, breaking down into specific commandments or illustrations. In the Christian Gospel, where a divine personality is presented, the only possible literary form would be that of a discontinuous sequence of epiphanies, which is the form that modem critics have discovered in it. For high hieratic style, a somewhat cacophonous term to which I seem to be committed, some more modern word like “intensity” is better than sublimity. We have high style in this mode when we feel the sense of what Joyce calls epiphany60 in a secular and specifically literary context, a momentary co-ordination of vision, a passage which stands out from its context demanding to be not merely read but possessed. The emphasis here is more individual than social, and the ethical element in the response less important. The lyric attempts to isolate this kind of intensity; in a longer poem certain passages stand out with a distinctive kind of luminousness, to which Horace’s abominable phrase “purple patch”61 hardly does justice. It was Poe who recognized the affinity of the lyric and the intense passages in longer poems, and suggested that the mid-

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dle-style construction out of which these passages emerged was really subpoetic.62 Several modern poets have followed up this suggestion, and Eliot, Pound, Valéry, Rilke, and others write discontinuous poems in which everything that must be said, in Valéry’s phrase,63 has been eliminated. The continuity, in effect, has been handed over to the reader. This technique gives to such fragmented and discontinuous poetry an oracular quality, corresponding closely to the aphoristic style of high demotic. In the Eliot Quartets, however, we notice that brief passages of lyrical intensity alternate with passages written in a deliberately prosaic and middle-style rhetoric. This reminds us of a more traditional method of stressing the emotional contrast between intensity and continuity—the method of writing a series of lyrics or parts of lyrics connected by prose narrative or commentary, employed by two poets who have profoundly influenced Eliot: Dante in the Vita Nuova, and St. John of the Cross in The Dark Night of the Soul. The poetry in the latter work is related to the Song of Songs in the Bible, and derives much of its authoritative tone from its predecessor. Works based on an interconnection of oracular poetry and prose commentary are usually found in or near the area of religion (even Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine takes this form). Poe’s theory that a long poem is a contradiction, to which we have just referred, is an attempt to define high style in purely hieratic terms. He separates poetry as sharply as possible from other verbal structures, recognizes the discontinuity of high style, and finds its basis in feeling alone, as everything we have associated with high demotic style has for him to be ruled out of poetry. Our present argument seems to indicate the existence of two kinds of “high” literary experience, one demotic and one hieratic, one in general verbal practice and one more strictly confined to literature; one a recognition of something like verbal truth and the other a recognition of something like verbal beauty. High style in demotic writing depends largely on social acceptance: it is the apotheosis of the proverb, the axioms that a society takes to its business and bosom. Hieratic writing is more dependent on canons of taste and aesthetic judgment, admittedly more flexible and more elusive than counsels of behaviour. For the genuine and sincere writer, everything he writes is in high style: he means every line with the maximum of intensity, and is apt to become exasperated with readers whose reception of his work is tepid or selective. In an art of communication, however, social acceptance is still necessary to make such intensity permanent. The development of a

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community of taste is slower and more haphazard than the development of a community of behaviour, but it still takes place. Arnold’s “touchstones” of high style are subjectively intuited and their merit is indemonstrable, like all critical value judgments, but still a community can respond to them, can feel that Arnold’s taste, within obvious limits, is accurate and that his quotations are accurate.64 The example of Homer, given a few pages back, suggests that Poe’s theory, however useful as a guide to a certain kind of technique, is inadequate as an observation on literature in general. The theory implies that a “great” long poem is a poem in which great passages tear themselves loose from their context. We notice that of Arnold’s touchstones, some are demotic, some hieratic, and some, like the passage from the Chanson de Roland, are representative of a certain level of writing. This last is a feature of Arnold’s theory which makes it more complete than Poe’s. The touchstone passage may also be related to a context, and in its context, the touchstone guarantees that the whole work in which it occurs is worth our attention. In fact a line may be a “touchstone” and yet worthless or unintelligible apart from its context, the stock example being “Never, never, never, never, never” from King Lear. The implication is that the authority of high style depends in part on the unity of the work in which it is to be found. No brilliant passage carries real authority unless it seems, in the long run, to emerge inevitably from its context. But if high style demands a context, the entire work in which it occurs has its context too. The passage in high style is not simply a recognition of truth or beauty in verbal form: it is also a kind of recognition scene in the reader’s verbal experience. What implications this has for the theory of criticism we shall try to discuss next. Chapter 3 All Ye Know on Earth I Literary criticism is more complicated than most disciplines. As a rule we begin with a student and what he studies, confronting each other in a relation of subject and object. But criticism presents us first of all with a triangle. A subject and an object, a group of people called writers and a class of things called in the aggregate literature, are being studied from a third position by people like us. People like us form the audience or

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public which is the final cause of literature, if there is such a thing: the total body of social response which every writer assumes by the act of writing. It is theoretically possible to write to please oneself without thought of an audience. What is not possible is that such work should be distinguishable, in its conventions and genres, from that of other writers who please to live or instruct to preserve their self-respect. I can think of one author who asserted that his book was a private dream written out merely to gratify himself, but this was Bunyan speaking of The Pilgrim’s Progress, not usually regarded as an example of pure self-expression. Not only is it didactic and allegorical, but its typed characters, Talkative, Brisk, By-Ends, have much more in common with the Fopling Flutters and Tunbelly Clumsies of contemporary comedy than Bunyan would ever have admitted or realized. At present we shall represent the literary public by a single sympathetic and informed person, whom we shall call the critic. The critic, then, is exposed to a series of impressions from literature, and by responding to these as carefully as possible, he develops, by practice, a skill and flexibility, for which the traditional term in English is taste. Taste, when acquired, may in turn lead to general theories about the process or products of literature, if general theory happens to be the bent of a critic’s interest. The impact of literature on a critic, and the critic’s responses to it, make up an area of criticism that is best called rhetorical. Rhetorical criticism in this sense is concerned with the “effects” of literature: it is in other words practical criticism. Reversing the direction of this flow of literature towards the critic gives us the conception of the study of literature as organized by a theory of criticism, which is what is usually meant by poetics. A critic may have precise and candid taste and yet be largely innocent of theory. Charles Lamb was such a critic, and one feels even that his lack of theory was an advantage to him. Coleridge, on the contrary, was one of the greatest of critical theorists, and yet had much less of Lamb’s ability to respond directly to poetry without being confused by moral, religious, and political anxieties. But theory, even when the theorist has a shaky practical foundation, is still essential to criticism, for it is only theory that can define, or outline, its specific subject. Aristotle, who founded poetics, wrote a separate treatise on rhetoric, a treatise concerned more with lawcourts and objective truth than with literature; yet he recognized the overlapping of the two areas, and in the Poetics sets aside certain critical problems as belonging to rhetoric. But the Poetics as

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a whole separates the area of literature (or “poetry”) from other forms of verbal expression. Rhetoric alone cannot do this. In rhetoric all the problems of discursive writing—the author’s intention, the direct appeal to the reader, moral value, evidence, and truth—get mixed up with literary problems. From the lectures of the sophist to the textbooks of the sophomore, rhetoric has dealt not solely with literature but with “effective communication” in words as a whole. If we keep our figure of the triangle in mind, we can see that there are two aspects of literary rhetoric: oratory, or the persuasion of an audience, and ornament, or the figuring of speech. This distinction is the basis of the one we made earlier between demotic and hieratic literature. There are two corresponding aspects of poetic theory, related to a common context usually identified with nature. These two emphases are often referred to by the terms Romantic and Classical. The Classical emphasis, established in Aristotle, is aesthetic (“hieratic”) in the sense that it is focused on the thing made, and assumes an emotional balance or detachment which we see in such aspects of it as catharsis. The fundamental conception of this approach is that of “imitation,” which is concerned with the relation of the poem to its context in nature. The other emphasis goes back to Plato, but its chief ancient spokesman is Longinus, whose interest in the personal relation of author and hearer and in the category of experience he calls the “sublime” has run through all its history. This emphasis is psychological rather than aesthetic, and is based on participation rather than on detachment. It thinks of a poem as an “expression,” to use Croce’s term,65 rather than as Aristotle’s techne or artefact, and its fundamental conception, corresponding to “imitation,” is “creation,” a metaphor which relates the poet to his context in nature. The two conceptions of “nature” differ correspondingly. The mimetic tradition thinks of the poem in a context of physical nature, of which we are, to some degree, spectators. It thinks of nature as a structure or system into which the poem fits by “imitation,” however imitation is conceived. The creative tradition tends to think of nature as a total creative process of which the poet’s creation forms part. The mimetic tradition uses metaphors of objective order; the creative tradition uses metaphors of organism and genesis. Most critics between Ben Jonson and Samuel Johnson are on the mimetic side, and speak of nature as an external model for the poet to “follow.” Romantic critics speak very differently. “Believe me,” says Coleridge, “you must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the

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higher sense and the soul of man.”66 Or, as Shelley seems to come close to saying, trees may be made by any fool of a demiurge, but only God, if there is a God, can make a poem.67 The mimetic tradition, stressing as it does the detachment of the work of art from the person who contemplates it, can hardly avoid expressing itself in figures of eyesight and space. The tag ut pictura poesis68 runs all through mimetic criticism, with its overtones of a controlled hallucination. In the poetry and criticism of the last century, metaphors of vision in daylight were carried to extraordinary lengths: in Rimbaud’s doctrine that the poet is to se faire voyant and produce the illumination;69 in later theories of “imagism”; in the conception of poetic objectivity in Eliot,70 which is closely linked with the “clear visual images” he ascribes to Dante. The creative tradition, though often attracted towards the same language, makes more use of aural and temporal metaphors, stresses the importance of the speaking voice and the evocative quality of rhythm and sound, and has more tolerance for the sense of mystery, obscurity, and magic, for unexplored resources of meaning, and other synonyms for hearing in the dark. The mimetic tradition, in short, stresses the product in which the completed form of the chicken is prior to the egg; for the creative tradition, being interested in process, the priority of the egg is what is obvious. In all such arguments a fair hearing should be granted to both sides, since in the meantime both chicken and egg exist. Our best critical models from this point of view are eclectic ones, like the Elizabethans who put statements about imitation derived at third hand from Aristotle directly beside statements about creation derived at about fifth hand from Plato. Or the eighteenth-century critics who paired off the “sublime,” the sense of something greater than ourselves that we feel impelled to participate in, with the “beautiful,” the more limited and manageable object that can be studied with less sense of involvement. The critic, therefore, is confronted with an odd mixture of participation and detachment, which seem equally important, yet hard to reconcile with each other. If we think of the poem as an imitation of nature, we can see that a work of art splits nature in two by imitating it. If a landscape painter is “imitating” a real landscape, he imitates a part of nature which remains outside the picture. Nature in this sense is the environment of art, and its position as an environment is the source of all such metaphors as “holding the mirror up to nature.” Nature as environment in space is also, in

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time, the area of the artist’s individual experience. In this context nature is the external occasion of the work of art. It provides the nightingales that Keats heard before he wrote his ode, the sexual experiences that Donne had before his Songs and Sonnets, and such events as the drowning of Edward King which was the occasion of Lycidas. In literature nature as environment plays an essential, though usually minor, role in the creative process. There remains the question of the landscape as imitated within the picture. Here nature is the content or material cause of the picture. Content is something to be contained, hence nature, conceived as the content of art, is inside art. The form of a painted landscape is a pictorial form. It has a relation to the landscape outside, but the landscape outside is not the source of its form. If it were, the painter would be trying to compete with nature on nature’s own ground, or else he would be trying to give us a smudged and oily substitute for a real landscape, designed perhaps to call it up in our memories. This is the Socratic paradox at the end of the Republic, and there is no avoiding its conclusion that if art is a second-hand copy of external nature, it has no point or place in civilized human life. If, now, we think of the poem as a poet’s creation, we can see that the act of creation also splits the poet’s personality in two. Poets themselves have constantly told us that they do not think of themselves as autonomous shapers of their poems; that their ordinary personalities are really observers of a largely involuntary process. Hence the number of metaphors of relaxed will that we find poets using: Wordsworth’s recollection in tranquillity, Keats’s negative capability, Eliot’s catalyzer image, and the traditional appeal to a Muse who is supposed to do the actual creative work.71 In this century the distinction has sometimes been given in deliberately paradoxical forms, such as Yeats’s conception of the poetic personality as a “mask” or compensation for the ordinary one, Joyce’s indifferent god, or Eliot’s theory of the poetic process as “impersonal.” Poetry is not strictly impersonal, but in many respects it is less misleading to think of it as such than to think of it as produced by some “hero as poet,” an imposing personality of which poetry is the direct expression. We notice how critics in all ages have preferred simplicity to cleverness in a poet. As early as Longinus we have the remark that it is the test of a good figure of speech when the fact that it is a figure goes unrecognized.72 The good writer is similarly assumed to have a virtue73 which is aesthetic and ethical at once, of being able to keep out of his work

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anything which does not “belong,” however striking or brilliant it may be in itself. Johnson attacks “metaphysical” poetry because for him it does not exhibit this virtue. Coleridge’s distinction of imagination and fancy is in part a distinction between complete integrity and integrity broken by ingenuity, and here again, as in Johnson, the example of the inferior type is Cowley. Wordsworth’s opposition of real and merely poetic language is parallel, and so is Arnold’s distinction between Classical and Romantic styles. One may agree or disagree with the various applications of this principle, but the principle itself is not affected by them. As soon as it is felt that a writer is showing off, that he is taking his eye away from his form and is beginning to introduce things that he cannot resist, a barrier goes up at once. The reason is that a self-conscious cleverness interrupting the unity of the form is an intervention from the ordinary personality, with its claims to attention, a kind of attempt at direct address from the author as “man.” The barrier is a sign that direct address, which has no place in literature as such, is being resisted. In short, “imitation” as a critical conception becomes nonsense as soon as nature as the content of art is confused or identified with nature conceived as the environment or occasion of art. “Creation” in its turn becomes nonsense as soon as the creator of the poem is confused or identified with the man who also uses words to order his breakfast. Or, more positively, the real meaning and value of both of these essential critical terms are in a conception of literature which distinguishes it from what is not literature. So far we have been presenting, in summary form, traditional critical conceptions about the process and the product of literature, the poeta and the poema, to use the traditional terms.74 What I wish to superimpose on this, and which may be new, is a similar conception of the process and the product of criticism. This new conception means, first of all, that the triangular relationship we originally proposed, with a critic watching the poet and his poem, is inadequate. We need four corners for our palace of art. Just as literature, or the total body of what is produced, is the conception polarizing the writer, so criticism, conceived as the total body of literature as something understood, polarizes the critic. The first step to take here is to realize that just as a poem implies a distinction between the poet as man and the poet as verbal craftsman, so the response to a poem implies a corresponding distinction in the critic. A critic at a play may have his attention utterly absorbed by the play; but in the intermission, the ordinary personality reappears, takes out the

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critical personality like a watch, and examines its pointer readings. If the critic has been deeply moved by the play, his critical response will set up an echo in the rest of the personality, but he is never persuaded out of his senses, like Don Quixote at the puppet show.75 Nor should he be: a “real” or fully engaged response to art does not heighten consciousness but lowers and debases it. Such responses are appealed to by what ought to be absurd, as in naive melodrama, or by the interested, as in propaganda, or by the pornographic, or by the vicious and perverted, as in the various arts of rabble-rousing. We occasionally hear of people who faint or scream at plays: this is always interpreted as a tribute to the vividness of the play, not to their critical sensitivity. We find even famous critics attaching so much importance to admiring some writers and repudiating others that their criticism begins to impress us as a kind of misapplied moral energy rather than actual criticism. The failure to split the critic off from the rest of the critic’s personality produces the associative or stock response, a critical conception established in I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism. The stock response, in failing to split the critic, fails also to split either the poet or nature, and so commits both the fallacies described above. When stock response looks at a picture, it cannot see the picture: it can only see the content of the picture as a reproduction of something in external nature, and reacts to its association with the latter. If it is a picture of cows, stock response feels placid, because that is its habitual association with cows: if it is a nonobjective painting, stock response says, “Why, that looks like—” and tries to think of something funny that the picture resembles. Mark Twain’s comparison of Turner’s “Slave Ship” to a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes76 is a hundred years old, and will do for all similar facetiae. Again, stock response cannot read a poem, but can only react to the content of a poem, which it judges as inspiring or boring or shocking according to its moral anxieties. Stock response is apt to hanker after some form of censorship, for it cannot understand that works of literature can only be good or bad in their own categories, and that no subject matter or vocabulary is inherently bad. The most easily corrected type of stock response, perhaps, is the mythohistorical, which is also probably the most common source of stock responses. I had a student once who was shocked to hear me refer to “Good King Wenceslas,” at a carol-singing gathering, as a silly poem. Investigation disclosed that he thought it had been written in the thirteenth century, and that anything coming from that age breathed a spirit

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of the simple piety of an age of faith which, etc., etc.—from there one goes on to St. Thomas Aquinas and the Chartres Cathedral. I explained that this narrative did not come from the thirteenth century, but was a kind of Victorian singing commercial, whereupon he lost all interest in “Good King Wenceslas,” because he also held the view that anything written in the mid-nineteenth century was too contemptible for words. Such critical water-wings do no great harm as long as they are eventually dispensed with, but this is only an obviously naive example of a very common form of misplaced concreteness. He had, after all, derived these notions from some book with a butterslide theory of Western culture,77 according to which this or that spiritual or cultural entity was “lost” after Dante or Raphael or Mozart or whatever the author was attaching his pastoral myth to. A slightly more difficult type of stock response is the biographical, which assumes that the relation between a poet and his reader is the relation between one man and another, and refuses to read the poet with any admiration if something in his biography, such as his treatment of his wife, seems unsatisfactory. The pseudo-criticism of such poets as Milton and Shelley is strewn with attempts to document a stock response to the poetry by references to the life. Here we may give a more advanced example of a critical fallacy than the previous one. Near the beginning of Stones of Venice, Ruskin examines a Renaissance tomb of a doge in a Venetian church, which, as it was placed high up in the church, had been carved only in the parts that could be seen from below, the luckless sculptor not expecting Ruskin to come along centuries later with a sacristan’s ladder and descend on it from above, like the Last Judgment. Ruskin works himself into a fine Victorian tantrum over the moral and aesthetic dishonesty of the sculptor, and concludes with triumph: But now, reader, comes the very gist and point of the whole matter: This lying monument to a dishonoured doge, this culminating pride of the Renaissance art of Venice, is at least veracious, if in nothing else, in its testimony to the character of its sculptor. He was banished from Venice for forgery in 1497. (Italics, naturally, Ruskin’s.)78

Ruskin may well be right about the actual merits of the tomb, but that is not always a valid excuse for a wrong critical method, and we need not labour the point that such methods are headed in the direction of more sinister versions of stock response. The next step is the type of pseudo-

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criticism favoured by Fascist or Communist states, where a poet’s merits and characteristics are deduced from whatever seem to have been, after consulting his biography, his social attitudes or ethnic origins. Stock response, then, is ultimately the interference with criticism by what in our first chapter we called the ego, and which finds its fulfilment in the social consensus that we called the mob. In looking at the relation between the writer and literature as the total body of what writers produce, we found that poeta and poema are embedded in a common context which critics have almost universally agreed to call nature. If we look at the relation between the critic and literature as the total body of what critics respond to, the common context would be better described as experience, following Aristotle’s conception of poetry as a mimesis praxeos, an imitation (in words) of human action. The critic, then, is concerned with two kinds of experience. First, he has to understand and interpret the experience which forms the content of the work he is reading. Second, the impact of the literary work on him is itself an experience, “an experience different in kind from any experience not of art,” as T.S. Eliot puts it.79 The most obvious way of trying to connect these two kinds of experience is to assume that the basis of critical understanding is the resemblance of the experience in the poem to some real experience the critic has had or could imagine himself having. Such an assumption is usually founded on, or develops, a theory of illusion or Schein,80 according to which the literary work manifests a reality to which the critic discovers a counterpart in himself. Conceptions of illusion are often used as the basis of realistic theories. The unities of time and place in drama have been defended on the ground that the spectator cannot accept an illusion of time lasting longer than the time he is sitting in the theatre. The assumption here appears to be that the illusion must maintain some kind of proportion to the spectator’s own possible experience. The same curious a posteriori argument is applied to the lyric by Poe, who denies that a genuine experience of poetry can last longer than a “sitting.”81 One can see from this metaphor that we are not clear of the stock response: the ordinary personality, which undoubtedly sits, is being confused with the critical one, which in itself neither sits nor stands, nor, with Milton’s creation, creeps, walks, swims, or flies (Paradise Lost, bk. 2, l. 950). Involved here, too, is a further assumption that those who have had, or wish to have, or could conceive of themselves as having, an experience like that of the poem will understand it better, or “get more out of it,” than those who are personally detached from such experience.

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Poe’s essay, just referred to, quotes Shelley’s I arise from dreams of thee, and says it will be appreciated “by none so thoroughly as by him who has himself arisen from sweet dreams of one beloved, to bathe in the aromatic air of a southern midsummer night.” For this poem, therefore, those who have had the somewhat rarefied, if undoubtedly Virginian, experience it describes constitute an inner circle of response. The same kind of critical assumption has in other contexts raised a thick cloud of pseudocritical issues connected with the problem of poetry and belief. Paradise Lost, for instance, presents experiences associated with religious doctrine: hence, so the assumption runs, those who actually believe in a personal devil or in the historical reality of Adam and Eve will find that the poem “means more” to them than if they did not have such beliefs. The conception of literature as an illusion founded on a potential common bond of experience, which looks at first sight like a common-sense theory of art, is really an esoteric one, where each work of art has its inner circle of those who have a special type of contact with the experiences described. Such a critical assumption, then, turns all of literature into various types of allegory, and it divides its audience, as allegory always tends to do, into the initiates and the profanum vulgus.82 We can see what is wrong with this conception of criticism if we turn to the other form of critical experience, the impact of the poem itself. This is often characterized as a kind of heightening of consciousness which acts chiefly on the emotions, and is, or is closely connected with, pleasure or delight. The Longinian emphasis on sublimity leads to metaphors of “elevation,” and this emphasis recurs in later doctrines of the “pleasures of the imagination.” In our day we hear about the response of a highly strung nervous system to poetry, in which it is not difficult to see the Romantic metaphor of the Aeolian harp still echoing. The mimetic tradition has always assured us, from Aristotle on, that we, being precocious monkeys, take an inordinate pleasure in seeing things cleverly imitated, or that (as in Locke) perceiving resemblances gives us a pleasure that the analytic habit of perceiving differences cannot supply.83 Literature in this aspect is not merely something to admire: like a saddled horse, it increases our own energy and “carries us away.” We discover however that such carriers, like other modes of transport, often lose their efficiency as time goes on: what carried us away at the age of twelve may not take us very far or fast now. Standards of taste in the arts are, it is true, much more flexible than standards of accuracy in science; but, with all allowance made for individual variety, there clearly are such standards. And the theory of direct experience will not lead us

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to them, for two reasons. First, the reality or intensity of the critic’s response does not guarantee that the response itself has any critical validity. Emily Dickinson remarked that if she felt as though the top of her head were taken off, she knew that what she was reading was poetry.84 But she could only have said this when she had acquired enough maturity to trust such a reaction. One may feel the same way in adolescence about things that one later ranks very low in the scale of values. The immature judgment is based on no less real an experience, but literary experience, at first, is bound to be full of the subjective and private associations of stock response. If I may be permitted a personal example: in my early days as a graduate student I was assisting the editor of a magazine devoted to poetry,85 and it was my task to winnow the mail and select what was fit for the editor to read. One poem about flowers was turned in which contained the phrase “golden rain.” My critical judgment told me that this poem was of no great merit, but there was something about the phrase “golden rain” that made me feel as though my viscera were floating in space. I finally, after long reflection, realized why: at the age of ten I had set off some fireworks on a holiday, which had given me as intense an aesthetic experience as I had ever had, and one of these fireworks bore the title of “golden rain.” This purely subjective and associative response did not interfere with my actual critical judgment, but the very fact that it did not was impressive proof that two quite different responses were involved. The second reason for the inadequacy of the theory of real experience is the haphazard and precarious nature of experience itself. Our moments of intense awareness are not necessarily connected with literature at all; when they are, they are not necessarily right, and when the conditions are right for them, they do not necessarily arise. Apart from the stealthy advance of what we only grudgingly learn to like and the stealthy departure of regretted enthusiasms, we find that the coincidence of great literature with an appropriate response has a large element of accident in it. Many plays are seen in the wrong mood and many poems are read with a headache or with our minds on something else. However, in the general welter of our literary experiences we become aware that in their passing there is also a floundering, spasmodic, inconsistent, yet continual increase of what at length becomes unmistakably a growing body of knowledge. Eventually we may come to understand that it is this body of knowledge which constitutes criticism as such, and not the direct

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experience of literature. It is knowledge that connects one experience with another, corrects false impressions and inadequacies, and makes possible that progression and sequence in experience without which there could be no such thing as criticism. It was long ago observed by Burke that it is the understanding alone which distinguishes good from bad taste.86 The presence of criticism as a body of knowledge democratizes literature: it provides for literature an educational discipline, something that can be taught and learned; it makes literature accessible to any student with good will, and prevents it from stagnating among groups of mutually unintelligible elites. This structure of knowledge is all the more essential in criticism, because direct experience, and the intuitions of value it brings, cannot be directly communicated. The kind of “dialogue,” as it is now fashionable to call it, that can be established between teacher and student on a basis of experience and value judgment alone is not helpful. Thus: (Teacher) Yeats’s Among School Children is one of the great poems of the twentieth century. (Student) But I don’t like it; it seems to me a lot of clap-trap; I get a lot more out of The Cremation of Sam McGee.87 (Teacher) The answer is simple: your taste is inferior to mine. (Student) But how do you know it’s inferior? (Teacher) I just know, that’s all. All teaching of literature is based on the indefinite postponing of this dialogue until the student learns enough about literature, as an ordered body of knowledge, to sing a more harmonious antiphony. For the values we want the student to acquire from us cannot be taught: only knowledge of literature can be taught. Without the possibility of criticism as a structure of knowledge, culture, and society with it, would be forever condemned to a morbid antagonism between the supercilious refined and the resentful unrefined. II The study of literature as an object of understanding, and the experience of literature as an object of wonder and admiration, are, of course, different things. Experience, for one thing, avoids repetition: we do not want two tremendous experiences of King Lear in the same day—hardly even in the same year. The study of the play, ransacking its text and comparing Folio and Quarto versions, is clearly something quite different even from the kind of experience described by Keats in his sonnet on rereading King Lear. Some people feel that study may blunt the edge of experience, or, as they often say, that it will kill a poem to analyze it. It is

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possible for someone naturally insensitive to become more so through familiarity, but this fear in itself is a superstition based on another critical fallacy related to the stock response but different in context. This is the fallacy of separating the understanding of literature from the appreciation of it. All fallacies of separation have two aspects. If we think of literature in purely aesthetic and hieratic terms, we think of the end of criticism as a vision of beauty; if we think of it in purely oratorical and demotic terms, we think of the end of criticism as a possession of some form of imaginative truth. Beauty and truth are certainly relevant to the study of literature, but if either is separated from the other and made an end in itself, something goes wrong. The direct experience of literature is usually thought of as a heightening of consciousness accompanied by pleasure. This conception is closely related to the Platonic view that ordinary experience, on its subject-object level, is distinguishable from a higher experience, where subject and object have become love and beauty respectively. The language of criticism, whenever it speaks of sublimity and the like, is frequently close to erotic language. We are not surprised to find that Shelley, with his Platonic leanings, identifies love and art, and bases his criticism on the superiority of this kind of consciousness to the ordinary discursive subject-object kind. Not far from Plato, too, is the assumption that the theory of art has a particularly close relationship to the theory of beauty. This assumption seems almost to be involved in the very existence of “aesthetics” as a branch of philosophy. Yet beauty can be predicated of many things besides art, and surely any conception of it which brings works of art into direct competition with girls in bathing suits ought to be looked at with some suspicion. There is, certainly, an important analogy between the aesthetic contemplation of a work of art and the “delight” or “pleasure” which catches our attention in nature. Whether this analogy will hold up a complete theory of art or not is another matter. In ordinary speech, the word “beautiful” soon comes to mean, not a quality or effect of the unity of form, but a stock response to content. That is, “beautiful” usually means possessing attractive subject matter, a synonym of loveliness. Hence such words as “instruction” or “truth” have regularly been added in order to get some roughage in the cultural diet. In conversation, at least, the word “beauty” is normally excluded from any serious discussion of art. We say that in Dickens such characters as Chadband or Micawber are better done, more vivid, representative of a

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more significant part of Dickens’s genius, than his unmemorably lovely heroines. But it is hard to say how we could call either the characters or Dickens’s treatment of them more “beautiful” without doing some violence to ordinary language. The word “ugliness” is equally confused. If it were a genuinely critical term, many a calendar picture of a pretty girl with thirty-two teeth and no clothes would be instantly called ugly. But we seldom use the word in this sense: we tend to reserve it either for dramatically unfashionable taste or for representations of repellent subject matter. In the nineteenth century there was some attempt to distinguish the artist who portrayed the “ugly” and didn’t like doing it from the artist who portrayed it and did, the former producing a healthy and the latter a morbid form of grotesque. Which was which could be decided subjectively or, again, biographically. This notion still survives as a stock response. The colloquial debasing of such words is not, of course, a serious argument against their proper use; but there is something in the words themselves that seems to throw us off the rails. We arrive at similar frustrations in pursuit of truth. The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one’s beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with “let this be,” not with “this is,” and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work. Such a disinterested response takes rigorous discipline to attain, and many, even among skilled critics, never consistently attain it. But the fact that it is there to be attained can hardly be disputed. At the same time such detachment is not an end in itself. We still have our engagements and commitments, our beliefs, our ideals, and what we may call our habitual imaginative attitudes; and it is natural to have a special enthusiasm for whatever expresses them well in literature. The feeling that there is such a thing as imaginative truth cannot be easily dismissed, and literature that seems to us “true” in this more specific sense is literature we feel we can trust: it participates in our lives and we in its articulateness. The demotic or oratorical aspect of literature, in which it is a spokesman for our own ideals and attitudes, is a genuine aspect. It is not necessarily naive to write “how true” on the margins of what we read; or at least we do not have to confine our contact with literature to purely disinterested and aesthetic responses. We should mutilate our literary experience if we did, and mutilations of experience designed

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merely to keep a theory consistent indicate something wrong with the theory. To go beyond this point would take us into a world of higher belief, a view of the human situation so broad that the whole of literature would illustrate it. But clearly no axioms of such a view could be formulated: all formulations would either have to be too narrow to apply to the whole of literature, or too vague to have definite meaning. Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic; if he deliberately aims at beauty, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the insipid. The poet, rather, writes out what takes shape in his mind, and works with such categories as unity, consistency, and appropriateness or decorum. If he says what should be said at that point, its beauty and truth will take care of themselves. Beauty then means the strength and accuracy of the creative energy, or, as Blake says, exuberance is beauty. Truth means what is true for that place, such as the blasphemies of Milton’s Satan and the hallucinations of Don Quixote. Criticism must shape its categories in the same way. Whether we regard literature as a transparent medium of a higher truth or as a beautiful end in itself, we are remaining on the level of a detached contemplative view of human artefacts, a view which is idolatrous to its own shadow, to quote Blake again.88 We said in the first chapter that the end of literary education is an ethical and participating aim, the transfer of imaginative energy from writer to reader, but we have not yet found the means to this end. The traditional attitude to the arts that Arnold associated with the term “Hebraism” distrusts beauty because its standards are so elusive compared to the impersonal truth of moral and intellectual law.89 Hence it regards the arts, including literature, as deriving what value they have from their approximation to such law. For the “Hebraist,” moral and intellectual law is the direct or primary form of God’s revelation to man and accommodation to man’s mind. The arts are thus to be regarded as allegories of truth, and judged accordingly. This conception is closely related to the one just dealt with, that a work of literature is an allegory of a real experience common to itself and to its critic. Since Arnold’s time the “Hebraic” attitude has dropped its God and become the attitude of Marxism, for which again the arts are allegories of “socialist realism.” This is historically a development of the demotic or Longinian tradition that revived with Romanticism, which may be one reason why art in Marxist countries exhibits Romantic and even Victorian affinities. Being

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demotic, it is addressed to the people, but being also essentially allegorical, it soon finds within itself an inner circle of people who understand how socialist realism is to be interpreted at the time. The modern non-Marxist reader is not likely to need warnings against the inadequacy of this approach to criticism. The bourgeois world has tended rather towards a hieratic or formalist view of the arts which, at least in the beginning, laid great stress on its anti-Romantic and neoClassical (“Hellenist”) bias. This approach, without making much explicit use of the terms “truth” and “beauty,” divides the mind into an intellect concerned with truth and an emotion which seeks the emotional equivalents or correlatives of truth, whose statements are pseudo-statements and provide, as Aristotle said of rhetoric, an answering chorus to truth. The arts are assigned to this emotional category.90 As we are looking for a more unified conception of criticism than either of these approaches provides, we need an approach that does not try to split up the mind, or ignore the obvious fact that both intellect and emotion are fully and simultaneously involved in all our literary experience. In our present terminology, then, we can say that there is a study of literature, or criticism proper, and there is a direct experience of literature. These are the critical equivalents of the search for truth and the search for beauty respectively. These two are, in the first place, inseparable, two halves of one great whole which is the possession of literature. The study of literature purifies our experience of the private and irrelevant associations of stock response. The more we know about literature, the better the chances that intensity of response and the greatness of the stimulus to it will coincide. An increasingly sensitive experience of literature, on the other hand, purifies the study of literature of pedantry, or literary experience without any depth of emotional content. The relation between literature and the informative or discursive verbal disciplines, philosophy, history, the social sciences, literary criticism itself, is involved at this point, but I have space only to consider this question in its abstract or simplified form of the relation between literature and belief. As something produced, the poem is a man-made thing (techne) to be distinguished from other things we see in the world around us. In this context, the poem is a form that has “nature” for its content, the nature which is the content of the poem being split off from the nature which is the environment of the poem. As something understood or experienced, the poem is a human endeavour, to be distinguished from other aspects

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of human experience and action. In this context the poem is a form that has human experience or action for its content, which is similarly to be split off from real experience or real action. Real human action expresses, consciously or unconsciously, certain axioms, beliefs, or convictions which can be given some verbal formulation. The more highly developed one’s life, the more consistently one’s beliefs find expression in action, and the more completely one’s real beliefs can be reconstructed from one’s behaviour. Such a life is the life of practical reason we spoke of in the first chapter, where quid credas passes into quid agas, and the detached categories of truth and falsehood become the engaged categories of freedom and restriction. In all Marxist and in much hieratic criticism, literature is enlisted in the operation of carrying beliefs into action, either directly as propaganda or indirectly by aligning the emotions with what the intellect sees to be the right course of action. Both forms of criticism are intensely conservative, though what they wish to conserve naturally differs: revolutionary dogma for one and some more traditional social or religious dogma for the other. In both these views the individual work of literature is related first of all to the experience which is beyond, behind, or manifested in it, whether we apprehend that experience allegorically or formally, intellectually or emotionally. Literary experiences, according to this, are discrete: what holds them together is something other than literature, whether our emotional life or our view of society. I suggest, on the other hand, that the first thing for criticism to do with any literary experience, the first step in understanding it as literature, is to associate it with other literary experiences. If a student is reading Lycidas or Shakespeare’s sonnets, he naturally tries first of all to read them allegorically, as disguised transcripts of real experiences with Edward King or Mr. W.H. If he fails, he will protest that they must be mere literary exercises, with no “real feeling” in them. It is of course only the inexperienced student who does this. The experienced and patient teacher must show him that Lycidas is a literary figure in a family of literary pastorals, whose next of kin are in Theocritus and Virgil and not in seventeenth-century Cambridge; that the only relevant experiences Milton had are his previous efforts in the pastoral convention; that the only relevant feelings he had are concerned with his determination to do a good job with a pastoral elegy. Shakespeare’s beautiful youth is another literary figure, an Eros or Hermaphroditus, and belongs in the literary convention of love poetry. Similarly with our own experience. It is legitimate enough to associate

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the characters we meet in modern plays and novels with people we know, or to wonder whether in real life people would behave like the characters in the fiction. We often feel with delight that this is exactly the way people are, that this is a clairvoyantly true observation of human life. Such a feeling is really a feeling of co-ordination, a sense that literature is uniting a great number of possible real experiences in a single insight. The study of literature takes the direction of making this feeling more precise and systematic. Our literary understanding of a character does not begin until we associate him with other literary characters. The more we know about literature, the more clearly its interconnecting structural principles appear: the conventions that link characters in O’Casey with characters of the same type and function in Aristophanes; the genres common to Shakespeare and Sophocles, to Proust and Lady Murasaki; the myths that connect contemporary poets with ancient classics. We have always been told that the function of literature is to instruct and delight, but only when we try to locate our literary experiences within literature do these two things become one thing. In this process, literature as a whole is independent of real experience and something distinct from the passing of belief into action. Literature is a body of hypothetical thought and action: it makes, as literature, no statements or assertions. It neither reflects nor escapes from the world of belief and action, but contains it in its own distinctive form. It is this independence from real experience which the term “imagination” expresses, a term which includes both intellect and emotion, and yet is different from actual truth or real feelings. When we meet an unfamiliar experience in literature, the relevant question is not, Is this true? but, Is it imaginatively conceivable? If not, there is still a chance that our notion of what is imaginatively conceivable needs expanding. Literature thus provides a kind of reservoir of possibilities of action. It gives us wider sympathies and greater tolerance, and new perspectives on action; it increases the power of articulating convictions, whether our own or those of others. Between imagination and belief there is constant traffic in both directions. Gods that men no longer believe in become literary characters; philosophical systems that are now only constructs become extensions of literary culture; political loyalties that have lost their context in society fall back into the imagination that conceived them. They take on a new life when they lose their power to direct or express the direction of action, but it is a different kind of life. We also see new beliefs emerging

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from the imaginative world, as they did from the writings of Rousseau in the eighteenth century. As long as both imagination and belief are working properly, we can avoid the neurotic extremes of the dilettante who is so bemused by imaginative possibilities that he has no convictions, and the bigot who is so bemused by his convictions that he cannot see them as also possibilities. But it is clear that imagination and belief have different functions, and it is unfortunate that Arnold should have spoken of poetry or culture as substituting for or coming to replace belief, as this is a red herring in criticism. A belief can only be replaced by another belief, even when a godless religion is substituted for a godly one.91 The relation of imagination and belief raises once again the question of high style. We recall that high demotic style has a close connection with the proverb and the aphorism, the axiom of behaviour. We read literature with our own axioms of behaviour and belief already in existence, and we have high demotic style when something in our reading strikes an echo in our habitual attitudes. The direction of high demotic style is thus centrifugal: it travels outward from the imaginative into the “real” world. We notice that proverbial and sententious statements in poetry have a curiously anonymous quality about them and come loose very easily from their context. Many people are familiar with “A little learning is a dangerous thing” and “The course of true love never did run smooth” who know nothing of the Essay on Criticism or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sometimes what we read is known to be a source of our convictions, as the Gospels would be for a Christian or the Communist Manifesto for a Marxist. But even here the instinct to “apply” what we read, to lead a passage out of its original context into that of our own affairs, is very strong. High hieratic style, on the other hand, is centripetal in direction, and demands to be kept in its original context. The line “And what is else not to be overcome” is one of Arnold’s touchstones, but we can hardly see it as one without putting it where it belongs, in Satan’s speech in the first book of Paradise Lost [bk. 1, l. 109]. Once there, the attribute of high style spreads over the whole passage, then over most of the book, until we are in possession of the entire epic; nor does the process stop there. We feel that we are in the presence of high style in this mode when what we read suddenly becomes a focus of our whole literary experience and imaginative life, when we feel that this is the kind of thing that literature can do, and has done for us. Arnold’s Aristotelian phrase “high seriousness,” and his tendency to find his touchstones in epic and tragedy, suggest that

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high style is invariably solemn; but it can equally well be a flash of wit or ribaldry. Our own conceptions of both forms of high style are subject to improvement. The inexperienced student may find high demotic style in cliché, accepted idea, and the stimuli of stock response; a teenager may find high hieratic style in a Tin Pan Alley lyric. It is fortunate that education in such matters is possible; but the principles of such education are a sealed book to critics as yet, and I can see only one more step to take before I must abandon this argument. So far we have been speaking of “the critic,” as though the response to poetry were individual; but, of course, it is social as well. The social response is most obvious in the theatre, but it holds for all genres: we cannot become the exclusive possessors of a book of poems by buying it, as we may with a painting. The creation of literature may be and often is a lonely process, but the response to it becomes increasingly a community of understanding, a sharing of vision. Literature, therefore, must relate itself ultimately to some kind of human community. As a disinterested world in which anything is conceivable and nothing really happens, it is in the individual mind the place of seed from which all conscious action is born and to which it returns, a world where, as Blake says of Beulah, no dispute can come.92 But in society it is the real parliament of man, the deliberative body in the centre, the symposium which in Plato is the model of society,93 the academic vision of possibilities which is the model of education. It is unfortunate that to speak of “the republic of letters,” or to associate liberal education with social freedom, should suggest only the rhetoric of commencement addresses and not functional conceptions in critical theory. But it seems clear that Arnold was on solid ground when he made “culture,” a total imaginative vision of life with literature at its centre, the regulating and normalizing element in social life, the human source, at least, of spiritual authority.94 Culture in Arnold’s sense is the exact opposite of an elite’s game preserve; it is, in its totality, a vision or model of what humanity is capable of achieving, the matrix of all Utopias and social ideals. It does not amuse: it educates, hence it acts as an informing principle in ordinary life, dissolving the inequalities of class structure and the dismal and illiberal ways of life that arise when society as a whole does not have enough vision. When we speak of actual human life, or the actual environment of nature, we speak of something of which literature is only a part, and a ridiculously small part at that. But when we speak of literature, we speak of a total imaginative form which is, in that context, bigger than either

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nature or human life, because it contains them, the actual being only a part of the possible. There is an eloquent passage in Longinus which explains how the whole universe is insufficient to meet the demands of poets,95 and Bacon remarks in the Advancement of Learning that this is why the arts have been so constantly associated with divinity.96 Literature, we say, neither reflects nor escapes from ordinary life: what it does reflect is the world as human imagination conceives it, in mythical, romantic, heroic, and ironic as well as realistic and fantastic terms. This world is the universe in human form, stretching from the complete fulfilment of human desire to what human desire utterly repudiates, the quo tendas vision of reality that elsewhere I have called, for reasons rooted in my study of Blake, apocalyptic. In this world the difference between the two kinds of high style just mentioned disappears. Some religions assume that such a world exists, though only for gods; other religions, including those closer to us, identify it with a world man enters at death, the extremes of desire becoming its heavens and hells; revolutionary philosophies associate it with what man is to gain in the future; mystics call it the world of total or cosmic consciousness. A poet may accept any of these identifications without damage to his poetry; but for the literary critic, this larger world is the world that man exists and participates in through his imagination. It is the world in which our imaginations move and have their being while we are also living in the “real” world, where our imaginations find the ideals that they try to pass on to belief and action, where they find the vision which is the source of both the dignity and the joy of life. High style, whether demotic or hieratic, is the authentic speech of that world, the language which is neither impersonal nor spoken by this or that person, but the language of humanity itself.

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35 Myth, Fiction, and Displacement Summer 1961

From FI, 21–38. Originally published in Daedalus, 90 (Summer 1961): 587– 605. Reprinted in Nuosiluopu Fulai: Wen lun xuan ji [Northrop Frye: Selected Essays], ed. Wu Chizhe, with prefaces by Robert D. Denham, William H. New, and Richard King (Beijing: China Press of Social Sciences, 1997); in Criticism: The Major Texts, enlarged ed., ed. Walter Jackson Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 625–36; in Literary Criticism: An Introduction, ed. Lionel Trilling (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1970), 574–90; reprinted as “Shinwa, fikushon, oyobi shinwakei haijo,” trans. Koichi Aihara, in Gendai hihyo no kozo [The Structure of Contemporary Literary Criticism], ed. Jiro Ari et al. (Tokyo: Shicho-sha, 1971), 93–110; as “Mitfickja-przemieszczenie” in Pamietnik Literacki 60, no. 2 (1969): 283–302, which was reprinted in Studia z teorii literatury: Archiwum przekladów “Pamietnika Literackiego,” vol. 1, ed. Michala Glowinskiego and Henryk Markiewicza (Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich Wydawnictwo, 1977), 289–307. The issue of Daedalus in which this much-reprinted essay appeared contained papers drawn from three conferences sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on the topic “Evolution and Man’s Progress,” and included contributions by a number of scholars of evolution and culture, among whom were Nobel laureate Hermann J. Muller, biophysicist Walter A. Rosenblith, anthropologist Julian H. Steward, and the behaviourist B.F. Skinner. Frye’s paper, however, had emerged from an earlier conference of the same organization, “Myth Today”: it appeared in a somewhat detached position at the end of the Daedalus volume, under the heading “Opinions and Issues.”

“Myth” is a conception permeating many areas of contemporary thought: anthropology, psychology, comparative religion, sociology, and several

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others. What follows is an attempt to explain what the term means in literary criticism today. Such an explanation must begin with the question: Why did the term ever get into literary criticism? There can be only one legitimate answer to such a question: Because myth is and has always been an integral element of literature, the interest of poets in myth and mythology having been remarkable and constant since Homer’s time. There are two broad divisions of literary works, which may be called the fictional and the thematic. The former comprises works of literature with internal characters, and includes novels, plays, narrative poetry, folk tales, and everything that tells a story. In thematic literature the author and the reader are the only characters involved: this division includes most lyrics, essays, didactic poetry, and oratory. Each division has its own type of myth, but we shall be concerned here only with the fictional part of literature, and with myth in its more common and easily recognized form as a certain kind of narrative. When a critic deals with a work of literature, the most natural thing for him to do is to freeze it, to ignore its movement in time and look at it as a completed pattern of words, with all its parts existing simultaneously. This approach is common to nearly all types of critical techniques: here New and old-fashioned critics are at one. But in the direct experience of literature, which is something distinct from criticism, we are aware of what we may call the persuasion of continuity, the power that keeps us turning the pages of a novel and that holds us in our seats at the theatre. The continuity may be logical, or pseudological, or psychological, or rhetorical: it may reside in the surge and thunder of epic verse or in some donkey’s carrot like the identity of the murderer in a detective story or the first sexual act of the heroine in a romance. Or we may feel afterwards that the sense of continuity was pure illusion, as though we had been laid under a spell. The continuity of a work of literature exists on different rhythmical levels. In the foreground, every word, every image, even every sound made audibly or inaudibly by the words, is making its tiny contribution to the total movement. But it would take a portentous concentration to attend to such details in direct experience: they belong to the kind of critical study that is dealing with a simultaneous unity. What we are conscious of in direct experience is rather a series of larger groupings, events and scenes that make up what we call the story. In ordinary English the word “plot” means this latter sequence of gross events. For a term that would include the total movement of sounds and images, the

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word “narrative” seems more natural than “plot,” though the choice is a matter of usage and not of inherent correctness. Both words translate Aristotle’s mythos, but Aristotle meant mainly by mythos what we are calling plot: narrative, in the above sense, is closer to his lexis. The plot, then, is like the trees and houses that we focus our eyes on through a train window: the narrative is more like the weeds and stones that rush by in the foreground. We now run into a curious difficulty. Plot, Aristotle says, is the life and soul of tragedy (and by implication of fiction generally): the essence of fiction, then, is plot or imitation of action, and characters exist primarily as functions of the plot. In our direct experience of fiction we feel how central is the importance of the steady progression of events that holds and guides our attention. Yet afterwards, when we try to remember or think about what we have seen, this sense of continuity is one of the most difficult things to recapture. What stands out in our minds is a vivid characterization, a great speech or striking image, a detached scene, bits and pieces of unusually convincing realization. A summary of a plot, say of a Scott novel, has much the same numbing effect on a hearer as a summary of last night’s dream. That is not how we remember the book; or at least not why we remember it. And even with a work of fiction that we know thoroughly, such as Hamlet, while we keep in mind a sequence of scenes, and know that the ghost comes at the beginning and the duel with Laertes at the end, still there is something oddly discontinuous about our possession of it. With the histories this disappearance of continuity is even more striking. The Oxford Companion to English Literature is an invaluable reference work largely because it is so good at summarizing all the fictional plots that one has forgotten, but here is its summary of King John: The play, with some departures from historical accuracy, deals with various events in King John’s reign, and principally with the tragedy of young Arthur. It ends with the death of John at Swinstead Abbey. It is significant that no mention of Magna Carta appears in it. The tragic quality of the play, the poignant grief of Constance, Arthur’s mother, and the political complications depicted, are relieved by the wit, humour, and gallantry of the Bastard of Faulconbridge.

This is, more or less, how we remember the play. We remember Faulconbridge and his great speech at the end; we remember the death

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scene of Prince Arthur; we remember Constance; we remember nothing about Magna Carta; we remember in the background the vacillating, obstinate, defiant king. But what happened in the play? What were the incidents that made it an imitation of an action? Does it matter? If it doesn’t matter, what becomes of the principle that the characters exist for the sake of the action, the truth of which we felt so vividly while watching the play? If it does matter, are we going to invent some silly pedantic theory of unity that would rule out King John as legitimate drama? Whatever the final answer, we may tentatively accept the principle that, in the direct experience of fiction, continuity is the centre of our attention; our later memory, or what I call the possession of it, tends to become discontinuous. Our attention shifts from the sequence of incidents to another focus: a sense of what the work of fiction was all about, or what criticism usually calls its theme. And we notice that as we go on to study and reread the work of fiction, we tend, not to reconstruct the plot, but to become more conscious of the theme, and to see all incidents as manifestations of it. Thus the incidents themselves tend to remain, in our critical study of the work, discontinuous, detached from one another and regrouped in a new way. Even if we know it by heart this is still true, and if we are writing or lecturing on it, we usually start with something other than its linear action. Now in the conception “theme,” as in the conception “narrative,” there are a number of distinguishable elements. One of them is “subject,” which criticism can usually express by some kind of summarized statement. If we are asked what Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is about, we say that it is about—that is, its subject is—the Salem witch trials. Similarly, the subject of Hamlet is Hamlet’s attempt at revenge on an uncle who has murdered his father and married his mother. But the Olivier movie of Hamlet began with the statement (quoted from an unreliable memory): “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.” Here is a quite different conception of theme: it expresses the theme in terms of what we may call its allegorical value. To the extent that it is an adequate statement of the theme of Hamlet, it makes the play into an allegory and the chief character into a personification of Indecision. In his illuminating study of The Ancient Mariner, Robert Penn Warren says that the poem is written out of, and about, the general belief that the truth is implicit “in the poetic act as such, that the moral concern and the aesthetic concern are aspects of the same activity, the creative activity, and that this activ-

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ity is expressive of the whole mind” (italicized in the original).1 Here again is allegorization, of a kind that takes the theme to be what Aristotle appears to have meant primarily by dianoia, the “thought” or sententious reflection that the poem suggests to a meditative reader. It seems to me that a third conception of “theme” is possible, less abstract than the subject and more direct than an allegorical translation. It is also, however, a conception for which the primitive vocabulary of contemporary criticism is ill adapted. Theme in this third sense is the mythos or plot examined as a simultaneous unity, when the entire shape of it is clear in our minds. In Anatomy of Criticism I use dianoia in this sense: an extension of Aristotle’s meaning, no doubt, but in my opinion a justifiable one. The theme, so considered, differs appreciably from the moving plot: it is the same in substance, but we are now concerned with the details in relation to a unity, not in relation to suspense and linear progression. The unifying factors assume a new and increased importance, and the smaller details of imagery, which may escape conscious notice in direct experience, take on their proper significance. It is because of this difference that we find our memory of the progression of events dissolving as the events regroup themselves around another centre of attention. Each event or incident, we now see, is a manifestation of some underlying unity, a unity that it both conceals and reveals, as clothes do the body in Sartor Resartus. Further, the plot or progress of events as a whole is also a manifestation of the theme, for the same story (i.e., theme in our sense) could be told in many different ways. It is, of course, impossible to say how extensive the changes of detail would have to be before we had a different theme, but they can be surprisingly extensive. Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale is a folk tale that started in India and must have reached Chaucer from some West-European source. It also stayed in India, where Kipling picked it up and put it into the Second Jungle Book. Everything is different—setting, details, method of treatment—yet I think any reader, on whatever level of sophistication, would say that it was recognizably the same “story”—story as theme, that is, for the linear progression is what is different. More often we have only smaller units in common, of a kind that students of folklore call motifs. Thus in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun we have the motif of the two heroines, one dark and one light, that we have in Ivanhoe and elsewhere; in Lycidas we have the motif of the “sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe,” the red or purple flower that turns up everywhere in pastoral elegy, and so on. These smaller units I have

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elsewhere called archetypes, a word which has been connected since Plato’s time with the sense of a pattern or model used in creation. In most works of fiction we are at once aware that the mythos or sequence of events which holds our attention is being shaped into a unity. We are continually, if often unconsciously, attempting to construct a larger pattern of simultaneous significance out of what we have so far read or seen. We feel confident that the beginning implies an end, and that the story is not like the soul in natural theology, starting off at an arbitrary moment in time and going on forever. Hence we often keep on reading even a tiresome novel “to see how it turns out.” That is, we expect a certain point near the end at which linear suspense is resolved and the unifying shape of the whole design becomes conceptually visible. This point was called anagnorisis by Aristotle, a term for which “recognition” is a better rendering than “discovery.” A tragic or comic plot is not a straight line: it is a parabola following the shapes of the mouths on the conventional masks. Comedy has a U-shaped plot, with the action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending. Tragedy has an inverted U, with the action rising in crisis to a peripety and then plunging downward to catastrophe through a series of recognitions, usually of the inevitable consequences of previous acts. But in both cases what is recognized is seldom anything new; it is something which has been there all along, and which, by its reappearance or manifestation, brings the end into line with the beginning. Recognition, and the unity of theme which it manifests, is often symbolized by some kind of emblematic object. A simple example is in the sixteenth-century play, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, the action of which is largely a great to-do over the loss of the needle, and which ends when a clown named Hodge gets it stuck in his posterior, bringing about what Finnegans Wake would call a culious epiphany. Fans, rings, chains, and other standard props of comedy are emblematic talismans of the same kind. Nearly always, however, such an emblem has to do with the identification of a chief character. Birthmarks and their symbolic relatives have run through fiction from Odysseus’ scar to the scarlet letter, and from the brand of Cain to the rose tattoo. In Greek romance and its descendants we have infants of noble birth exposed on a hillside with birth tokens beside them; they are found by a shepherd or farmer and brought up in a lower station of life, and the birth tokens are produced when the story has gone on long enough. In more complex fiction the

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emblem may be an oblique comment on a character, as with Henry James’s golden bowl; or, if it is only a motif, it may serve as what T.S. Eliot calls an objective correlative. In any case, the point of recognition seems to be also a point of identification, where a hidden truth about something or somebody emerges into view. Besides the emblem, the hero may discover who his parents or children are, or he may go through some kind of ordeal (basanos) that manifests his true character, or the villain may be unmasked as a hypocrite, or, as in a detective story, identified as a murderer. In the Chinese play The Chalk Circle we have almost every possible form of recognition in the crucial scene. A concubine bears her master a son and is then accused of having murdered him by the wife, who has murdered him herself, and who also claims the son as her own. The concubine is tried before a foolish judge and condemned to death, then tried again before a wise one, who performs an experiment in a chalk circle resembling that of the judgment of Solomon in the Bible, and which proves that the concubine is the mother. Here we have: (a) the specific emblematic device which gives the play its name; (b) an ordeal or test which reveals character; (c) the reunion of the mother with her rightful child; and (d) the recognition of the true moral natures of concubine and wife. There are several other elements of structural importance, but these will do to go on with. So far, however, we have been speaking of strictly controlled forms, like comedy, where the end of the linear action also manifests the unity of the theme. What shall we find if we turn to other works where the author has just let his imagination go? I put the question in the form of this very common phrase because of the way that it illustrates a curious critical muddle. Usually, when we think of “imagination” psychologically, we think of it in its Renaissance sense as a faculty that works mainly by association and outside the province of judgment. But the associative faculty is not the creative one, though the two are frequently confused by neurotics. When we think of imagination as the power that produces art, we often think of it as the designing or structural principle in creation, Coleridge’s “esemplastic” power.2 But imagination in this sense, left to itself, can only design. Random fantasy is exceedingly rare in the arts, and most of what we do have is a clever simulation of it. From primitive cultures to the tachiste3 and action paintings of today, it has been a regular rule that the uninhibited imagination, in the structural sense, produces highly conventionalized art.

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This rule implies, of course, that the main source of inhibitions is the need to produce a credible or plausible story, to come to terms with things as they are and not as the story-teller would like them to be for his convenience. Removing the necessity for telling a credible story enables the teller to concentrate on its structure, and when this happens, characters turn into imaginative projections, heroes becoming purely heroic and villains purely villainous. That is, they become assimilated to their functions in the plot. We see this conventionalizing of structure very clearly in the folk tale. Folk tales tell us nothing credible about the life or manners of any society; so far from giving us dialogue, imagery, or complex behaviour, they do not even care whether their characters are men or ghosts or animals. Folk tales are simply abstract story patterns, uncomplicated and easy to remember, no more hampered by barriers of language and culture than migrating birds are by customs officers, and made up of interchangeable motifs that can be counted and indexed. Nevertheless, folk tales form a continuum with other literary fictions. We know, vaguely, that the story of Cinderella has been retold hundreds of thousands of times in middle-class fiction, and that nearly every thriller we see is a variant of Bluebeard. But it is seldom explained why even the greatest writers are interested in such tales: why Shakespeare put a folk-tale motif into nearly every comedy he wrote; why some of the most intellectualized fiction of our day, such as the later works of Thomas Mann, are based on them. Writers are interested in folk tales for the same reason that painters are interested in still-life arrangements: because they illustrate essential principles of story-telling. The writer who uses them then has the technical problem of making them sufficiently plausible or credible to a sophisticated audience. When he succeeds, he produces, not realism, but a distortion of realism in the interests of structure. Such distortion is the literary equivalent of the tendency in painting to assimilate subject matter to geometrical form, which we see both in primitive painting and in the sophisticated primitivism of, say, Léger or Modigliani. What we see clearly in the folk tale we see less clearly in popular fiction. If we want incident for its own sake, we turn from the standard novelists to adventure stories, like those of Rider Haggard or John Buchan, where the action is close to if not actually across the boundary of the credible. Such stories are not looser or more flexible than the classical novels, but far tighter. Gone is all sense of the leisurely acquiring of

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incidental experience, of exploring all facets of a character, of learning something about a specific society. A hazardous enterprise is announced at the beginning and everything is rigorously subordinated to that. In such works, while characters exist for the sake of the action, the two aspects of the action which we have defined as plot and theme are very close together. The story could hardly have been told in any other narrative shape, and our attention has so little expanding to do when it reaches the recognition that we often feel that there would be no point in reading it a second time. The subordination of character to linear action is also a feature of the detective story, for the fact that one of the characters is capable of murder is the concealed clue on which every detective story turns. Even more striking is the subordinating of moral attitude to the conventions of the story. Thus in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale, The Body-Snatcher, which is about the smuggling of corpses from cemeteries into medical classrooms, we read of bodies being “exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys,” and much more to the same effect. It is irrelevant to inquire whether this is really Stevenson’s attitude to the use of cadavers in medical study or whether he expects it to be ours. The more sinister the crime can be felt to be, the more thrilling the thriller, and the moral attitude is being deliberately talked up to thicken the atmosphere. The opposite extreme from such conventionalized fiction is represented by Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset. Here the main story line is a kind of parody of a detective novel—such parodies of suspense are frequent in Trollope. Some money has been stolen, and suspicion falls on the Reverend Josiah Crawley, curate of Hogglestock. The point of the parody is that Crawley’s character is clearly and fully set forth, and if you imagine him capable of stealing money you are simply not attending to the story. The action, therefore, appears to exist for the sake of the characters, reversing Aristotle’s axiom. But this is not really true. Characters still exist only as functions of the action, but in Trollope the “action” resides in the huge social panorama that the linear events build up. Recognition is continuous: it is in the texture of characterization, the dialogue and the comment itself, and needs no twist in the plot to dramatize a contrast between appearance and reality. And what is true of Trollope is roughly true of most mimetic fiction between Defoe and Arnold Bennett. When we read Smollett or Jane Austen or Dickens, we read them for the sake of the texture of characterization, and tend to think of the plot, when we think of it at all, as a conventional, mechanical,

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or even (as occasionally in Dickens) absurd contrivance included only to satisfy the demands of the literary market. The requirement of plausibility, then, has the apparently paradoxical effect of limiting the imagination by making its design more flexible. Thus in a Dutch realistic interior the painter’s ability to render the sheen of satin or the varnish of a lute both limits his power of design (for a realistic painter cannot, like Braque or Juan Gris, distort his object in the interest of pictorial composition) and yet makes that design less easy to take in at a glance. In fact we often “read” Dutch pictures instead of looking at them, absorbed by their technical virtuosity but unaffected by much conscious sense of their total structure. By this time the ambiguity in our word “imagination” is catching up with us. So far we have been using it in the sense of a structural power which, left to itself, produces rigorously predictable fictions. In this sense Bernard Shaw spoke of the romances of Marie Corelli as illustrating the triumph of imagination over mind.4 What is implied by “mind” here is less a structural than a reproductive power, which expresses itself in the texture of characterization and imagery. There seems no reason why this should not be called imagination too: in any case, in reading fiction there are two kinds of recognition. One is the continuous recognition of credibility, fidelity to experience, and of what is not so much lifelikeness as lifeliveliness. The other is the recognition of the identity of the total design, into which we are initiated by the technical recognition in the plot. The influence of mimetic fiction has thrown the main emphasis in criticism on the former kind of recognition. Coleridge, as is well known, intended the climax of the Biographia Literaria to be a demonstration of the “esemplastic” or structural nature of the imagination, only to discover when the great chapter arrived that he was unable to write it. There were doubtless many reasons for this, but one was that he does not really think of imagination as a constructive power at all. He means by imagination what we have called the reproductive power, the ability to bring to life the texture of characterization and imagery. It is to this power that he applies his favourite metaphor of an organism, where the unity is some mysterious and elusive “vitality.” His practical criticism of work he admires is concerned with texture: he never discusses the total design, or what we call the theme, of a Shakespeare play. It is really fancy which is his “esemplastic” power, and which he tends to think of as mechanical. His conception of fancy as a mode of memory, emancipated from time and space and playing with fixities and definites, admirably

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characterizes the folk tale, with its remoteness from society and its stock of interchangeable motifs. Thus Coleridge is in the tradition of critical naturalism, which bases its values on the immediacy of contact between art and nature that we continuously feel in the texture of mimetic fiction. There is nothing wrong with critical naturalism, as far as it goes, but it does not do full justice to our feelings about the total design of a work of fiction. We shall not improve on Coleridge, however, by merely reversing his perspective, as T.E. Hulme did, and giving our favourable value judgments to fancy, wit, and highly conventionalized forms. This can start a new critical trend, but not develop the study of criticism. In the direct experience of a new work of fiction we have a sense of its unity which we derive from its persuasive continuity. As the work becomes more familiar, this sense of continuity fades out, and we tend to think of it as a discontinuous series of episodes, held together by something which eludes critical analysis. But that this unity is available for critical study as well seems clear when it emerges as a unity of “theme,” as we call it, which we can study all at once, and to which we are normally initiated by some crucial recognition in the plot. Hence we need a supplementary form of criticism which can examine the total design of fiction as something which is neither mechanical nor of secondary importance. By a myth, as I said at the beginning, I mean primarily a certain type of story. It is a story in which some of the chief characters are gods or other beings larger in power than humanity. Very seldom is it located in history: its action takes place in a world above or prior to ordinary time, in illo tempore, in Mircea Eliade’s phrase. Hence, like the folk tale, it is an abstract story pattern. The characters can do what they like, which means what the story-teller likes: there is no need to be plausible or logical in motivation. The things that happen in myth are things that happen only in stories; they are in a self-contained literary world. Hence myth would naturally have the same kind of appeal for the fiction writer that folk tales have. It presents him with a ready-made framework, hoary with antiquity, and allows him to devote all his energies to elaborating its design. Thus the use of myth in Joyce or Cocteau, like the use of folk tale in Mann, is parallel to the use of abstraction and other means of emphasizing design in contemporary painting; and a modern writer’s interest in primitive fertility rites is parallel to a modern sculptor’s interest in primitive woodcarving.

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The differences between myth and folk tale, however, also have their importance. Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have “really happened,” or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphosis and dying-god myths, divine-marriage and hero-ancestry myths, etiological myths, apocalyptic myths, and writers of sacred scriptures or collectors of myth like Ovid tend to arrange these in a series. And while myths themselves are seldom historical, they seem to provide a kind of containing form of tradition, one result of which is the obliterating of boundaries separating legend, historical reminiscence, and actual history that we find in Homer and the Old Testament. As a type of story, myth is a form of verbal art, and belongs to the world of art. Like art, and unlike science, it deals, not with the world that man contemplates, but with the world that man creates. The total form of art, so to speak, is a world whose content is nature but whose form is human; hence when it “imitates” nature it assimilates nature to human forms. The world of art is human in perspective, a world in which the sun continues to rise and set long after science has explained that its rising and setting are illusions. And myth, too, makes a systematic attempt to see nature in human shape: it does not simply roam at large in nature like the folk tale. The obvious conception which brings together the human form and the natural content in myth is the god. It is not the connection of the stories of Phaethon and Endymion with the sun and moon that makes them myths, for we could have folk tales of the same kind: it is rather their attachment to the body of stories told about Apollo and Artemis which gives them a canonical place in the growing system of tales that we call a mythology. And every developed mythology tends to complete itself, to outline an entire universe in which the “gods” represent the whole of nature in humanized form, and at the same time show in perspective man’s origin, his destiny, the limits of his power, and the extension of his hopes and desires. A mythology may develop by accretion, as in Greece, or by rigorous codifying and the excluding of unwanted material, as in Israel; but the drive towards a verbal circumference of human experience is clear in both cultures.

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The two great conceptual principles which myth uses in assimilating nature to human form are analogy and identity. Analogy establishes the parallels between human life and natural phenomena, and identity conceives of a “sun-god” or a “tree-god.” Myth seizes on the fundamental element of design offered by nature—the cycle, as we have it daily in the sun and yearly in the seasons—and assimilates it to the human cycle of life, death, and (analogy again) rebirth. At the same time the discrepancy between the world man lives in and the world he would like to live in develops a dialectic in myth which, as in the New Testament and Plato’s Phaedo, separates reality into two contrasting states, a heaven and a hell. Again, myths are often used as allegories of science or religion or morality: they may arise in the first place to account for a ritual or a law, or they may be exempla or parables which illustrate a particular situation or argument, like the myths in Plato or Achilles’ myth of the two jars of Zeus at the end of the Iliad. Once established in their own right, they may then be interpreted dogmatically or allegorically, as all the standard myths have been for centuries, in innumerable ways. But because myths are stories, what they “mean” is inside them, in the implications of their incidents. No rendering of any myth into conceptual language can serve as a full equivalent of its meaning. A myth may be told and retold: it may be modified or elaborated, or different patterns may be discovered in it; and its life is always the poetic life of a story, not the homiletic life of some illustrated truism. When a system of myths loses all connection with belief, it becomes purely literary, as Classical myth did in Christian Europe. Such a development would be impossible unless myths were inherently literary in structure. As it makes no difference to that structure whether an interpretation of the myth is believed in or not, there is no difficulty in speaking of a Christian mythology. Myth thus provides the main outlines and the circumference of a verbal universe which is later occupied by literature as well. Literature is more flexible than myth, and fills up this universe more completely: a poet or novelist may work in areas of human life apparently remote from the shadowy gods and gigantic story outlines of mythology. But in all cultures mythology merges insensibly into, and with, literature. The Odyssey is to us a work of literature, but its early place in the literary tradition, the importance of gods in its action, and its influence on the later religious thought of Greece, are all features common to literature proper and to mythology, and indicate that the difference between them

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is more chronological than structural. Educators are now aware that any effective teaching of literature has to recapitulate its history and begin, in early childhood, with myths, folk tales, and legends.5 We should expect, therefore, that there would be a great many literary works derived directly from specific myths, like the poems by Drayton and Keats about Endymion which are derived from the myth of Endymion. But the study of the relations between mythology and literature is not confined to such one-to-one relationships. In the first place, mythology as a total structure, defining as it does a society’s religious beliefs, historical traditions, cosmological speculations—in short, the whole range of its verbal expressiveness—is the matrix of literature, and major poetry keeps returning to it. In every age poets who are thinkers (remembering that poets think in metaphors and images, not in propositions) and are deeply concerned with the origin or destiny or desires of mankind—with anything that belongs to the larger outlines of what literature can express— can hardly find a literary theme that does not coincide with a myth. Hence the imposing body of explicitly mythopoeic poetry in the epic and encyclopedic forms which so many of the greatest poets use. A poet who accepts a mythology as valid for belief, as Dante and Milton accepted Christianity, will naturally use it; poets outside such a tradition turn to other mythologies as suggestive or symbolic of what might be believed, as in the adaptations of Classical or occult mythological systems made by Goethe, Victor Hugo, Shelley, or Yeats. Similarly, the structural principles of a mythology, built up from analogy and identity, become in due course the structural principles of literature. The absorption of the natural cycle into mythology provides myth with two of these structures; the rising movement that we find in myths of spring or the dawn, of birth, marriage, and resurrection, and the falling movement in myths of death, metamorphosis, or sacrifice. These movements reappear as the structural principles of comedy and tragedy in literature. Again, the dialectic in myth that projects a paradise or heaven above our world and a hell or place of shades below it reappears in literature as the idealized world of pastoral and romance and the absurd, suffering, or frustrated world of irony and satire. The relation between myth and literature, therefore, is established by studying the genres and conventions of literature. Thus the convention of the pastoral elegy in Lycidas links it to Virgil and Theocritus, and thence with the myth of Adonis. Thus the convention of the foundling plot, which is the basis of Tom Jones and Oliver Twist, goes back to Menandrine

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comedy formulas, thence to Euripides, and so back to such myths as the finding of Moses and Perseus. In myth criticism, when we examine the theme or total design of a fiction, we must isolate that aspect of the fiction which is conventional, and held in common with all other works of the same category. When we begin, say, Pride and Prejudice, we can see at once that a story which sustains that particular mood or tone is most unlikely to end in tragedy or melodrama or mordant irony or romance. It clearly belongs to the category represented by the word “comedy,” and we are not surprised to find in it the conventional features of comedy, including a foolish lover, with some economic advantages, encouraged by one of the parents, a hypocrite unmasked, misunderstandings between the chief characters eventually cleared up and happy marriages for those who deserve them. This conventional comic form is in Pride and Prejudice somewhat as the sonata form is in a Mozart symphony. Its presence there does not account for any of the merits of the novel, but it does account for its conventional, as distinct from its individual, structure. A serious interest in structure, then, ought naturally to lead us from Pride and Prejudice to a study of the comic form which it exemplifies, the conventions of which have presented much the same features from Plautus to our own day. These conventions in turn take us back into myth. When we compare the conventional plot of a play of Plautus with the Christian myth of a son appeasing the wrath of a father and redeeming his bride, we can see that the latter is quite accurately described, from a literary point of view, as a divine comedy. Whenever we find explicit mythologizing in literature, or a writer trying to indicate what myths he is particularly interested in, we should treat this as confirmatory or supporting evidence for our study of the genres and conventions he is using. Meredith’s The Egoist is a story about a girl who narrowly escapes marrying a selfish man, which makes many references, both explicitly and indirectly in its imagery, to the two bestknown myths of female sacrifice, the stories of Andromeda and Iphigeneia. Such allusions would be pointless or unintelligible except as indications by Meredith of an awareness of the conventional shape of the story he is telling. Again, it is as true of poetry as it is of myth that its main conceptual elements are analogy and identity, which reappear in the two commonest figures of speech, the simile and the metaphor. Literature, like mythology, is largely an art of misleading analogies and mistaken identities. Hence we often find poets, especially young poets, turning to myth because of the scope it affords them for uninhibited poetic im-

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agery. If Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis had been simply a story about a willing girl and an unwilling boy, all the resources of analogy and identity would have been left unexplored: the fanciful imagery appropriate to the mythical subject would have been merely tasteless exaggeration. Especially is this true with what may be called sympathetic imagery, the association of human and natural life: No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed, But stole his blood and seem’d with him to bleed. [ll. 1055–6]

The opposite extreme from such deliberate exploiting of myth is to be found in the general tendency of realism or naturalism to give imaginative life and coherence to something closely resembling our own ordinary experience. Such realism often begins by simplifying its language, and dropping the explicit connections with myth which are a sign of an awareness of literary tradition. Wordsworth, for example, felt that in his day Phoebus and Philomela were getting to be mere trade slang for the sun and the nightingale, and that poetry would do better to discard this kind of inorganic allusion. But, as Wordsworth himself clearly recognized, the result of turning one’s back on explicit myth can only be the reconstructing of the same mythical patterns in more ordinary words: 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? For the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day. [The Recluse, pt. 1, bk. 1, ll. 800–8]

To this indirect mythologizing I have elsewhere given the name of displacement. By displacement I mean the techniques a writer uses to make his story credible, logically motivated, or morally acceptable— lifelike, in short. I call it displacement for many reasons, but one is that fidelity to the credible is a feature of literature that can affect only content. Life presents a continuum, and a selection from it can only be what is called a tranche de vie: plausibility is easy to sustain, but except for

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death life has little to suggest in the way of plausible conclusions. And even a plausible conclusion does not necessarily round out a shape. The realistic writer soon finds that the requirements of literary form and plausible content always fight against each other. Just as the poetic metaphor is always a logical absurdity, so every inherited convention of plot in literature is more or less mad. The king’s rash promise, the cuckold’s jealousy, the “lived happily ever after” tag to a concluding marriage, the manipulated happy endings of comedy in general, the equally manipulated ironic endings of modern realism—none of these was suggested by any observation of human life or behaviour: all exist solely as story-telling devices. Literary shape cannot come from life; it comes only from literary tradition, and so ultimately from myth. In sober realism, like the novels of Trollope, the plot, as we have noted, is often a parody plot. It is instructive to notice, too, how strong the popular demand is for such forms as detective stories, science fiction, comic strips, comic formulas like the P.G. Wodehouse stories, all of which are as rigorously conventional and stylized as the folk tale itself, works of pure “esemplastic” imagination, with the recognition turning up as predictably as the caesura in minor Augustan poetry. One difficulty in proceeding from this point comes from the lack of any literary term which corresponds to the word “mythology.” We find it hard to conceive of literature as an order of words, as a unified imaginative system that can be studied as a whole by criticism. If we had such a conception, we could readily see that literature as a whole provides a framework or context for every work of literature, just as a fully developed mythology provides a framework or context for each of its myths. Further, because mythology and literature occupy the same verbal space, so to speak, the framework or context of every work of literature can be found in mythology as well, when its literary tradition is understood. It is relatively easy to see the place of a myth in a mythology, and one of the main uses of myth criticism is to enable us to understand the corresponding place that a work of literature has in the context of literature as a whole. Putting works of literature in such a context gives them an immense reverberating dimension of significance. (If anyone is worrying about value judgments, I should add that establishing such a context tends to make the genuine work of literature sublime and the pinchbeck one ridiculous.) This reverberating significance, in which every literary work catches the echoes of all other works of its type in literature, and so

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ripples out into the rest of literature and thence into life, is often, and wrongly, called allegory. We have allegory when one literary work is joined to another, or to a myth, by a certain interpretation of meaning rather than by structure. Thus The Pilgrim’s Progress is related allegorically to the Christian myth of redemption, and Hawthorne’s story, The Bosom Serpent, is related allegorically to various moral serpents going back to the Book of Genesis. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, already mentioned, deals with the Salem witch trials in a way that suggested McCarthyism to most of its original audience. This relation in itself is allegorical. But if The Crucible is good enough to hold the stage after McCarthyism has become as dead an issue as the Salem trials, it would be clear that the theme of The Crucible is one which can always be used in literature, and that any social hysteria can form its subject matter. Social hysteria, however, is the content and not the form of the theme itself, which belongs in the category of the purgatorial or triumphant tragedy. As so often happens in literature, the only explicit clue to its mythical shape is provided by the title. To sum up. In the direct experience of a new work of literature, we are aware of its continuity or moving power in time. As we become both more familiar with and more detached from it, the work tends to break up into a discontinuous series of felicities, bits of vivid imagery, convincing characterization, witty dialogue, and the like. The study of this belongs to what we have called critical naturalism or continuous recognition, the sense of the sharply focused reproduction of life in the fiction. But there was a feeling of unity in the original experience which such criticism does not recapture. We need to move from a criticism of “effects” to what we may call a criticism of causes, specifically the formal cause which holds the work together. The fact that such unity is available for critical study as well as for direct experience is normally symbolized by a crucial recognition, a point marking a real and not merely apparent unity in the design. Fictions like those of Trollope which appeal particularly to critical naturalism often play down or even parody such a device, and such works show the highest degree of displacement and the least conscious or explicit relationship to myth. If, however, we go on to study the theme or total shape of the fiction, we find that it also belongs to a convention or category, like those of comedy and tragedy. With the literary category we reach a dead end, until we realize that literature is a reconstructed mythology, with its structural principles derived from those of myth. Then we can see that

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literature is in a complex setting what a mythology is in a simpler one: a total body of verbal creation. In literature, whatever has a shape has a mythical shape, and leads us towards the centre of the order of words. For just as critical naturalism studies the counterpoint of literature and life, words and things, so myth criticism pulls us away from “life” towards a self-contained and autonomous literary universe. But myth, as we said at the beginning, means many things besides literary structure, and the world of words is not so self-contained and autonomous after all.

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36 The Imaginative and the Imaginary 7–11 May 1962

From FI, 151–67. Originally given as an address to the 118th annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto, and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 119 (October 1962): 289–98. Frye’s unparalleled capacity to recognize and exploit analogies, comparisons, and parallels made this attempt to discuss the topic of the imaginary before a conference of psychiatrists less implausible than it sounds, but his opening words show that he recognized the need to make the connection between his work and theirs. Interestingly, he mentions neither Freud nor Jung, in whose writings he was well versed.

I should like to begin by distinguishing two social contexts of the human mind. What I say in this connection will be familiar enough to you, but I need to establish some common ground between an association of psychiatrists and a literary critic. Man lives in an environment that we call nature, and he also lives in a society or home, a human world that he is trying to build out of nature. There is the world he sees and the world he constructs, the world he lives in and the world he wants to live in. In relation to the world he sees, or the environment, the essential attitude of his mind is that of recognition, the ability to see things as they are, the clear understanding of what is, as distinct from what we should like it to be. This is an attitude often associated, sometimes correctly, with the reason. I should prefer to call it “sense,” because it is a pragmatic and practical habit of mind, not theoretical, as reason is, and because it requires emotional as well as intellectual balance. It is the attitude with which the scientist initially faces nature, determined to see first of all what is there without allowing any other of his mental interests to cook

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the evidence. And it is, I should think, the attitude that psychiatry would take as the standard of the “normal,” the condition of mental health from which mental illness deviates. The other attitude is usually described as “creative,” a somewhat hazy metaphor of religious origin, or as imaginative. This is the vision, not of what is, but of what otherwise might be done with a given situation. Along with the given world, there is or may be present an invisible model of something nonexistent but possible and desirable. Imagination exists in all areas of human activity, but in three of particular importance, the arts, love, and religion. Where we see a landscape, a painter also sees the possibility of a picture. He sees more than we see, and the picture itself is the proof that he really does see it. The standard of reality does not inhere in what is there, but in an unreal and subjective excess over what is there which then comes into being with its own kind of reality. In love, we frequently hear the voice of sense in some such phrase as “I don’t know what he sees in her,” or vice versa. But it is generally admitted that here it is the subjective excess over reality which is appropriate. Similarly in religion. The New Testament defines faith as the evidence of things unseen: reality in religion is not “there”: it is brought into being through a certain kind of experience. The religious life is, like the artist’s picture, the manifestation of such experience in the world of sense, or what the gospel calls letting one’s light shine. The imaginative or creative force in the mind is what has produced everything that we call culture and civilization. It is the power of transforming a subhuman physical world into a world with a human shape and meaning, a world not of rocks and trees but of cities and gardens, not an environment but a home. The drive behind it we may call desire, a desire which has nothing to do with the biological needs and wants of psychological theory, but is rather the impulse towards what Aristotle calls telos, realizing the form that one potentially has. As desire, it works dialectically, separating what is wanted from what is not wanted. Planting a garden develops the conception “weed,” a conception of vegetable value unintelligible except in the context of a garden. The attitude we have just called sense can only distinguish itself from what is below itself. It can separate the real from the imaginary, sense from nonsense, what is there from what is not there, but it has no criteria for recognizing what is above itself. It is a fact of experience that the world we live in is a world largely created by the human imagination. It is a part of sense’s own recognition of reality that there must be a

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standard above sense, and one that has the power of veto over it. But it is the resemblance between vision and hallucination, ecstasy and neurosis, the imaginative and the imaginary, that impresses itself on sense. These resemblances are, of course, obvious and remarkable. The creative and the neurotic reactions to experience are both dissatisfied with what they see; they both believe that something else should be “there”; they both attempt to remake the world of experience into something more responsive to their desire. There are equally important differences, but in themselves the visions of the artist, the lover, and the saint can only be regarded by sense as illusions, and all that sense can say about them is that certain significant types of activity seem to be guided by illusion. We may therefore see the creative imagination as polarized by two opposite and complementary forces. One is sense itself, which tells us what kind of reality the imagination must found itself on, what is possible for it, and what must remain on the level of wish or fantasy. The other pole I shall call vision, the pure uninhibited wish or desire to extend human power or perception (directly or by proxy in gods or angels) without regard to its possible realization. This polarizing of creative power between vision and sense is the basis of the distinction between the arts and the sciences. The sciences begin with sense, and work towards a mental construct founded on it. The arts begin with vision, and work towards a complementary mental construct founded on it. As sense is incorporated in science, and as science continually evolves and improves, what sense declares to be impossible in one age, such as airplanes, may become possible in the next. The arts do not evolve or improve, partly because vision, being pure wish, can reach its conceivable limits at once. The airplane is a recent invention, but the vision that produced it was already ancient in the arts when Daedalus flew out of the labyrinth and Jehovah rode the sky on the wings of a seraph. But there may be considerable differences of emphasis within the arts themselves. Some cultures have a more uninhibited vision than other cultures: we find the most soaring imaginations, as a rule, in defeated or oppressed nations, like the Hebrews and the Celts. The attitude in the arts that we call “romantic,” too, tends to stress vision rather than sense, and our ordinary use of the word indicates that a “romantic” approach to things may sometimes be in danger of a facile or rose-coloured idealization. On the other hand, a culture may be dominated by a feeling of proportion and limitation derived ultimately from what we have been calling sense, and a culture of this kind may achieve the clarity and

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simplicity that we associate with the word “classical.” The most impressive example of such a culture is probably the Chinese, but in our Western tradition we tend naturally to think of the Greeks. Greek culture was founded on the conception of dike, a contract entered into by gods, man, and nature, where each accepted certain limitations. The working out of this contract was the process of ananke or moira, words that we translate, very loosely, as “fate.” Zeus, in the Iliad, goes to bed with his consort Hera and nearly allows the Greeks to win the Trojan war, that being Hera’s idea in getting him to bed, and scrambles out in time to help the Trojans, whom on the whole he prefers. But the contract says that the Greeks are to win in the end, and Zeus himself dares not ignore it. And if the contract binds even the king of gods and men, still more is man bound to avoid the proud and boastful spirit that the Greeks called hubris and saw as the main cause of tragedy; still more must he avoid excess and seek moderation and limits in all things. Know thyself, said the Delphic oracle, implying that self-knowledge was the final secret of wisdom. For man’s mind is turned outward to nature, and his knowledge of himself is an inference from his knowledge of the much greater thing that is not himself. The Classical inheritance was incorporated into later Western culture: medieval philosophers described the attitude we call sense as prudentia, and gave it a central place in their moral hierarchy. Even so, the attitude of the age of Shakespeare to sense and imagination was very different from ours, and perhaps we can learn something about our own age by examining the differences. When Shakespeare’s Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, classified “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet” as being “of imagination all compact,” he was expressing an Elizabethan commonplace, and one usually summed up in the word “melancholy.” Melancholy was a physiological disturbance caused by the excess of one of the four humours, but this excess in its turn was the cause of emotional and mental illness. Body and mind were therefore treated as a unit: a collection of remarkably cheerful songs bears the title “Pills to Purge Melancholy.” There were two kinds of melancholy. One was a disease; the other was a mood which was the prerequisite of certain important experiences in religion, love, or poetry. Love and poetry were combined in the literary convention within which the bulk of poetry in that age was produced. A young man sees his destined mistress and instantly falls a prey to melancholy. He stays awake all night and keeps his house dark all day; he mopes,

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sighs, forsakes his friends, turns absent-minded and slovenly in his appearance. More to the point, he writes poetry incessantly, complaining of his lady’s inflexibility, cruelty, and disdain. It was understood that a poet could hardly get properly started as a poet without falling in love in this way, and that a lover was hardly doing his duty by his lady without leaving a stack of lyrical complaints at her door. In the background was the religious experience on which this conventional love was modelled, and of which it was to some extent a parody: the experience of becoming aware of sin and the wrath of God, of the necessity for supplicating grace and acceptance. Melancholy of this kind was certainly an emotional disturbance: it could become a mental disease, or at least there are many love poems threatening madness or suicide to impress an obdurate mistress. Normally, however, such disturbance was more in the nature of a calculated risk, undertaken for the sake of a certain intensity of experience. It was a kind of male pregnancy, a creative state with some analogies to illness. But melancholy as a disease was equally familiar, and Shakespeare’s audience would have recognized its characteristic symptoms in Hamlet. The indecision, the inability to act through “thinking too precisely on th’ event,” the clairvoyant sense of the evil and corruption of human nature, the addiction to black clothes, the obsession with death both in others and in oneself, the deranged behaviour that could easily modulate into actual madness with little outward change, were stock attributes of melancholy. So too was the fact that Hamlet, though not a poet, as he tells Ophelia, shows many similarities to the poetic temperament. Polonius, who has literary tastes, has a literary explanation for Hamlet’s melancholy: he is in love with Ophelia; but the audience has already been given a more convincing reason. Of course a tendency to melancholy would be greatly increased if one had been born under either of the two melancholy planets, Saturn and the moon, which tended to make one saturnine or lunatic. Nations as well as individuals had their tutelary planets, and the fact that England’s was the moon was responsible for many jokes, including some from Hamlet’s grave-digger. Not only the most fascinating play of the period, but its greatest prose work (in England), has melancholy for its theme. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is an exhaustive analysis of the causes, symptoms, treatment, and cure of melancholy, with two enormous appendices on love melancholy and religious melancholy. Burton was an Oxford don, and his chief amusement is said to have been going down to the Isis river and listening

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to the bargemen swear. The story may be true, or it may have been invented by someone who noticed that the qualities of Burton’s prose, with its vast catalogues, piled-up epithets, Latin tags, allusiveness, and exhaustive knowledge of theology and personal hygiene, are essentially the qualities of good swearing. Burton assumes rather than discusses the connection of melancholy with creative power: being a scholar himself, like Hamlet, he associates it rather with the scholarly temperament, and includes a long digression on the miseries of scholars. On religious melancholy his position is simple: one can best avoid it by sticking to the reasonable middle way of the Church of England, avoiding the neurotic extremes of papist and puritan on either side. But in love there is no reasonable ground to take, for its very essence is illusion. On this point we had better let Burton speak for himself: Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, having a swollen juggler’s platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squis’d cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrowmouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp fox-nose, a red nose, China flat, great nose, nare simo patuloque, a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven, brown teeth, beetle-browed, a witch’s beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, a sharp chin, lave-eared, with a long crane’s neck, which stands awry too, pendulis mammis, “her dugs like two double jugs,” or else no dugs, in that other extreme, bloody-fallen fingers, she have filthy, long unpared nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tanned skin, a rotten carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splay-footed, “as slender in the middle as a cow in the waist,” gouty legs, her ankles hang over her shoes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a mere changeling, a very monster, an oaf imperfect, her whole complexion savours, an harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gait, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker (si qua latent meliora puta), and to thy judgment looks like a mard in a lanthorn, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest, and wouldest have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom, remedium amoris to another man, a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty, rank, rammy, filthy, beastly quean, dishonest peradventure, obscene, base, beggarly, rude, foolish, untaught, peevish, Irus’ daughter,

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Thersites’ sister, Grobian’s scholar; if he love her once, he admires her for all this, he takes no notice of any such errors or imperfections of body or mind, Ipsa haec Delectant, veluti Balbinum polypus Agnae; he had rather have her than any woman in the world.1

Renaissance writers, when they speak of the imagination, are interested chiefly in its pathology, in hysteria and hallucination and the influence of the mind on the body. This is true of Montaigne’s essay on the force of imagination, where an example of what may be called psychological vampirism comes from his own experience: Simon Thomas was a great Physitian in his daies. I remember upon a time comming by chance to visit a rich old man that dwelt in Tholouse, and who was troubled with the cough of the lungs, who discoursing with the said Simon Thomas of the meanes of his recoverie, he told him, that one of the best was, to give me occasion to be delighted in his companie, and that fixing his eyes upon the livelines and freshness of my face, and setting his thoughts upon the jolitie and vigor, wherewith my youthfull age did then flourish, and filling all his senses with my florishing estate, his habitude might thereby be amended, and his health recovered. But he forgot to say, that mine might also be empaired and infected.2

At that stage of scientific development, scientific and occult explanations could be given of the same phenomena, and hysteria and hallucination might be explained either as mental disorders or as caused by witchcraft or diabolical suggestion. Burton gives a good deal of attention to such matters, though with a detachment towards them unusual in his age. He has read all the books about devils and witches, and has gathered from them that there is more theorizing than solid knowledge of the subject. He drops a hint that belief in their existence is convenient for an organized priestcraft, and continues: Many such stories I find amongst pontifical writers, to prove their assertions; let them free their own credits; some few I will recite in this kind out of most approved physicians. Cornelius Gemma, lib. 2 de nat. mirac. cap. 4, related of a young maid, called Katherine Gualter, a cooper’s daughter, anno 1571, that had such strange passions and convulsions, three men could not sometimes hold her; she purged a live eel, which he saw, a foot and a half long, and touched himself; but the eel afterwards vanished; she vom-

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ited some twenty-four pounds of fulsome stuff of all colours, twice a day for fourteen days; and after that she voided great balls of hair, pieces of wood, pigeon’s dung, parchment, goose dung, coals; and after them two pound of pure blood, and then again coals and stones, of which some had inscriptions, bigger than a walnut, some of them pieces of glass, brass, etc., besides paroxysms of laughing, weeping and ecstasies, etc. Et hoc (inquit) cum horrore vidi, “this I saw with horror.” They could do no good on her by physic, but left her to the clergy.3

Burton is aware that he is describing a case of hysteria; what he is not sure of is whether it was the doctor or the patient who had it, and the reader is left with the feeling that Burton regards hysteria as a highly contagious illness. We notice that the association of poetry, love, and melancholy extends only so far. The lover’s melancholy was of no more lasting importance in his life than a contemporary teenager’s crush on a movie star: it was understood to be normal, even expected, of youth, and it had nothing to do with the serious business of marriage which was being arranged for him by his parents. Religious melancholy would turn instantly to the church, and be restored to normality by the sacraments and disciplines of that church. The kind of lyrical poetry produced by the lover’s melancholy, too, was regarded as relatively minor poetry, appropriate to young poets learning their trade or to well-born amateurs who were merely using poetry as a status symbol. The major poet, who had advanced to the major or heroic genres of epic and tragedy, was no longer inspired by melancholy but was working in the same general educational area as the philosopher, the jurist, or the theologian. Thus the difference between the creative imagination of the professional artist and the practical skill of other professional men was minimized as far as possible. The great epic poet of Shakespeare’s age, Edmund Spenser, includes in the second book of his Faerie Queene an allegory of the human body and mind, which he calls the House of Alma, and compares to a building. He explores the brain, and finds it divided into three parts. At the back of the brain is an old man called Eumnestes, good memory, who is concerned with the past. In the middle is the judgment, which is concerned with the present. In front is a melancholy figure named Phantastes, born under Saturn, concerned not so much with the future as with the possible, or rather with that uncritical kind of perception which cannot clearly distinguish the real from the fanciful:

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The poetic faculty, it is important to notice, does not belong to this aspect of the brain: it belongs to the judgment in the middle, which also produces philosophy and law: Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals, Of commen wealthes, of states, of policy, Of Lawes, of iudgements, and of decretals; All artes, all science, all Philosophy, And all that in the world was aye thought wittily. (canto ix, st. 53, ll. 5–9)

Spenser had a disciple in the next generation, Phineas Fletcher, who produced a long didactic poem called The Purple Island (i.e., the body of man, traditionally formed of red clay). Half of it consists of an expansion of Spenser’s House of Alma, an exhaustive survey of anatomy under the allegory of a building. Fletcher finds the same three divisions in the brain that Spenser found: he seems in fact to be merely cribbing from Spenser, but when he comes to Phantastes he makes a significant change: The next that in the Castles front is plac’t, Phantastes hight; his yeares are fresh and green, His visage old, his face too much defac’t With ashes pale, his eyes deep sunken been With often thoughts, and never slackt intention: Yet he the fount of speedy apprehension, Father of wit, the well of arts, and quick invention.4

Here, we see, Phantastes is the source of the arts, and of the creative aspect of the mind generally. The change may be sheer inadvertence, or

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it may mean that an actual change of emphasis is beginning to make itself felt on the level of informed but unspecialized opinion represented by such a poem. If so, it was not for another century that the change becomes generally perceptible. The refusal of Renaissance thinkers to carry through the association of the creative and the neurotic temperaments is the result of a certain view of the world that was ultimately religious in origin. They thought of human culture and civilization as an order of nature or reality separable from, and superior to, the ordinary physical environment. This latter world is theologically “fallen”; man entered it with Adam’s sin, and is now in it but not of it. He does not belong in physical nature like the animals and plants; he is confronted with a moral choice, and must either rise above nature into his own proper human home, or sink below it into sin, the latter a degradation that the animals cannot reach. The crux of the argument, however, is that the higher human order was not created by man: it was created by God and designed for man. Adam awoke in a garden not of his planting, a human world pre-established and ordered by a divine mind. In Milton’s Paradise Lost Adam and Eve are suburbanites in the nude, and angels on a brief outing from the City of God drop in for lunch. But the City of God was there, along with another city in hell, long before the descendants of Cain started imitating them on earth. The corollary of this view was that the divine intention in regard to man was revealed in law and in the institutions of society, not in the dreams of poets. All ancient societies tend to ascribe their laws and customs to the gods, and, as the name of Moses reminds us, the Judaeo-Christian tradition is no exception. We said at the beginning that the order of human existence represented by such words as “culture” and “civilization” has been established by man. This statement may seem obviously true now, but it is only within the last two centuries that it has been generally accepted. In earlier centuries, when man was not regarded as the creator of the human order, it could even be disputed whether the arts themselves, poetry, painting, architecture, were genuinely educational agencies or not. Naturally the poets insisted that poetry at least was; for most, however, obedience to law, the habit of virtue, and the disciplines of religion were far safer guides than the arts. Even those who were sympathetic to poetry, in fact even the poets themselves, placed strict limits on human creative power. The poet was urged to follow nature, and the nature he was to follow was conceived, not as the physical world, which could only be copied at second hand,

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but as an order of reality, a structure or system of divine ordinance. If one believes, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his Religio Medici, that “nature is the art of God,” the art of man which follows nature does not transform the world but merely comes to terms with it. The social results of such a view are, of course, intensely conservative. Whatever is of serious importance, in the arts or elsewhere, serves the interests of the community of church and state; whatever is immature is also divisive and anarchic, and exalts the individual at the expense of society. The imaginary belongs to the melancholy individual and his whims; the imaginative is incorporated into a natural and human order established by divine decree. The eighteenth century was the period in which this view of the imagination struggled with, and was finally defeated by, an opposed conception which came to power in the Romantic movement. At the beginning of the century we have Swift, for whom established authority in church and state was the only thing in human life strong enough to restrain the desperately irrational soul of man. In his day the conception of “melancholy” was out of fashion, but another ancient medical notion of “spirits” or “vapours” rising from the loins into the head was still going strong. For Swift, or at least for the purposes of Swift’s satire, all behaviour that breaks down society is caused by an uprush either of digestive disturbances or of sexual excitement into the head. Swift’s chief target is the left-wing Protestantism which in the seventeenth century had carried religious melancholy to the point of replacing the authority of the church with private judgment and had made a virtue even of political rebellion. But he finds the same phenomena in the political tyrant who substitutes his own will for the social contract, or the poet who allows his emotions to take precedence over communication. “The very same principle,” he says, “that influences a bully to break the windows of a whore who has jilted him, naturally stirs up a great prince to raise mighty armies, and dream of nothing but sieges, battles and victories.”5 In his Discourse of the Mechanical Operation of Spirit Swift says that three sources of abnormal behaviour have been generally recognized. One is of divine origin, or revelation, one of demonic origin, or possession, and one of natural origin, which produces such emotions as grief and anger. To these he proposes to add a fourth, which is artificial or mechanical, and is essentially a transfer of sexual energy to the brain, where it produces lofty rationalizations of erotic drives. Or, as Swift says with a nice calculation of doubles entendres:

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. . . however Spiritual Intrigues begin, they generally conclude like all others; they may branch upwards toward Heaven, but the Root is in the Earth. Too intense a Contemplation is not the Business of Flesh and Blood; it must by the necessary Course of Things, in a little Time, let go its Hold, and fall into Matter. Lovers, for the sake of Celestial Converse, are but another sort of Platonicks, who pretend to see Stars and Heaven in Ladies Eyes, and to look or think no lower; but the same Pit is provided for both; and they seem a perfect Moral to the Story of that Philosopher, who, while his Thoughts and Eyes were fixed upon the Constellations, found himself seduced by his lower Parts into a Ditch.6

Swift is a satirist, and the attitude he takes is congenial to satire. For satire usually takes the point of view of sense: it requires a standard of the normal against which the absurd is to be measured, and, like sense, does not distinguish what is above it from what is below it. Such satire speaks with the voice of the consensus of society, and society can protect itself but cannot surpass itself. Hence a great age of satire like the early eighteenth century is likely to represent a culture which has clearly defined views about madness, but feels fairly confident about its own sanity. But even as Swift was writing there was beginning one of those great changes in cultural attitude, where we cannot see any origin or clear development of the change, but realize after a certain time that we are looking at a different world. As this different world, which came in with Romanticism, is essentially our world, we may take a moment to characterize some of the changes. Slowly but steadily the doctrine of the divine creation of the human order fades out, not perhaps as a religious conception, but as a historical and literal fact taking place at a specific point in past time. Man thus comes to be thought of as the architect of his own order, a conception which instantly puts the creative arts in the very centre of human culture. This new emphasis on the primacy of the arts in social life is clear in the statements and assumptions of the Romantic poets. The conception of nature as a divine artefact also fades out, and nature is thought of, not so much as a structure or system presented objectively to man, but rather as a total creative process in which man, the creation of man, and the creation of man’s art, are all involved. For the Romantics, the poet no longer follows nature: nature works through the poet, and poems are natural as well as human creations. But if man

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has created his own order, he is in a position to judge of his own achievement, and to measure that achievement against the kind of ideals his imagination suggests. In Rousseau we meet the doctrine that much of human culture and civilization has in fact been perverse in direction, full of inequalities caused by aggression which have blotted out the true form of human community. This latter Rousseau saw as a society made up of a “general will” of free and equal individuals. And as society can speak only with the middle voice of sense, and cannot by itself distinguish the creative from the neurotic, we thus arrive at two typically Romantic, and therefore modern, conceptions. First, any genuinely creative individual is likely to be regarded by society as antisocial or even mad, merely because he is creative. The association of the creative and the neurotic, being largely imposed on the artist by society, places creative abilities under a curse, a capacity of misunderstanding that may blight or destroy the artist’s social personality. Baudelaire symbolizes the creative spirit by an albatross, so superbly beautiful in its lonely flight, so grotesquely awkward and comic when captured and brought into the view of a human society.7 If we compare the target of Swift’s satire, the melancholy individual creating his own poetry and religion out of a powerful erotic stimulus, with the figure of Byron a century later, we can see how completely cultural standards have reversed themselves. Byron like Swift was a satirist, but his satire does not speak with the voice of society against the erratic individual: it speaks with the voice of the individual against society, and assumes the individual’s possession of a set of standards superior to those of society. This leads us at once to the second new conception: a society may judge an individual to be mad because that society is actually mad itself. The notion that the whole of mankind has been injured in its wits as the result of Adam’s fall was familiar enough, and is the basis for a great deal of satire, including that of Burton’s Anatomy. In the seventeenth century the poet and dramatist Nathaniel Lee, a contemporary of Dryden, remarked when confined to a madhouse: “They said I was mad, and I said they were mad, and, damn them, they outvoted me.”8 Fifty years later Hogarth, depicting the last stage of the rake’s progress in the madhouse of Bedlam, sticks an enormous penny on the wall, indicating that the whole of Britannia is as mad as the rake. But the notion that madness can be a social disease affecting a specific society at a specific time is, I think, not older than the French Revolution. At that time those on one side of politics saw a whole society gone mad in revolutionary France;

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those on the opposite side saw an equally dangerous delusion in accepting the status quo. This social dimension of madness is, to put it mildly, still with us in the century of Fascism, Communism, and the parasites in the democracies who devote themselves to spreading hysteria. Of all the great artists of the Romantic movement, the most interesting for our present purposes is William Blake. Blake had practically no influence in his own day, and his reputation during his life and for long after his death was that of a lunatic. Gradually it was realized that he was a great creative genius, and that if the normal attitude regards him as a lunatic, so much the worse for the normal attitude. Blake himself had very clear notions of what constituted mental health and mental disease. For him, mental health consisted in the practice of the imagination, a practice exemplified by the artist, but manifested in every act of mankind that proceeds from a vision of a better world. Madness, for Blake, was essentially the attitude of mind that we have been calling sense, when regarded as an end in itself. The world outside us, or physical nature, is a blind and mechanical order, hence if we merely accept its conditions we find ourselves setting up blind and mechanistic patterns of behaviour. The world outside is also a fiercely competitive world, and living under its conditions involves us in unending war and misery. Blake’s lyrics contrast the vision of experience, the stupefied adult view that the evils of nature are built into human life and cannot be changed, with the vision of innocence in the child, who assumes that the world is a pleasant place made for his benefit. The adult tends to think of the child’s vision as ignorant and undeveloped, but actually it is a clearer and more civilized vision than his own. Blake interpreted the ancient myths of Titans, giants, and universal deluges to mean that man had in the past very nearly succeeded in exterminating himself. He warns us that this danger will return unless we stop accepting experience and shift our energies to remaking the world on the model of a more desirable vision. This model Blake found in the Bible, but in his reading of the Bible he identifies God with the imaginative or creative part of the human mind. Thus his vision is quixotic in the strict sense, seeing the world about him as having fallen away from the vision of the Word of God, just as Don Quixote saw the world of his day as having fallen away from a vision of chivalry which he found in his library. Don Quixote is of course another great Renaissance masterpiece in which imagination is treated primarily as diseased vision. It would be

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easy to see in Quixote a relatively harmless example of a very sinister type, one of the line of paranoiacs culminating in Hitler who have attempted to destroy the present on the pretext of restoring the past. But we soon realize that there is something better than this in Quixote, something that gives him a dignity and pathos which he never loses in his wildest escapades. He is followed by Sancho Panza, who is so completely an incarnation of sense that only one thing about him is mysterious: the source of his loyalty to Quixote. We get a clue to this near the beginning of the book. Quixote and Sancho meet a group of peasants who invite them to share their lunch of goat’s milk and acorns. Acorns were traditionally the food of those who lived in the Golden Age, that legendary time of simplicity and equality which has haunted so many discussions of human culture from Plato’s Laws to Rousseau’s Social Contract. Don Quixote is prompted by the sight of acorns to make a long speech about the Golden Age, first inviting Sancho to sit beside him, quoting from the Bible the verse about the exalting of the humble. He says that it is his mission to restore the Golden Age, which is, incidentally, exactly what Blake said the purpose of his art was. True, elsewhere he tells Sancho that the Golden Age would soon return if people would only see things as they really are, and not allow themselves to be deluded by enchanters who make giants look like windmills. But we can see that Quixote’s obsession about chivalry is not so much what he believes in as what he thinks he believes in, a childish world where dreams of conquered giants and rescued damsels keep coming true, and which has thrust itself in front of his real social vision. This latter is a vision of simplicity and innocence, not childish but childlike, the element in Quixote that makes him courteous, chaste, generous (except that he has no money), intelligent and cultured within the limits of his obsession, and, of course, courageous. It is the solid core of moral reality in the middle of his fantasy that holds the loyalty not only of Sancho but of the readers of his adventures. For this wistful sense of a Golden Age, lost but still possible, the child’s vision which the Gospel tells us is so dangerous to lose, is something that makes Quixotes of us all, and gives our minds, too, whatever dignity they may possess. In part 2 of the book, Quixote and Sancho come into the dominions of a duke who has read part 1, and who, to amuse himself, makes Sancho the governor of an island. We are perhaps less surprised than he to learn that Sancho rules his island so honestly and efficiently that he has to be pulled out of office in a hurry before he starts to disintegrate the Spanish

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aristocracy. We are even less surprised to find that Quixote’s advice to him is full of gentle and shrewd good sense. The world is still looking for that lost island, and it still asks for nothing better than to have Sancho Panza for its ruler and Don Quixote for his honoured counsellor. In the fifth book of Wordsworth’s Prelude, the great epic poem in which he describes the growth and formation of his own very modern mind, Wordsworth deals with the influence that his reading has had on him. As a student he was interested in mathematics and literature, and the literary works he particularly mentions are the Arabian Nights and Don Quixote. He tells us that he (at least we may assume it was he) fell asleep while reading Don Quixote, and had a strange dream. He saw an Arab horseman, who was also Don Quixote, riding over the sands of a desert carrying a stone and a shell, which were also books. The books were Euclid and an unnamed book of poetry: in other words they were the keys to the worlds of words and numbers, the two great instruments that man has invented for transforming reality. The Arab, or “SemiQuixote” as Wordsworth calls him, is fleeing from some unimaginable catastrophe, which the poet calls a deluge, and is going to bury these two books to keep them safe until the disaster is past. Wordsworth says that he often reverts to this dream, and that he has felt A reverence for a Being thus employ’d; And thought that in the blind and awful lair Of such a madness, reason did lie couch’d. Enow there are on earth to take in charge Their Wives, their Children, and their virgin Loves, Or whatsoever else the heart holds dear; Enow to think of these; yea, will I say, In sober contemplation of the approach Of such great overthrow, made manifest By certain evidence, that I, methinks, Could share that Maniac’s anxiousness, could go Upon like errand.9

Perhaps in the age of the useless bomb shelter10 it may be easier for us than it was even for Wordsworth to understand that if the human race is to have any future at all, it can only obtain it through a concern for preserving its powers of creation which it will be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish clearly from a “Maniac’s anxiousness.”

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37 The Educated Imagination November–December 1962

From The Educated Imagination, the Massey Lectures, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, November-December 1962 (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1963) in both hardcover and paperback. Reprinted as The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, hardcover 1964, paperback 1966); as The Educated Imagination, ed. Hisaaki Yamanouchi (Tokyo: Tsurumi shoten, 1967); as Kyôyô no tame no sôzôryoko, trans. Toro Egawa and Masahiko Maeda (Tokyo: Taiyosha, 1969, rpt. 1980); as Pouvoirs de l’imagination: essai, trans. Jean Simard (Montreal: Éditions HMH, 1969); as Sin-wha Mun-hak-non, trans. Sangil Kim (Seoul: Ul-you Mun-wha-sa, 1971); as L’immaginazione coltivata., trans. Amleto Lorenzini and Mario Manzari (Milan: Longanesi, 1974); as The Educated Imagination, Braille ed. transcribed by Hilda Billig in 2 vols. (Vancouver: Canadian National Institute for the Blind, 1979); as Takhayyul-i farikhtah, trans. and with a preface by Saeed Arbaab-Shirani (Tihran: Markaz-i Nashr-i Danishgahi [Centre for University Publications], 1984); as Mun-hak-ui Ku-cho-wa Sang-sang-lyok, trans. Sang-woo Lee (Seoul: Chip-mun-dang, 1987). The volume also includes two essays by Frye, “Literature and Myth” (pp. 119–42) and “The Archetypes of Literature” (pp. 143–62), as well as the translator’s analysis, based on Frye’s criticism, of the mythical imagery in the writings of Kim Donginby (pp. 163– 87), first trans. and published in 1964. Also reprinted as The Educated Imagination (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1993); and most recently as Fulai Wenlun Sanzhong: Xiangxiangli de Xiuyang, Chuangzhao yu Zai Chuangzhao, Wenlian de Pipingjai [Three of Frye’s Critical Monographs (The Educated Imagination, Creation and Recreation, The Well-Tempered Critic)] trans. Xu Kun et al., rev. and prefaced, and annotated by Wu Chizhe (Hoh–Hot: University of Inner Mongolia Press, 2003). Frye had given many talks for the CBC before, and he wrote The Educated Imagination very quickly, recording

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the lectures for broadcast in the fall of 1962 (Ayre, 285–8). He planned them carefully, however, working out his ideas for a more direct and accessible version of his theories over thirty-three pages (NFF 1991, box 22, Notebook 9). A decade later he objected to the proposed title for the Italian translation—Immaginazione e realtà—on the grounds that it “was an educational book to begin with . . . the aim of the book was practical, rather theoretical.”1 He also put up a strenuous fight when the book’s American publisher wanted to remove the Canadian references.2 The Educated Imagination proved to be Frye’s most popular book, and an unexpected publishing success for the CBC as well. It has been reprinted in Canada and abroad many times.

1 The Motive for Metaphor For the past twenty-five years I have been teaching and studying English literature in a university. As in any other job, questions stick in one’s mind, not because people keep asking them, but because they’re the questions inspired by the very fact of being in such a place. What good is the study of literature? Does it help us to think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it? What is the function of the teacher and scholar, or of the person who calls himself, as I do, a literary critic? What difference does the study of literature make in our social or political or religious attitude? In my early days I thought very little about such questions, not because I had any of the answers, but because I assumed that anybody who asked them was naive. I think now that the simplest questions are not only the hardest to answer, but the most important to ask, so I’m going to raise them and try to suggest what my present answers are. I say try to suggest, because there are only more or less inadequate answers to such questions—there aren’t any right answers. The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever “solve.” Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions. As I can’t see my audience, I have to choose my rhetorical style in the dark, and I’m taking the classroom style, because an audience of students is the one I feel easiest with. There are two things in particular that I want to discuss with you. In school, and in university, there’s a subject called “English” in Englishspeaking countries. English means, in the first place, the mother tongue. As that, it’s the most practical subject in the world: you can’t understand

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anything or take any part in your society without it. Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it’s as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep. The native language takes precedence over every other subject of study: nothing else can compare with it in usefulness. But then you find that every mother tongue, in any developed or civilized society, turns into something called literature. If you keep on studying “English,” you find yourself trying to read Shakespeare and Milton. Literature, we’re told, is one of the arts, along with painting and music, and, after you’ve looked up all the hard words and the Classical allusions and learned what words like “imagery” and “diction” are supposed to mean, what you use in understanding it, or so you’re told, is your imagination. Here you don’t seem to be in quite the same practical and useful area: Shakespeare and Milton, whatever their merits, are not the kind of thing you must know to hold any place in society at all. A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don’t mind being that. Every child realizes that literature is taking him in a different direction from the immediately useful, and a good many children complain loudly about this. Two questions I want to deal with, then, are, first, What is the relation of English as the mother tongue to English as a literature? Second, What is the social value of the study of literature, and what is the place of the imagination that literature addresses itself to, in the learning process? Let’s start with the different ways there are of dealing with the world we’re living in. Suppose you’re shipwrecked on an uninhabited island in the South Seas. The first thing you do is to take a long look at the world around you, a world of sky and sea and earth and stars and trees and hills. You see this world as objective, as something set over against you and not yourself or related to you in any way. And you notice two things about this objective world. In the first place, it doesn’t have any conversation. It’s full of animals and plants and insects going on with their own business, but there’s nothing that responds to you: it has no morals and no intelligence, or at least none that you can grasp. It may have a shape and a meaning, but it doesn’t seem to be a human shape or a human meaning. Even if there’s enough to eat and no dangerous animals, you feel lonely and frightened and unwanted in such a world. In the second place, you find that looking at the world, as something set over against you, splits your mind in two. You have an intellect that feels curious about it and wants to study it, and you have feelings or emotions that see it as beautiful or austere or terrible. You know that

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both these attitudes have some reality, at least for you. If the ship you were wrecked in was a Western ship, you’d probably feel that your intellect tells you more about what’s really there in the outer world, and that your emotions tell you more about what’s going on inside you. If your background were Oriental, you’d be more likely to reverse this and say that the beauty or terror was what was really there, and that your instinct to count and classify and measure and pull to pieces was what was inside your mind. But whether your point of view is Western or Eastern, intellect and emotion never get together in your mind as long as you’re simply looking at the world. They alternate, and keep you divided between them. The language you use on this level of the mind is the language of consciousness or awareness. It’s largely a language of nouns and adjectives. You have to have names for things, and you need qualities like “wet” or “green” or “beautiful” to describe how things seem to you. This is the speculative or contemplative position of the mind, the position in which the arts and sciences begin, although they don’t stay there very long. The sciences begin by accepting the facts and the evidence about an outside world without trying to alter them. Science proceeds by accurate measurement and description, and follows the demands of the reason rather than the emotions. What it deals with is there, whether we like it or not. The emotions are unreasonable: for them it’s what they like and don’t like that comes first. We’d be naturally inclined to think that the arts follow the path of emotion, in contrast to the sciences. Up to a point they do, but there’s a complicating factor. That complicating factor is the contrast between “I like this” and “I don’t like this.” In this Robinson Crusoe life I’ve assigned you, you may have moods of complete peacefulness and joy, moods when you accept your island and everything around you. You wouldn’t have such moods very often, and when you had them, they’d be moods of identification, when you felt that the island was a part of you and you a part of it. That is not the feeling of consciousness or awareness, where you feel split off from everything that’s not your perceiving self. Your habitual state of mind is the feeling of separation which goes with being conscious, and the feeling “this is not a part of me” soon becomes “this is not what I want.” Notice the word “want”: we’ll be coming back to it. So you soon realize that there’s a difference between the world you’re living in and the world you want to live in. The world you want to live in is a human world, not an objective one: it’s not an environment but a

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home; it’s not the world you see but the world you build out of what you see. You go to work to build a shelter or plant a garden, and as soon as you start to work you’ve moved into a different level of human life. You’re not separating only yourself from nature now, but constructing a human world and separating it from the rest of the world. Your intellect and emotions are now both engaged in the same activity, so there’s no longer any real distinction between them. As soon as you plant a garden or a crop, you develop the conception of a “weed,” the plant you don’t want in there. But you can’t say that “weed” is either an intellectual or an emotional conception, because it’s both at once. Further, you go to work because you feel you have to, and because you want something at the end of the work. That means that the important categories of your life are no longer the subject and the object, the watcher and the things being watched: the important categories are what you have to do and what you want to do—in other words, necessity and freedom. One person by himself is not a complete human being, so I’ll provide you with another shipwrecked refugee of the opposite sex and an eventual family. Now you’re a member of a human society. This human society after a while will transform the island into something with a human shape. What that human shape is, is revealed in the shape of the work you do: the buildings, such as they are, the paths through the woods, the planted crops fenced off against whatever animals want to eat them. These things, these rudiments of city, highway, garden, and farm, are the human form of nature, or the form of human nature, whichever you like. This is the area of the applied arts and sciences, and it appears in our society as engineering and agriculture and medicine and architecture. In this area we can never say clearly where the art stops and the science begins, or vice versa. The language you use on this level is the language of practical sense, a language of verbs or words of action and movement. The practical world, however, is a world where actions speak louder than words. In some ways it’s a higher level of existence than the speculative level, because it’s doing something about the world instead of just looking at it, but in itself it’s a much more primitive level. It’s the process of adapting to the environment, or rather of transforming the environment in the interests of one species, that goes on among animals and plants as well as human beings. The animals have a good many of our practical skills: some insects make pretty fair architects, and beavers know quite a lot about engineering. In this island, probably, and certainly if you were alone,

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you’d have about the ranking of a second-rate animal. What makes our practical life really human is a third level of the mind, a level where consciousness and practical skill come together. This third level is a vision or model in your mind of what you want to construct. There’s that word “want” again. The actions of man are prompted by desire, and some of these desires are needs, like food and warmth and shelter. One of these needs is sexual, the desire to reproduce and bring more human beings into existence. But there’s also a desire to bring a social human form into existence: the form of cities and gardens and farms that we call civilization. Many animals and insects have this social form too, but man knows that he has it: he can compare what he does with what he can imagine being done. So we begin to see where the imagination belongs in the scheme of human affairs. It’s the power of constructing possible models of human experience. In the world of the imagination, anything goes that’s imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens. If it did happen, it would move out of the world of imagination into the world of action. We have three levels of the mind now, and a language for each of them, which in English-speaking societies means an English for each of them. There’s the level of consciousness and awareness, where the most important thing is the difference between me and everything else. The English of this level is the English of ordinary conversation, which is mostly monologue, as you’ll soon realize if you do a bit of eavesdropping, or listening to yourself. We can call it the language of self-expression. Then there’s the level of social participation, the working or technological language of teachers and preachers and politicians and advertisers and lawyers and journalists and scientists. We’ve already called this the language of practical sense. Then there’s the level of imagination, which produces the literary language of poems and plays and novels. They’re not really different languages, of course, but three different reasons for using words. On this basis, perhaps, we can distinguish the arts from the sciences. Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves towards the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts

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with the imagination, and then works towards ordinary experience: that is, it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can. You can see why we tend to think of the sciences as intellectual and the arts as emotional: one starts with the world as it is, the other with the world we want to have. Up to a point it is true that science gives an intellectual view of reality, and that the arts try to make the emotions as precise and disciplined as sciences do the intellect. But of course it’s nonsense to think of the scientist as a cold unemotional reasoner and the artist as somebody who’s in a perpetual emotional tizzy. You can’t distinguish the arts from the sciences by the mental processes the people in them use: they both operate on a mixture of hunch and common sense. A highly developed science and a highly developed art are very close together, psychologically and otherwise. Still, the fact that they start from opposite ends, even if they do meet in the middle, makes for one important difference between them. Science learns more and more about the world as it goes on: it evolves and improves. A physicist today knows more physics than Newton did, even if he’s not as great a scientist. But literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic. Literature doesn’t evolve or improve or progress. We may have dramatists in the future who will write plays as good as King Lear, though they’ll be very different ones, but drama as a whole will never get better than King Lear. King Lear is it, as far as drama is concerned; so is Oedipus Rex, written two thousand years earlier than that, and both will be models of dramatic writing as long as the human race endures. Social conditions may improve: most of us would rather live in nineteenthcentury United States than in thirteenth-century Italy, and for most of us Whitman’s celebration of democracy makes a lot more sense than Dante’s Inferno. But it doesn’t follow that Whitman is a better poet than Dante: literature won’t line up with that kind of improvement. So we find that everything that does improve, including science, leaves the literary artist out in the cold. Writers don’t seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds. And you certainly wouldn’t turn to contemporary poets for guidance or leadership in the twentieth-century world. You’d hardly go to Ezra Pound, with his Fascism and social credit and Confucianism and antiSemitism. Or to Yeats, with his spiritualism and fairies and astrology. Or to D.H. Lawrence, who’ll tell you that it’s a good thing for servants to be flogged because that restores the precious current of blood-reciprocity

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between servant and master. Or to T.S. Eliot, who’ll tell you that to have a flourishing culture we should educate an elite, keep most people living in the same spot, and never disestablish the Church of England. The novelists seem to be a little closer to the world they’re living in, but not much. When Communists talk about the decadence of bourgeois culture, this is the kind of thing they always bring up. Their own writers don’t seem to be any better, though; just duller. So the real question is a bigger one. Is it possible that literature, especially poetry, is something that a scientific civilization like ours will eventually outgrow? Man has always wanted to fly, and thousands of years ago he was making sculptures of winged bulls and telling stories about people who flew so high on artificial wings that the sun melted them off. In an Indian play fifteen hundred years old, Sakuntala, there’s a god who flies around in a chariot that to a modern reader sounds very much like a private airplane. Interesting that the writer had so much imagination, but do we need such stories now that we have private airplanes? This is not a new question: it was raised 150 years ago by Thomas Love Peacock, who was a poet and novelist himself, and a very brilliant one. He wrote an essay called Four Ages of Poetry, with his tongue of course in his cheek, in which he said that poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the imagination of mankind in its infancy, but that now, in an age of science and technology, the poet has outlived his social function. “A poet in our times,” said Peacock, “is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backwards.”3 Peacock’s essay annoyed his friend Shelley, who wrote another essay called A Defence of Poetry to refute it. Shelley’s essay is a wonderful piece of writing, but it’s not likely to convince anyone who needs convincing. I shall be spending a good deal of my time on this question of the relevance of literature in the world of today, and I can only indicate the general lines my answer will take. There are two points I can make now, one simple, the other more difficult. The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment. Literature’s world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas; the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments. The world of literature is human in shape, a world where the

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sun rises in the east and sets in the west over the edge of a flat earth in three dimensions, where the primary realities are not atoms or electrons but bodies, and the primary forces not energy or gravitation but love and death and passion and joy. It’s not surprising if writers are often rather simple people, not always what we think of as intellectuals, and certainly not always any freer of silliness or perversity than anyone else. What concerns us is what they produce, not what they are, and poetry, according to Milton, who ought to have known, is “more simple, sensuous, and passionate” than philosophy or science. The more difficult point takes us back to what we said when we were on that South Sea island. Our emotional reaction to the world varies from “I like this” to “I don’t like this.” The first, we said, was a state of identity, a feeling that everything around us was part of us, and the second is the ordinary state of consciousness, or separation, where art and science begin. Art begins as soon as “I don’t like this” turns into “this is not the way I could imagine it.” We notice in passing that the creative and the neurotic minds have a lot in common. They’re both dissatisfied with what they see; they both believe that something else ought to be there; and they try to pretend it is there or to make it be there. The differences are more important, but we’re not ready for them yet. At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn’t. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there’s a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world. Here we recapture, in full consciousness, that original lost sense of identity with our surroundings, where there is nothing outside the mind of man, or something identical with the mind of man. Religions present us with visions of eternal and infinite heavens or paradises which have the form of the cities and gardens of human civilization, like the Jerusalem and Eden of the Bible, completely separated from the state of frustration and misery that bulks so large in ordinary life. We’re not concerned with these visions as religion, but they indicate what the limits of the imagination are. They indicate too that in the human world the imagination has no limits, if you follow me. We said that the desire to fly produced the airplane. But people don’t get into planes because they want to fly; they get into planes because they want to get somewhere else faster. What’s produced the airplane is not so much a desire to fly as a rebellion against

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the tyranny of time and space. And that’s a process that can never stop, no matter how high our Titovs and Glenns may go.4 For each of these six talks I’ve taken a title from some work of literature, and my title for this one is The Motive for Metaphor, from a poem of Wallace Stevens. Here’s the poem: You like it under the trees in autumn, Because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves And repeats words without meaning. In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon— The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be, Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The A B C of being, The ruddy temper, the hammer Of red and blue, the hard sound— Steel against intimation—the sharp flash, The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

What Stevens calls the weight of primary noon, the A B C of being, and the dominant X is the objective world, the world set over against us. Outside literature, the main motive for writing is to describe this world. But literature itself uses language in a way which associates our minds with it. As soon as you use associative language, you begin using figures of speech. If you say this talk is dry and dull, you’re using figures associating it with bread and breadknives. There are two main kinds of

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association, analogy and identity, two things that are like each other and two things that are each other. You can say with Burns, “My love’s like a red, red rose,” or you can say with Shakespeare: Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament And only herald to the gaudy spring. [Sonnet 1, ll. 9–10]

One produces the figure of speech called the simile; the other produces the figure called metaphor. In descriptive writing you have to be careful of associative language. You’ll find that analogy, or likeness to something else, is very tricky to handle in description, because the differences are as important as the resemblances. As for metaphor, where you’re really saying “this is that,” you’re turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same thing and still remain two things. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind. So he produces what Baudelaire called a “suggestive magic including at the same time object and subject, the world outside the artist and the artist himself.”5 The motive for metaphor, according to Wallace Stevens, is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says (1 Cor. 13: 9) we are also a part of what we know. 2 The Singing School In my first talk I shipwrecked you on a South Sea island and tried to distinguish the attitudes of mind that might result. I suggested that there would be three main attitudes. First, a state of consciousness or awareness that separates you as an individual from the rest of the world. Second, a practical attitude of creating a human way of life in that world. Third, an imaginative attitude, a vision or model of the world as you could imagine it and would like it to be. I said that there was a language for each attitude, and that these languages appear in our society as the language of ordinary conversation, the language of practical skills, and the language of literature. We discovered that the language of literature

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was associative: it uses figures of speech, like the simile and the metaphor, to suggest an identity between the human mind and the world outside it, that identity being what the imagination is chiefly concerned with. You notice that we’ve gradually shifted off the island back to twentieth-century Canada. There’d be precious little literature produced on your island, and what there’d be would be of a severely practical kind, like messages in bottles, if you had any bottles. The reason for that is that you’re not a genuine primitive: your imagination couldn’t operate on such a world except in terms of the world you know. We’ll see how important a point this is in a moment. In the meantime, think of Robinson Crusoe, an eighteenth-century Englishman from a nation of shop-keepers. He didn’t write poetry: what he did was to open a journal and a ledger. But suppose you were enough of a primitive to develop a genuinely imaginative life of your own. You’d start by identifying the human and the nonhuman worlds in all sorts of ways. The commonest, and the most important for literature, is the god, the being who is human in general form and character, but seems to have some particular connection with the outer world, a storm-god or sun-god or tree-god. Some peoples identify themselves with certain animals or plants, called totems; some link certain animals, real or imaginary, bulls or dragons, with forces of nature; some ascribe powers of controlling nature to certain human beings, usually magicians, sometimes kings. You may say that these things belong to comparative religion or anthropology, not to literary criticism. I’m saying that they are all products of an impulse to identify human and natural worlds; that they’re really metaphors, and become purely metaphors, part of the language of poetry, as soon as they cease to be beliefs, or even sooner. Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter.6 But Horace’s poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter’s religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature. No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn’t yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it’s still embedded in religion, magic, and social ceremonies. But we can see literary expression taking shape in these things, and forming an imaginative framework, so to speak, that contains the literature descending from it. Stories are told about gods,

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and form a mythology. The gods take on certain characteristics: there’s a trickster god, a mocking god, a boastful god: the same types of characters get into legends and folk tales, and, as literature develops, into fiction. Rituals and dances take on dramatic form, and eventually an independent drama develops. Poems used for certain occasions, war-songs, worksongs, funeral laments, lullabies, become traditional literary forms. The moral of all this is that every form in literature has a pedigree, and we can trace its descent back to the earliest times. A writer’s desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he’ll start by imitating whatever he’s read, which usually means what the people around him are writing. This provides for him what is called a convention, a certain typical and socially accepted way of writing. The young poet of Shakespeare’s day would probably write about the frustration of sexual desire; a young poet today would probably write about the release of it, but in both cases the writing is conventional. After working in this convention for a while, his own distinctive sense of form will develop out of his knowledge of literary technique. He doesn’t create out of nothing; and whatever he has to say he can only say in a recognizably literary way. We can perhaps understand this better if we take painting as our example. There have been painters since the last ice age, and I hope there’ll be painters until the next one: they show every conceivable variety of vision, and of originality in setting it out. But the actual technical or formal problems of composition involved in the act of getting certain colours and shapes on a flat surface, usually rectangular, have remained constant from the beginning. So with literature. In fiction, the technical problems of shaping a story to make it interesting to read, to provide for suspense, to find the logical points where the story should begin and end, don’t change much in whatever time or culture the story’s being told. E.M. Forster once remarked that if it weren’t for wedding bells or funeral bells a novelist would hardly know where to stop:7 he might have added a third conventional ending, the point of self-knowledge, at which a character finds something out about himself as a result of some crucial experience. But weddings and deaths and initiation ceremonies have always been points at which the creative imagination came into focus, both now and thousands of years ago. If you open the Bible, you’ll soon come to the story of the finding of the infant Moses by Pharaoh’s daughter. That’s a conventional type of story, the mysterious birth of the hero. It was told about a Mesopotamian king long before there was any Bible; it was told of

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Perseus in Greek legend; then it passed into literature with Euripides’ play Ion; then it was used by Plautus and Terence and other writers of comedies; then it became a device in fiction, used in Tom Jones and Oliver Twist, and it’s still going strong. You notice that popular literature, the kind of stories that are read for relaxation, is always very highly conventionalized. If you pick up a detective story, you may not know until the last page who done it, but you always know before you start reading exactly the kind of thing that’s going to happen. If you read the fiction in women’s magazines, you read the story of Cinderella over and over again. If you read thrillers, you read the story of Bluebeard over and over again. If you read Westerns, you’re reading a development of a pastoral convention, which turns up in writers of all ages, including Shakespeare. It’s the same with characterization. The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. I mentioned Plautus and Terence, writers of comedies in Rome two hundred years before Christ, who took their plots mainly from still earlier Greek plays. Usually what happens is that a young man is in love with a courtesan; his father says nothing doing, but a clever slave fools the father and the young man gets his girl. Change the courtesan to a chorus-girl, the slave to a butler, and the father to Aunt Agatha, and you’ve got the same plot and the same cast of characters that you find in a novel of P.G. Wodehouse.8 Wodehouse is a popular writer, and the fact that he is a popular writer has a lot to do with his use of stock plots. Of course, he doesn’t take his own plots seriously; he makes fun of them by the way he uses them; but so did Plautus and Terence. Our principle is, then, that literature can only derive its forms from itself: they can’t exist outside literature, any more than musical forms like the sonata and the fugue can exist outside music. This principle is important for understanding what’s happened in Canadian literature. When Canada was still a country for pioneers, it was assumed that a new country, a new society, new things to look at, and new experiences would produce a new literature. So Canadian writers ever since, including me, have been saying that Canada was just about to get itself a brand new literature. But these new things provide only content; they don’t provide new literary forms. Those can come only from the literature Canadians already know. People coming to Canada from, say, England in 1830 started writing in the conventions of English literature in 1830. They couldn’t possibly have done anything else: they weren’t primitives,

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and could never have looked at the world the way the Indians did. When they wrote, they produced second-hand imitations of Byron and Scott and Tom Moore, because that was what they had been reading; Canadian writers today produce imitations of D.H. Lawrence and W.H. Auden for the same reason. The same thing happened in the States, and people predicted that new Iliads and Odysseys would arise in the ancient forests of the new world. The Americans were a little luckier than we were: they really did have writers original enough to give them their national epics. These national epics weren’t a bit like the Iliad or the Odyssey; they were such books as Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, which developed out of conventions quite different from Homer’s. Or is it really true to say that they’re not a bit like the Iliad or the Odyssey? Superficially they’re very different, but the better you know both the Odyssey and Huckleberry Finn, the more impressed you’ll be by the resemblances: the disguises, the ingenious lies to get out of scrapes, the exciting adventures that often suddenly turn tragic, the mingling of the strange and the familiar, the sense of a human comradeship stronger than any disaster. And Melville goes out of his way to explain how his white whale belongs in the same family of sea monsters that turn up in Greek myths and in the Bible. I’m not saying that there’s nothing new in literature: I’m saying that everything is new, and yet recognizably the same kind of thing as the old, just as a new baby is a genuinely new individual, although it’s also an example of something very common, which is human beings, and also it’s lineally descended from the first human beings there ever were. And what, you ask, is the point of saying that? I have two points. First: you remember that I distinguished the language of imagination, or literature, from the language of consciousness, which produces ordinary conversation, and from the language of practical skill or knowledge, which produces information, like science and history. These are both forms of verbal address, where you speak directly to an audience. There is no direct address in literature: it isn’t what you say but how it’s said that’s important there. The literary writer isn’t giving information, either about a subject or about his state of mind: he’s trying to let something take on its own form, whether it’s a poem or play or novel or whatever. That’s why you can’t produce literature voluntarily, in the way you’d write a letter or a report. That’s also why it’s no use telling the poet that he ought to write in a different way so you can understand him better. The writer of literature can only write out what takes shape in his

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mind. It’s quite wrong to think of the original writer as the opposite of the conventional one. All writers are conventional, because all writers have the same problem of transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination. For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong. Here’s a poem by a contemporary of Shakespeare, Thomas Campion: When thou must home to shades of underground, And there arriv’d, a new admired guest, The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round, White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest, To hear the stories of thy finish’d love From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move; Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make, Of tourneys and great challenges of knights, And all these triumphs for thy beauty’s sake: When thou hast told these honours done to thee, Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me.9

This is written in the convention that poets of that age used for love poetry: the poet is always in love with some obdurate and unresponsive mistress, whose neglect of the lover may even cause his madness or death. It’s pure convention, and it’s a complete waste of time trying to find out about the women in Campion’s life—there can’t possibly be any real experience behind it. Campion himself was a poet and critic, and a composer who set his poems to his own musical settings. He was also a professional man who started out in law but switched over to medicine, and served for some time in the army. In other words, he was a busy man, who didn’t have much time for getting himself murdered by cruel mistresses. The poem uses religious language, but not a religion that Campion could ever have believed in. At the same time it’s a superbly lovely poem; it’s perfection itself, and if you think that a conventional poem can only be just a literary exercise, and that you could write a better poem out of real experience, I’d be doubtful of your success. But I

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can’t explain what Campion has really done in this poem without my second point. All themes and characters and stories that you encounter in literature belong to one big interlocking family. You can see how true this is if you think of such words as tragedy or comedy or satire or romance: certain typical ways in which stories get told. You keep associating your literary experiences together: you’re always being reminded of some other story you read or movie you saw or character that impressed you. For most of us, most of the time, this goes on unconsciously, but the fact that it does go on suggests that perhaps in literature you don’t just read one novel or poem after another, but that there’s a real subject to be studied, as there is in a science, and that the more you read, the more you learn about literature as a whole. This conception of “literature as a whole” suggests something else. Is it possible to get, in however crude and sketchy a way, some bird’s-eye view of what literature as a whole is about: considered, that is, as a coherent subject of study and not just a pile of books? Several critics in the last few years have been playing with this suggestion, and they all begin by going back to the primitive literature that we spoke of a moment ago. For constructing any work of art you need some principle of repetition or recurrence: that’s what gives you rhythm in music and pattern in painting. A literature, we said, has a lot to do with identifying the human world with the natural world around it, or finding analogies between them. In nature the most obvious repeating or recurring feature is the cycle. The sun travels across the sky into the dark and comes back again; the seasons go from spring to winter and back to spring again; water goes from springs or fountains to the sea and back again in rain. Human life goes from childhood to death and back again in a new birth. A great many primitive stories and myths, then, would attach themselves to this cycle which stretches like a backbone through the middle of both human and natural life. Mythologies are full of young gods or heroes who go through various successful adventures and then are deserted or betrayed and killed, and then come back to life again, suggesting in their story the movement of the sun across the sky into the dark or the progression of seasons through winter and spring. Sometimes they’re swallowed by a huge sea monster or killed by a boar; or they wander in a strange dark underworld and then fight their way out again. Myths of this kind come into the stories of Perseus, Theseus, and Hercules in Greek myth, and they lurk behind

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many of the stories of the Bible. Usually there’s a female figure in the story. Some of the critics I mentioned suggest that these stories go back to a single mythical story, which may never have existed as a whole story anywhere, but which we can reconstruct from the myths and legends we have. The poet Robert Graves has tried to do this, in a book called The White Goddess. Graves has a poem called To Juan at the Winter Solstice: Juan is his son, and the winter solstice is Christmas time, the low point of the year, when we set logs on fire or hang lights on a tree, originally to help make sure that the light of the world won’t go out altogether. Graves’s poem begins: There is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling, Whether as learned bard or gifted child; To it all lines or lesser gauds belong That startle with their shining Such common stories as they stray into.

In Graves’s version of the one story, the heroine is a “white goddess,” a female figure associated with the moon, who is sometimes a maiden, sometimes a wife, sometimes a beautiful but treacherous witch or siren, sometimes a sinister old woman or hag belonging to the lower world, like Hecate and the witches in Macbeth. Graves would say that the eloquence and power of the Campion poem I just read you was the result of the fact that it evokes this white goddess in one of her most frequent aspects: the sinister witch in hell gloating over the murdered bodies of her lovers. By saying it’s the only story worth telling in literature, Graves means that the great types of stories, such as comedies and tragedies, start out as episodes from it. Comedies derive from the phase in which god and goddess are happy wedded lovers; tragedies from the phase in which the lover is cast off and killed while the white goddess renews her youth and waits for another round of victims. I think myself that Graves’s story is a central one in literature, but that it fits inside a still bigger and better known one. To explain what it is I have to take you back, for the last time, I hope, to the desert island and the three levels of the mind. You start, I said, by looking at the world with your intellect and your emotions. Occasionally you have a feeling of identity with your surroundings—“I like this”—but more often you feel self-conscious and cut

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off from them. I mentioned Robinson Crusoe opening his journal and ledger: all he had to put into his ledger were the things against and in favour of his situation, and perhaps now we can see why he thought it was important to record them. If you were developing an imagination in your new world that belonged to that world, you’d start off something like this: I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I’ve felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I’ll have that feeling again, and that next time it won’t go away. That’s a dim, misty outline of the story that’s told so often, of how man once lived in a Golden Age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides, or a happy island kingdom in the Atlantic, how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. I said earlier that this is a feeling of lost identity, and that poetry, by using the language of identification, which is metaphor, tries to lead our imaginations back to it. Anyway, that’s what a lot of poets say they’re trying to do. Here’s Blake: The nature of my work is visionary or imaginative; it is an attempt to restore what the ancients called the Golden Age.10

Here’s Wordsworth: 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

Here’s D.H. Lawrence: 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.12

And here’s Yeats, in his poem Sailing to Byzantium, which has given me the title I have given to this talk, “The Singing School”:

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An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature. Inside it comes the story of the hero with a thousand faces, as one critic calls him,13 whose adventures, death, disappearance, and marriage or resurrection are the focal points of what later become romance and tragedy and satire and comedy in fiction, and the emotional moods that take their place in such forms as the lyric, which normally doesn’t tell a story. We notice that modern writers speak of these visions of sacred golden cities and happy gardens very rarely, though when they do they clearly mean what they say. They spend a good deal more of their time on the misery, frustration, or absurdity of human existence. In other words, literature not only leads us towards the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don’t like and want to get away from. The tone literature takes towards this world is not a moralizing tone, but the tone we call ironic. The effect of irony is to enable us to see over the head of a situation—we have irony in a play, for example, when we know more about what’s going on than the characters do—and so to detach us, at least in imagination, from the world we’d prefer not to be involved with. As civilization develops, we become more preoccupied with human life, and less conscious of our relation to nonhuman nature. Literature reflects this, and the more advanced the civilization, the more literature seems to concern itself with purely human problems and conflicts. The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves. In Shakespeare we can still have heroes who can see ghosts and talk in magnificent poetry, but by the time we get to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot they’re speaking prose and have turned into ghosts themselves. We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images, and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and

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the problem of surmounting it still with us. Above all, we have to look at the total design of a writer’s work, the title he gives to it, and his main theme, which means his point in writing it, to understand that literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows. 3 Giants in Time In the last two talks we’ve been circling around the question: what kind of reality does literature have? When you see a play of Shakespeare, you know that there never were any such people as Hamlet or Falstaff. There may once have been a prince in Denmark named Amleth, or there may have been somebody called Sir John Fastolf—in fact there was, and he comes into an earlier play of Shakespeare’s. But these historical figures have no more to do with Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Falstaff than you or I have. Poets are fond of telling people, especially people with money or influence, that they can make them immortal by mentioning them in poems. Sometimes they’re right. If there ever was any huge sulky bruiser in the Greek army named Achilles, he’d no doubt be surprised to find that his name was still well known after three thousand years. Whether he’d be pleased or not is another question. Assuming that there was a historical Achilles, there are two reasons why his name is still well known. One reason is that Homer wrote about him. The other reason is that practically everything Homer said about him was preposterous. Nobody was ever made invulnerable by being dipped in a river; nobody ever fought with a river-god; nobody had a sea-nymph for a mother. Whether it’s Achilles or Hamlet or King Arthur or Charles Dickens’s father, once anyone gets put into literature he’s taken over by literature, and whatever he was in real life could hardly matter less. Still, if Homer’s Achilles isn’t the real Achilles, he isn’t unreal either; unrealities don’t seem so full of life after three thousand years as Homer’s Achilles does. This is the kind of problem we have to tackle next: the fact that what we meet in literature is neither real nor unreal. We have two words, “imaginary,” meaning unreal, and “imaginative,” meaning what the writer produces, and they mean entirely different things. We can understand though how the poet got his reputation as a kind of licensed liar. The word poet itself means liar in some languages, and the words we use in literary criticism, fable, fiction, myth, have all come to mean something we can’t believe. Some parents in Victorian times

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wouldn’t let their children read novels because they weren’t “true.” But not many reasonable people today would deny that the poet is entitled to change whatever he likes when he uses a theme from history or real life. The reason why was explained long ago by Aristotle. The historian makes specific and particular statements, such as: “The battle of Hastings was fought in 1066.” Consequently he’s judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says—either there was such a battle or there wasn’t, and if there was he’s got the date either right or wrong. But the poet, Aristotle says, never makes any real statements at all, certainly no particular or specific ones. The poet’s job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place. He gives you the typical, recurring, or what Aristotle calls universal event. You wouldn’t go to Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland—you go to it to learn what a man feels like after he’s gained a kingdom and lost his soul. When you meet such a character as Micawber in Dickens, you don’t feel that there must have been a man Dickens knew who was exactly like this: you feel that there’s a bit of Micawber in almost everybody you know, including yourself. Our impressions of human life are picked up one by one, and remain for most of us loose and disorganized. But we constantly find things in literature that suddenly co-ordinate and bring into focus a great many such impressions, and this is part of what Aristotle means by the typical or universal human event. All right: but how does this explain Achilles? Achilles was invulnerable except for his heel, and he was the son of a sea-nymph. Neither of these things can be true of anybody, so how does that make Achilles a typical or universal figure? Here there’s another kind of principle involved. We said earlier that the more realistic a writer is, and the more his characters and incidents seem to be people like ourselves, the more apt he is to become ironic, which involves putting you, as the reader, in a position of superiority to them, so that you can detach your imagination from the world they live in by seeing it clearly and in the round. Homer’s Achilles represents the opposite technique, where the character is a hero, much larger than life. Achilles is more than what any man could be, because he’s also what a man wishes he could be, and he does what most men would do if they were strong enough. He’s not a portrait of an individual hero, but a great smouldering force of human desire and frustration and discontent, something we all have in us too, part of mankind as a whole. And because he’s that he can be partly a god,

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involved with nature to the point of having a mother in the sea and an enemy in the river, besides having other gods in the sky directly interested in him and what he’s doing. And because with all his superhuman strength he’s still up against something he can’t understand, there’s an ironic perspective too. Nobody cares now about the historical Achilles, if there ever was one, but the mythical Achilles reflects a part of our own lives. Let’s leave this for a bit and turn to the question of imagery. What happens when a poet, say, uses an image, an object in nature, like a flock of sheep or a field of flowers? If he does use them, he’s clearly going to make a poetic use of them: they’re going to become poetic sheep and poetic flowers, absorbed and digested by literature, set out in literary language and inside literary conventions. What you never get in literature are just the sheep that nibble the grass or just the flowers that bloom in the spring. There’s always some literary reason for using them, and that means something in human life that they correspond to or represent or resemble. This correspondence of the natural and the human is one of the things that the word “symbol” means, so we can say that whenever a writer uses an image, or object from the world around him, he’s made it a symbol. There are several ways of doing this. Besides literature, there are all the verbal structures of practical sense, religion, morality, science, and philosophy; and one of the things literature does is to illustrate them, putting their abstract ideas into concrete images and situations. When it does this deliberately, we have what we call allegory, where the writer is saying, more or less: I don’t really mean sheep; I mean something political or religious when I say sheep. I think of sheep because I’ve just heard, on the radio, someone singing an aria from a Bach cantata, which begins: “Sheep may safely graze where a good shepherd is watching.” This was on a program of religious music, so I suppose somebody must have assumed that the sheep meant Christians and the good shepherd Christ. They easily could have meant that, although by an accident this particular cantata happens to be a secular one, written in honour of the birthday of some German princeling, so the good shepherd is really the prince and the sheep are his taxpayers. But the sheep are allegorical sheep whether the allegory is political or religious, and if they’re allegorical they’re literary. There’s a great deal of allegory in literature, much more than we

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usually realize, but straightforward allegory is out of fashion now: most modern writers dislike having their images pinned down in this specific way, and so modern critics think of allegory as a bit simple-minded. The reason is that allegory, where literature is illustrating moral or political or religious truths, means that both the writer and his public have to be pretty firmly convinced of the reality and importance of those truths, and modern writers and publics, on the whole, aren’t. A more common way of indicating that an image is literary is by allusion to something else in literature. Literature tends to be very allusive, and the central things in literature, the Greek and Roman classics, the Bible, Shakespeare and Milton, are echoed over and over again. To take a simple example: many of you will know G.K. Chesterton’s poem on the donkey, which describes how ungainly and ridiculous a beast he is, but that he doesn’t care because, as the poem concludes: I also had my hour, One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet.14

The reference to Palm Sunday is not incidental to the poem but the whole point of the poem, and we can’t read the poem at all until we’ve placed the reference. In other poems we get references to Classical myths. There’s an early poem of Yeats, called The Sorrow of Love, where the second stanza went like this: And then you came with those red mournful lips, And with you came the whole of the world’s tears, And all the trouble of her labouring ships, And all the trouble of her myriad years.

But Yeats was constantly tinkering with his poems, especially the early ones, and in the final edition of his collected poetry we get this instead: A girl arose that had red mournful lips And seemed the greatness of the world in tears, Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships And proud as Priam murdered with his peers.15

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The early version is a vague, and the later one a precise, reference to something else in the literary tradition, and Yeats thought that the precise reference was an improvement. This allusiveness in literature is significant, because it shows what we’ve been saying all along, that in literature you don’t just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader. Many people think that the original writer is always directly inspired by life, and that only commonplace or derivative writers get inspired by books. That’s nonsense: the only inspiration worth having is an inspiration that clarifies the form of what’s being written, and that’s more likely to come from something that already has a literary form. We don’t often find that a poem depends completely on an allusion, as Chesterton’s poem does, but allusiveness runs all through our literary experience. If we don’t know the Bible and the central stories of Greek and Roman literature, we can still read books and see plays, but our knowledge of literature can’t grow, just as our knowledge of mathematics can’t grow if we don’t learn the multiplication table. Here we touch on an educational problem, of what should be read when, that we’ll have to come back to later. I said earlier that there’s nothing new in literature that isn’t the old reshaped. The latest thing in drama is the theatre of the absurd, a completely wacky form of writing where anything goes and there are no rational rules. In one of these plays, Ionesco’s La Chauve Cantatrice (The Bald Soprano in English), a Mr. and Mrs. Martin are talking. They think they must have seen each other before, and discover that they travelled in the same train that morning, that they have the same name and address, sleep in the same bedroom, and both have a two-year-old daughter named Alice. Eventually Mr. Martin decides that he must be talking to his long lost wife Elizabeth. This scene is built on two of the solidest conventions in literature. One is the ironic situation in which two people are intimately related and yet know nothing about each other; the other is the ancient and often very corny device that critics call the “recognition scene,” where the long lost son and heir turns up from Australia in the last act. What makes the Ionesco scene funny is the fact that it’s a parody or take-off of these familiar conventions. The allusiveness of literature is part of its symbolic quality, its capacity to absorb everything from natural or human life into its own imaginative body.

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Another well-known poem, Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud, tells how Wordsworth sees a field of daffodils, and then finds later that: They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

The flowers become poetic flowers as soon as they’re identified with a human mind. Here we have an image from the natural world, a field of daffodils: it’s enclosed inside the human mind, which puts it into the world of the imagination, and the sense of human vision and emotion radiating from the daffodils, so to speak, is what gives them their poetic magic. The human mind is Wordsworth’s individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our minds too. There is no selfexpression in Wordsworth’s poem, because once the poem is there the individual Wordsworth has disappeared. The general principle involved is that there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature. In other words, it isn’t just the historical figure who gets taken over by literature: the poet gets taken over too. As we said in our first talk, the poet as a person is no wiser or better a man than anyone else. He’s a man with a special craft of putting words together, but he may have no claim on our attention beyond that. Most of the well-known poets have wellknown lives, and some of them, like Byron, have had some highly publicized love affairs. But it’s only for incidental interest that we relate what a poet writes to his own life. Byron wrote a poem to a maid of Athens, and there really was a maid of Athens, a twelve-year-old girl whose price, set by her mother, was 30,000 piastres, which Byron refused to pay. Wordsworth wrote some lovely poems about a girl named Lucy, but he made Lucy up. But Lucy is just as real as the maid of Athens. With some poets, with Milton for example, we feel that here is a great man who happened to be a poet, but would still have been great whatever he did. With other equally great poets, including Homer and Shakespeare, we feel only that they were great poets. We know nothing about Homer: some people think there were two Homers or a committee of Homers. We think of a blind old man, but we get that notion from one of Homer’s characters. We know nothing about Shakespeare except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a

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man who is clearly an idiot.16 We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time. Wordsworth’s poem is useful because it’s one of those poems that tell you what the poet thinks he’s trying to do. Here’s another poem that tells you nothing, but just gives you the image—in Blake’s The Sick Rose: O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

The author of a recent book on Blake, Hazard Adams, says he gave this poem to a class of sixty students and asked them to explain what it meant. Fifty-nine of them turned the poem into an allegory; the sixtieth was a student of horticulture who thought Blake was talking about plant disease. Now whenever you try to explain what any poem means you’re bound to turn it into an allegory to some extent: there’s no way out of that. Blake isn’t talking about plant disease, but about something human, and as soon as you “explain” his rose and worm you have to translate them into some aspect of human life and feeling. Here it’s the sexual relation that seems to be closest to the poem. But the poem is not really an allegory, and so you can’t feel that any explanation is adequate: its eloquence and power and magic get away from all explanations. And if it’s not allegorical it’s not allusive either. You can think of Eve in the garden of Eden, standing naked among the flowers—herself a fairer flower, as Milton says—and being taught by the serpent that her nakedness, and the love that went with it, ought to be something dark and secret. This allusion, perhaps, does help you to understand the poem better, because it leads you toward the centre of Western literary imagination, and introduces you to the family of things Blake is dealing with. But the poem doesn’t depend on the Bible, even though it would never have been written without the Bible. The student of horticulture got one

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thing right: he saw that Blake meant what he said when he talked about roses and worms, and not something else. To understand Blake’s poem, then, you simply have to accept a world which is totally symbolic: a world in which roses and worms are so completely surrounded and possessed by the human mind that whatever goes on between them is identical with something going on in human life. You remember that Theseus, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, remarked that: The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. [5.1.7–8]

Theseus is not a literary critic; he’s an amiable stuffed shirt, but just the same his remark has an important truth in it. The lunatic and the lover are trying to identify themselves with something, the lover with his mistress, the lunatic with whatever he’s obsessed with. Primitive people also try to identify themselves with totems or animals or spirits. I spoke of the magic in Blake’s poem: that’s usually a very vague word in criticism, but magic is really a belief in identity of the same kind: the magician makes a wax image of somebody he doesn’t like, sticks a pin in it, and the person it’s identified with gets a pain. The poet, too, is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life. That’s why literature, and more particularly poetry, shows the analogy to primitive minds that I mentioned in my first talk. The difference is more important. Magic and primitive religion are forms of belief: lunacy and love are forms of experience or action. Belief and action are closely related, because what a man really believes is what his actions show that he believes. In belief you’re continually concerned with questions of truth or reality: you can’t believe anything unless you can say “this is so.” But literature, we remember, never makes any statements of that kind: what the poet and novelist say is more like “let’s assume this situation.” So there can never be any religion of poetry or any set of beliefs founded on literature. When we stop believing in a religion, as the Roman world stopped believing in Jupiter and Venus, its gods become literary characters, and go back to the world of imagination. But a belief itself can only be replaced by another belief. Writers of course have their own beliefs, and it’s natural to feel a special affection for the ones who seem to see things the same way we do. But we all know, or soon realize, that a writer’s real greatness lies elsewhere. The

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world of the imagination is a world of unborn or embryonic beliefs: if you believe what you read in literature, you can, quite literally, believe anything. So, you may ask, what is the use of studying a world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous. What produces the tolerance is the power of detachment in the imagination, where things are removed just out of reach of belief and action. Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way that the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process. When experience is removed from us a bit, as the experience of the Napoleonic war is in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, there’s a tremendous increase of dignity and exhilaration. I mention Tolstoy because he’d be the last writer to try to glamorize the war itself, or pretend that its horror wasn’t horrible. There is an element of illusion even in War and Peace, but the illusion gives us a reality that isn’t in the actual experience of the war itself: the reality of proportion and perspective, of seeing what it’s all about, that only detachment can give. Literature helps to give us that detachment, and so do history and philosophy and science and everything else worth studying. But literature has something more to give peculiarly its own: something as absurd and impossible as the primitive magic it so closely resembles. The title of this talk, “Giants in Time,” comes from the last sentence of the great series of novels by Marcel Proust called A la recherche du temps perdu, which I’d prefer to translate quite literally as “In Search of Lost Time.” Proust says that our ordinary experience, where everything dissolves into the past and where we never know what’s coming next, can’t give us any sense of reality, although we call it real life. In ordinary experience we’re all in the position of a dog in a library, surrounded by a

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world of meaning in plain sight that we don’t even know is there. Proust tells an immense long story that meanders through the life of France from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War, a story held together by certain recurring themes and experiences. Most of the story is a record of the jealousies and perversions and hypocrisies of “real life,” but there are occasional glimpses of an ecstasy and serenity infinitely beyond them. At the end of the series of books Proust explains (or at least his narrator explains) how one such experience takes him outside his ordinary life and also outside the time he is living it in. This is what enables him to write his book, because it makes it possible for him to look at men, not as living from moment to disappearing moment, but as “giants immersed in time.” The writer is neither a watcher nor a dreamer. Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn’t escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it. And the imagination won’t stop until it’s swallowed everything. No matter what direction we start off in, the signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the human imagination. If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, at least, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be. We come back to the limit of the imagination that I referred to in my first talk, a universe entirely possessed and occupied by human life, a city of which the stars are suburbs. Nobody can believe in any such universe: literature is not religion, and it doesn’t address itself to belief. But if we shut the vision of it completely out of our minds, or insist on its being limited in various ways, something goes dead inside us, perhaps the one thing that it’s really important to keep alive. 4 The Keys to Dreamland I’ve been trying to explain literature by putting you in a primitive situation on an uninhabited island, where you could see the imagination working in the most direct and simple way. Now let’s start with our own society, and see where literature belongs in that, if it does. Suppose you’re walking down the street of a Canadian city, Bloor or Granville or St. Catherine or Portage Avenue. All around you is a highly artificial society, but you don’t think of it as artificial: you’re so accustomed to it that you think of it as natural. But suppose your imagination plays a little trick on you of a kind that it often does play, and you suddenly feel like a

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complete outsider, someone who’s just blown in from Mars on a flying saucer. Instantly you see how conventionalized everything is: the clothes, the shop windows, the movement of the cars in traffic, the cropped hair and shaved faces of the men, the red lips and blue eyelids that women put on because they want to conventionalize their faces, or “look nice,” as they say, which means the same thing. All this convention is pressing towards uniformity or likeness. To be outside the convention makes a person look queer, or, if he’s driving a car, a menace to life and limb. The only exceptions are people who have decided to conform to different conventions, like nuns or beatniks. There’s clearly a strong force making towards conformity in society, so strong that it seems to have something to do with the stability of society itself. In ordinary life even the most splendid things we can think of, like goodness and truth and beauty, all mean essentially what we’re accustomed to. As I hinted just now in speaking of female make-up, most of our ideas of beauty are pure convention, and even truth has been defined as whatever doesn’t disturb the pattern of what we already know. When we move on to literature, we again find conventions, but this time we notice that they are conventions, because we’re not so used to them. These conventions seem to have something to do with making literature as unlike life as possible. Chaucer represents people as making up stories in ten-syllable couplets. Shakespeare uses dramatic conventions, which means, for instance, that Iago has to smash Othello’s marriage and dreams of future happiness and get him ready to murder his wife in a few minutes. Milton has two nudes in a garden haranguing each other in set speeches beginning with such lines as “Daughter of God and Man, immortal Eve”—Eve being Adam’s daughter because she’s just been extracted from his ribcase. Almost every story we read demands that we accept as fact something that we know to be nonsense: that good people always win, especially in love; that murders are complicated and ingenious puzzles to be solved by logic, and so on. It isn’t only popular literature that demands this: more highbrow stories are apt to be more ironic, but irony has its conventions too. If we go further back into literature, we run into such conventions as the king’s rash promise, the enraged cuckold, the cruel mistress of love poetry—never anything that we or any other time would recognize as the normal behaviour of adult people, only the maddened ethics of fairyland. Even the details of literature are equally perverse. Literature is a world where phoenixes and unicorns are quite as important as horses and

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dogs—and in literature some of the horses talk, like the ones in Gulliver’s Travels. A random example is calling Shakespeare the “swan of Avon”— he was called that by Ben Jonson. The town of Stratford, Ontario, keeps swans in its river partly as a literary allusion. Poets of Shakespeare’s day hated to admit that they were writing words on a page: they always insisted that they were producing music. In pastoral poetry they might be playing a flute (or more accurately an oboe), but every other kind of poetic effort was called song, with a harp, a lyre, or a lute in the background, depending on how highbrow the song was. Singing suggests birds, and so for their typical songbird and emblem of themselves, the poets chose the swan, a bird that can’t sing. Because it can’t sing, they made up a legend that it sang once before death, when nobody was listening. But Shakespeare didn’t burst into song before his death: he wrote two plays a year until he’d made enough money to retire, and spent the last five years of his life counting his take. So however useful literature may be in improving one’s imagination or vocabulary, it would be the wildest kind of pedantry to use it directly as a guide to life. Perhaps here we see one reason why the poet is not only very seldom a person one would turn to for insight into the state of the world, but often seems even more gullible and simple-minded than the rest of us. For the poet, the particular literary conventions he adopts are likely to become, for him, facts of life. If he finds that the kind of writing he’s best at has a good deal to do with fairies, like Yeats, or a white goddess, like Graves, or a life-force, like Bernard Shaw, or episcopal sermons, like T.S. Eliot, or bullfights, like Hemingway, or exasperation at social hypocrisies, as with the so-called angry school, these things are apt to take on a reality for him that seems badly out of proportion to his contemporaries. His life may imitate literature in a way that may warp or even destroy his social personality, as Byron wore himself out at thirtyfour with the strain of being Byronic. Life and literature, then, are both conventionalized, and of the conventions of literature about all we can say is that they don’t much resemble the conditions of life. It’s when the two sets of conventions collide that we realize how different they are. In fact, whenever literature gets too probable, too much like life, some self-defeating process, some mysterious law of diminishing returns, seems to set in. There’s a vivid and expertly written novel by H.G. Wells called Kipps, about a lower-middle-class, inarticulate, very likeable Cockney, the kind of character we often find in Dickens. Kipps is carefully studied: he never says anything that a man like Kipps wouldn’t say; he never

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sounds the “h” in home or head; nothing he does is out of line with what we expect such a person to be like. It’s an admirable novel, well worth reading, and yet I have a nagging feeling that there’s some inner secret in bringing him completely to life that Dickens would have and that Wells doesn’t have. All right, then, what would Dickens have done? Well, one of the things that Dickens often does do is write badly. He might have given Kipps sentimental speeches and false heroics and all sorts of inappropriate verbiage to say; and some readers would have clucked and tuttutted over these passages and explained to each other how bad Dickens’s taste was and how uncertain his hold on character could be. Perhaps they’d be right too. But we’d have had Kipps a few times the way he’d look to himself or the way he’d sometimes wish he could be: that’s part of his reality, and the effect would remain with us however much we disapproved of it. Whether I’m right about this book or not, and I’m not at all sure I am, I think my general principle is right. What we’d never see except in a book is often what we go to books to find. Whatever is completely lifelike in literature is a bit of a laboratory specimen there. To bring anything really to life in literature we can’t be lifelike: we have to be literature-like. The same thing is true even of the use of language. We’re often taught that prose is the language of ordinary speech, which is usually true in literature. But in ordinary life prose is no more the language of ordinary speech than one’s Sunday suit is a bathing suit. The people who actually speak prose are highly cultivated and articulate people, who’ve read a good many books, and even they can speak prose only to each other. If you read the beautiful sentences of Elizabeth Bennett’s conversation in Pride and Prejudice, you can see how in that book they give a powerfully convincing impression of a sensible and intelligent girl. But any girl who talked as coherently as that on a street car would be stared at as though she had green hair. It isn’t only the difference between 1813 and 1962 that’s involved either, as you’ll see if you compare her speech with her mother’s. The poet Emily Dickinson complained that everybody said “What?” to her, until finally she practically gave up trying to talk altogether, and confined herself to writing notes. All this is involved with the principle I’ve touched on before: the difference between literary and other kinds of writing. If we’re writing to convey information, or for any practical reason, our writing is an act of will and intention: we mean what we say, and the words we use represent that meaning directly. It’s different in literature, not because the

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poet doesn’t mean what he says too, but because his real effort is one of putting words together. What’s important is not what he may have meant to say, but what the words themselves say when they get fitted together. With a novelist it’s rather the incidents in the story he tells that get fitted together—as D.H. Lawrence says, don’t trust the novelist; trust his story. That’s why so much of a writer’s best writing is or seems to be involuntary. It’s involuntary because the forms of literature itself are taking control of it, and these forms are what are embodied in the conventions of literature. Conventions, we see, have the same role in literature that they have in life: they impose certain patterns of order and stability on the writer. Only, if they’re such different conventions, it seems clear that the order of words, or the structure of literature, is different from the social order. The absence of any clear line of connection between literature and life comes out in the issues involved in censorship. Because of the large involuntary element in writing, works of literature can’t be treated as embodiments of conscious will or intention, like people, and so no laws can be framed to control their behaviour which assume a tendency to do this or an intention of doing that. Works of literature get into legal trouble because they offend some powerful religious or political interest, and this interest in its turn usually acquires or exploits the kind of social hysteria that’s always revolving around sex. But it’s impossible to give legal definitions of such terms as obscenity in relation to works of literature. What happens to the book depends mainly on the intelligence of the judge. If he’s a sensible man we get a sensible decision; if he’s an ass we get that sort of decision, but what we don’t get is a legal decision, because the basis for one doesn’t exist. The best we get is a precedent tending to discourage cranks and pressure groups from attacking serious books. If you read the casebook on the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, you may remember how bewildered the critics were when they were asked what the moral effect of the book would be. They weren’t putting on an act: they didn’t know. Novels can only be good or bad in their own categories. There’s no such thing as a morally bad novel: its moral effect depends entirely on the moral quality of its reader, and nobody can predict what that will be. And if literature isn’t morally bad it isn’t morally good either. I suppose one reason why Lady Chatterley’s Lover dramatized this question so vividly was that it’s a rather preachy and self-conscious book: like the Sunday school novels of my childhood, it bores me a little because it tries so hard to do me good.

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So literature has no consistent connection with ordinary life, positive or negative. Here we touch on another important difference between structures of the imagination and structures of practical sense, which include the applied sciences. Imagination is certainly essential to science, applied or pure. Without a constructive power in the mind to make models of experience, get hunches and follow them out, play freely around with hypotheses, and so forth, no scientist could get anywhere. But all imaginative effort in practical fields has to meet the test of practicability, otherwise it’s discarded. The imagination in literature has no such test to meet. You don’t relate it directly to life or reality: you relate works of literature, as we’ve said earlier, to each other. Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we’ve built, and keep adding new wings to all the time. So it’s natural to swing to the opposite extreme and say that literature is really a refuge or escape from life, a self-contained world like the world of the dream, a world of play or make-believe to balance the world of work. Some literature is like that and many people tell us that they only read to get away from reality for a bit. And I’ve suggested myself that the sense of escape, or at least detachment, does come into everybody’s literary experience. But the real point of literature can hardly be that. Think of such writers as William Faulkner or François Mauriac, their great moral dignity, the intensity and compassion that they’ve studied the life around them with. Or think of James Joyce, spending seven years on one book and seventeen on another, and having them ridiculed or abused or banned by the customs when they did get published. Or of the poets Rilke and Valéry, waiting patiently for years in silence until what they had to say was ready to be said. There’s a deadly seriousness in all this that even the most refined theories of fantasy or make-believe won’t quite cover. Still, let’s go along with the idea for a bit, because we’re not getting on very fast with the relation of literature to life, or what we could call the horizontal perspective of literature. That seems to block us off on all sides. The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination. We see a great deal in it that reminds us vividly of the life we know. But in that very vividness there’s something unreal. We can understand this more clearly with pictures, perhaps. There are trick pictures—trompe l’oeil, the French call them—where the resemblance to life is very strong. An American painter of this school

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played a joke on his bitchy wife by painting one of her best napkins so expertly that she grabbed at the canvas trying to pull it off. But a painting as realistic as that isn’t a reality but an illusion: it has the glittering unnatural clarity of a hallucination. The real realities, so to speak, are things that don’t remind us directly of our own experience, but are such things as the wrath of Achilles or the jealousy of Othello, which are bigger and more intense experiences than anything we can reach—except in our imagination, which is what we’re reaching with. Sometimes, as in the happy endings of comedies, or in the ideal world of romances, we seem to be looking at a pleasanter world than we ordinarily know. Sometimes, as in tragedy and satire, we seem to be looking at a world more devoted to suffering or absurdity than we ordinarily know. In literature we always seem to be looking either up or down. It’s the vertical perspective that’s important, not the horizontal one that looks out to life. Of course, in the greatest works of literature we get both the up and down views, often at the same time as different aspects of one event. There are two halves to literary experience, then. Imagination gives us both a better and a worse world than the one we usually live with, and demands that we keep looking steadily at them both. I said in my first talk that the arts follow the path of the emotions, and of the tendency of the emotions to separate the world into a half that we like and a half that we don’t like. Literature is not a world of dreams, but it would be if we had only one half without the other. If we had nothing but romances and comedies with happy endings, literature would express only a wishfulfilment dream. Some people ask why poets want to write tragedies when the world’s so full of them anyway, and suggest that enjoying such things has something morbid or gloating about it. It doesn’t, but it might if there were nothing else in literature. This point is worth spending another minute on. You recall that terrible scene in King Lear where Gloucester’s eyes are put out on the stage. That’s part of a play, and a play is supposed to be entertaining. Now in what sense can a scene like that be entertaining? The fact that it’s not really happening is certainly important. It would be degrading to watch a real blinding scene and far more so to get any pleasure out of watching it. Consequently, the entertainment doesn’t consist in its reminding us of a real blinding scene. If it did, one of the great scenes of drama would turn into a piece of repulsive pornography. We couldn’t stop anyone from reacting in this way, and it certainly wouldn’t cure him, much less

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help the public, to start blaming or censoring Shakespeare for putting sadistic ideas in his head. But a reaction of that kind has nothing to do with drama. In a dramatic scene of cruelty and hatred we’re seeing cruelty and hatred, which we know are permanently real things in human life, from the point of view of the imagination. What the imagination suggests is horror, not the paralyzing sickening horror of a real blinding scene, but an exuberant horror, full of the energy of repudiation. This is as powerful a rendering as we can ever get of life as we don’t want it. So we see that there are moral standards in literature after all, even though they have nothing to do with calling the police when we see a word in a book that’s more familiar in sound than in print. One of the things Gloucester says in that scene is: “I am tied to the stake, and I must stand the course.” In Shakespeare’s day it was a favourite sport to tie a bear to a stake and set dogs on it until they killed it. The Puritans suppressed this sport, according to Macaulay, not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Macaulay may have intended his remark to be a sneer at the Puritans, but surely if the Puritans did feel this way they were one hundred per cent right. What other reason is there for abolishing public hangings? Whatever their motives, the Puritans and Shakespeare were operating in the same direction. Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us as entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure in these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren’t really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouthfilling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities. The top half of literature is the world expressed by such words as “sublime,” “inspiring,” and the like, where what we feel is not detachment but absorption. This is the world of heroes and gods and Titans and Rabelaisian giants, a world of powers and passions and moments of ecstasy far greater than anything we meet outside the imagination. Such forces would not only absorb but annihilate us if they entered ordinary life, but luckily the protecting wall of the imagination is here too. As the German poet Rilke says, we adore them because they disdain to destroy us.17 We seem to have got quite a long way from our emotions with their division of things into “I like this” and “I don’t like this.” Literature gives us an experience that stretches us vertically to the heights and depths of

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what the human mind can conceive, to what corresponds to the conceptions of heaven and hell in religion. In this perspective what I like or don’t like disappears, because there’s nothing left of me as a separate person: as a reader of literature I exist only as a representative of humanity as a whole. We’ll see how important this is in the last talk. No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself. It seems to be very difficult for many people to understand the reality and intensity of literary experience. To give an example that you may think a bit irrelevant: why have so many people managed to convince themselves that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare’s plays, when there is not an atom of evidence that anybody else did? Apparently because they feel that poetry must be written out of personal experience, and that Shakespeare didn’t have enough experience of the right kind. But Shakespeare’s plays weren’t produced by his experience: they were produced by his imagination, and the way to develop the imagination is to read a good book or two. As for us, we can’t speak or think or comprehend even our own experience except within the limits of our own power over words, and those limits have been established for us by our great writers. Literature, then, is not a dream world: it’s two dreams, a wish-fulfilment dream and an anxiety dream, that are focused together, like a pair of glasses, and become a fully conscious vision. Art, according to Plato, is a dream for awakened minds, a work of imagination withdrawn from ordinary life, dominated by the same forces that dominate the dream, and yet giving us a perspective and dimension on reality that we don’t get from any other approach to reality. So the poet and the dreamer are distinct, as Keats says.18 Ordinary life forms a community, and literature is among other things an art of communication, so it forms a community too. In ordinary life we fall into a private and separate subconscious every night, where we reshape the world according to a private and separate imagination. Underneath literature there’s another kind of subconscious, which is social and not private, a need for forming a community around certain symbols, like the Queen and the flag, or around certain gods that represent order and stability, or becoming and change, or death and rebirth to a new life. This is the myth-making power of the human mind, which throws up and dissolves one civilization after another.

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I’ve taken my title for this talk, “The Keys to Dreamland,” from what is possibly the greatest single effort of the literary imagination in the twentieth century, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. In this book a man goes to sleep and falls, not into the Freudian separate or private subconscious, but into the deeper dream of man that creates and destroys his own societies. The entire book is written in the language of this dream. It’s a subconscious language, mainly English, but connected by associations and puns with the eighteen or so other languages that Joyce knew. Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher: as Joyce says, it’s about a dreamer, but it’s addressed to an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia. The reader or critic, then, has a role complementing the poet’s role. We need two powers in literature, a power to create and a power to understand. In all our literary experience there are two kinds of response. There is the direct experience of the work itself, while we’re reading a book or seeing a play, especially for the first time. This experience is uncritical, or rather precritical, so it’s not infallible. If our experience is limited, we can be roused to enthusiasm or carried away by something that we can later see to have been second-rate or even phoney. Then there is the conscious, critical response we make after we’ve finished reading or left the theatre, where we compare what we’ve experienced with other things of the same kind, and form a judgment of value and proportion on it. This critical response, with practice, gradually makes our precritical responses more sensitive and accurate, or improves our taste, as we say. But behind our responses to individual works, there’s a bigger response to our literary experience as a whole, as a total possession. The critic has always been called a judge of literature, which means, not that he’s in a superior position to the poet, but that he ought to know something about literature, just as a judge’s right to be on a bench depends on his knowledge of law. If he’s up against something the size of Shakespeare, he’s the one being judged. The critic’s function is to interpret every work of literature in the light of all the literature he knows, to keep constantly struggling to understand what literature as a whole is about. Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell. Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgment of mankind.

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5 Verticals of Adam In my first four talks I’ve been building up a theory of literature. Now I’m ready to put this theory to a practical test. If it’s any good, it should give us some guidance on the question of how to teach literature, especially to children. It should tell us what the simple and fundamental conceptions are that we should start with, and what more advanced studies can later be built on them. It seems clear that the teaching of literature needs a bit more theory of this kind, and suffers in comparison with science and mathematics from not having it. My general principle, developed in my first four talks, is that in the history of civilization literature follows after a mythology. A myth is a simple and primitive effort of the imagination to identify the human with the nonhuman world, and its most typical result is a story about a god. Later on, mythology begins to merge into literature, and myth then becomes a structural principle of story-telling. I’ve tried to explain how myths stick together to form a mythology, and how the containing framework of the mythology takes the shape of a feeling of lost identity which we had once and may have again. The most complete form of this myth is given in the Christian Bible, and so the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the teaching of literature. It should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it. That, I am aware, is a highly controversial statement, and can be misunderstood in all kinds of ways, so please remember that I’m speaking as a literary critic about the teaching of literature. There are all sorts of secondary reasons for teaching the Bible as literature: the fact that it’s so endlessly quoted from and alluded to, the fact that the cadences and phrases of the King James translation are built into our minds and way of thought, the fact that it’s full of the greatest and best known stories we have, and so on. There are also the moral and religious reasons for its importance, which are different reasons. But in the particular context in which I’m speaking now, it’s the total shape and structure of the Bible which is most important: the fact that it’s a continuous narrative beginning with the creation and ending with the Last Judgment, and surveying the whole history of mankind, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel, in between. In other words, it’s the myth of the Bible that should be the basis of literary training, its imaginative survey of the human situation which is so broad and comprehensive that everything

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else finds its place inside it. Remember too that to me the word “myth,” like the words “fable” and “fiction,” is a technical term in criticism, and the popular sense in which it means something untrue I regard as a debasing of language. Further, the Bible may be more things than a work of literature, but it certainly is a work of literature too: no book can have had its influence on literature without itself having literary qualities. For the purpose I have in mind, however, the Bible could only be taught in school by someone with a well-developed sense of literary structure. The first thing to be laid on top of a Biblical training, in my opinion, is Classical mythology, which gives us the same kind of imaginative framework, of a more fragmentary kind. Here again there are all sorts of incidental or secondary reasons for the study: the literatures of all modern Western languages are so full of Classical myths that one hardly knows what’s going on without some training in them. But again, the primary reason is the shape of the mythology. The Classical myths give us, much more clearly than the Bible, the main episodes of the central myth of the hero whose mysterious birth, triumph and marriage, death and betrayal, and eventual rebirth follow the rhythm of the sun and the seasons. Hercules and his twelve labours, Theseus emerging from his labyrinth, Perseus with the head of Medusa: these are story-themes that ought to get into the mind as early as possible. Resemblances between Biblical and Classical legend should not be treated as purely coincidental: on the contrary, it’s essential to show how the same literary patterns turn up within different cultures and religions. A poet living in the days of Shakespeare or Milton got this kind of training in elementary school, and we can’t read far in Paradise Lost, for example, without realizing not simply that we need to know the both the Bible and the Classical myths to follow it, but that we also have to see the relation of the two mythologies to each other. Modern poets don’t get the same kind of education, as a rule: they have to educate themselves, and some of the difficulty that people complain about in modern poets goes back to what I think is a deficiency in the earliest stages of literary teaching, for both poet and reader. I’ve taken the title for this talk, “Verticals of Adam,” from a series of sonnets by Dylan Thomas, “Altarwise by owl-light,” which tells the story of a “gentleman,” as Thomas calls him, who is both Adam and Apollo, and moves across the sky going through the stages of life and death and rebirth. These sonnets make very tough reading, and I think one reason why they’re so obscure is that the shape of the central myth of literature broke in on Thomas suddenly at a certain stage of his develop-

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ment, and that it broke with such force that he could hardly get all his symbols and metaphors down fast enough. His later poems, difficult as some of them are, are still much simpler, because by that time he’d digested his mythology. The Greeks and Romans, like the authors of the Old Testament, arranged their myths in a sequence, starting with stories of creation and fall and flood and gradually moving into historical reminiscence, and finally into actual history. And as they move into history they also move into more recognizable and fully developed forms of literature. The Classical myths produced Homer and the Greek dramatists; the ancient traditions of the Old Testament developed into the Psalms and the Book of Job. The next step in literary teaching is to understand the structure of the great literary forms. Two of these forms are the pair familiar to us from drama, tragedy and comedy. There’s also another pair of opposites, which I should call romance and irony. In romance we have a simplified and idealized world, of brave heroes, pure and beautiful heroines , and very bad villains. All forms of irony, including satire, stress the complexity of human life in opposition to this simple world. Of these four forms, comedy and romance are the primary ones; they can be taught to the youngest students. When adults read for relaxation they almost always return to either comedy or romance. Tragedy and irony are more difficult, and ought to be reserved, I think, for the secondary school level. Romance develops out of the story of the hero’s adventures which the student has already met in myth, and comedy out of the episode of the hero’s triumph or marriage. It’s important to get the habit of standing back and looking at the total structure of every literary work studied. A student who acquires this habit will see how the comedy of Shakespeare he’s studying has the same general structure as the battered old movie he saw on television the night before. When I was at school we had to read Lorna Doone, and a girl beside me used to fish a love-story magazine out of her desk and read it on her knee when the teacher wasn’t looking. She obviously regarded these stories as much hotter stuff than Lorna Doone, and perhaps they were, but I’d be willing to bet something that they told exactly the same kind of story. To see these resemblances in structure will not, by itself, give any sense of comparative value, any notion why Shakespeare is better than the television movie. In my opinion value judgments in literature should not be hurried. It does a student little good to be told that A is better than B, especially if he prefers B at the time. He has to feel values for himself, and should follow his individual

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rhythm in doing so. In the meantime, he can read almost anything in any order, just as he can eat mixtures of food that would have his elders reaching for the baking soda. A sensible teacher or librarian can soon learn how to give guidance to a youth’s reading that allows for undeveloped taste and still doesn’t turn him into a gourmet or a dyspeptic before his time. It’s important too that everything that has a story, such as a myth, should be read or listened to purely as a story. Many people grow up without really understanding the difference between imaginative and discursive writing. On the rare occasions when they encounter poems, or even pictures, they treat them exactly as though they were intended to be pieces of more or less disguised information. Their questions are all based on this assumption. What is he trying to get across? What am I supposed to get out of it? Why doesn’t somebody explain it to me? Why couldn’t he have written it in a different way so I could understand him? The art of listening to stories is a basic training for the imagination. You don’t start arguing with the writer: you accept his postulates, even if he tells you that the cow jumped over the moon, and you don’t react until you’ve taken in all of what he has to say. If Bertrand Russell is right in saying that suspension of judgment is one of the essential operations of the mind, the benefits of learning to do this go far beyond literature. And even then what you react to is the total structure of the story as a whole, not to some message or moral or Great Thought that you can snatch out of it and run away with. Equal in importance to this training is that of getting the student to write himself. No matter how little of this he does, he’s bound to have the experience sooner or later of feeling he’s said something that he can’t explain except in exactly the same way that he’s said it. That should help to make him more tolerant about difficulties he encounters in his reading, although the benefits of trying to express oneself in different literary ways naturally extend a lot further than mere tolerance. I have to cover a good deal of ground in this talk, so I can only suggest briefly that the study of English has two contexts which must be in place for the student if his study is to have any reality. There is, first, the context of languages other than English, and there is, second, the context of the arts other than literature. The people who call themselves humanists, and who include students of literature, have always been primarily people who studied other languages. The basis of the cultural heritage of English-speaking peoples is not in English; it’s in Latin and Greek and

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Hebrew. This basis has to be given the young student in translation, although no translation of anything worth reading is of much use except as a crib to the original. Nowadays the modern languages take a more prominent place in education than the Classical ones, and it’s often said that we ought to learn other languages as a kind of painful political duty.19 There’s that, certainly, but there’s also the fact that all our mental processes connected with words tend to follow the structure of the language we’re thinking in. We can’t use our minds at full capacity unless we have some idea of how much of what we think we’re thinking is really thought, and how much is just familiar words running along their own familiar tracks. Nearly everyone does enough talking, at least, to become fairly fluent in his own language, and at that point there’s always the danger of automatic fluency, turning on a tap and letting a lot of platitudinous bumble emerge. The best check on this so far discovered is some knowledge of other languages, where at least the bumble has to fit into a different set of grammatical grooves. I have a friend who was chairman of a commission that had to turn in a complicated report, where things had to be put clearly and precisely. Over and over again he’d turn to a French Canadian on the committee and ask him to say it in French, and he’d get his lead from that. This is an example of why the humanists have always insisted that you don’t learn to think wholly from one language: you learn to think better from linguistic conflict, from bouncing one language off another. And just as it’s easy to confuse thinking with the habitual associations of language, so it’s easy to confuse thinking with thinking in words. I’ve even heard it said that thought is inner speech, though how you’d apply that statement to what Beethoven was doing when he was thinking about his ninth symphony I don’t know. But the study of other arts, such as painting and music, has many values for literary training apart from their value as subjects in themselves. Everything man does that’s worth doing is some kind of construction, and the imagination is the constructive power of the mind set free to work on pure construction, construction for its own sake. The units don’t have to be words; they can be numbers or tones or colours or bricks or pieces of marble. It’s hardly possible to understand what the imagination is doing with words without seeing how it operates with some of these other units. As the student gets older, he reads more complicated literature, and this usually means literature concerned largely or exclusively with human situations and conflicts. The old primitive association of human and

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natural worlds is still there in the background, but in, say, a novel of Henry James it’s a long way in the background. We often feel that certain types of literature, such as fairy tales, are somehow good for the imagination: the reason is that they restore the primitive perspective that mythology has. So does modern poetry, on the whole, as compared with fiction. At this point a third context of literature begins to take shape: the relation of literature to other subjects, such as history and philosophy and the social sciences, that are built out of words. In every properly taught subject, we start at the centre and work outwards. To try to teach literature by starting with the applied use of words, or “effective communication,” as it’s often called, then gradually work into literature through the more documentary forms of prose fiction and finally into poetry, seems to me a futile procedure. If literature is to be properly taught, we have to start at its centre, which is poetry, then work outwards to literary prose, then outwards from there to the applied languages of business and professions and ordinary life. Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don’t think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you’ll see what I mean. Some languages, such as Chinese, have kept differences of pitch in the spoken word: where Canadians got the monotone honk that you’re listening to now I don’t know—probably from the Canada goose. What poetry can give the student is, first of all, the sense of physical movement. Poetry is not irregular lines in a book, but something very close to dance and song, something to walk down the street keeping time to. Even if the rhythm is free it’s still something to be declaimed. The surge and sweep of Homer and the sinewy springing rhythm of Shakespeare have much the same origin: they were written that way partly because they had to be bellowed at a restless audience. Modern poets work very hard at trying to convince people in cafés or even in parks on Sunday that poetry can be performed and listened to, like a concert. There are quieter effects in poetry, of course, but a lot even of them have to do with physical movement, such as the effect of wit that we get from strict metre, from hearing words stepping along in an ordered marching rhythm. From poetry one can go on to prose, and if one’s literary educa-

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tion is sound the first thing one should demand from prose is rhythm. My own teacher, Pelham Edgar, once told me that if the rhythm of a sentence was right, its sense could look after itself. Of course I was at university then, and I admit that this would be a dangerous thing to say to a ten-year-old. But it said one thing that was true. We’re often told that to write we must have something to say, but that in its turn means having a certain potential of verbal energy. Besides rhythm, the imagery and diction of poetry should be carried out into other modes of English. The preference of poetry for concrete and simple words, for metaphor and simile and all the figures of associative language, and its ability to contain great reserves of meaning in the simple forms that we call myths and read as stories, are equally important. The study of literature, we’ve been saying, revolves around certain classics or models, which the student gradually learns to read for himself. There are many reasons why certain works of literature are classics, and most of them are purely literary reasons. But there’s another reason too: a great work of literature is also a place in which the whole cultural history of the nation that produced it comes into focus. I’ve mentioned Robinson Crusoe: you can get from that book a kind of detached vision of the British Empire, imposing its own pattern wherever it goes, catching its man Friday and trying to turn him into an eighteenth-century Nonconformist, never dreaming of “going native,” that history alone would hardly give. If you read Anna and the King of Siam or saw The King and I, you remember the story of the Victorian lady in an Oriental country which had never had any tradition of chivalry or deference to women. She expected to be treated like a Victorian lady, but she didn’t so much say so as express by her whole bearing and attitude that nothing else was possible, and eventually Siam fell into line. As you read or see that story, the shadow of an even greater Victorian lady appears behind her: Alice in Wonderland, remembering the manners her governess taught her, politely starting topics of conversation and pausing for a reply, unperturbed by the fact that what she’s talking to may be a mock turtle or a caterpillar, surprised only by any rudeness or similar failure to conform to the proper standards of behaviour. This aspect of literature in which it’s a kind of imaginative key to history is particularly clear in the novel, and more elusive and difficult in Shakespeare or Milton. American literature falls mainly in the period of fiction, and in such books as Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Walden, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a great deal of American social life,

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history, religion, and cultural mythology is reflected. I think it’s a mistake to approach such books inside out, as is often done, starting with the history and sociology and the rest of it and treating the book as though it were an allegory of such things. The book itself is a literary form, descended from and related to other literary forms: everything else follows from that. The constructs of the imagination tell us things about human life that we don’t get in any other way. That’s why it’s important for Canadians to pay particular attention to Canadian literature, even when the imported brands are better seasoned. I often think of a passage in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” The Gettysburg address is a great poem, and poets have been saying ever since Homer’s time that they were just following after the great deeds of the heroes, and that it was the deeds which were important and not what they said about them. So it was right, in a way, that is, it was traditional, and tradition is very important in literature, for Lincoln to say what he did. And yet it isn’t really true. Nobody can remember the names and dates of battles unless they make some appeal to the imagination: that is, unless there is some literary reason for doing so. Everything that happens in time vanishes in time: it’s only the imagination that, like Proust, whom I quoted earlier, can see men as “giants in time.” What is true of the relation of literature to history is also true of the relation of literature to thought. I said in my first talk that literature, being one of the arts, is concerned with the home and not the environment of man: it lives in a simple, man-centred world and describes the nature around it in the kind of associative language that relates it to human concerns. We notice that this man-centred perspective is in ordinary speech as well: in ordinary speech we are all bad poets. We think of things as up or down, for example, so habitually that we often forget they’re just metaphors. Religious language is so full of metaphors of ascent, like “lift up your hearts,” and so full of traditional associations with the sky, that Mr. Krushchev still thinks he’s made quite a point when he tells us that his astronauts can’t find any trace of God in outer space. If we’re being realistic instead of religious, we prefer to descend, to get “down” to the facts (or to “brass tacks,” which is rhyming slang for the same thing). We speak of a subconscious mind which we assume is underneath the conscious mind, although so far as I know it’s only a spatial metaphor that puts it there. We line up arguments facing each other like football teams: on the one hand there’s this and on the other hand there’s that.

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All this is familiar enough, but it isn’t often thought of as directly connected with one’s education in literature. Still, it takes me to a point at which I can perhaps venture a suggestion about what the real place of literature in education is. I think it has somewhat the same relationship to the studies built out of words, history, philosophy, the social sciences, law, and theology, that mathematics has to the physical sciences. The pure mathematician proceeds by making postulates and assumptions and seeing what comes out of them, and what the poet or novelist does is rather similar. The great mathematical geniuses often do their best work in early life, like most of the great lyrical poets. Pure mathematics enters into and gives form to the physical sciences, and I have a notion that the myths and images of literature also enter into and give form to all the structures we build out of words. In literature we have both a theory and a practice. The practice is the production of literature by writers of all types, from geniuses to hacks, from those who write out of the deepest agonies of the spirit to those who write for fun. The theory of literature is what I mean by criticism, the activity of uniting literature with society, and with the different contexts that literature itself has, some of which we’ve been looking at. The great bulk of criticism is teaching, at all levels from kindergarten to graduate school. A small part of it is reviewing, or introducing current literature to its public, and a still smaller, though of course central, part of it is scholarship and research. The importance of criticism, in this sense, has increased prodigiously in the last century or so, the reason being simply the increase in the proportion of people that education is trying to reach. If we think of any period in the past—say eighteenth-century England— we think of the writers and scholars and artists, Fielding and Johnson and Hogarth and Adam Smith and a hundred more, and the cultivated and educated audience which made their work possible. But these writers and artists and their entire public, added all together, would make up only a minute fraction of the total population of England at that time—so minute that my guess is we’d hardly believe the statistics if we had them. In these days we’re in a hare-and-tortoise race between mob rule and education: to avoid collapsing into mob rule we have to try to educate a minority that’ll stand out against it. The fable says the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring. In my third talk I tried to distinguish the world of imagination from the world of belief and action. The first, I said, was a vision of possibilities, which expands the horizon of belief and makes it both more tolerant

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and more efficient. I have now tried to trace the progress of literary education to the point at which the student has acquired something of this vision and is ready to carry what he has of it into society. It’s clear that the end of literary teaching is not simply the admiration of literature; it’s something more like the transfer of imaginative energy from literature to the student. The student’s response to this transfer of energy may be to become a writer himself, but the great majority of students will do other things with it. In my last talk I want to consider the educated imagination and what it does as it goes to work in society. 6 The Vocation of Eloquence The title I’m using for this talk, “The Vocation of Eloquence,” comes from a gorgeous French poem called Anabase, by a writer whose pen-name is St. John Perse. It’s been translated into English by T.S. Eliot. Its theme is the founding of a city and a new civilization, and naturally the author, being a poet, is keenly aware of the importance of the use of words in establishing a society. Tonight I want to move away from strict critical theory into the wider and more practical aspects of a literary training. I don’t think of myself as speaking primarily to writers, or to people who want to be writers: I’m speaking to you as consumers, not producers, of literature, as people who read and form the public for literature. It’s as consumers that you may want to know more about what literature can do and what its uses are, apart from the pleasure it gives. I said at the beginning that nothing can be more obviously useful than learning to read and write and talk, but that a lot of people, especially young and inexperienced people, don’t see why studying literature should be a necessary part of this. One of the things I’ve been trying to do in these talks is to distinguish the language of the imagination, which is literature, from two other ways of using words: ordinary speech and the conveying of information. It’s probably occurred to you already that these three ways of using words overlap a good deal. Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination. But we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and practical life: it even produces dreams when we’re asleep. Consequently we have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well-trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not. When you stop to think about it, you soon realize that our imagination

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is what our whole social life is really based on. We have feelings, but they affect only us and those immediately around us; and feelings can’t be directly conveyed by words at all. We have intelligence and a capacity for reasoning, but in ordinary life we almost never get a chance to use the intellect by itself. In practically everything we do it’s the combination of emotion and intellect we call imagination that goes to work. Take, for example, the subject that in literary criticism is called rhetoric, the social or public use of words. In ordinary life, as in literature, the way you say things can be just as important as what’s said. The words you use are like the clothes you wear. Situations, like bodies, are supposed to be decently covered. You may have some social job to do that involves words, such as making a speech or preaching a sermon or teaching a lesson or presenting a case to a judge or writing an obituary on a dead skinflint or reporting a murder trial or greeting visitors in a public building or writing copy for an ad. In none of these cases is it your job to tell the naked truth: we realize that even in the truth there are certain things we can say and certain things we can’t say. Society attaches an immense importance to saying the right thing at the right time. In this conception of the “right thing,” there are two factors involved, one moral and one aesthetic. They are inseparable, and equally important. Some of the right things said may be only partly true, or they may be so little of the truth as to be actually hypocritical or false, at least in the eyes of the Recording Angel. It doesn’t matter: in society’s eyes the virtue of saying the right thing at the right time is more important than the virtue of telling the whole truth, or sometimes even of telling the truth at all. We even have a law of libel to prevent us from telling some truths about some people unless it’s in the public interest. So when Bernard Shaw remarks that a temptation to tell the truth should be just as carefully considered as a temptation to tell a lie,20 he’s pointing to a social standard beyond the merely intellectual standards of truth and falsehood, which has the power of final veto, and which only the imagination can grasp. We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them. Suppose we’re talking to somebody, let’s say a woman, who’s in a difficult mood. We’re faced at once with the problem: does what she is saying represent her actual meaning, or is it just a disguised way of representing her emotional state of mind? Usually we assume the latter but pretend to be assuming the former. This is a problem in rhetoric, and our decision is an act of literary criticism. The importance of rhetoric proves, once again, that the imagi-

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nation uses words to express a certain kind of social vision. The social vision of rhetoric is that of society dressed up in its Sunday clothes, people parading in front of each other, and keeping up the polite, necessary, and not always true assumption that they are what they appear to be. In our use of words in ordinary life, I said in my last talk, we are all bad poets. We read stories in our newspapers about Britain and Russia and France and India, all doing that and thinking that, as though each of these nations was an individual person. We know, of course, that such a use of language is a figure of speech, and probably a necessary figure, but sometimes we get misled by such figures. Or we get into the opposite habit of referring to the government of Canada as “they,” forgetting that they’re our own employees and assuming that “they” are carrying out plans and pursuing interests of their own. Both of these habits are forms of misapplied mythology or personification. The central place of the imagination in social life is something that the advertisers suddenly woke up to a few years ago. Ever since, they’ve been doing what they call projecting the image, and hiring psychologists to tell them what makes the most direct appeal to the imagination. I spoke in my last talk of the element of illusion in the imagination, and advertising is one example, though a very obvious one, of the deliberate creation of an illusion in the middle of real life. Our reaction to advertising is really a form of literary criticism. We don’t take it literally, and we aren’t supposed to: anyone who believed literally what every advertiser said would hardly be capable of managing his own affairs. I recently went past two teenage girls looking at the display in front of a movie which told them that inside was the thrill of a lifetime, on no account to be missed, and I heard one of them say, “Do you suppose it’s any good?” That was the voice of sanity trying to get its bearings in a world of illusion. We may think of it as the voice of reason, but it’s really the voice of the imagination doing its proper job. You remember that I spoke of irony, which means saying one thing and meaning another, as a device which a writer uses to detach our imaginations from a world of absurdity or frustration by letting us see around it. To protect ourselves in a society like ours, we have to look at such advertising as that movie display ironically: it means something to us which is different from what it says. The end of the process is not to reject all advertising, but to develop our own vision of society to the point at which we can choose what we want out of what’s offered to us and let the rest go. What we choose is what fits that vision of society.

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This principle holds not only for advertising but for most aspects of social life. During an election campaign, politicians project various images on us and make speeches which we know to be at best a carefully selected part of the truth. We tend to look down on the person who responds to such appeals emotionally: we feel he’s behaving childishly and like an irresponsible citizen if he allows himself to be stampeded. Of course there’s often a great sense of release in a purely emotional response. Hitler represented to Germany a tremendous release from its frustrations and grievances by simply acting like a three-year-old child: when he wanted something he went into a tantrum and screamed and chewed the scenery until he got it. But that example shows how dangerous the emotional response is, and how right we are to distrust it. So we say we ought to use our reason instead. But all the appeals to us are carefully rationalized, except the obviously crackpot ones, and we still have to make a choice. What the responsible citizen really uses is his imagination, not believing anybody literally, but voting for the man or party that corresponds most closely, or least remotely, to his vision of the society he wants to live in. The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in. Obviously that can’t be a separated society, so we have to understand how to relate the two. The society we have to live in, which for us happens to be a twentiethcentury Canadian society, presents our imagination with its own substitute for literature. This is a social mythology, with its own folklore and its own literary conventions, or what corresponds to them. The purpose of this mythology is to persuade us to accept our society’s standards and values, to “adjust” to it, as we say. Every society produces such a mythology: it’s a necessary part of its coherence, and we have to accept some of it if we’re to live in it, even things that we don’t believe. The more slowly a society changes, the more solidly based its mythology seems to be. In the Middle Ages the mythology of protection and obedience seemed one of the eternal verities, something that could never change. But change it did, at least all of it that depended on a certain kind of social structure. A hundred years ago a mythology of independence, hard work, thrift, and saving for a rainy day looked equally immortal, but, again, everything that was based on weak social services and stable values of money had to go. If a society changes very rapidly, and our society certainly does, we have to recognize the large element of illusion in all social mythology as a simple matter of self-protection. The first thing our imaginations have

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to do for us, as soon as we can handle words well enough to read and write and talk, is to fight to protect us from falling into the illusions that society threatens us with. The illusion is itself produced by the social imagination, of course, but it’s an inverted form of imagination. What it creates is the imaginary, which as I said earlier is different from the imaginative. The main elements of this social mythology will be familiar to you as soon as I mention them. I spoke of advertising, and what’s illusory about that is the perverted appeal it so often makes to the imagination: the appeals to snobbery and to what are called “status symbols,” the exploiting of the fear of being ridiculed or isolated from society, the suggestion of an easy way of getting on the inside track of what’s going on, and so on. Then there’s the use of cliché, that is, the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy to think the illusion of thinking. The Communists of course have made a heavy industry of clichés, but we have our own too. Hard-headed business man; ivory tower; longhair; regimentation; togetherness; airy-fairy. Anybody who believes literally what these clichés express, as far as any thinking for himself is concerned, might just as well be in Moscow reading about Fascist hyenas and the minions of imperialist aggression. Then there’s the use of what we call jargon or gobbledegook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call federal prose, the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement. There’s a particular reason for using gobbledegook which makes it a part of social mythology. People write this way when they want to sound as impersonal as possible, and the reason why they want to sound impersonal is that they want to suggest that the social machine they’re operating, usually a government agency, is running smoothly, and that no human factors are going to disturb it. Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledegook don’t want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring. I remember a report on the classification of government documents which informed me that some documents were eventually classified for permanent deposition. The writer meant that he threw them away. But he didn’t want to say so, and suggest that somebody was actually tearing up paper and aiming it at a waste-basket; he wanted to suggest some kind of invisible perfect processing. We get similar euphemisms in military writing, where we read about “anti-personnel bombs,” meaning bombs that kill men, designed not to give us any uncomfortable images of legs torn

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off and skulls blown open. We can see here how the ordinary use of rhetoric, which attempts to make society presentable, is becoming hypocritical and disguising the reality it presents beyond the level of social safety. Then there’s all the mythology about the “good old days,” when everything was simpler and more leisurely and everybody was much closer to nature and got their milk out of cows instead of out of bottles. Literary critics call these reveries pastoral myths, because they correspond to the same kind of convention in literature that produces stories about happy shepherds and milkmaids. Many people like to assume that the society of their childhood was a solid and coherent structure which is now falling apart, as morals have become looser and social conditions more chaotic and the arts more unintelligible to ordinary people, and so forth. Some time ago an archaeologist in the Near East dug up an inscription five thousand years old which told him that “children no longer obey their parents, and the end of the world is rapidly approaching.” It’s characteristic of such social myth-making that it can swing from one extreme to the other without any sense of inconsistency, and so we also have progress myths, of the kind that rationalize the spreading of filling stations and suburban bungalows and four-lane highways over the Canadian landscape. Progress myths come into all the phoney history that people use when they say that someone is a “Puritan,” meaning that he’s a prude, or that someone else is “medieval” or “mid-Victorian,” meaning that he’s old-fashioned. The effect of such words is to give the impression that all past history was a kind of bad dream, which in these enlightened days we’ve shaken off. I mentioned in my last talk the various diagrams and doodles that people carry around in their minds to help them sort things out. Sometimes they sort things the wrong way. For instance, there’s the diagram of left-wing and right-wing in politics, where you start with Communism at the extreme left and go around to Fascism at the extreme right. We use this diagram all the time, but suppose I were to say: “the Conservatives are nearer to being Fascists than the Liberals, and the Liberals are nearer to being Communists than the Conservatives.” You recognize that statement to be nonsense; but if it’s nonsense, the diagram it’s founded on is more misleading than it is useful.21 The person it’s most useful to is the person who wants to turn abusive, which is my next point. Ordinary speech is largely concerned with registering our reactions to

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what goes on outside us. In all such reactions there’s a large automatic or mechanical element. And if our only aim is to say what gets by in society, our reactions will become almost completely mechanical. That’s the direction in which the use of clichés takes us. In a society which changes rapidly, many things happen that frighten us or make us feel threatened. People who can do nothing but accept their social mythology can only try to huddle more closely together when they feel frightened or threatened, and in that situation their clichés turn hysterical. Naturally that doesn’t make them any less mechanical. Some years ago, in a town in the States, I heard somebody say “those yellow bastards,” meaning the Japanese. More recently, in another town, I heard somebody else use the same phrase, but meaning the Chinese. There are many reasons, not connected with literary criticism, why nobody should use a phrase like that about anybody. But the literary reason is that the phrase is pure reflex: it’s no more a product of a conscious mind than the bark of a dog is. We said that the person who is surrounded with advertisers, or with politicians at election time, neither believes everything literally nor rejects everything, but chooses in accordance with his own vision of society. The essential thing is the power of choice. In wartime this power of choice is greatly curtailed, and we resign ourselves to living by halftruths for the duration. In a totalitarian state the competition in propaganda largely disappears, and consequently the power of imaginative choice is sealed off. In our hatred and fear of war and of totalitarian government, one central element is a sense of claustrophobia that the imagination develops when it isn’t allowed to function properly. This is the aspect of tyranny that’s so prominently displayed in George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell even goes so far as to suggest that the only way to make tyranny permanent and unshakable, the only way in other words to create a literal hell on earth, is deliberately to debase our language by turning our speech into an automatic gabble. The fear of being reduced to such a life is a genuine fear, but of course as soon as we express it in hysterical clichés we are in the same state ourselves. As the poet William Blake says in describing something very similar, we become what we behold.22 Too often the study of literature, or even the study of language, is thought of as a kind of elegant accomplishment, a matter of talking good grammar or keeping up with one’s reading. I’m trying to show that the subject is a little more serious than that. I don’t see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech,

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which we all know is fundamental to our society. The area of ordinary speech, as I see it, is a battleground between two forms of social speech, the speech of a mob and the speech of a free society. One stands for cliché, ready-made idea, and automatic babble, and it leads us inevitably from illusion into hysteria. There can be no free speech in a mob: free speech is one thing a mob can’t stand. You notice that the people who allow their fear of Communism to become hysterical eventually get to screaming that every sane man they see is a Communist. Free speech, again, has nothing to do with grousing or saying that the country’s in a mess and that all politicians are liars and cheats, and so on and so on. Grousing never gets any further than clichés of this kind, and the sort of vague cynicism they express is the attitude of somebody who’s looking for a mob to join. You see, freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You’re not free to move unless you’ve learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practise. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at. The only exceptions, and they are exceptions that prove the rule, are people who, in some crisis, show that they have a social imagination strong and mature enough to stand out against a mob. In the recent row over desegregation in New Orleans, there was one mother who gave her reasons for sending her children to an integrated school with such dignity and precision that the reporters couldn’t understand how a woman who never got past grade six learned to talk like the Declaration of Independence.23 Such people already have what literature tries to give. For most of us, free speech is cultivated speech, but cultivating speech is not just a skill, like playing chess. You can’t cultivate speech, beyond a certain point, unless you have something to say, and the basis of what you have to say is your vision of society. So while free speech may be, at least at present, important only to a very small minority, that very small minority is what makes the difference between living in Canada and living in East Berlin or South Africa. The next question is, Where do the standards of a free society come from? They don’t come from that society itself, as we’ve just seen. Let us suppose that some intelligent man has been chasing status symbols all his life, until suddenly the bottom falls out of his world and he sees no reason for going on. He can’t make his solid gold cadillac24 represent his success or his reputation or his sexual potency any more:

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now it seems to him only absurd and a little pathetic. No psychiatrist or clergyman can do him any good, because his state of mind is neither sick nor sinful: he’s wrestling with his angel. He discovers immediately that he wants more education, and he wants it in the same way that a starving man wants food. But he wants education of a particular kind. His intelligence and emotions may quite well be in fine shape. It’s his imagination that’s been starved and fed on shadows, and it’s education in that that he specifically wants and needs. What has happened is that he’s so far recognized only one society, the society he has to live in, the middle-class twentieth-century Canadian society that he sees around him. That is, the society he does live in is identical with the one he wants to live in. So all he has to do is to adjust to that society, to see how it works and find opportunities for getting ahead in it. Nothing wrong with that: it’s what we all do. But it’s not all of what we all do. He’s beginning to realize that if he recognizes no other society except the one around him, he can never be anything more than a parasite on that society. And no mentally healthy man wants to be a parasite: he wants to feel he has some function, something to contribute to the world, something that would make the world poorer if he weren’t in it. But as soon as that notion dawns in the mind, the world we live in and the world we want to live in become different worlds. One is around us, the other is a vision inside our minds, born and fostered by the imagination, yet real enough for us to try to make the world we see conform to its shape. This second world is the world we want to live in, but the word “want” is now appealing to something impersonal and unselfish in us. Nobody can enter a profession unless he makes at least a gesture recognizing the ideal existence of a world beyond his own interests: a world of health for the doctor, of justice for the lawyer, of peace for the social worker, a redeemed world for the clergyman, and so on. I’m not wandering away from my subject, or at least I’m trying not to. My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn’t just train the mind: it’s a social and moral development too. But now that we’ve discovered that the imaginative world and the world around us are different worlds, and that the imaginative world is more important, we have to take one more step. The society around us looks like the real world, but we’ve just seen that there’s a great deal of illusion in it, the kind of illusion that propaganda and slanted news and prejudice and a great deal of advertising appeal to. For one thing, as we’ve been saying, it

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changes very rapidly, and people who don’t know of any other world can never understand what makes it change. If Canada in 1962 is a different society from the Canada of 1942, it can’t be real society, but only a temporary appearance of real society. And just as it looks real, so this ideal world that our imaginations develop inside us looks like a dream that came out of nowhere, and has no reality except what we put into it. But it isn’t. It’s the real world, the real form of human society hidden behind the one we see. It’s the world of what humanity has done, and therefore can do, the world revealed to us in the arts and sciences. This is the world that won’t go away, the world out of which we built the Canada of 1942, are now building the Canada of 1962, and will be building the quite different Canada of 1982. A hundred years ago the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold pointed out that we live in two environments, an actual social one and an ideal one, and that the ideal one can only come from something suggested in our education. Arnold called this ideal environment culture, and defined culture as the best that has been thought and said.25 The word “culture” has different overtones to most of us, but Arnold’s conception is a very important one, and I need it at this point. We live, then, in both a social and a cultural environment, and only the cultural environment, the world we study in the arts and sciences, can provide the kind of standards and values we need if we’re to do anything better than adjust. I spoke in my first talk of three levels of the mind, which we have now seen to be also three forms of society and three ways of using words. The first is the level of ordinary experience and of self-expression. On this level we use words to say the right thing at the right time, to keep the social machinery running, faces saved, self-respect preserved, and social situations intact. It’s not the noblest thing that words can do, but it’s essential, and it creates and diffuses a social mythology, which is a structure of words developed by the imagination. For we find that to use words properly even in this way we have to use our imaginations, otherwise they become mechanical clichés, and get further and further removed from any kind of reality. There’s something in all of us that wants to drift towards a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we’re either fighting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we’re taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization.

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This is the world revealed by philosophy and history and science and religion and law, all of which represent a more highly organized way of using words. We find knowledge and information in these studies, but they’re also structures, things made out of words by a power in the human mind that constructs and builds. This power is the imagination, and these studies are its products. When we think of their content, they’re bodies of knowledge; when we think of their form, they’re myths, that is, imaginative verbal structures. So the whole subject of the use of words revolves around this constructive power itself, as it operates in the art of words, which is literature, the laboratory where myths themselves are studied and experimented with. The particular myth that’s been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it’s really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it’s really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth.

Notes

Introduction 1 NB 8.185. 2 Frye’s musical notebook of the 1930s (NB 5, to appear in volume 9 of the Collected Works) contains his dense and informed analysis of harmonic structures ranging from the Elizabethans he loved to Mendelssohn, whose music he thought harmonically empty. 3 At the conference on Frye held at Victoria College the year after his death, composer John Beckwith and poet James Reaney, both deeply interested in Frye’s work, presented “In the Middle of Ordinary Noise . . .”, a musical portrait of Frye; it was restaged in Toronto by the Toronto Masque Theatre in January 2005. See The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 261–75. 4 “butter-slide: a slide made of butter or ice; also fig.” (OED). NF uses it to refer to the egotism of viewing history as a descent from the heights of one culture to the lower level of another allegedly more impoverished or wrongheaded. A reference in his book on T.S. Eliot (see TSE 7) indicates he knew “butterslide” as a bobsledding term. Modern waterskiers describe a butterslide as cutting back sideways across the wake of the boat; this may be why in somewhat the same terms he mocked the “U-shaped” view of history as a descent from the heights followed by an upturn leading to whatever historical position was being assumed by the speaker. For both, see the various references in NFR, 263; LS, 84, 126-7; D, 17; and no. 17 and no. 34 in this volume. 5 NB 18.105, quoted in Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, ed. Robert D. Denham (Toronto: Anansi, 2004), 68. 6 In 1936 Frye was ordained in the ministry of the United Church of Canada (formed in 1925 when Methodists united with Congregationalists and about three-quarters of the Presbyterians), but he early decided not to seek a

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congregation. However, throughout his life he was constantly called to preach on special occasions and sometimes to marry and bury, and he took these responsibilities seriously. The 2,053 books from his library annotated by Frye are preserved in the Northrop Frye Fonds of Victoria University Library. For Robert Denham’s discussion of a substantial selection of the books, with illustrative excerpts from the annotations, see his “Annotations in Frye’s Books,” Northrop Frye Newsletter 9.2 (2002), 20–35. NB 20.1, quoted in Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, 92. Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 279. Alvin A. Lee, “Victoria’s Contribution to Canadian Literary Culture,” in From Cobourg to Toronto: The Sesquicentennial Lectures, 1986 (Toronto: Chartres Books, 1989), 71. I once asked Frye whether in his experience this kind of classification by good taste (which I had witnessed as a student) really was important to his colleagues at Toronto during the 1940s and 1950s, and he slipped the bonds of his usual detachment to reply, with passionate distaste, “Yes—oh, YES!” Frye was in the advance guard of those who have since expressed serious reservations about Eliot’s social vision; see T.S. Eliot (1963), in the Writers and Critics series published by Oliver and Boyd. On the controversy this little book caused in England see Ayre 280–3 and 288, 290. Interestingly it proved the most popular book in its series. See variously: Hart, Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination, 165 and Caterina Nella Cotrupi, Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 5. Sorting out Frye’s revisions would be tasking even for a skilled genetic critic. Not only did he rethink almost everything he ever wrote, reinstalling each element in still larger syntheses, he reused material for practical reasons, as does anyone called on frequently for public lectures and editorial contributions. For a discussion of the private names (Liberal, Rencontre, etc.) Frye used in his notebooks for the books he was projecting, and their relationship with the “Great Doodle,” see Michael Dolzani’s “Introduction” to TBN, especially xl and xli. Woodhouse’s firm rule over the Toronto colleges’ Combined Departments of English for nearly three decades ought to have made him the Nobodaddy of Frye’s academic cosmology, but admiration and respect for his overworked, underproductive, yet magisterial colleague is reiterated in a number of diary entries. “As I am included in the mythological group, I suppose my own methods are classed as deductive: actually they are inductive as far as my experience

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of them goes, generalizations shaped from a variety of individual contacts with literature. But I know that when I write them out they look as deductive as Euclid” (200–1; see review of Crane, “Content with the Form,” no. 20.) See headnote to no. 24. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Frye, like other local academics, regularly did talks for the CBC; see Ayre, passim, and the frequent references in the Diaries. The six lectures as taped were extensively revised when Frye prepared the manuscript for publication (Robert Denham, personal communication). My own second copy, bought in 1991 to be annotated for classroom use, has “twenty-fourth printing” on the copyright page. Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 1. Further references will appear in parentheses in the text. Frye was kindlier to Wimsatt than this jab (probably necessary at the time) suggests; he contributed an essay on Wallace Stevens—fittingly, a “close reading”—to Wimsatt’s festschrift in 1973, and spoke of his “great affection and admiration” for the acerbic critic in the introduction to Spiritus Mundi, where the essay is reprinted (SM, xii). Anatomy of Criticism, Glossary and p. 136. [Hartman’s note.] See particularly Jan Gorak’s Introduction to NFMC. Julia Kristeva, “The Importance of Frye” Hayden White, “Frye’s Place in Contemporary Cultural Studies”; and Nella Cotrupi, “Verum Factum: Viconian Markers along Frye’s Path,” in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, 335–7, 28–39, and 286–95 respectively. See also Cotrupi, Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process. 1. Dr. Edgar’s Book

1 In what follows, NF mentions several standard works on fiction that a wellinformed student would have known in 1933: Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921), Henry James’s essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884), and William Lyon Phelps, The Advance of the English Novel (1916). 2 See John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, where early in the narrative Christian is sent to the Interpreter’s House by Good Will. 3 Régis Michaud, The American Novel Today (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928), xi. 2. Art Does Need Sociability 1 Sir Wyly Grier (1862–1957), Canadian portrait painter; knighted in 1935 for his contributions to Canadian arts and letters (NFHK, 2, 707, 796). His “Sociability in Art” appeared in Saturday Night (26 July 1941): 15.

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2 The great Italian poet Dante’s club was the bianchi, the “white” or more constitutional wing of the Guelph party. In 1302 he was exiled from his home city of Florence by an edict of the aristocratic faction the neri (“black”), and was never able to return. 3 Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), 126. 4 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses to which Are Added his Letters to “The Idler,” intro. Austin Dobson (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), Discourse I, 3–4. 3. Music in Poetry 1 2 3 4

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John Milton, L’Allegro, ll. 143–4. John Milton, in his note “The Verse,” prefaced to Paradise Lost. Poems by, respectively, Longfellow, Browning, Arnold, Burns, and Keats. There is no explicit recognition of this in Browning’s Parleying with Smart, but his admiration for the poem is obviously connected with it. Smart’s interest in the musical effects possible to poetry is clearly marked in Jubilate Agno, ed. W.F. Stead (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), sec. 28. [NF] Browning’s poem about the famous organ improviser, Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler (1749–1814). That the Sir Thopas stanza can be admirable for musical poetry is shown by [Smart’s] Song to David. [NF] Coolidge Otis Chapman, “The Musical Training of the Pearl Poet,” PMLA 46: 177–81. [NF] Of course some of those who read the rough and bumpy lines of the preTyrwhitt editions [that is, before 1775] would take him for a musical poet: the use made of him in the Shepheardes Calender indicates that Spenser did. [NF]. Wryteling: chirruping or trilling; gogeling: eye-rolling or head-wagging. In seventeenth-century English music, the technique of improvising variations upon a cantus firmus or “ground” which remained the same throughout. John Lydgate, The Dance of Death, ed. Florence Warren, intro. and notes by Beatrice White (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 62 (ll. 505–08) and 60 (ll. 487–504). These are rare in poetry: the mezzoforte [moderately strong] direction for Lycidas, “Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string,” is an example. [NF] The “dynamic markings” are NF’s own. A debate in verse in which two poets compete in hurling invective at each other. Poems of Sir Thomas Wiat, ed. A.K. Foxwell (London: University of London Press, 1913), 2:34. [NF]

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15 Frye has in mind G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), and possibly the essay by Edward J. Dent, “Shakespeare and Music,” in Harley Granville Barker’s A Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934). 16 Richard Crashaw, A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa, ll. 1–2, 181–2. 17 Durchkomponiert: a song with a single melodic line from beginning to end, as opposed to one in which the melody is repeated for each stanza. 18 Note 32 to Davideis, bk. 1. This explanation, which is worthy of Paracelsus, comes rather oddly from the panegyrist of Bacon and Hobbes. [NF] 19 Samuel Johnson, “Milton,” in Lives of the English Poets (The World’s Classics, London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 1:138. [NF] 20 Robert Southey, “Preface” to Thalaba the Destroyer (1800) in Poems of Robert Southey, ed. Maurice H. Fitzgerald (London: Oxford University Press, 1909), 23. 4. The Anatomy in Prose Fiction 1 Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–62), author of the often reprinted History of Civilisation in England (1857). 2 A comparison of borderline cases in the classified lists of Everyman’s Library (E) and the World’s Classics (W) may be interesting. The Pilgrim’s Progress is “Romance” in E; “Religion” in W. Borrow’s Lavengro is fiction in E, but “Travel and Topography” in W. Sartor Resartus is “Essays and Belles Lettres” in E, “Philosophy and Science” in W. Gulliver’s Travels is fiction in W: E puts out a bowdlerized version under “For Young People.” [NF] 3 Frye has in mind late antique Greek writers like Heliodorus of Emesa (fl. A.D. 220–50), whose romance the Aethiopica, in its Renaissance editions, was an important influence on Sidney. 4 “Author’s Preface” to The House of Seven Gables [NF]. 5 “Conversation de Lucien, Érasme, et Rabelais dans les Champs Élysées,” Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Garnier, 1877–83), 25:339–44. [NF] 6 John Dryden, Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 2:64–7. Ker’s notes tell us that Dryden’s main source is Isaac Casaubon’s book on classical satire (Paris, 1605), that the “volume of German authors” referred to is “most probably the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum” (283), and that Casaubon’s own list of examples gives Petronius, Seneca, Lucian, Julian, Martianus Capella, and Boetius. Casaubon is therefore thinking of a predominantly prose form, so that Dryden’s English examples do not really belong to it. The main Classical sources (both quoted by Dryden) are Quintilian, Insitutio Oratoria, bk. 10, chap. 1, sec. 95, and Cicero, Academica,

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bk. 1, chap. 2, sec. 8. [NF] By “Boetius” (a rare spelling) Ker meant the late Latin philosopher and poet Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (ca. A.D. 480–ca. 525). See previous note. [NF] “[In those old writers of our country] . . . I treated with a certain amount of ridicule, there is a copious admixture of elements derived from the inmost depths of philosophy, and many utterances in good logical form.” Cicero, Academica, I, ii, 8. [NF] “All the doings of mankind, their vows, their fears, their angers and their pleasures, their joys and goings to and fro, shall form the motley subject of my page.” Juvenal, Satire 1, 85–6. Squire Western, Thwackum, and Square are all characters in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). For a similar attitude to the sceptic, cf. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, bk. 3, chap. 36. [NF] No Erasmus scholar been able to confirm that Burton borrowed the name “Democritus Junior” from Erasmus (see n. 24, below). Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry [i.e., The Defence of Poesy] in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1904) 1:185. [NF] Totengesprach: a dialogue of, or with, the dead; Lucian originated the genre and it was popular in seventeenth-century Germany. The way NF used the term here and elsewhere suggests he knew both sources. For Lucian’s Alexander see his short prose work, “Alexander the False Prophet,” Lucian, 4:173–253. Voltaire’s Diatribe of Dr. Akakia attacked the scientist Pierre Louis Moureau de Maupertuis (1698–1759); see “Histoire du docteur Akakia” in Oeuvres Complètes, 23:559–85; the “Diatribe” is 560–5. Erasmus, ’Ixuyfagja, “A Fish Diet,” (1526) in Erasmus, Colloquies, trans. and ann. Craig R. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 40:675–762. For Voltaire’s Micromegas, Histoire philosophique (1752) and L’Ingénu, Histoire véritable tirée des manuscrits du P. Quesnel (1767) see Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, Paris: Garnier,1877–83), 21:105–22 and 247–304. For this a fortiori technique cf. Erasmus’s comment on his Religious Feast, trans. N. Bailey, Colloquies (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878), 2:362. [Erasmus, “The Usefulness of the Colloquies,” in Colloquies, 40:1101]. In the pastoral tradition the simple life often suggests the Edenic state of innocence: cf. the reference to the fall and flood in Swift [Gulliver’s Travels], chap. 9. For an ingenious attempt to make Sidney’s Arcadia a Utopian satire, see chap. 1 of Greville’s Life [Fulke Greville’s Life of Sidney, now known as A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, ed. John Gouws, The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)]. [NF] Chap. 6 of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836). [NF]

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20 NF’s reference to Paracelsus has proved untraceable. 21 “Either reported or pretended,” Augustine, De Civitate Dei, bk. 18, chap. 18. [NF] 22 Pandect: a complete body of laws, and thus by extension a compendious treatise. 23 H.O. Taylor, Thought and Expression in the 16th Century (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 1: 38, has an interesting quotation from the humanist Bruni which shows clearly what sort of literary influence Plato exerted on Erasmus and Castiglione. The three encyclopedic farragos were also very popular, partly because they were so valuable as cribs: thus Erasmus, in De Ratione Studii, 1511, mentions all three directly after Pliny. Athenaeus was translated into Latin by the great mythologist Natalis Comes in 1556. For Lucian’s influence, see Preserved Smith’s Erasmus (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), 193. [NF.] 24 E.g., Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie and the Worlds Madnesse (1596). [NF] 25 See n. 11. 26 He refers to Rabelais only as “that French Lucian,” and seems not to have known him well, though such an epithet should be quite a compliment coming from Burton. [NF] 27 For another example of this in prose fiction, cf. Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee. [NF] 28 Burton is classified with the “eccentrics” in Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian’s History of English Literature (London: J.M. Dent, 1930), 386. [NF] 29 Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit; Euphues and his England, ed. Morris W. Croll and Harry Clemons (London: Routledge, 1916), xxiii. See the N.E.D. [i.e., O.E.D., 2nd ed., “anatomy,” III.10, where Burton is specifically cited]. Burton simply mentions the word as common. [NF] 30 The influence of Rabelais on Kingsley’s Water-babies is clear enough. Meredith’s Shaving of Shagpat also belongs to the form. [NF] 5. The Nature of Satire 1 John Milton, An Apology Against a Pamphlet . . . (known as the Apology Against Smectymnuus), sec. 6. 2 Blunderbore is the Giant in the story of Jack the Giant Killer; Polyphemus is the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey. 3 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819, 16–20. 4 Byron, Don Juan, “Dedication,” st. 12, ll. 89–96. 5 Thomas Moore, What’s My Thought Like? in Poetical Works, ed. A.D. Godley (London: Henry Frowde, 1910 [1929]), 169. 6 “Round as a globe . . .” John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, pt. 2, ll. 460–1. “A portly prince . . .” The Hind and the Panther, l. 2440.

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7 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 1:200. 8 Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace, “The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” ll. 116–22. 9 Juvenal, Satire 1, l. 30. 10 See n. 1, above. 11 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 3, sec. 2, mem. 3, subs. 1. 12 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, chap. 4, “Characteristics.” 13 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, pt. 4, chap. 5. 14 Robert Burns, “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” ll. 19–30. 15 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, pt. 1, chap. 6. 16 Alexander Pope, Epistle to Several Persons, “To a Lady, of the Characters of Women,” Epistle 2, ll. 239–48. 17 “The Hearse Song,” widely sung in the First World War, with many variants. NF’s source is unknown; his quotation conflates the two versions in Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 444. 18 Sir Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (1625), “XXXII, Of Discourse.” 19 John Skelton, “Colin Clout,” ll. 1, 5–8, 26–9, 33–7. 20 R.S. Surtees, Handley Cross, or Mr. Jorrock’s Hunt (expanded edition of 1854, London: George Bayntun, 1926), 385. 6. Nichols and Kirkup’s The Cosmic Shape 1 A long poem by James Kirkup, The Cosmic Shape, 79–98. 8. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time 1 Edgar Guest (1881–1959) published his sentimental verses in the Detroit Free Press; his books, of which the most popular was A Heap o’ Livin’ (1916), sold in the millions. 2 John Ruskin, Munera Pulveris (1872), par. 134; however, NF quotes directly from Arnold’s reference (see n. 3) where several phrases are silently omitted. 3 Matthew Arnold, “The Literary Influence of Academies,” in Essays in Criticism: First Series (London: Macmillan, 1896), 71. 4 T.S. Eliot, “Preface” to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), vii. 5 NF may have had in mind the title of Tate’s Reactionary Essays, published in 1936. 6 Martha Finley (1828–1909) published the sentimental girls’ novel Elsie

Notes to pages 69–119

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Dinsmore in 1867; the book and its twenty-seven sequels sold millions of copies, and some are still in print. 7 Stephen Dedalus defines the lyrical, “epical,” and dramatic forms during the discussion of aesthetics with his friend Lynch in chap. 5 of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 8 John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927) analysed the genesis of Coleridge’s poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” 9 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 2.1. 9. The Four Forms of Prose Fiction 1 “Grace Abounding”: John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). 2 See no. 4, n. 13. 3 Torchecul: arse-wipe; see Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, chap. 13. 10. Levels of Meaning in Literature 1 Aristotle, Categories 1a, 1b. 2 Strictly speaking, “paronomasia” is word-play based on words that sound alike, that is, punning. 3 Freud discusses “tendency-wit” as a rebellion against authority in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), pt. A, sec. 3. 4 For consonantia see Stephen Dedalus’s discussion of aesthetics with Lynch, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chap. 5. 5 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 1:156. 11. A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres 1 Commedia dell’arte: Renaissance Italian popular comedy, often played by travelling troupes; it featured stock figures such as Harlequin and Punchinello. Zauberspiel: semi-operatic comedy popular in Vienna in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, featuring ordinary people thrust into magical situations; Mozart’s The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) famously exploits but transcends this genre. 2 Pierre Corneille, Le Cid (1637); Victor Hugo, Hernani (1830). 3 Menander (342/1–293/98 b.c.), Greek dramatist, was the most important writer of New Comedy, the popular urban theatre of Athens in the last quarter of the first century b.c. 4 Paul Claudel, L’annonce faite à Marie (1912).

504

Notes to pages 122–67 12. The Archetypes of Literature

1 Susan B. Warner’s Sunday School hymn, “Jesus Bids us Shine” (1864): “In this world of darkness, / We must shine / You in your small corner, / And I in mine.” 2 Stock exchange: Shocking as the admission may be, I was not aware when I wrote this that the same figure had appeared in Mr. Eliot’s own essay, “What is Minor Poetry?” [NF] 3 Carl Jung, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), or Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido: A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1916). 13. Three Meanings of Symbolism 1 Hendiadys: a rhetorical figure in which a single idea, instead of being expressed by an adjective and noun, appears as two nouns connected by “and”; for example, Virgil, Georgics, bk. 2, l. 192: “we pour libations in cups and gold” (“pateris libamus et aureo”) for “golden cups.” 2 The poet John Gould Fletcher published eleven verbal “colour symphonies” in his Preludes and Symphonies (New York: Macmillan, 1930). 14. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes 1 Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793–1860); his jingle “Higglety pigglety pop!” is Opie no. 219. It had become sufficiently canonized as a “nursery rhyme” that the Opies were able to collect it from an oral source in 1945. 2 For John Bellenden Ker’s Essay on the Archaeology of Popular English Phrases and Nursery Rhymes (1834) see Opie, 27–8. 15. Towards a Theory of Cultural History 1 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (Orpington, Kent: George Allen, 1888), 3:160 (pt. 4, sec. 5). 2 Little Eva, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Little Nell, in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. 3 In the bardic tradition, ollaves are learned poets, not yet bards but great composers of cursing poems; see for example Mananaan MacLir in the “Circe” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses. 4 In Finnegans Wake Joyce employed the cyclical theory of history outlined by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in La Nuova scienza (successive revised editions, 1725–44).

Notes to pages 167–83

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5 Ezra Pound drew the title of his collection of essays Make It New from a passage in Da Xue (“The Book of Great Learning,” the fourth of the Confucian books), in which the scholar Zeng Tze comments on the Confucian teaching of “reforming oneself and purifying one’s mind regularly, and becoming a new man every day.” Pound’s book only appeared in 1934, though he had been arguing the same revolutionary poetic principles for two decades. 16. Art in a New Modulation 1 Henri Bergson’s L’Evolution créatrice (1907) appeared in English as Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1911). It had an important influence on modernism; for Wyndham Lewis’s response, see his Time and Western Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927). 17. Ministry of Angels 1 Poe’s story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). 2 For the “Great Western Butterslide” theory of history Frye also mentions scornfully elsewhere in his writings, see Introduction. 3 Dante’s “Epistle to Can Grande” (epist. 13, para. 1, to Can Grande de la Scala, Lord of Verona) explains the title and subject of the Divine Comedy. 4 A lapse on NF’s part; he means not his young colleague Edmund Carpenter (see Introduction) but Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), pioneering campaigner for homosexual equality, socialist writer and author of Days with Walt Whitman (1886). 5 The concise prose style of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, modelled on Seneca and Sallust; Shaftesbury’s complaint about its “easy gait” (as opposed to the formal rhetoric of the Ciceronians) gave George Williamson the title for his influential The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (London: Faber, 1951). 6 In Aquinas, the “lumen naturale” of the intellect is the natural light of reason (Expositio super Isaiam ad litteram, chap. 1, sec. 1), as opposed to what Fergusson terms “la raison, ‘reason’ limited to the myopic rigors of geometry.” 7 In music, stretto (strictly speaking) means “quick,” but it also describes a passage near the end of a work that draws together previous themes. 8 Quid credas: what you believe; quid agas: what you do or enact. 9 In the Novum organum, aphorism 44 (1620), Francis Bacon calls the received systems of philosophy “Idols of the Theatre,” that is, “but so many stage plays” that represent “worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.”

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Notes to pages 190–208 19. Myth as Information

1 The year was 1922; D.H. Lawrence was the author of Fantasia of the Unconscious. 2 Folke Leander, “Further Problems Suggested by the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,” in Paul A. Schilpp, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston, IL: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 335–57; 338. 3 Cassirer’s comments on Mill were made in An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 126–7. For Mill’s discussion of the relations of grammar and logic, see his “Essays on Equality, Law, and Education,” ed. Stefan Collini, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 21:228. 4 See in general chap. 3, “Language in the Phase of Intuitive Expression.” Cassirer uses some South Pacific and North American Native terms, but not these; NF may have been extrapolating on the basis of his own reading. The Maori word mana signifies, in general, “an impersonal supernatural power which can be associated with people or with objects and which can be transmitted or inherited.” The Iroquois word orenda has been variously defined, but “invisible power or energy” fits the sense here (see OED). The two terms have sometimes been treated as equivalent. 5 NF is punning on the name of an elementary move in chess, the four-move “scholar’s mate” in which Bishop and Queen attack a weak pawn protected only by the King. 5 “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu,” Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Tombeau de Edgar Poe,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 189. 20. Content with the Form 1 Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932), 19. 21. Forming Fours 1 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937). 2 The ethnographer Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), author of The Childhood of Man (Aus den Flegeljahren der Menschheit, 1901). Frye’s annotated copy of A.H. Keane’s translation of 1909 (New York: Meridian, 1960) is in NFL. 3 The ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, is a Gnostic symbol, a mystic image of the cyclical nature of things and the continuity of life.

Notes to pages 213–36

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4 Goethe, Faust, Part I, l. 1237: “Im Anfang war die That,” (In the beginning was the deed). 22. The Language of Poetry 1 T.S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger,” Times Literary Supplement, 27 May 1920, reprinted in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 53. 2 “There is a god within us,” Ovid, Fasti, bk. 6, l. 5. 3 The Sacaea was the midwinter renewal festival of the Persians and Babylonians. 23. The Transferability of Literary Concepts 1 The principle of indeterminacy was formulated in 1927 by Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), one of the founders of quantum mechanics. It states a scientific paradox: the more accurately the position of a particle is measured, the less accurately its speed can be calculated, and vice versa. 2 Wheeler gave the paper immediately preceding NF’s; Wheeler’s “seven sybils” were: unknown knowable, grapple (by which he seems to have meant “the human drive to know”), measure, analogy, correspondence, complementarity, and the high and the low. See Wheeler, “A Septet of Sybils,” in the report of the conference, 33–5. 24. An Indispensable Book 1 René Welleck, review of Fearful Symmetry, Modern Language Notes 64 (January 1949): 63. 2 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1819), the obscure German aesthetician who argued that irony is the principle of all art; see Wellek, The Romantic Age, 2:298–303. 3 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 31. 4 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, pt. 1, sec. 16. 25. “Preface” and “Introduction: Lexis and Melos” 1 This paper [i.e., NF’s introduction] contains material drawn from an early article, “Music in Poetry,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 1942. It is this article that Mr. Sternfeld is quoting on p. 38 in “Poetry and Music—Joyce’s Ulysses.” [NF]. NF’s paper is no. 3 in this volume. Sternfeld quoted, with

508

Notes to pages 243–82

elisions, the passage, “When we find . . . a dreamy sensuous flow of language . . . Hopkins’ sprung rhythm is, in origin, a musical idea . . .” 2 “Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens and Shades of Death,” PL, bk. 2, l. 621, quoted by Ants Oras in his paper, “Spenser and Milton: Some Parallels and Contrasts in the Handling of Sound,” in the same volume of English Institute papers as NF’s “Introduction,” 113. 26. The Ulysses Theme 1 Ewiger jude: the Wandering Jew (ewiger = endless, or eternal) of medieval legend; among the sources of the story was John 18: 20–2, concerning the man who struck Jesus on his way to the crucifixion and was condemned to wander until the end of the world. 2 Homer, Odyssey, bk. 1, l. 1, calls Ulysses “polytropos,” meaning both “crafty” and “much-wandering.” 3 Habent sua fata libelli: proverbial, but deriving from Terentianus Maurus (2nd C.), De literis, syllabis, et metris Horatii. The whole verse is, “pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli,” that is, “the fate of books depends on the understanding of the reader.” 27. Nature and Homer 1 Longinus, On Great Writing (On the Sublime), trans. G.M.A. Grube (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 47. [NF] 2 See no. 37, n. 13. 3 Lodowick Carlell (1602?–75) and Henry Glapthorne (fl. 1635–43), two seventeenth-century popular playwrights, now almost unknown. 28. Sir James Frazer 1 Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831–1880), a German theorist of myth who had an important influence on Frazer. 2 Bronislaw Malinowski, “Sir James George Frazer,” in A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 211. 29. Interior Monologue of M. Teste 1 Among Valéry’s well-known early works was the first-person anthology of “pensées,” La Soirée avec M. Teste (1896). 2 Paul Valéry, “A Solemn Address,” in The Art of Poetry, intro. T.S. Eliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 271, and see 274. The occasion of Valéry’s

Notes to pages 289–304

509

address was a reading of French poetry that took place at the Comédie Française on 24 September, 1939. NF’s copy is in NFL; beside the quotation he has written “Little Gidding.” 30. World Enough without Time 1 Sir Edward Tylor (1832–1917), a founder of the study of anthropology in England. 2 Rev. Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954) and Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), influential scholars of comparative mythology. 3 Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895). Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Nonrational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (1917); trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). NF’s annotated copy of Kierkegaard’s Repetition is in NFL. 31. Literature as Possession 1 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (The World’s Classics, London: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11. 2 See no. 34., n. 19. 3 See no. 34., n. 20. 4 See no. 34., n. 22. 5 Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, epist. 2, pt. 1, ll. 11–18. 6 Knittelvers: literally, doggerel. See also NF’s remarks on Byron in “Ministry of Angels,” no. 17 in this volume. 7 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 2, canto 4, st. 9 and 35. 8 Edgar Allan Poe, “The City in the Sea,” in The Complete Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, intro. Hervey Allen (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 964, l. 23. 9 For “Lilacs” (1920), see The Poems of Amy Lowell, ed. Louis Untermeyer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 446–7. NF misremembered; these lines are in the closing section of the poem. 10 George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance, with a Treatise on Parents and Children (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1972), 4:16–17. 11 John Donne, “Nineteenth Expostulation,” Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 100–1. 12 “The synthetic or the contrary demands the paideutic continuous form.” Coleridge, no. 70, “What Does the Word Mean? A Note Headed ‘Solger’s Erwin,’” in Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Prose Writings, Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 100.

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Notes to pages 304–19

13 “Live? Our servants will do that for us!,” Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Axël (1890), trans. H.P.R. Finberg, with a preface by William Butler Yeats (London: Jarrolds, 1925), 284. Yeats popularized the translation, “As for living, our servants will do that for us.” See Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), 305. 32. New Directions from Old 1 Paul Valéry, “The cosmogony is one of the oldest of all literary forms,” in “Fragment from ‘On Poe’s Eureka,’” Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1950), 123. 2 Thomas Love Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry,” in Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, Browning’s Essay on Shelley, ed. H.F.B. Brett-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1929), 16. 3 Matthew Arnold, “Preface to First Edition of Poems (1853),” in Matthew Arnold on the Classical Tradition, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 7. 4 Menander, Thais 218 (“Bad company corrupts good character”) is usually cited to demonstrate St. Paul’s debt in 1 Corinthians 15: 33; however, the proverb likely originated with Euripides. For the diverting complexities of this issue, see Robert Renehan, “Classical Greek Quotations in the New Testament,” in The Heritage of the Early Church, ed. D. Neiman and M. Schatkin (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1973), 17–46, specifically 29–34. 5 The “serious works on theology” NF had in mind are not known, but the economist Dennis Robertson used quotations, primarily from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There but also from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as epigraphs in his Money (London: Cambridge University Press, 1922 and subsequent editions). 6 NF did not need Tolkien to tell him about middle earth, but it is worth noting that despite Tolkien’s confusing Beowulf lectures in Oxford (Ayre, 152) NF had read and annotated a copy of the Lord of the Rings in the late 1950s. 7 NF probably knew the original passage in Pascal, but his reference suggests he was remembering the version from a school textbook, probably French Prose of the Seventeenth Century, ed. F.M. Warren (Boston: Heath, 1899), 79– 82. The anthology was in use at Victoria College from at least the late 1920s to the 1950s. For the complete text see Pensées, 185, in Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres completes, ed. Michel Le Guern (Paris: Gallimard, 1998, 2000) II, 608–14. 8 Blake did not, apparently, say this, though NF’s intense reading of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Milton may have suggested to him that the poet ought to have.

Notes to pages 320–36

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9 On the mythical structure of Prometheus Unbound see, now, Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), a study not available to me when writing this essay. Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), is also largely devoted to the study of what is here called topocosm, in both neo-Classical and Romantic poets. [NF] NF made the point about Bloom’s book in a parenthesis at the end of this paragraph in the original edition; by FI he had turned it into one of his rare annotations, and added Wasserman’s book as well. 10 NF is referring to the American space program of the 1960s, which on 20 July 1969 would succeed in its goal of putting a man on the moon. 33. The Well-Tempered Critic (I) 1 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 292. 2 Between 1938 and 1961 a bequest to Victoria College by George H. Armstrong provided public lectures on educational or religious subjects; speakers were such well-known scholars as Arnold J. Toynbee, Douglas Bush, and Hilda Neatby. The lectureship is currently dormant, despite an attempt to revive it in the 1970s. 3 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 14. 4 See no. 34, n. 8. 5 The passage NF deplores is, oddly, from his friend R.S. Crane’s collection Critics and Criticism (page 20), which NF reviewed in no. 18 in this volume. Precisely the same passage was mocked by Frederick C. Crews in his parody of Chicago School criticism, “A Complete Analysis of Winnie-thePooh” by Duns C. Penwiper; see Crews, The Pooh Perplex (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1963), 89. 6 Kierkegaard: see no. 34, n. 6. 7 “Honours English”: the first students in the “English Language and Literature” program at the University of Toronto entered in 1937, and the last graduated in 1972; see Robin S. Harris, English Studies at Toronto: A History (University of Toronto: Governing Council, 1988), chaps. 4, 5, and 6; Frye’s introduction to Harris’s book appears in WE, 595–8. For a discussion of Frye’s teaching in this curriculum, see Introduction. 8 Mencken: see no. 34, n. 7. 9 Burke: see no. 34, n. 8. 10 Vanzetti: see no. 34, n. 9. Louis Riel (1844–1886), a prominent Métis spokesman, led two rebellions in Western Canada in 1869–70 and 1885; he was tried and executed by the Canadian government on charges of high treason. One of the most controversial figures in Canadian history, he is today widely regarded as a national hero.

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Notes to pages 336–54

11 The New Orleans mother: see no. 34, n. 13. 34. The Well-Tempered Critic (II) 1 NF to Amleto Lorenzini, 11 September 1973 (NFF, 1988, box 62, file 8). 2 NF was remembering (somewhat vaguely) the passage in Plato, Symposium, sec. 215, where Alcibiades refers to the “Silenoi”—small statues of the satyrlike Silenus that opened up to reveal images of the gods inside. 3 [Alexander] Pope, An Essay on Criticism, l. 292. [NF] 4 James Thurber’s character Walter Mitty had a vivid imaginative life; see “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” first published in The New Yorker (vol. 15, 18 March 1939) and reprinted in The Thurber Carnival (New York: Harper & Bros., 1945), 47–51. 5 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934), 81. The passage appears near the end of “Lotus Eaters.” 6 Comic drama in the Renaissance often relied on psychological stereotypes based on the ancient theory of the four “humours,” and we still describe people as sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. 7 John Dewey advocated the “project method” in education; it requires children to find their own solutions to the problems posed them by teachers. Solutions emerge from the concrete action of the search, not from knowledge passed down. 8 “Proses” were the prose compositions customarily required of young students of Latin. 9 [Søren] Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie [Princeton: Princeton University Press, for American Scandinavian Foundation, 1941], 115 ff. [NF] 10 [H.L.] Mencken, The American Language [1919], more or less passim. [NF] 11 Edmund Burke, Appeal from [the] New to [the] Old Whigs. In Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1906–7), 5:101. 12 Bartolomeo Vanzetti was executed for murder on 23 August 1927 along with his fellow anarchist Nicola Sacco; his innocence is still being debated. See WE, 236 and n. 4, 633. 13 The New Orleans mother was Daisy Gabrielle. In 1960 she and her husband sent their six-year-old daughter, Yolanda, to William Frantz School which was undergoing token desegregation (it had only three black children). Mr. Gabrielle lost his job with the city and Mrs. Gabrielle was beaten up by a group of white women (New York Times, 4 December 1960, 80). The Gabrielles were eventually driven from New Orleans and planned to move to Rhode Island. (New York Times, 9 December 1960, 27). 14 The tags quid credas, quid agas, and quo tendas (what you should believe, what you should do, where you should be going) were used in the Middle

Notes to pages 355–63

15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

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Ages to describe the three levels of meaning beyond the literal level: the allegorical, the moral or tropological, and the anagogic. Cf. Dante’s Convivio, bk. 2, chap. 1, and Francis Fergusson, Dante’s Drama of the Mind (1953), 179. [NF] John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 4:319. Paradise Lost, bk. 1, l. 650. [NF] The line of Pope’s is from The Dunciad, bk. 1, l. 32. [NF] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Modern Library, 1932), 1:167–8. Johnson to Chesterfield, 7 February 1755. In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L.F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 1:262. Sir Thomas Browne, Hydrotaphia; Urne Burialle; or, a Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk (1658), chap. 4. The French Jesuit Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), Browne’s younger contemporary, was noted for his sermons and funeral orations. Robert Greene, Gwydonius, or The Card of Fancy, ed. Carmine di Biase (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2001), 83. Cf. 1 Henry IV, 2.4.374 ff. Euphuism derives its name from Lyly’s Euphues, referred to below. [NF] John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Euphues and his England, ed. M.W. Croll and Harry Clemons (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1916), 16. Mrs. Malaprop, in Sheridan’s The Rivals, 3.3. Coleridge’s poem is called Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement. When originally published it bore the additional subtitle, A Poem which Affects not to be Poetry. The phrase sermoni propriora, from Horace’s Satires, 1.4.42, means “closer to ordinary conversation” (or to prose, as sermo does not make the distinction I am trying to establish in the text). Charles Lamb’s translation, “more proper for a sermon,” has much to be said for it. [NF] Coleridge misquoted Horace; the correct phrase is sermoni propiora, that is, “more akin to prose.” For the tangled history of Coleridge’s epigraph see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J.C.C. Mays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 260–1. Lamb’s translation is mentioned by Coleridge in his Table Talk (4 August 1832). William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), bk. 5, ll. 294–5. Knittelvers: a favourite term with NF when he means “doggerel;” here he is pointing to its derivation from knüttel (cudgel or club), “clumsy verse.” Misremembered from Ogden Nash’s “The Cobra,” in his collection Free Wheeling (1931): “This creature fills its mouth with venom / And walks

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31 32

33 34 35

36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43

44

45

Notes to pages 364–72

upon its duodenum. / He who attempts to tease the cobra / Is soon a sadder he, and sobra,” in I Wouldn’t Have Missed It: Selected Poems of Ogden Nash, sel. Linell Smith and Isobel Eberstadt, intro. Anthony Burgess (London: Deutsch, 1983), 18. James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems (published in 1760–3), including Carric-Thura, from which this extract is taken, are printed typographically as prose. [NF] See no. 13, n. 2. [Edmund] Spenser, The Faerie Queene. The three passages quoted are from bk. 4, canto 1, st. 42; bk. 11, canto 12, st. 71; and bk 1, canto 1, st. 41. The “contemporary rhetoric book” is Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike (1588). [NF] [Edmund] Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 1, canto 2, st. 41. [Algernon] Swinburne, Dolores, st. 7. [NF] The references are to Donne’s Holy Sonnets X and VII and his Hymn to God the Father; to Herbert’s poems The Altar and Easter Wings which are printed typographically in the shape of their themes; to Eliot’s The Dry Salvages and Burnt Norton, and to Hopkins’s That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection. [NF] From the critique of metaphysical poetry in Johnson’s Life of Cowley. [NF] For Donne’s pun on his own name, see “A Hymn to God the Father,” ll. 5 and 11 and, of course, the change Donne rings on the line in l. 17. For the Eliot quotations see Four Quartets: “it tosses up our losses” (“The Dry Salvages,” l. 22) or “words, after speech, reach” (“Burnt Norton,” l. 142). Hopkins’s poem 174, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,” in The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 198. The Diary of Samuel Sewell 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), 1:184–5 and 186. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), bk. 5, chap. 9, 292. See no. 31, n. 11. See no. 31, n. 10. Blake’s Proverbs of Hell are in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pls. 7–10. Two of them are quoted on pages 372 and 394, below. [NF] [These appear as “‘Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity,’”and as “. . . or, as Blake says, exuberance is beauty.”] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Journal E,” in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph Orth, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 7:457. Shaw, Man and Superman (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1972), 4:16–17.

Notes to pages 372–7

515

46 See no. 31, n. 11. 47 Cf. René Char, Hypnos Waking: Poems and Prose, trans. Jackson Mathews and others (New York: Random House, 1956), 124–5. [NF] 48 The reference to Rimbaud is from his lettre du voyant to A.P. Demeny, as is the reference on p. 383. [NF]. See Rimbaud to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, Oeuvres complètes: Correspondance (Lausanne: Henri Kaeser Éditeur, 1948), 31. 49 See no. 31, n. 13. 50 See n. 51, below. 51 Cf. [Paul] Valéry, The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot [intro. T.S. Eliot] (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958) and Wordsworth’s Preface to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads. [NF] 52 [Oliver] Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, act 1. [NF] 53 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 17, especially the last few paragraphs. 54 E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Penguin Books, 1936), chap. 33, 184. 55 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letter to A.W.M. Baillie, 10 September 1864. [NF]. In Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C.C. Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 216. 56 In his review of Tennyson and Browning, Pure, Ornate and Grotesque Art in English Poetry (1864), Bagehot quotes the following passage from Enoch Arden: While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas, Or often journeying landward; for in truth Enoch’s white horse, and Enoch’s ocean spoil In ocean-smelling osier, and his face, Rough-redden’d with a thousand winter gales, Not only to the market-cross were known, But in the leafy lanes behind the down, Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp, And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall, Whose Friday fare was Enoch’s ministering. and remarks, “So much has not often been made of selling fish.” [NF]. See The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St. John Stevas (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 2:343. 57 Blake once suggested that there were no epigrams in Homer. Cf. Blake, Public Address, Rossetti MS., 18–19. [See The Note-Book of William Blake, called the Rossetti Manuscript, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1935), 104.] For the formulaic epic cf. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). [NF]

516

Notes to pages 378–84

58 For the headgear of women in Corinth see 1 Corinthians 11: 13. For the method of appointing elders in Galatia see Galatians 1 and 2. 59 See Friedrich Engels, Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), trans. Emile Burns, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1939), and V.I. Lenin, “On Strikes,” Collected Works: 1898–1901 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), 4:310–19. 60 A concise explanation of the term “epiphany” in Joyce may be found in Theodore Spencer’s introduction to Stephen Hero (1944), 16 ff. [NF] See Stephen Hero: A Part of the First Draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Theodore Spencer (New York: New Directions, 1944). 61 Horace, Ars Poetica, 15–16. The context in Horace is one of parody, but the phrase has been extended, usually in the form “purple passage,” to more favourable senses. [NF] 62 All references to Poe’s critical theory are to his essay The Poetic Principle. [NF] 63 [Paul] Valéry, The Art of Poetry, 23. [NF] 64 See Matthew Arnold’s essay The Study of Poetry, reprinted in Essays in Criticism, [ed. S. R. Littlewood (London: MacMillan, 1958)] (2nd series). [NF] 65 Cf. Croce, Aesthetic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (rev. ed., 1922), chap. 1, [NF], referring to Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, rev. ed., trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York: Noonday Press, 1956). 66 Coleridge, On Poesy or Art. [NF]. Coleridge, 1818 Lectures on European Literature, Lecture 13, Tuesday, March 10, 1818, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes (Collected Works, v. 5, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 2: 220–1. 67 The concluding lines (parodied here) of Joyce Kilmer’s much-anthologized poem “Trees” (1914): “Poems are made by fools like me / But only God can make a tree.” 68 Horace, Ars Poetica, 361: cf. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904] 1:386. [NF] 69 See n. 48, above. 70 Cf. Eliot, Selected Essays (3rd ed., [London: Faber] 1951), 242. [NF] 71 Cf. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads; Keats, Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 1817; Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” [NF] For Keats, see Letter 45, 21 27(?) December 1817, in The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:191–94. For Eliot, see “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1960), 54. 72 Longinus, On the Sublime, chap 18. [NF] 73 The references are to Johnson’s Life of Cowley; Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, chap. 4; Wordsworth’s Preface [to the Lyrical Ballads]; Arnold’s Preface to the Poems of 1853. [NF]

Notes to pages 385–400

517

74 Cf. [J.E.] Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908], 1:226–7. The third traditional term, poesis, is what is meant here by criticism. [NF] 75 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), pt. 2, chap. 26. 76 The comparison was made by a Boston newspaper reporter; Twain reported it in chap. 24 of A Tramp Abroad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880), 209. 77 For the “Great Western Butterslide” theory of history, see Introduction. 78 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 4th ed. (Orpington, Kent: George Allen, 1886), chap. 1, “The Quarry,” xlii–xliii, 26–9. 79 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays [3rd ed., London: Faber] 1951, 18. [NF] 80 Schein: light or brilliance, here in its more specific sense of pretence or semblance. 81 The references are again to [Poe’s] The Poetic Principle. [NF]. See n. 62, above. 82 Profanum vulgus: the illiterate mob; see Horace, Odes, bk. 3, ode 1, l. 1: “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” (“I hate the uninitiate crowd and keep them far away”). 83 See John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 11: “Of Discerning, and Other Operations of the Mind.” 84 Reported in T.W. Higginson’s celebrated article on her in the Atlantic Monthly, 1891. [NF]. See Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 68 (1891), 453. 85 NF is referring to his stint in 1936 as an assistant to E.J. Pratt on Canadian Poetry Magazine (Ayre, 122). 86 Edmund Burke, from the “Essay on Taste” which introduces his treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful. [NF] 87 “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” a comic poem by the widely read popular poet Robert W. Service; see his The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses (New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1907), 50–4. 88 William Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 29. [NF] 89 The terms “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” are in [Matthew Arnold’s] Culture and Anarchy, chap. 4 [NF] 90 The opening sentence of Aristotle’s treatise on rhetoric states that “Rhetoric is the counterpart (antistrophos) of dialectic.” [NF] 91 From [Matthew Arnold’s] The Study of Poetry, as before. [NF]. See n. 64, above. 92 Cf. William Blake, Milton, pl. 33 [NF] 93 Cf. Plato, Laws, bks. 1 and 2. [NF] 94 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, chap. 1. [NF] 95 Longinus, On the Sublime, chap. 35. [NF] 96 Cf. J.E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 1.6. [NF]

518

Notes to pages 405–32 35. Myth, Fiction, and Displacement

1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illus. by Alexander Calder, with an essay by Robert Penn Warren (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946). 2 See Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 13, “On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power.” 3 Tachiste: from the French “spot” or “stain.” “Tachisme” was an artistic movement in France and the United States after the Second World War; the American equivalent is “action painting.” 4 Shaw’s witticism has not been traced, and Frye may have known it secondhand. In his biography of Marie Corelli, Brian Masters quotes Shaw as saying she “represented the victory of a powerful imagination over an inadequate array of facts” and he doesn’t give a reference either; see Now Barabbas Was a Rotter: The Extraordinary Life of Marie Corelli (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 296. 5 See “An Articulated English Program: A Hypothesis to Test,” PMLA, September 1959, 13–19. My chief reservation to the argument of this article is that it seems strange not to require from doctoral students (16) some knowledge of the degrees by which they did ascend—that is, some scholarly understanding of the connections between mythology and literature. [NF] 36. The Imaginative and the Imaginary 1 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 3, sec. 2, mem. 3, subs. 1. 2 Michel de Montaigne, “On the Force of Imagination,” in Essays written in French by Michel Lord of Montaigne . . . trans. John Florio (London, 1613), 40. 3 Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 2, sec. 2, mem. 1, subs. 2. 2. 4 Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island, VI, st. 46, in Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, ed. F.S. Boas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 2:79. 5 Swift, The Tale of a Tub, IX, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), 1:104 6 Swift, Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), 1:189–90. 7 Charles Baudelaire, “L’Albatross,” Les Fleurs du Mal, ed. Vincenette Pichois (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1980), 22. 8 Nathaniel Lee (1653–1692), dramatist and alcoholic, is said on no very reliable evidence to have uttered these often-quoted words when committed to Bedlam in 1684.

Notes to pages 435–59

519

9 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk. 5, l. 151. 10 “the age of the useless bomb shelter”: Frye, writing in 1962, was alluding to individual householders’ obsession during the Cold War with building atom bomb-proof shelters in their gardens. 37. The Educated Imagination 1 NF to Amleto Lorenzini, 11 September 1973 (NFF 1988, box 79, file 5). 2 NF to Bernard Perry (Indiana University Press), 20 January 1964 (NFF 1988, box 62, file 8). 3 See no. 32, n. 2. 4 Frye was writing just as manned orbital missions began. On 6 August 1961, the Russian astronaut Gherman Stepanovich Titov made the second such flight (after Yuri Gagarin’s on 12 April 1961) and on 20 February 1962 the United States sent John Glenn on the third—the first manned space flight by the United States. 5 Charles Baudelaire, from the opening paragraph of “L’Art philosophique,” a posthumous essay published in 1869; see L’Art romantique, ed. Jacques Crépet, Oeuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Louis Conard, 1925), 119. 6 Horace, Odes III, 30, 8–10. 7 “If it were not for death and marriage I do not know how the average novelist would conclude,” E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, pt. 5, “The Plot” (London: Edward Arnold, 1949), 91. 8 Bertie Wooster’s formidable Aunt Agatha, in the comic novels by P.G. Wodehouse about Bertie and his impeccable manservant Jeeves. 9 Thomas Campion, Song 20, from A Booke of Ayres (1601) in The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R. Davis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1967), 46. 10 William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgement, in The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1957), 605. 11 William Wordsworth, The Recluse, pt. 1, bk. 1, 800–4, 809–11. 12 D.H. Lawrence, “The Song of a Man Who Has Come Through,” in Complete Poems, ed. V. De Sola Pinto and W. Roberts (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 1:250, ll. 8–10. 13 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949). 14 G.K. Chesterton, “The Donkey,” in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, 10: Collected Poetry, pt. 2, ed. Aiden Mackey (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 134. 15 For the two versions, see poem 28 in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Anspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 120.

520

Notes to pages 462–93

16 NF is thinking here of the Martin Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare printed on the title page of the 1623 folio of Shakespeare’s works, and playing for laughs as he often does. 17 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 1, ll. 6–7. 18 John Keats, The Fall of Hyperion, l. 199. 19 In the 1960s English-speaking Canadians were beginning to recognize the role of the French spoken in Quebec in their history and political life; “French schools” and French-immersion programs were emerging as a significant feature of Canadian education. 20 The observation NF attributes to Shaw remains unidentified. 21 The “diagram” NF had in mind gave rise to our political terms “left” and “right.” In the assemblies of the French Revolution, supporters of a constitutional monarchy sat to the right of the president and representatives of the menu-peuples (“little people”) sat to the left. 22 “All who see become what they behold,” Jerusalem, in William Blake, The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1958), chap. 3, pl. 66, 702. 23 For the New Orleans mother, see no. 34, n. 10. 24 Harold Teichmann and George S. Kaufman’s 1953 play The Solid Gold Cadillac was turned into a popular film starring Judy Holliday in 1956. 25 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 6. NF’s copy of this edition is in NFL. Arnold’s words stirred early doubts in the young Frye’s mind; beside the famous passage he wrote “donnish idea,” and an early notebook entry dismisses it as a “false theory . . . leading to the dismal Martin Tupperisms of translated oriental Scriptures Confucius and the rest” (NFF 1991, box 22, notebook 4, folder 5r). Tupper was a popular nineteenth-century philosophical versifier, much satirized. However, by 1949 Frye had come round to the view that underpinned much of his later thinking, that Arnold rightly based “wisdom on culture, the liberal education of the free man which is also the form of society” (D, 179).

Emendations

521

Emendations

Page/Line 26/30

28/16 58/10 62/30 72/13 110/25 141/34 180/3 190/21 194/18 195/34 208/6 211/14 255/9 275/5 292/6 330/33, 34, 35, and 331/1 333/8 394/36 480/29

though it is a recurring feature. The Menippean is the prose satire form: line transposed to later in the page in printed text, corrected in an offprint signed by NF play Campaspe for play of Campaspe and for and and literature . . . again (mistakenly repeated in copy-text) from either the critical reader or the for from either the critical reader or from the in control of for in the control of (no TS to check, but NF says it many times) supercilious.”) for supercilious.” (parenthesis not closed) narcissist for narcist shows for show (corrected in NF’s offprint) mentioned above for above mentioned in the future for in future (corrected in NF’s offprint) stories for story study, for study of a divinely for divinely (as in Texas Quarterly) make for makes recur for recurs

discription for description (following WTC II, no. 34). on for in socialist realism for social realism down the street for down street

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Index

523

Index

Abrams, M(eyer) H(oward) (Mike) (b. 1912), 232 Absurd: in satire, 45; theatre of the, 460 Achilles, 152, 456–8 Action, 122, 464; and belief, 395–6; hero’s power of, 150–2; imitation of, 308–11; and narrative, 187; praxis as, 184; and ritual, 129, 209 Actor, cult of the, 114 Adam: alchemical, 211; as ironic, 158 Adams, Hazard (b. 1926), 462 Addison, Joseph (1672–1719), 181 Adonis, 414; gardens of, 315 Advertising, 163, 329, 336, 353; vision versus, 486 Aeschylus (ca. 525–ca. 456 B.C.): Suppliants, 107 Aestheticism, failure of, 141 Aesthetics, 65, 169, 191; and ethics, 100; foundation of, 5; objective nature of, 4 Agamemnon, 261 Agrippa, Cornelius (1486–1535), 36; Vanity of the Arts and Sciences (1530), 34–5 Aiken, Conrad (1889–1973), 12 Alazon, 156–7, 161 Alchemy, 49; Jung on, 210–13

Alger, Horatio (1832–99), 66, 161 Allegory, 90, 237, 418, 458; and irony, 94; and romance, 79, 81; and satire, 44 Alliteration, 16, 19, 21; in prose, 357; in verse, 13–14 Allusion, 459–60 Ambiguity: in literature, 98; in poetry, 227; of symbols, 97 Anagnorisis, 117, 406; Aristotle on, 115 Anagogy, 90, 102–3 Analogy, 446; in the arts, 236; and history, 310; and myth, 413; uses of, 224–6 Ananke, 423 Anapest(s), 16 Anaphora, 16, 19, 241 Anatomy form, 35–6, 86–8 Anderson, Fulton, xxx Andreev, Leonid (1871–1919): The Black Maskers, 117 Andromeda, 153, 415 Angel, 176; wrestling with, 492 Anima, 204; mundi, 106; as the soul, 206 Animal(s), 129, 134, 155; identification with, 447; in romance, 153–4

524 Anna and the King of Siam (musical), 481 Anthropology, 128, 131–2, 220, 221, 268; literary, 127 Antimasque, 116 Antithesis, resolution of, 123, 133 Aphorism(s), 304; discontinuous, 371–3 Apocalypse: and Blake, 144; dramatic, 118; and the poet, 140; and possession, 306; vision of, 400 Apollo, 117, 159, 216 Apotheosis, comic, 133 Apuleius, Lucius (b. ca. A.D. 125), 26, 83–4, 87 Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225–74), 227 Archetype(s), 99, 101, 206–7; and anagogy, 103; associative, 217; the four, 205; as meaning, 130; origin of, 127–8; in romance, 79, 81; symbol as, 143–5; two kinds of, 209–10 Architecture, 170, 173 Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533), 66 Aristocracy, 154; and the masque, 114; and poetry, 140; and romance, 80 Aristophanes (ca. 448–ca. 388 B.C.), 160–1, 397; Birds, 160; Knights, 112; Wasps, 112 Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), 94, 98, 118, 182, 199, 202, 218–19, 222, 229, 313, 395; on art forms, 5; on art and nature, 255; on dianoia, 195; on history and poetry, 457; on imitation, 215; on logic, 227; on mimesis, 170, 173, 388–9; on mythos, 403; on poetry, 277, 308, 311; on rhetoric, 226; on tragedy, 108–9; Ethics, 157; Physics, 102; Poetics, 104–5, 150–1, 184–5, 198, 201, 257, 296, 381–2 Arnold, Matthew (1822–88), 63, 72,

Index 76, 217, 310, 338, 385, 398; on culture, 175, 339; on Hebraism, 394; on high style, 380; on the ideal world, 493; on Ruskin, 63–4; Thyrsis (1866), 12 Art, 121; and belief, 28; community of, 473; and criticism, 60–2; formal causes of, 119; function of, 170–1; as knowledge, 143; and love, 392; and nature, 254–66 passim; origin of, 444; popular, 219–20; and reality, 169–70, 172–3; and the sciences, 441–3; social function of, 133; and superstition, 29; synthesis of, 32; time and space in, 128; total form of, 412; unity of, 125, 172 Artist, 125; as eiron, 157 Arts, the: imagination in, 421; and sciences, 422 Ascent, images of, 314–18, 320–1 Association: free, 96–8; and imagination, 407; rhythm of, 325–6, 342–3, 353, 360, 363–73; speech of, 331, 348 Assonance, 97, 361 Astrology, 49 Astronomy, 68, 124 Athenaeus (2nd c. A.D.): Deipnosophists, 33 Atlantis, 221 Atwood, Margaret, xxiii Aucassin et Nicolette, 34, 247 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907–73), 21, 61, 450; “The Enchafed Flood” (1950), 126; For the Time Being, 285, 320; Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed., 245 Audience, 143; as cause, 380–1; as character, 164–5; five kinds of dramatic, 115; in the masque, 114; in poetry, 139–40 Augustine, St. (A.D. 354–430), 82, 177 Austen, Jane (1775–1817), 25, 37, 73,

Index 82, 83, 84, 100, 409; conventions of, 78–9; Northanger Abbey (1818), 81; Pride and Prejudice (1813), 52, 166, 415, 468 Auto sacramentale, 113–14, 116; dramatic genre of the, 106–8 Autobiography: and the novel, 81–2 Autonomy: in literature, 72–3 Axiom, 311 Babel: descent from, 494 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685–1750), 13; and Dante, 181; The WellTempered Clavichord (1722), 339 Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans and Baron Verulam (1561–1626), 68, 95, 177, 372; on poetry, 310; on satire, 55; The Advancement of Learning (1605), 400 Bagehot, Walter (1826–77), 258, 377 Ballad(s), 210, 218–19 Ballet, 114 Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1856), 24, 156, 161 Barabbas, 162 Barclay, John (1582–1621): Euphormionis Satyricon (1603), 34 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821–67), 132; on creation, 432; on identity, 446 Beat philosophy, 292 Beauty, 92, 139; and pattern, 137; and poetry, 141; and the sublime, 383; and truth, 392–5 Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–89): Malone Dies (1958), 375; Molloy (1951), 375; The Unnamable (1960), 326, 375; Waiting for Godot (trans. 1954), 264, 455 Behemoth, 118 Being: and tragedy, 108–9 Belief: and action, 395–6; and art, 28;

525 and imagination, 397–8; and literature, 395–8, 463–5; and metaphor, 447 Bell, Clive (1881–1964), 171, 305 Belloc, (Joseph) Hilaire Pierre (1879– 1953): as satirist, 40 Benedict, Ruth (1887–1948): Patterns of Culture (1934), 132 Bennett, (Enoch) Arnold (1867–1931), 409 Beowulf, 154, 208, 240; music of, 21 Berdyaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1874–1948), 175 Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), 98, 170, 193 Bible, 103, 132, 182, 261, 459; as alchemical text, 212–13; as fifth prose form, 88–9; primacy of, 475–6 Biography: and criticism, 70–1, 221, 387 Biology, 68, 124 Blackmore, Richard Doddridge (1825–1900): Lorna Doone (1869), 477 Blackmur, Richard P. (1904–65), 201 Blake, William (1757–1827), 72, 142, 145, 207, 245, 319; and alchemy, 213; and apocalypse, 144; on beauty, 394; criticism on, 66–7; epigrams of, 372; on the Golden Age, 454; on imagination, 433; Milton in, 142; music in, 20–1; on unity, 92; Book of Thel (1789), 318; Island in the Moon (1784), 37; “Prophecies,” 13; “Proverbs of Hell,” 372; The Sick Rose (1794), 462–3; Songs of Innocence (1789), 263 Blank verse, 20, 299–300, 361 Blavatsky, Madame née Hahn, Helena Petrovna (1831–91), 308; The Secret Doctrine (1888), 379

526 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–75): Decameron (1358), 82 Body: and language, 191; spiritual, 206 Boehme, Jacob (1575–1624), 207 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (ca. A.D. 480–524), 34 Bollingen Foundation, 203 Borrow, George Henry (1803–81), 78, 87; Lavengro (1851), 78 Boussuet, Jacques Benigne (1627– 1704): Oraisons funèbres, 359 Bridges, Robert (1844–1930), 312 Brontë, Emily (1818–48), 78; Wuthering Heights (1837), 25, 79, 156, 217 Brooks, Cleanth (1906–94), 199; Tragic Themes in Western Literature (1955), 252–3 Brown, Elizabeth Eedy, xxii Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–82), 232; Religio Medici (1642), 82, 430; Urn Burial (1658), 23, 359 Browning, Robert (1812–89), 17, 156; blank verse of, 361; dramas of, 110; on harmony, 238; as musical, 237; rhyme in, 12; Abt Volger (1864), 13; Flight of the Duchess (1845), 10–11, 240; A Grammarian’s Funeral (1855), 244; The Heretic’s Tragedy (1855), 12, 241; How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, 244; Love among the Ruins (1855), 13, 241; Mr. Sludge, “The Medium” (1864), 37, 49; Pippa Passes (1841), 13; Porphyria’s Lover (1836), 13; The Ring and the Book (1868), 13, 237; Saul (1855), 13 Buchan, John, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (1875–1940), 408 Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821–62), 23, 310 Buddhism, 206, 292, 304

Index Bunyan, John (1628–88), 24, 45, 100; Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), 82; The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84), 24, 80–1, 83, 381, 418 Burke, Edmund (1729–97), 334–5, 351; on nature, 255; on taste, 391 Burns, Robert (1759–96), 17, 20, 80, 245; Holy Willie, 50–1; The Jolly Beggars (1785), 12, 241; My Love is like a Red, Red Rose, 446 Burton, Robert (1577–1640), 38, 241; punctuation in, 369; Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), xxvii–xxviii, xli, 35–6, 78, 47–8, 86, 137, 369, 424–6, 426–7, 432 Bush, Douglas (1896–1983), 199 Butler, Samuel (1612–80): Hudibras (1663), 49, 300, 362, 375 Butler, Samuel (1835–1902), 37, 50, 55; Erewhon (1872), 30, 31, 45, 84, 178; The Way of All Flesh (1903), 83 Butterslide, great western, xxi, 177–8 Byron, George Gordon (Baron Byron of Rochdale) (1788–1824), 319–20, 450; as Byronic, 467; doggerel in, 181; life of, 461; personality of, 259– 60; and Swift, 432; Don Juan (1819– 24), 41–2, 300, 362; The Isles of Greece (1821), 261 Cabell, James Branch, 299 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (1600– 81), 106, 233; on Ulysses, 250 Campbell, Roy (1901–57), 40 Campell, Joseph (1904–87): The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), 455; Man and Time (1957), 285 Campion, Thomas (1567–1620), 240; Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), 12; When Thou must

Index Home to Shades of Underground (1601), 180, 451–2 Canada: accent in, 480; change in, 493; literature in, 449–50, 482; speech in, 328 Canadian Forum, xxv Canning, George (1770–1827), 43 apek, Josef (1890–1938) and Carel (1887–1945), 117 Caricature, 84 Carlell, Lodowick (1602–75), 263 Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), 80; on laughter, 48; Sartor Resartus (1833– 34), 38, 78, 87, 312, 405 Carpenter, Edmund, xxxvi, xlviii Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832–98): Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), 44, 85, 312, 481; Sylvie and Bruno (1889– 93), 44; Water-Babies (1863), 85 Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945), 64, 169; An Essay on Man (1944), 189, 191, 193–4; Language and Myth (trans. 1946), 130; Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (trans. 1954), 189–96 Castell of Perseveraunce (morality play), 117 Castelvetro, Lodovico (1505–71), 185 Castiglione, Baldassarre, Conte di Novilava (1478–1529), 85 Catalogue: in free verse, 364 Catastrophe: in drama, 108–9 Catharsis, 154–5, 382; in comedy, 160; in drama, 107; function of, 471–3; in melodrama, 163; in tragedy, 108 Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536), 147 Catherine II (The Great) (1729–96), 250 Catholicism, 176; Jung and, 206–7; and symbolisme, 142 Causerie, 63–5 passim Cayley, David, xix

527 Celtic myth, 152 Censorship, 386, 469 Centrifugal: criticism, 122; meaning, 92–4, 136 Centripetal: criticism, 123–4; meaning, 91–2, 136, 138 Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616): Don Quixote (1605–15), 45–6, 80, 87, 386, 394, 433–5 Chain of Being, 133–5, 313 The Chalk Circle (Chinese play), 407 Chanson de Roland, 154–5, 380 Chanting: of poetry, 246–7 Chaplin, Sir Charles (Charlie) (1889– 1977), 114, 159, 162 Char, René (1907–88), 373 Character: Aristotle on, 150–1; in romance, 24 Characterization: in the masque, 117; in romance, 79 Chatterton, Thomas (1752–70), 243 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345–1400), 35, 43–4, 49, 66, 86, 215, 466; as conventional, 215; music of, 13–15; Canterbury Tales, 40, 168; Knight’s Tale, 54; Legend of Good Women, 14; Merchant’s Tale, 54; Pardoner’s Tale, 405; Troilus and Criseyde, 54 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860– 1904), 79; Three Sisters (1901), 109 Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) (1874– 1936), 305; The Donkey, 261, 459 Chicago, University of, 184 Chicago School, 198 Children: language of, 295–6, 324, 341; and poetry, 148–9 Choice, 490 Chords: as discords, 11 Christ, 100, 102, 106, 216; descent of, 316, 318; in drama, 118; as fourfold, 205; as ironic, 159; as the philosopher’s stone, 212; as self, 206;

528 Sermon on the Mount, 335; as tragic, 153; as the Word, 140. See also Jesus Christianity: fiction under, 152; Jung and, 206; and time, 290 Christmas: in drama, 118 Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965), 298, 358 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 B.C.), 184, 198 Circumference: of literature, 75 City, 134 Claritas, 102–3 Class: and rhetoric, 350; and speech, 327–8, 341 Classic: in literature, 481 Classic(s): literature of, 152; mythology of, 476–7 Claudel, Paul (1868–1955), 119, 140 Cliché, 333, 350, 371, 488; danger of, 490; and the mob, 335, 352 Cochrane, Charles, xlviii Cocteau, Jean (1889–1963), 411 Coincidence, Jung on, 286 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772– 1834), 19, 126, 143, 179, 231, 305, 374, 385; on continuous prose, 304; on Defoe, 157; on the esemplastic, 407; on imagination, 233–4; on the Logos, 144, 232; on natura naturans, 382–3; and theory, 381; on Wordsworth, 361; Biographia Literaria (1817), 410; Christabel (1797–8), 244; Kubla Khan (1816), 234, 366; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), 234, 404 Collins, Wilkie (1824–89): Ode to Evening (1746), 367; The Woman in White (1860), 217 Comédie larmoyante, 111 Comedy, 130, 415, 471, 477; Aristotle on, 104–5; festival in, 99; as for-

Index tune, 171; of manners, 79; modes of, 159–64; nature of, 110–12; plots of, 406; reality in, 138; and satire, 52–4; vision of, 133–5 Commedia dell’arte, 105, 114, 117, 263 Commentary, criticism as, 122–3 Communication: archetypal, 209; and community, 352–3; and convention, 216–20; and expression, 192 Communion, 134; in drama, 106–7, 118 Communism, 287, 387, 433; and time, 290–1 Community: of art, 101, 473; and communication, 352–3; comic, 133– 4; and criticism, 399; in drama, 112, 114; and poetry, 216; and speech, 334–6 Concepts, transferability of, 224–5 Concord, 11 Confession: form, 37–8, 81–2, 86–8; and Menippean satire, 84 Conformity: in society, 466 Congreve, William (1670–1729), 52 Connotation: in meaning, 98–9 Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924): Heart of Darkness (1902), 25; Lord Jim (1900), 81, 156 Consciousness: language of, 439, 450; and unity, 192 Consonantia, 99 Content: and form, 257–66 passim; significant, 209, 219, 222 Continuity: in literature, 402–4; in prose, 370 Convention, 126, 209, 214–18 passim, 448–51 passim; and archetypes, 99; and communication, 216–20; and content, 258–66; and copyright, 217; in creation, 144; in literature, 465–9; and myth, 414–15; in the novel, 79; and satire, 30

Index Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851): The Last of the Mohicans (1826), 217 Copernicus, Nicolas (1473–1543), 319 Copyright, 99; and convention, 215–17 Corbière, Tristan (1845–75), 281 Corinthians, First Letter to the, 446 Corneille, Pierre (1606–84): Le Cid (1637), 107 Correspondence: and truth, 137 Cosmology: in literature, 307–8 Cosmos, four levels of, 318–21 Couplet, heroic, 12, 19–20, 299 Courtier: poets as, 140; Yeats as, 145 Courtly love, 139, 260–1 Coward, Sir Noel Pierce (1899–1973), 116 Cowley, Abraham (1618–67), 263, 385; rhythm in, 244; Davideis (1656), 19–20 Crane, R(onald) S(almon) (1886– 1967), xxxviii; ed., Critics and Criticism (1952), 184–8, 197 Crashaw, Richard (1612–49), 241; rhythm in, 244; The Flaming Heart (1652), 19; A Hymn in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, 19; A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa (1646), 19; Musicks Duell (1646), 18, 237 Creation, 130, 140, 232; alchemical, 211; divine and human, 429–30; and imitation, 382–5; process of, 95–8; romantic conception of, 143, 144 Creativity: and neurosis, 428, 432 Critic, the: and the critical reader, 62–5; as judge, 474 Criticism: and art, 60–2; archetypal, 208–10, 218–23 passim; autonomy of, 62, 64–5, 215; beauty and truth in, 391–5; classical and romantic,

529 380–5; and community, 399; containing form of, 71–6 passim; development of, 121–5, 131–3 passim; first step of, 396; five phases of, 104–5; function of, 60– 76; genuine, 64; history of, 230–4; inductive, 125–8; limits of, 103; meaning ignored in, 90; objective, 4–5; place of, 483; practice of, 202; as process and product, 277, 385– 91; as revelation, 474; as a science, 175–6; schools of, 197–220 passim; shortcomings of, 188; two aspects of, 323, 339–40; vision in, 133 Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952), 382 Crucifixion drama, 106 Culture, environment of, 493 Cupid and Psyche, 32 Cursor Mundi, 165 Cycle(s): in literature, 452; in poetry, 313–21 Cynicism, philosophy of, 28 Dadism, 218 Dance, 448; as energy, 170; in drama, 113–14 Danse macabre, 31, 34, 52 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 64, 65, 75, 90, 145, 176, 383, 414; on anagogy, 102; cosmos of, 256, 318, 320; as critic, 62; on literal meaning, 91–2; praxis in, 187; satirist supreme, 57; on Ulysses, 251; Convivio, 308, 100; Divine Comedy, 160, 166, 201, 307; Inferno, 7, 134, 177, 442; Letter to Can Grande, 177; Paradiso, 183; Purgatorio, 181–2, 314, 316; Vita Nuova, 379 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–82), 50, 268, 269, 273; Origin of Species (1859), 296–7, 356–7, 360 David, King, 19–20

530 Davidson, John (1857–1910): Thirty Bob a Week, 264–5 Davis, Herbert, xxv Death: and rebirth, 288–90 Deduction: as a critical method, 128– 30; and induction, 310 Defoe, Daniel (1660–1731), 36, 78, 152, 157, 409; Moll Flanders (1722), 24, 82; Robinson Crusoe (1719), 447, 481 Deloney, Thomas (ca. 1550–1600), 78, 265 de Man, Paul (1919–83), xxv Demotic: in literature, 374–80 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), xxv, xliv Descartes, René (1596–1650), 27, 50, 177; dualism of, 176 Descent, images of, 314, 316–18, 321 Description, 98, 137–8, 141, 446 Desire: and action, 441; and dream, 218; telos of, 421 Detachment: and criticism, 393–4 Detective fiction, 449; and irony, 162–3 Determinism: in criticism, 176 Diagram: as thought, 489 Dialectic: and rhetoric, 198 Dialogue form, 85, 112–113 Diana, 269 Dianoia, 195, 202, 219, 222; Aristotle on, 105; in drama, 111–12, 118; forms of, 187; and the masque, 114; in Plato, 256–7; as theme, 405 Diary, form of, 368–9 Dickens, Charles (1812–70), 263; characters in, 467–8; punctuation in, 369; villains in, 156; David Copperfield (1850), 392, 457; Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), 301; Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1), 155; Oliver Twist (1837), 414, 449; The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), 56, 301, 326, 342, 358

Index Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth (1830– 86), 389, 468 Diction, 237; Aristotle on, 198; music of, 11–12; poetic, 281 Didactic literature, 186–7 Dike, 423 Dionysus, 117, 216; and tragedy, 153 Discontinuity: in literature, 404; in prose, 360, 371–3; the sublime and, 378 Discord, 11, 239 Discursive prose, 95, 98 Disney, Walt (Walter Elias) (1901– 66), 44 Displacement: and plausibility, 416–17 Doggerel, rhythm of, 362–3 Donne, John (1572–1631), 69, 123, 142, 265, 384; heroic couplet in, 12; metre of, 18; paradox in, 368; as satirist, 39; Meditations, 303; Satire IV (1633), 362 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–81): The Idiot (1868–9), 164; Notes from Underground (1864), 375 Dowson, Ernest (1867–1900), 141, 302, 367 Dragon, 99 Drama, 69, 170, 448, 477; archetypes in, 210–10; Aristotle on, 104–5; declamation in, 247; heroic, 107, 108; ironic, 108–10; mimetic, 113, 114–15; rhythm in, 362; and ritual, 131, 220; scriptural, 118; spectacular, 113–14; and symbolisme, 145; visions of, 111–12 Dream of the Rood, 153 Dream(s), 199, 219, 220; and archetypal criticism, 209–10; collective, 205; in criticism, 222; literature as,

Index 473–4; and meaning, 132–3; in Morris, 144–5; and myth, 207; poetry, 367 Dryden, John (1631–1700), 20, 34, 43, 48, 55, 64, 181, 356, 369; Absalom and Achitophel (1681), 37, 42; Alexander’s Feast (1697), 243; “Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693), 25–6; The Hind and the Panther (1687), 42; A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687 (1687), 13 Dualism, Descartes on, 176 Dühring, Eugen Karl (1833–1921), 378 Dumézil, Georges (1898–1986), 289 Dunbar, William (ca. 1456–ca. 1513), 15; refrain in, 16; rhythm in, 243; Ane Ballat of Our Lady, 17; Dance of the Seven Deidly Sinnis, 17; Flyting with Kennedy, 17 Dying god, 153 Earth: as middle earth, 314 Easter: in drama, 118 Ecclesiastes, Book of, 372 Echolalia, rhythms of, 366–8 Eckhart, Meister (Johannes Eckhart) (ca. 1260–1327), 207 Eddyson (Edward Dyson): The Lost Chord (1920), 239 Eden, 256, 314–16, 454, 462 Edgar, Pelham (1871–1948), xvii, xxvi, 481; The Art of the Novel (1933), 3–6 Editing, bad, 17 Education: archetypes in, 99–100; hunger for, 492–3; in literature, 479–84; liberal, 101; poetry in, 480– 1; and speech, 327–33, 345–8 Ego: expression of, 334, 351; Jung on, 204

531 Egyptian Book of the Dead, 89 Eikasia, 256–7 Eiron, 167; as artist, 157 Elegy, 131, 154, 160 Eliade, Mircea (1907–86), xxxvi; Birth and Rebirth (trans. 1958), 291; Cosmos and History (trans. 1954), 290–1, 293; Patterns in Comparative Religion (trans. 1958), 289–90; The Sacred and the Profane (trans. 1957), 289, 293; Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (trans. 1958), 291 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819–80), 87 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888–1965), xviii, 123, 142, 171, 179, 277, 281, 293, 384, 388, 443, 467, 484; criticism and, 64, 76; discontinuity in, 379; on imitation, 215; on Milton, 245; on the objective correlative, 383, 407; paradox in, 368; as royalist, 140; and symbolisme, 140; value judgments of, 65; Ash-Wednesday (1930), 316, 318; The Cocktail Party (1950), 244; Four Quartets (1935–42), 285, 308, 379; Sweeney Agonistes (1932), 21, 243, 264, 375; Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1920), 261; The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), 306; The Waste Land (1921), 190, 292, 320 Elizabeth I (1533–1603), 147; as the Virgin Mary, 107 Emblem(s): of recognition, 406 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82), 32, 372 Emotion: and intellect, 442 Empson, William (1906–84), 199 Encyclopedia, imaginative, 165 Encyclopedic form, 85, 165; and ritual, 129, 131 Energy: dance as, 170; and matter,

532 191–2; in poetry, 327, 343–4; verbal, 481, 484 Engels, Friedrich (1820–95), 378 English: Honour course in, at U. of T., xxiii–xxiv; Institute, xliv, 235 English, 193; foundations of, 478–9; three dimensions of, 354; usefulness of, 437–8, 484 Epic, 32, 69, 75, 126; and encyclopedic form, 131; classical, 299; style of, 377; in the United States, 450 Epigram, 372 Epiphany, 102–3, 129–30, 132; dramatic, 118; and prophecy, 132; and ritual, 131 Epistolary form. See Letters, form of Eranos conference, 284 Erasmus, Desiderius (ca. 1466–1536), 25, 27–9, 36, 38, 50, 83, 85, 86; “A Fish Diet,” 30; Adagia, 33; Colloquies (1516), 34; Encomium Moriae (In Praise of Folly) (1509), 34, 35 Eros, 216; and criticism, 392 Escapism, literature as, 470 Essay form: as confession, 82 Ethics, 169; and aesthetics, 100 Etymology, rhetorical, 97 Euphuism, 298–9, 305, 359–61 Euripides (ca. 480–406 B.C.), 108, 415; Hecuba, 251; Ion, 449; Iphigeneia at Tauris, 220 Everyman, 159, 250; and the masque, 116 Evolution, 124; and literature, 126; progress, 225 Existentialism, 109, 292 Experience: and art, 32, 258–66 passim; common field of, 74; in criticism, 388–92; and literature, 396–7, 464 Expression: and communication, 192 Expressionism, drama of, 117

Index Fairy tales, 480 Faith, 421 Fall, the: in drama, 109 Falstaff, 360, 456; rejection of, 162 Fancy, 410–11 Fantasy, 44 Farce, 116 Fascism, 387, 433 Fate: in drama, 109 Faulkner, William (1897–1962), 449, 470; The Sound and the Fury (1929), 216 Feeling, poetry as, 179–80 Fergusson, Francis (1904–86): A Modern Reading of the Purgatorio (1953), 181–3 Festival: in comedy, 112 Fiction, 448; criticism of, 3–6; definition of, 23–5, 77–8; five modes of, 151–3, 159; novel as, 69; plot in, 408–10. See also Prose Fielding, Henry (1707–54), 84, 187, 483; on the novel, 78; Journey from This World to the Next (1743), 36; Tom Jones (1749), 296, 414, 449 Figuration, imagery as, 94 Film, 170; and the masque, 114–16 Finley, Martha (1828–1909), 66 Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key (1896– 1940), 260 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–80), 142, 167, 279; Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), 333, 350, 371; Madame Bovary (1857), 81, 88, 156 Fletcher, Angus, xxviii Fletcher, John Gould (1886–1950), 141; colour symphonies of, 364 Fletcher, Phineas (1582–1650): The Purple Island (1633), 428 Flood myth(s), 131, 134 Folk tale(s), 127, 130, 210, 218–19, 448; and myth, 411–12; plots of, 408

Index Fool: in comedy, 171 Ford, Henry (1863–1947), 147 Forest, romance in, 154 Form: and belief, 28; centrality of, 5; and content, 257–66 passim; of criticism, 71–6 passim; as father, 216; in music, 11; myth as, 195; and recurrence, 10; symbolic, 194; total, 127; two aspects of, 214; unifying, 310 Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (1879– 1970), 4; A Passage to India (1923), 375 Fort, Paul (1872–1960), 373 Fortune, Wheel of, 155 Four-beat line, 14–15 Four phases of narrative, 130–1 France, drama in, 107 Frazer, Sir James George (1854–1941), xxxvii, 64, 130, 321; on myth, 190; overview of, 267–75; Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead (1913–24), 268; Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion (1933–6), 267–8; Folklore in the Old Testament (1918), 267; The Golden Bough (1890), 132, 208–9, 210, 220, 288–9, 267–75 passim; Totemism and Exogamy (1910), 267, 271; Worship of Nature (1926), 267 Free association, 96–8 Free prose, rhythms of, 368–70 Free verse, rhythm of, 364 Freedom, 352, 353; and art, 133; and death, 291–2; humours lack, 110– 11; through literature, 101; and necessity, 439–40; and the parable, 355; of speech, 335–6, 352, 353–4, 490–1 French, 193 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), 64, 96, 117, 272, 288; on da Vinci, 209; and

533 Jung, 204, 205–6; on myth, 190; on Oedipus, 196, 222, 229; on wit, 97; The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), 321; Totem and Taboo (1913), 275 Frobenius, Johannes (1460–1527), 207 Frye, (Herman) Northrop (1912–91): Alexander lectures, 197; as deductive critic, 200; edits Canadian Poetry Magazine, 390; as Methodist Parson, 334; notebooks of, xxii– xxiii; as teacher, xxi; Anatomy of Criticism (1957), xvii–xviii, 338, 405; “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction” (1942), xxvi; “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951), xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxix; “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” (1951), xxxiii; Double Vision (1991), xl, xlix; The Educated Imagination (1963), xvii–xviii, xli– xliii; Fables of Identity, xviii, xxxix; Fearful Symmetry (1947), xxii, xxvi; “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” (1950), xlviii; “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1949), xxix–xxx; “The Imaginative and the Imaginary” (1962), xli; “The Language of Poetry” (1955), xxxvi; “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (1950), xxv, xxx; “Lexis and Melos” (1956), xxvii; “Music in Poetry” (1942), xxvii; “Myth, Fiction and Displacement” (1961), xl; “New Directions from Old” (1960), xl; “The Nature of Satire” (1944), xxix; “Three Meanings of Symbolism” (1953), xxxv; “Towards a Theory of Cultural History” (1953), xxxv; “The Transferability of Literary Concepts” (1955), xli; Spiritus Mundi (1976), xix; Well-Tempered Critic

534 (1963), xix, xli–xliii; Words with Power (1990), xix, xlvii–xlix Frye, Helen Kemp (1910–86), xix, xxii Fuller, Thomas (1608–61): The History of the Worthies of England (1662), 8 Gammer Gurton’s Needle, 406 Gandhi, Mahatma (1869–1948), 494 Garden, 134 Gaster, Theodor H. (1906): Thespis (1950), 318–19 Gellius, Aulus (2nd c. A.D.): Attic Nights, 33 Genesis, Book of, 98 Genius, 67, 75; metaphor as, 201 Genre, 209, 215; central to criticism, 68–9; and myth, 414–15; origin of, 126; and the quest myth, 131 Germany, drama in, 107 Gibbon, Edward (1737–94), 23, 273, 309; Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), 297, 357–8, 360 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (1836– 1911), and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900), 300, 362; The Mikado (1885), 162, 220 Giraudoux, Jean (1882–1944): La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935), 251 Glapthorne, Henry (fl. 1635–43), 263 Gloucester, Robert (ca. 1090–1147), 312 God: as character, 132; and science, 313; Word of, 102 God(s), 151; origin of, 447–8 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749– 1832), 232, 287, 414; drama of, 107; Faust (1808–32), 72, 118 Golden Age, 221, 255, 434, 454 Goodrich, Samuel Griswold (1793– 1860), 146 Gothic thrillers, 157, 163

Index Gower, John (ca. 1325–1408), 165 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José de (1746–1828), 51 Grammar: importance of, 329–30, 347; and logic, 96, 191–4; and narrative, 95 Granville-Barker, Harley (1877–1946), 18 Graves, Robert van Ranke (1895– 1985), 467; To Juan at the Winter Solstice (1945), 453; The White Goddess (1948), 453 Gray, Thomas (1716–71): Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1751), 199, 201 Greene, Graham (1904–91), 164; Brighton Rock (1938), 264; The Ministry of Fear (1943), 264 Greene, Robert (1558–92): Card of Fancy (1584), 298, 359–60 Grier, Sir Wyly (1862–1957): “Sociability in Art” (1941), 7 Grotesque: in satire, 45 Guest, Edgar (1881–1959), 61 Gunkel, Hermann (1862–1932): Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895), 290 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider (1856– 1925), 408 Hall, Bishop Joseph (1574–1656): as satirist, 40 Hamartia, 109, 154, 155 Handel, Georg Friedrich (1685–1759): Messiah (1742), 238 Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928), 319; Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), 155, 158 Harmony, 238; concord and discord within, 11; meaning as, 129 Harrowing of Hell, 208; morality play, 118 Hartman, Geoffrey, xlvi, xlvii

Index Havelock, Eric, xxv Hawes, Stephen (ca. 1475–1511): Pastime of Pleasure (1509), 312 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–64), 25, 66, 81; “The Bosum Serpent” (1843), 418; “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851), 80; The Marble Faun (1860), 217, 405; The Scarlet Letter (1850), 143, 481 Haydn, Franz Joseph (1732–1809): The Creation (1798), 238 Hazlitt, William (1778–1830), 63 Heaven, 133 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), 231, 233 Hemingway, Ernest Millar (1899– 1961), 375, 467; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), 216 Henry VIII (1491–1547), 55 Heraclitus (fl. 500 B.C., ca. 540–ca. 480 B.C.), 304 Herbert, George (1593–1633): metre of, 18; paradox in, 368 Hercules, 153, 159, 452, 476 Hermaphrodite: as alchemical, 211 Hero(es), 130–16; birth of, 448; cult of, 80; in drama, 4, 108; five types of, 150–3; poet as, 165, 166 Heroic couplet, 12, 19, 20, 361 Heroine(s), 80; dark and light, 217 Herondas (3rd c. B.C.), 110 Hesiod (8th century B.C.), 165 Hesperides, Garden of, 454 Hieratic: in literature, 374–80 High mimetic: comedy, 160; mode, 151–3 Hinduism, 292, 373 History, 68, 122, 131; and fiction, 5; and literature, 70, 126–7, 162, 481– 2; in the novel, 81; plays, 107–8, 113; and poetry, 94, 308–11 Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), 487

535 Hogarth, William (1697–1764), 483; on madness, 432 Hollander, John (b. 1929), 239 Holmes, Sherlock, 163 Holy Spirit, 211, 216 Homer (8th cent. B.C.), 75, 165, 254, 356, 412; life of, 461; personality of, 260; style in, 377; Iliad, 259, 377, 413, 423, 450, 456; Odyssey, 41, 87, 135, 317, 320, 450 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–89), 179, 181; on middle style, 376; paradox in, 368; rhythm in, 12, 243–4, 302; The Windhover (1877), 16 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 B.C.), 26, 39–40, 118, 184, 186, 198, 259, 378, 447 Housman, Alfred Edward (1859– 1936): A Shropshire Lad (1896), 264–5 Hubris, 106, 154 Hudson Review, xxiv Hugo, Victor Marie (1802–85): Hernani (1830), 107, 287, 414 Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest) (1883– 1917), 411; Speculations (1906), 64 Humanism, 186; languages and, 478; Renaissance, 144 Humanities: literature central to, 122 Humanity, language of, 400 Human nature, 440 Humour: in satire, 40, 42–5 Humours, 86; comic, 110–11; in the masque, 116; in Menippean satire, 84 Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894–1963): Antic Hay (1923), 38; Chrome Yellow (1921), 38; Brave New World (1923), 38, 83–4; The Perennial Philosophy (1945), 206; Point Counter Point (1928), 38, 237; Those Barren Leaves (1925), 164

536 Huysmans, Joris Karl (1848–1907), 100 Hypothesis, central, 124 Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906): Brand (1866), 156; Emperor and Galilean (1873), 62; Peer Gynt (1867), 62, 118, 251 Id, 204 Identification, 439; language of, 287; recognition as, 407 Identity, 444, 446; and myth, 413; quest for, 453–5 Ideograms, translation via, 193–4 Idiot, Shakespeare as, 462 Idolatry, realism as, 109 Idyll, 130 Illusion, 422, 471; advertising as, 486; and experience, 388–9; in social mythology, 487–90 Image(s): definition of, 94; in poetry, 10; and sign, 136–7, 142–3; words as, 141 Imagery: archetypes of, 99; in poetry, 312–13; and quest myths, 133; as symbol, 458 Imaginary: and imaginative, 24, 420– 35, 456, 488 Imagination, 354, 355, 410, 438; and association, 407; and belief, 397–8; importance of, 464–5; as knowledge, 143–4; language of, 441–2, 450; leap of, 73; limits of, 444–5; and madness, 433–5; origin of, 133; range of, 474; and reality, 400, 470– 3; and religion, 293–4; and ritual, 272; social uses of, 421–2, 484–7 passim Imagism, 141, 245, 364, 383; rhythm in, 302; and symbolisme, 138 Imitation, 194–5, 215, 218; of action, 308–11; art as, 169; and creation,

Index 382–5; poetry as, 184. See also Mimesis Incantation: in poetry, 139–40 Incest: in alchemy, 211 Individualism, 292 Individuation, Jungian, 205–6 Induction: in criticism, 64–5, 67–8, 125–8; and deduction, 310 Innis, Harold, xlviii Innocence, vision of, 133 Integritas, 92 Intellect: and emotion, 442 Intention, authorial, 91, 222 Invective: in satire, 43–4, 46–9 Ionesco, Eugène (1909–94): La Cantatrice chauve (1950), 460 Iphigeneia, 415 Irony, 457–8, 466; and allegory, 94; in drama, 108–10; as modern, 455; mode of, 152–4; and myth, 167; in Plato, 113; in satire, 48–9; as teargas, 49; tragic, 154, 157–9; vision of, 111–12 “Jack the Giant Killer,” 41 Jacobean drama, 300 James I of England (1566–1625), 147 James, Henry (1843–1916), 24, 66, 78, 82, 85, 480; on experience, 258; as Shakespeare, 5–6; The Altar of the Dead (1895), 159; “The Art of Fiction,” (1884), 4; Daisy Miller (1878), 155; The Golden Bowl (1904), 407; The Turn of the Screw (1898), 25 Jargon, 333, 350, 488–9 Jarry, Alfred (1873–1907), 281 Jazz: in poetry, 21 Jeans, Sir James Hopwood (1877– 1946): The Mysterious Universe (1930), 73 Jesus, aphorisms of, 304. See also Christ

Index Job, Book of, 109, 118, 158–9, 313 John of the Cross, St. (1542–91): Dark Night of the Soul, 379 Johnson, Lionel (1867–1902), 141 Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), 176, 232, 358, 382, 385, 483; on blank verse, 20; oratory of, 298; on versification, 244; Lives of the Poets (1779–81), 71; Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), 36 Jonah, Book of, 208 Jonson, Ben (1572–1637), 7, 43, 49, 55, 382, 467; on humours, 110; as satirist, 47; Volpone (1605), 161 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882–1941), 132, 142, 159, 167, 241, 384, 411, 470; on epiphany, 102–3, 378; punctuation in, 369; on Ulysses, 250; Dubliners (1914), 82; Finnegans Wake (1939), xxxix, 87–8, 96, 159, 209, 233, 237, 285, 301–2, 308, 326, 367, 376, 406, 474; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 69, 82, 92; Ulysses (1922), 21, 38, 87–8, 190, 237, 264, 290, 326, 342–3, 358 Judaism, 131 Judgment, aesthetic, 305 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961), xxxxvii, xxxix, 64, 96, 130, 132, 272; on alchemy, 210–13; on archetypes, 58; dogma of, 285; and dramatic characterization, 117; on dreams, 220; on the psyche, 204–5; and romance, 79; Psychology and Alchemy (1944), 204, 211–13; Symbols of Transformation (1911), 289; Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1953), 203–4, 207 Jupiter, 447 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) (ca. A.D. 55–ca. 140), 26, 39–40, 44

537 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), 98, 159, 190, 231, 280; The Trial (1937), 158 Kazantzakis, Nikos (1883–1957): on Ulysses, 251 Keast, W.R. (b. 1914), 187 Keats, John (1795–1821), 13, 126, 142, 278, 361, 365, 384, 473; on feeling, 179; Spenser in, 142; Endymion (1818), 243, 318; Hyperion (1820), 166; Lamia (1820), 242; Ode on a Grecian Urn (1820), 12; Ode on Melancholy (1820), 367; Ode to a Nightingale (1820), 202, 384 Kenner, Hugh, xxiii Kenyon Review, xxiv Ker, John Bellenden (1765–1842), 147 Kerouac, Jack (1922–69), 292 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55), 183; Repetition (1843), 290 Kingsley, Charles (1819–75), 153 Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936): If (1895), 372; Second Jungle Book (1895), 405 Kirkup, James (b. 1918): The Sleeper in the Earth, 58 Knight errantry, 152 Knight, G(eorge) Wilson (1897–1985), xxv, 18, 187 Knowledge: as imagination, 143–4 Koine, 350 Koran, 165, 378 Krieger, Murray, xliv Kristeva, Julia, xlviii Krushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich (1894–1971), 482 Künstler-roman, 82 Lafontaine, Jean de (1621–95): Adonis, 280 Laforgue, Jules (1860–87), 142, 281 Lamb, Charles (1775–1834), 231; and theory, 381

538 Landor, Walter Savage (1775–1864), 29; personality of, 259–60; Imaginary Conversations (1824), 37, 85 Langer, Susanne K. (1895–1985): Feeling and Form (1953), xxxvi, 169– 74; Philosophy in a New Key (1942), 169 Langland, William (ca. 1330–ca. 1400): Piers Plowman, 40, 54, 56 Language(s): associative, 445–6; descriptive, 137–8, 141; Elizabethans and, 46–7; other than English, 478–9; hieratic, 140; and literature, 69–70; and logic, 190–4 passim; in society, 331, 349; three kinds of, 295, 354, 439–41, 493–4 Lanier, Sidney (1842–81), 241 Lao-Tse, aphorisms of, 304 Latin, 141; not dead, 330, 347–8; words in English, 242–3 Laughter, deliverance of, 162; in satire, 48 Law: natural, 153; tragedy a vision of, 108–9 Lawes, Henry, 246 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885– 1930), 179, 442, 450; Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), 190; Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), 469; The Prussian Officer (1914), 25; Song of a Man Who Has Come Through (1917), 454 Layamon (fl. early 13th century), 21 Leander, Folke (1910–1981), 191 Lear, Edward (1812–88), 44 Lee, Nathaniel (1653–92): on madness, 432 Legend, 131 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646– 1716), 27, 50 Leisure: in poetry, 327, 344 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924), 378

Index Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81): Laokoön (1766), 236 Letters, form of, 368 Leviathan, 99, 118, 135, 211 Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair (1885–1951): as satirist, 40 Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (1882– 1957), 170, 301; Time and Western Man (1927), 342 Lexis, 237, 245 Libido, 205 Lincoln, Abraham (1809–65), 298, 494; Gettysburg address (1863), 262, 335, 482 Lindsay, Vachel (1879–1931), 12, 21, 243 Literacy, 437–8; usefulness of, 484 Literal meaning, 90, 91–2 Literature, 170, 354; analysis of, 99; autonomy of, 450–1; and belief, 395–8; centre of, 127, 182; coherence of, 124–5; concrete, 443–4; in education, 121, 479–84; experience of, 391; fictional and thematic, 402; five modes of, 151–3, 159; four levels of meaning in, 90–103; four forms of, 477; hypothetical nature of, 93–5 passim, 98, 100–1, 137, 195– 6; and language, 69–70; and life, 75, 465; and mathematics, 225–6; mimetic and didactic, 186–7; and myth, 191, 413–19; nature of, 71, 72–6 passim; popular, 132, 262–6 passim, 449; possession of, 305–6, 395, 404; as process and product, 382–5; prose, 23–4; and religion, 293–4; reality in, 466–71; rhythms of, 355–80; self-expression in, 461; and teaching, 391, 475–8; two responses to, 474; unity in, 144, 452; upper limit of, 162 Locke, John (1632–1704), 389

Index Locus amoenus, 314–16 passim Logic, 226–7; and grammar, 96; and language, 190–4 passim Logos: in poetry, 201 Loki, 153 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–82): Evangeline (1847), 12; The Song of Hiawatha (1855), 245; The Psalm of Life, 372 Longinus (1st c. A.D.?), 179, 384, 389, 400; on poesis, 277; On the Sublime, 257, 335, 352, 378, 382 Love, 134; and art, 392; imagination in, 421; in Jung, 204; melancholy, 423–6 Low mimetic: comedy, 160; irony born from, 157, 159; mode, 151–3; tragedy, 155–6 Low, Sir David Alexander Cecil (1891-1963), 40 Lowell, Amy Lawrence (1874–1925), 141; Lilacs (1925), 302, 364 Lowes, John Livingston (1867–1945): Road to Xanadu (1927), 71 Lubbock, Percy (1879–1966): The Craft of Fiction (1921), 4 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) (A.D. 39–65), 182 Lucian (ca. A.D. 120–180), 25–6, 38–9, 83; as humanist, 34–5; “Alexander the False Prophet,” 29; Charon, 31; Kataplous, 31; Sale of Lives, 27, 28; Symposium, 29 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (ca. 94–55 B.C.), 28, 312; De Rerum Natura, 279 Lydgate, John (ca. 1370–ca. 1451): rhythm in, 243; Danse Macabre (1430), 14–15 Lyly, John (ca. 1554–1606): euphuism in, 360; Campaspe (1584), 28; Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), 36

539 Lyric, 69, 75; and epiphany, 131; rhythms of, 365–8; and symbolisme, 139 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron (1800–59), 273 Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527), 179 Maclean, Norman (1909–92), 187, 188 MacLeish, Archibald (1892–1982): Ars Poetica (1926), 61–2 Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius (5th c. A.D.): Saturnalia, 33 Madness: and imagination, 433–5 Madrigal, 246 Maeterlinck, Count MauricePolydore-Marie-Bernard (1862– 1949), 116, 117 Magic, 269–70, 463; art as, 170; in the masque, 116; and science, 274–5 Malapropism, 360 Malinowski, Bronislaw (1884–1942), 269 Mallarmé, Stéphane (1842–98), 139– 40, 142, 167, 304, 373; on meaning, 194; le Verbe in, 281 Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471), 35, 66 Mana, 191, 193 Mandala, Jung on, 205 Mankynd (morality play), 117 Mann, Thomas (1875–1955), 411; folk tales in, 408; Joseph and His Brothers (1933–43), 221 Mannhardt, Wilhelm (1831–1880), 269 Mansfield, Katherine (1888–1923), 79 Map, Walter (ca. 1140–1210): De nugis curialium, 34 Marathon, battle of, 261–2 Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93), 108, 265; Doctor Faustus (1604), 118, 156; Tamburlaine (1587), 107, 156 Marriage, 130, 134

540 Marston, John (1576–1634), 55 Martianus Capella (Martianus Minneus Felix Capella) (fl. A.D. 480), 34 Marvell, Andrew (1621–78), 134, 265; The Character of Holland (1681), 43 Marxism: dogma of, 285; jargon of, 333; in Morris, 144; and Romanticism, 394 Masque: archetypal, 115–18; origin of, 113–14 Masterpiece, 127 Mathematics, 98; and literature, 225– 6, 483; and logic, 192; meaning in, 279; pure, 73; and reality, 74–5 Matter: and energy, 191–2 Matthews, James Brander (1852– 1929), 171 Mauriac, François (1885–1970), 470 McLuhan, Marshall, xxx, xlviii Meaning: and dream, 132–3; four levels of, 90–103, 182–3; levels of, 72; as pattern, 129–30; in poetry, 194, 227, 248, 278–9, 282–3; response to, 132; and rhetoric, 98 Meditation: in prose, 304–5, 358; in verse, 368 Medusa, 476 Melancholy, 154; creative, 423–30; love, 423–6 Melchizedek, 24 Melodrama, 111, 163–4 Melody, narrative as, 129 Melos, two kinds of, 237, 245, 247 Melville, Herman (1819–91), 66; Billy Budd (1924), 158; Moby Dick (1851), 78, 87, 99, 143, 450, 481; Pierre (1852), 156, 217 Memory, 165 Menander (ca. 343–291 B.C.), 110, 160, 310

Index Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis) (1880– 1956), 334, 351; as subjective critic, 4 Menippean satire, 39, 69; analysis of, 26–34 passim, 83–6 Menippus (fl. 250 B.C.), 26; as cynic, 28 Mercury, 159 Meredith, George (1828–1909), 25; The Egoist (1879), 78, 415; Love in the Valley, 245 Mermaid Tavern, 7 Metahistory, 309–11 Metaphor: and belief, 447; concrete, 327, 344; as equation, 226; as genius, 201; as basis of myth, 196; spatial, 98; in symbolisme, 138; understanding via, 227–8 Metaphysical poetry, 12 Metaphysics, 74, 137; as literature, 95, 98–9; and poetry, 312 Michaud, Régis (1880–1939): The American Novel Today (1928), 4 Middle Ages: Butterslide theory of, 177–8; continuity of, 185–6 Miles gloriosus, 156 Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), 82, 191; on poetry, 62 Miller, Henry (1891–1980): The Crucible (1953), 404, 418 Milton, John (1608–74), 21, 43, 65, 75, 123, 142, 144, 216–17, 243, 246, 265, 361, 414, 438, 459, 481; as conventional, 215; cosmos of, 318; as great, 461; against Bishop Hall, 40; on poetry, 444; on poetry and philosophy, 312; on rhyme, 12, 240–1; rhythm of, 18; as satirist, 41, 45; L’Allegro (1645), 11, 238; Areopagitica (1644), 355; Upon the Circumcision (1634), 20; “Colasterion” (1645), 350; Comus

Index (1637), 255, 116, 118, 134, 315; Lycidas (1638), 20, 93–4, 99–100, 217, 240, 384, 396, 405, 414; Nativity Ode (On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity) (1645), 256, 319; On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament (1673), 12; Paradise Lost (1667), 8, 20, 132, 238, 242, 307, 316, 354–5, 365, 388, 394, 398, 429, 462, 466, 476; Paradise Regained (1671), 215, 316, 333, 350; Samson Agonistes (1671), 20, 238, 244; At a Solemn Musick (1634), 13, 20; On Time, 20 Mime, 109–10, 113 Mimesis, 170, 173; Aristotle on, 105–6; in drama, 114–15; praxeos, 209, 218. See also Imitation Mimetic literature, 186–7 Minot, Laurence (1300–52), 43 Mirror, 257 Mirror for Magistrates (1559), 155 Mistress Quickly, 301 Mistresses, cruel, 451–2 Mock-romance, 25 Modern Age, satire in, 38, 56 Modesty, topos of, 262 Moira (fate), 423 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622–73), 110; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), 295, 324, 340; Le Malade Imaginaire (1673), 222–3; Tartuffe (1664), 156, 161 Molnár, Ferenc (1878-1952), 116 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533–92), 30, 31; as anatomist, 38; Essais (1580–95), 23; “On the Force of Imagination” (1613), 426 Monteverdi, Claudio (1567–1643), 187 Mood: in poetry, 139 Moore, George Edward (1873–1958), 171

541 Moore, Thomas (1779–1852), 450; What’s My Thought Like? 42 Morality: in drama, 111; and literature, 100, 472; play, 116; and tragedy, 155 More, Sir Thomas, St. (1478–1535): Utopia (1516), 45, 54 Morris, William (1834–96), 145; romances of, 80; The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), 144–5; The Sundering Flood (1897), 81 Moses, 415, 448 Movies. See Film Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756– 91): Don Giovanni (1787), 115; The Magic Flute (1791), 212; The Marriage of Figaro (1786), 115 Muller, Adam, 234 Muse, 384 Music, 74, 170, 195; chords in, 11; in drama, 113; as dumb, 61; and literature, 128–9; in Milton, 20; and poetry, 9–22, 237–48; recurrence in, 10; in Shakespeare, 18; of the Spheres, 13 Musical comedy, 114 Mystery: art as, 61; in poetry, 139–40 Myth, 101, 127, 151–2, 199, 229, 273; and anagogy, 103; archetypal, 207– 8; of art, 133; and the Bible, 475–6; criticism, 185; in drama, 104–5; four phases of, 130–1; and history, 309; importance of, 189–91, 195–6; and irony, 159, 167; in Jung, 211; and literature, 190, 401–2; and mythology, 475; as narrative, 130; and the novel, 81; overview of, 411–17 passim; play, 114; and ritual, 268; ritual and dream as, 219; spatial, 191; as tropological, 100 Mythology, 447–8; cycles within, 452–3; individual, 125; and litera-

542 ture, 414, 417–19, 456; primacy of, 475–7; social, 487–90 passim Mythopoeia: collective, 205; in poetry, 142–4; spatial, 191 Mythos, 218, 229, 309, 406; Aristotle on, 105–6; in drama, 109, 112, 118; in poetry, 201; as soul of fiction, 195; in tragedy, 109 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) (1769–1821), 221, 250 Narcissus, 190 Narrative: and action, 187; archetypes of, 99; four phases of, 130–1; and grammar, 95; imagination and, 478; as lexis, 402–3; personified, 144; response to, 132; as rhythm, 129–30; and ritual, 209–10; in romance, 24. See also Prose Nash, Ogden (1902–71), 49, 55, 300, 362; The Cobra (1931), 363 Nashe, Thomas (1567–1601): humour of, 43; as satirist, 47 Naturalism, 138; and symbolisme, 142, 145 Natural sciences, 124 Nature, 121, 420; and art, 254–66 passim; and imitation, 215, 382–5; and mankind, 319, 438, 455–6; as mother of poetry, 216; order of, 124, 127, 143, 152; and poetry, 431– 2; rhythm of, 129; and scripture, 211–12; solemn sympathy of, 153; two levels of, 429 Necessity: and freedom, 439–40 Nemesis: in drama, 108–9 Neurosis: and creativity, 428, 432 New Comedy, 112, 160 New Criticism, 142, 185, 198 Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801–90), 76, 175; Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), 82

Index Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), 319, 442 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844– 1900): Ecce Homo (1908), 216; Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–92), 373 Nihilism: in romance, 79 Noh plays, 106 Nonfiction: definition of, 23–4, 77–8 Nordau, Max (1849–1923): Degeneration (1892), 285 Nous, 256 Novel, 69, 86–8, 126; and anatomy form, 36; character in, 79; criticism on, 4; form of, 24–5; historical, 81; history in, 481; and Menippean satire, 84–5; nature of, 78–9; as nineteenth-century art form, 5; and romance, 80–1, 83; and satire, 27–8 Nursery rhymes, 146–9; rhythm of, 302 Obscenity: and satire, 32, 52 O’Casey, Sean (John Casey) (1884– 1964), 397 O’Faolain, Sean (1900–91), xviii Old Comedy, 160 Old English: poetry in, 242 Old Testament, 412; proverbs in, 371 Olson, Elder (1909–92), 186, 187 Opera: and the masque, 114–15 Opie, Iona (b. 1923) and Peter (1918– 92): Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951), 146–9 Opsis, 237 Oracle(s): poet as, 165; prose, 373 Oras, Ants (1900–82), 242 Oratorio: of Wagner, 107 Oratory, 298; music in, 247; and ornament, 382; in prose, 358–9 Order, 134; reflection of, 190; of

Index vision, 143; of words, 101–2, 127 Orenda, 191, 193 Orient: in contemporary literature, 292; world view of, 439 Origin(s), false, 192 Originality: in literature, 215 Orm, or Orrm (fl late 12th c.): The Ormulum, 312 Ornament: and oratory, 382 Orpheus, 100, 153, 165 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903–50): 1984 (1949), 490 Osborne, Dorothy (1627–95), 265 Otto, Rudolf (1869–1937): The Idea of the Holy (1917), 290 Ossian (James Macpherson) (1736– 96): rhythm of, 364 Ouroboros, 208, 211 Ovid, (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.–A.D. 17), 216, 412 Owl and the Nightingale, The (poem), 14 , 22 Oxford Companion to English Literature (1932, 1995, 1998), 403 Page-Barbour Foundation, 338 Painting, 74, 169, 194–5; Canadian, 8; convention in, 448; as dumb, 61; and literature, 128; nature and, 383; recurrence in, 10 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da (ca. 1525–94), 187 Pantomime, 114 Parable: and freedom, 355 Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) (1493–1541), 32, 207 Paradise, 130; lost, 355; the masque in, 114 Parallelism: Biblical, 359 Paronomasia, 96–8, 192 Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), 319

543 Pastoral, 130, 134, 160; as communicable, 217; conventions of, 467; elegy, 100; myth of, 489 Pater, Walter Horatio (1839–94), 241, 299 Pathos: nature of, 155–6 Pattern: in art, 128–30; and beauty, 137; in fiction, 81; in poetry, 10–11 Patterson, Richard Ferrar (b. 1888): The Story of English Literature (1947), 59 Paul, St., 311 Peacock, Thomas Love (1785–1866), 78, 83; on poets, 308; Crochet Castle (1831), 37; Four Ages of Poetry, 443; Headlong Hall (1816), 37; The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), 37; Song of Dinas Vawr, 246 Pearl, 13–14, 366; rhythm in, 301 Péguy, Charles (1873–1914), 140 Pentameter, 361; Surrey establishes, 18 Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703), 265 Perse, St. John (Marie René Auguste Alexis Léger) (1887–1975), 373; Anabase (1924), 484 Perseus, 415, 449, 452, 476 Persona, 204 Personality: and prose, 349–50; and speech, 334, 351, 332–3 Peter, St., 100 Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter) (d. A.D. 66), 26, 39, 83, 84, 85; Satyricon, 32 Pharmakos, 158, 164; the umpire as, 162 Phases of narrative, four, 130–1 Phelps, William Lyon (1865–1943): The Advance of the English Novel (1916), 5 Philology, 67, 69, 122, 128 Philosopher’s stone: as Christ, 212

544 Philosophus gloriosus, 84, 86 Philosophy, 122, 128, 190; archetypes in, 99; and literature, 162; natural, 124; play, 113; and poetry, 94; and satire, 27, 50 Phoenix, The, 356 Phonetics, 122 Physics, 68, 121, 124; and literature, 102 Picaro, 161 Picturesque, 258 Pirandello, Luigi (1867–1936), 117 Pistis, 256 Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 B.C.), 29, 95, 98, 182, 186, 196, 313; on art, 133, 473; irony in, 49; on music, 239; on Ulysses, 250; Laws, 112; Phaedo, 413; Republic, 256–7, 384; Symposium, 34 Plausibility: and displacement, 416–17; and plot, 408–10 Plautus, Titus Maccius (ca. 254–184 B.C.), 266, 415, 449 Pleasure, 139, 154; in literature, 137 Plot, 195, 309, 402–6; convention and, 448–9; in the novel, 79; and plausibility, 408–10 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49), 35, 79, 178, 178, 305, 378; on poetry, 140, 181, 367, 379, 388; rhythm in, 302; Valery on, 279; The Bells (1849), 243, 367–8; The City in the Sea (1845), 367; Eureka (1848), 176, 307, 308; “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), 176; “Ligeia” (1838), 217; “The Philosophy of Composition” (1850), 276; “The Poetic Principle” (ca. 1845), 21, 246; The Raven (1845), 243, 276, 367–8 Poesis, 170 Poet: function of, 97, 165–7; as liar, 456–7; as swan, 140

Index Poeta: and poema, 385, 388 Poetics, 184; new, 124; and rhetoric, 198, 381 Poetry, 77, 130, 137, 323–4, 340; Classical, 241; and communication, 216; criticism on, 198–9; Dante’s liberal art of, 182; as disinterested, 61; didactic and mimetic, 201–2; in education, 480–1; form of, 184–5; formal cause of, 125–6; as imitation, 215, 308–13 passim; judges the critic, 234; meaningless, 296; modern, 141; and music, 237–48; music in, 9–22; mythopoeic, 142–4; and nature, 431–2; nursery rhymes as, 148–9; powerhouse of, 327, 343– 4; and prose, 71, 95; process and product in, 277; pure, 281–2; recurrence and desire in, 209; and religion, 287–8; responses to, 385– 91; rhetoric organizes, 94; and romanticism, 179–81; and satire, 45; as song, 467; spatial and temporal, 10; translation of, 194; unity in, 139; and verse, 343, 326–7 Poets: education of, 476; lives of, 467 Polytheism: and literature, 152 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), 13, 20, 43, 55, 215, 339, 356; on nature, 256; as satirist, 39–40; The Dunciad (1728), 55, 131; Essay on Criticism (1711), 97, 227, 243, 254–5, 299, 398; “The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” 44; Messiah (1712), 12; The Rape of the Lock (1712), 12 Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885–1972), 142, 167–8, 179, 442; discontinuity in, 379; as fascist, 140; rhythm in, 245; and symbolisme, 140; Cantos (1917– 59), 320

Index Power: of the imagination, 494; of words, 97, 98, 101 Pratt, E(dwin) J(ohn) (1882–1964): The Drag-Irons, 54 Praxis, 311; Aristotle on, 184 Prayer: form of, 370 Preaching: and satire, 46 Presence: of the Word, 140 Present: real, 291 Primitive, 262–6 passim; literature, 447–8, 452 Proairesis, 108 Progress: as evolution, 225; myth of, 489 Prometheus, 167; as ironic, 159 Promised Land: Eden as, 315–16 Propaganda, 163, 336, 353 Prophet: satirist as, 44 Prose: associative rhythms in, 368–73; continuous and discontinuous, 303–5 Prose Edda, 89 Prose fiction, 95; definition of, 23–5; forms of, 69–70, 77, 79, 86–7; and personality, 349–50; and poetry, 71, 95, 344–5, 480–1; and the novel, 79–80. See also Discursive prose; Fiction; Narrative Prose: and speech, 468, 295–6, 324–6, 329–30, 340–3, 347; and thought, 296–8; types of, 356–61 Prosody, 122 Protestantism: and mythopoeia, 142; and the Word, 144 Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), 87, 142, 167, 171, 193, 206, 279, 285, 482; Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) (1913–27), 190, 464–5 Proverb(s), 130, 311; form, 371–3; high style and, 379 Prudentia, 423

545 Psyche: Jung on, 204–5 Psychology, 131–2, 220; and criticism, 221–3; literary, 125–6, 128 Punch, 48 Punctuation: in free verse, 369 Puppet play, 115 Pushkin, Alexander (1799–1837), 494 Pythagoras (6th c. B.C.), 304 Quest myth, 131–2, 207–8, 133 Quest romance, 99 Quid agas, credas, tendas, 354 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) (ca. A.D. 35–ca. 100), 33, 184, 198 Rabelais, François (1494–1553), 25, 27, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 50, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 241, 369; catalogues of, 33; invective in, 46; low style in, 376; music of, 22; Exkubalauron, 47; Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–5), 35; Logopandecteison, 47; Pantochronochanon, 47; Trissotetras, 47 Racine, Jean (1639–99), 154, 179 Ramus, Petrus (1515–72), 177 Ray, Margaret Violet (Peggy) (1898– 1982): helps with Edgar book, 6 Read, Sir Herbert (1893–1968): The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (1953), 175, 178–81, 183 Reader, 134, 277; importance of, 123 Reading: rhythm of, 345; in society, 323; two directions of, 136–7, 278 Realism: in drama, 109 Reality: and art, 169–70, 172–3; as censor, 74; and imagination, 456–8, 492–4; and literature, 137, 466–71 Reason: and consciousness, 192 Recognition, 406–7; scene, 158; two kinds of, 410

546 Recurrence: in art, 128; and form, 10; in poetry, 16, 313–14; and ritual, 218 Religion: and cosmology, 307; and criticism, 132, 133; defined, 287; imagination in, 421; and literature, 152; and magic, 274–5; and satire, 29–30, 50–1; and superstition, 293–4 Renaissance: humanism, 144; literature during, 152 Repetition, 172; associative, 363; in poetry, 97, 217; of sound, 10–11; in verse, 356. See also Recurrence Representation: fallacy of, 129; in symbolisme, 138–9 Representationalism, 74 Research: and criticism, 66–7 Response: active and passive, 132; critical, 385–6; to poetry, 222; to the sublime, 377; total body of, 381 Revelation, 165; as fourfold, 205 Revelation, Book of, 210 Revenge: play, 112; in tragedy, 108 Revolution: and dreams, 144–5; and romance, 80; and satire, 45 Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–92): on hobnobbing, 8 Rhetoric, 128, 131, 143, 179, 184, 298, 323; in criticism, 124; and dialectic, 198; as grammar of vision, 143; and logic, 96, 192, 226–7; and meaning, 98; and poetry, 94, 198, 381; in prose, 358; rhythm of, 325, 342; social uses of, 485–6; and symbolisme, 140; three levels of, 333–6, 350–3 Rhyme(s), 240; absence of, 361; identical, 366; Milton rejects, 19; and rhythm, 12; royal, 16; nursery, 146–9 Rhythm: in art, 128–30; and continu-

Index ity, 402; cumulative, 10–11; energy of, 480–1; four-beat, 15; in literature, 94, 355–80; and meaning, 13, 19; in poetry, 180–1; in reading, 345; and rhyme, 12; in speech, 300, 325–6, 342–3; of verse, 299–300 Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong) (1893– 1979), 199, 323; Practical Criticism (1929), 201, 306, 386 Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761): Clarissa (1747–8), 155; Pamela (1740– 41), 87, 161 Riddle(s), 130, 141 Riel, Louis (1844–85), 336 Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926), 140, 167, 470, 472; discontinuity in, 379 Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur (1854– 91), 141, 281; dérèglement de tous les sens, 141, 167, 373; as voyant, 383; Illuminations (1886), 132; Une Saison en enfer (1873), 373 Ritual, 127, 133, 199, 270, 448; and criticism, 208, 218–21; in drama, 105; and epiphany, 131; and imagination, 272; and myth, 268, 309; and narrative, 129, 209–10; sacrificial, 162 River symbol, 134 Robortello, Francesco (1516–67), 185 Roman à thèse, 86 Romance, 79–80, 86–8, 130, 151, 471, 477; archetypes in, 210–10; conventions of, 24–5; descent in, 318; drama, 107; and Menippean satire, 84; naive, 154; nature in, 153–4; and the novel, 83; and ritual, 219; two forms of, 152 Romanticism, 166; advent of, 431–2; cosmos of, 319–20; and poetry, 142, 179–81 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712–78), 61, 82, 320; Émile (1762), 83

Index Royal Society, 27 Ruskin, John (1819–1900), 305; as critic, 64; pathetic fallacy of, 153; Munera Pulveris (1862), 63; Stones of Venice (1851–53), 387 Russell, Bertrand, 3rd Earl Russell (1872–1970), 478 Rymer, Thomas (1641–1713): “Othello: A Bloody Farce” (1693), 259 Sacrifice: in ironic comedy, 162; rituals of, 220 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (1804–69), 63 Saints: legends of, 152 Saintsbury, George Edward Bateman (1845–1933): History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (1900–04), 230 Sakuntala, 443 Salvation, 160 Satire, 131, 163, 431, 471; analysis of, 39–57, 83–6; and common sense, 30–2; defined, 27; doggerel in, 362; dramatic form of, 110; function of, 45; as giant-killing, 45–6, 49; humanist, 34; invective in, 43–4, 46–9; and irony, 48–9, 157; and the Modern Age, 38; and the novel, 27–8; and obscenity, 32, 52; prose, 369; and religion, 29–30; Roman, 152; of superstition, 49–51 passim; and tragedy, 52–5; Satire Menippée, 34. See also Menippean Satire Saturday Night, xxv Satyr play, 117–18 Saxo Grammaticus (ca. 1150–ca. 1220), 128 Scansion, 241–8 Scarlatti, Domenico (1685–1757), 16 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph

547 von (1775–1854): on romanticism, 179 Schicksal drama, 109 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759–1805), 132; drama of, 107 Schmidt, Rev. Wilhelm (1868–1954), 289 Scholarship: and criticism, 66–7, 322–3, 339 Scholasticism, 95 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), 231, 233 Science, 171, 439; and the arts, 441–3; and cosmology, 307–8; criticism as, 65–6, 121–2, 124; and imagination, 470; induction in, 68; and magic, 274–5; and poetry, 313; satire of, 49; versified, 312; words in, 226 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), 80, 142, 450; plots of, 403; Ivanhoe (1819), 217, 405; The Lady of the Lake (1810), 344 Scripture: as fifth prose form, 88; and nature, 211–12 Sculpture, 170; as dumb, 61 Sea, 134 Secunda Pastorum, 118 Self: Jung on, 205–6; totality of, 207 Self-expression: in speech, 325; in speech, 341–2 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger (ca. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65), 181; on Ulysses, 251 Sense, 420–1; and vision, 421–3 Sentence, 331, 345; free prose and, 368; prose based on, 357 Sententiae, 372; and high style, 377 Sermon: form, 359; on the Mount, 335, 352 Service, Robert William (1874–1958): The Cremation of Sam McGee (1907), 391

548 Settle, Elkanah (1648–1724): Cambyses, King of Persia (1673), 263 Sewall, Samuel (1652–1730): Diary (1674–1729), 368–9 Sex, 469; and romance, 81 Shadow: Jungian, 204 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), 61, 65, 100, 145, 154, 182, 210, 265, 438, 455, 459, 474, 481, 494; authorship of, 473; his club, 7; comedies of, 112, 134, 217; as conventional, 215; as critic, 62; folk tales in, 408; life of, 461–2; rhythm in, 18, 243; as swan, 467; transcends criticism, 188 – works: I Henry IV (1598), 298–9; Antony and Cleopatra (1623), 53, 118, 168; Henry V (1600), 108; Hamlet (1604–5), 6, 53, 88, 93, 108, 109, 118, 127–8, 156, 225, 242, 403, 404, 424, 456; King John (1623), 403–4; King Lear (1608), 18, 53, 109, 187–8, 279, 292, 326, 342, 380, 391, 442, 471–2; Macbeth (1623), 108, 118, 199, 207, 260, 305, 457; Measure for Measure (1604), 180, 247–8; The Merchant of Venice (1600), 161; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), 113, 311, 398, 423, 463; Othello (1622), 155, 156, 106, 466; Pericles (1609), 266; Richard II (1597), 107–8; Richard III (1597), 107–8; Romeo and Juliet (1597), 301, 326, 342; Sonnets (1609), 216, 396; Sonnet 1, 446; The Tempest (1623), 113, 116, 135, 255; Titus Andronicus (1623), 118; Troilus and Cressida (1609), 109; Venus and Adonis (1593), 153, 416; The Winter’s Tale (ca. 1610), 105, 186, 255, 266 Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), 268, 410, 467; epigrams of, 372; as

Index satirist, 40; rhythm of, 302–3, 370; on the truth, 485 – works: Arms and the Man (1898), 157; Back to Methusaleh (1921), 113; Getting Married (1910), 113; In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1939), 113; Man and Superman (1901–3), 113; Pygmalion (1913), 328, 341; Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), 113; Saint Joan (1925), 107 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), 69, 123, 126, 142, 145, 217, 234, 319, 414; on nature, 383; rhetoric in, 180; Plato influences, 257; A Defence of Poetry (1821), 443; The Indian Serenade (1819), 389; Prometheus Unbound (1820), 51, 318, 320; Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819 (1832), 41 Short story form, 79 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–86), 102; on humour, 43; on imitation, 311; on nature, 255; on poetry, 28, 75, 93–4, 113, 186, 209, 218, 225; sincerity of, 260–1; Arcadia (1590), 24 Sign(s): and archetypes, 218; and image, 136–7, 142, 143; knowledge via, 143 Silberer, Herbert (1882–1922): Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism (1917), 210 Silenus, 338 Simile, 446 Sin: original, 109 Sincerity: convention of, 260–1; cult of, 179–8 Skelton, John (ca. 1460–1529), 43, 57, 241; as musical poet, 15–16, 21; refrain in, 16; Collyn Cloute, 55–6; The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe, 15, 244; The Garland of Laurell (1523), 16 Sky-gods, 319

Index Smart, Christopher (1722–71): Jubilate Agno (1939 posth.), 96–7, 245, 376; A Song to David (1763), 12, 19, 241 Smiles, Samuel (1812–1904), 161 Smith, Adam (1723–90), 483 Smith, Robertson, 268 Smollett, Tobias George (1721–71), 409 Social history, 128 Social science(s), 125; criticism as, 65–6 Socialist realism, 394 Society, 440; aristocratic, 140; in comedy, 159; genuine, 353–4; the imagination in, 484–7 passim; new comic, 110–11 Sociology, 124 Socrates (469–399 B.C.), 157; teacher and lover, 112 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand (1780–1819), 232 Solomon: judgment of, 407 Soma psychikos, 206 Sonnet, 126; Milton’s, 12 Sophocles (ca. 496–405 B.C.), 182; Oedipus Rex, 109, 214, 229, 442 Soul: as anima, 206; in Jung, 204 Sound: patterns in poetry, 10 Southey, Robert (1774–1843): Thalaba (1801), 21, 245 Space: in art, 128; cosmos of, 318; painting in, 170; praxis in, 187; rhythm in, 244 Spain: drama in, 107 Spectacle, 237; in drama, 105–6, 113–14 Speech: and education, 327–33, 345–8; free, 490–1; high style in, 353; language of, 324–6, 340–3; ordinary, 295–6, 300; origin of, 190; and personality, 333–6; and prose, 468 Spengler, Oswald (1880–1936), xlix,

549 178, 309, 310; Decline of the West (1918), xx–xxi, 310 Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552–99), 45, 64, 72, 142, 144–5, 217, 265; rhythm of, 18; Mutabilitie Cantos, 256, 315; Shepheardes Calender (1579), 243, 264 – The Faerie Queene (1590–96), 35, 66, 166, 186, 201, 213, 240, 242, 315, 301–2, 365–6; House of Alma in, 427–8 Spinoza, Baruch de (or Benedictus) (1632–77), 227, 372; Ethics (1677), 95 Spirit: Word and, 139–40 Spurgeon, Caroline Frances Eleanor (1869–1942), 187 Stanford, William Bedell: The Ulysses Theme (1954), 249–52 Stanza: in lyric, 365 Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), 296; rhythm in, 301 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783– 1842), 161 Sterne, Laurence (1713–68), 241; A Sentimental Journey (1767), 36, 303, 375; Tristram Shandy (1759–65), 21, 36–7, 78, 86–8, 369 Sternfeld, Frederick William (1914– 94): Goethe and Music (1954), 237 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), xxxix; Credences of Summer (1947), 317; Motive for Metaphor (1947), 445–6; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1923), 237 Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–94): The Body-Snatcher (1881), 409 Stewart, Robert, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822): despised by poets, 41 Stock response, 386–8, 390 Storytelling: imagination and, 478 Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811–96):

550 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), 155–6, 481 Stream of consciousness, 88, 300, 325, 341 Structure, 402; in criticism, 124, 125; ideogrammatic, 193–4; total verbal, 90–1 Style, 23, 78; high, 398–400; high, middle, low, 333–6, 350–3, 374–80; manual of, 355–80 Subject–object split: fallacy of, 123 Sublime, 257, 398–400; and the beautiful, 383; high style of, 377–80 Supernatural, 79 Superstition: and religion, 293–4; satire of, 49–51 passim Surrey, Henry Howard (1517–1547): as unmusical, 17–18 Surtees, Robert Smith (1805–64): Handley Cross (1843), 57 Swearing, good, 46 Swedenborg, Emmanuel (1688–1772), 308 Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), 24–5, 27, 31, 35–6, 43, 83–4, 181; and Byron, 432; invective in, 46; on melancholy, 430–1; as satirist, 39–40; Discourse of the Mechanical Operation of Spirit, 430; Gulliver’s Travels (1726), 24, 45, 49–51, 54, 78; Journal to Stella (1710–13), 156, 369; A Tale of a Tub (1704), 30, 32, 38, 45, 51, 84, 467 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837– 1909): anapests of, 12, 181, 244; rhythm of, 367 Symbol, 190; as ambiguous, 97; and archetype, 126, 143–5; literature as, 73; verbal, 90–1; the word as, 139 Symbolism: apocalyptic, 306; comparative, 271–2; dream, 222; religious and literary, 287–94 passim

Index Symbolisme, 138–9, 166–7, 281; and naturalism, 142, 145 Symmetry: in Dante, 308 Symons, Arthur William (1865–1945), 145 Symposium: form, 134; in drama, 112–13 Syncopation, 12 Synge, John Millington (1871–1909): Playboy of the Western World (1907), 157 Syntax, 193–4 Tacitus, Gaius Cornelius (ca. A.D. 55– 120), 310 Taoism, 206 Taste, 123; development of, 381; man of, 63 Tate, (John Orley) Allen (1899–1979), 64; The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays (1953), 176–8, 183 Taylor, Jeremy (1613–67), 241: Holy Dying (1651), 359 Teaching: and literature, 391, 475–8 Television: limbo of, 116 Temenos, 172 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809–92), 13, 123, 222, 312, 361; as musical, 21, 237; Enoch Arden (1864), 376; Oenone (1833), 10, 239; Ulysses (1841), 251 Terence, Publius Terentius Afer (ca. 190–159 B.C.), 110, 449; Brothers, 111 Teutonic myth, 152 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63), 35; Vanity Fair (1847), 151 Theme: unity of, 404–7, 411 Theocritus (fl. 270 B.C.), 217, 396, 414 Theology, 74, 99, 137; and physics, 102 Theoria, 311

Index Theory: critical, 381; of literature, 483 Theseus, 452, 476 Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914–53): voice of, 246; Altarwise by Owllight (1936), 308, 476–7; Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait (1941), 292; Under Milk Wood (1954), 303, 360 Thomism: and the Divine Comedy, 181 Thompson, Francis (1859–1907), 141 Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62): and the Bhagavadgita, 292; Walden (1854), 481 Thought: freedom of, 101; grammar nurtures, 191; and language, 190–4, 296, 336, 353, 479, 482; and poetry, 311–13 Thrillers. See Gothic thrillers Thucydides (ca. 469–ca. 400 B.C.), 310 Thurber, James Grover (1894–1961): “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1941), 341 Time: in art, 128; man’s relation to, 284–94 passim; revolt against, 290–1 Tolerance: literature encourages, 464 Tolstoy, Count Lev Nikolayevich (1828–1910), 85; War and Peace (1863–69), 464 Topocosm: four levels of, 318–21 Totemism, 287, 447 Totengesprach, 29 Touchstone passages, 365, 380 Towneley Cycle (mystery plays), 106 Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889–1975), 273, 309–10 Tradition: in creation, 144 Tragedy, 101, 117, 131, 258, 471, 477; Aristotle on, 104–5; and death, 99; development of, 108–10; as fate, 171; five modes of, 153–9; in the novel, 79; plots of, 406; reality in, 138; and satire, 52–5; vision of, 111–12, 133–5

551 Transformation: Jung on, 205 Translation: difficulty of, 192–3 Transubstantiation, 212 Tree of Life, 134 Trinity, 153; and Jung, 207 Trivium, the, 95 Trollope, Anthony (1815–82), 80, 417, 418; Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), 409 Tropology, 90, 100 Truth, 485–6; and beauty, 392–5; of correspondence, 137 Twain, Mark (Samuel Longhorne Clemens) (1835–1910), 386; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 51, 263, 332, 334, 351, 375, 450, 481; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), 247 Typology: and alchemy, 213 Ulysses: character of, 249–52 Underhill, F(rank) H(awkins) (1882– 1971): on metahistory, 309 United States: epic in, 450; literature of, 481 Unity: of art, 172; and consciousness, 192; higher, 74; in literature, 144; in poetry, 92; spiritual, 139; of theme, 404–7, 411 Universe, verbal, 73–6 passim University of Toronto Quarterly, xxiv University of Virginia, 338 Ut pictura poesis, 383 Utopia, 85, 86; in Burton, 35; satire of, 31 Valéry, Paul (1871–1945), xxxvii, 140, 470; on cosmology, 307; as critic, 276–83; discontinuity in, 379; on poetic language, 374; Le Cimetière marin (1920), 282; La Jeune parque (1917), 282

552 Value judgments, 65, 70, 72, 122–3, 233–4, 259, 477 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo (1888–1927), 336, 353 Varro, Marcus Terentius (116–27 B.C.), 26, 33, 83 Varronian satire: analysis of, 83–6 Vers libre, 181 Verse: blank, 20; four-beat line in, 14– 10; heroic, 12; and poetry, 326–7, 343; and prose, 324, 340; repetition in, 356; rhythm of, 299–300; types of, 361–8 Vico, Giambattista (1668–1774), xlviii Victoria College, xxi Victoria College Library, 6 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Marro) (70– 19 B.C.), 75, 215, 217, 254, 356, 396, 414; Aeneid, 270, 317, 320–1; Eclogues, 217 Virgin birth: of the Word, 140 Virgin Mary, 118; Elizabeth I as, 107 Vision: apocalyptic, 400; of drama, 111; of literature, 101, 306; rhetoric as grammar of, 143; and sense, 421–3; social, 487, 492–4; total, 102–3 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de (1694–1778), 24, 27, 36, 50, 84–6; Candide (1759), 83; “Conversation de Lucien, Érasme, et Rabelais dans les Champs Élysées,” 25; Diatribe of Dr. Akakia, 29; Dictionnaire Philosophique, 33; L’Ingénu, Histoire véritable tirée des manuscrits du P. Quesnel (1767), 31 Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard (1813– 83), 170, 237–8, 247; Parsifal (1882), 107; Tristan and Isolde (1857–59), 107

Index Walton, Izaak (1593–1683), 85; The Compleat Angler (1653), 36 Warner, William (ca. 1558–1609), 312 Warren, Robert Penn (1905–89): on truth, 404–5 Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St. John (1903–66): A Handful of Dust (1934), 164 Webster, John (ca. 1580–ca. 1626), 61, 108; The Duchess of Malfi (1623), 53 Weinberg, Bernard (1909–73), 185 Welch, Joseph (1890–1960), 353 Wellek, René (1903–95): A History of Modern Criticism: The Romantic Age (1955), 230–4 Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866– 1946), 309; Kipps (1905), 467 Westerns, 449 Wheel of fortune, 109, 155 Whitman, Walt (1819–92), 179, 217, 343, 442; catalogues in, 364; rhythm in, 245, 302; Song of Myself (1855), 375 Wilde, Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills (1854–1900), 48, 141; cliche in, 371–2 Williams, Tennessee (1911–83), 449 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), 100 Wimsatt, W.K., xlv Winters, Yvor (1900–68): In Defence of Reason (1947), 64 Wisdom, 122; in Jung, 204; literature, 371–3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Joseph Johann (1889–1951), 73–4, 95, 372; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 227 Wodehouse, P.G. (Sir Pelham Grenville) (1881–1975), 266, 417, 449 Woodhouse, A.S.P., xxx Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–

Index 1941), 142; Mrs. Dalloway (1925), 158 Word(s): first, 102; Elizabethans coin, 46–7; of God, 205; and ideas, 349; order of, 101–2, 127; and power, 97, 98, 101, 227, 494; in science, 226; spoken, 245–8; and things, 137; and works, 355 Word, the: in poetry, 139–40; unity of words in, 144; Wordsworth, William (1770–1850), 80, 179, 231, 384–5; blank verse of, 361; language of, 264; The Excursion (1814), 375; Idiot Boy (1798), 21, 245; I wandered lonely as a cloud, 461; Lucy poems, 461; Lyrical Ballads (1800), 261, 263; Peter Bell (1819), 21, 245; Preface to 2nd ed. of Lyrical Ballads (1800), 62, 374; The Prelude (1805, 1850), 21, 361, 375, 435; The Recluse, 416, 454; The Sailor’s Mother (1800), 155–6 Work, 440 Writer: as character, 164–5 Writing: in education, 478; and speech, 330–3 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503–42), 15, 19; I

553 abide and abide and better abide, 17; They Flee from Me, 16 Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), 106, 142, 167, 201, 287, 373, 414, 442, 467; as aristocrat, 140; incantation in, 139; repetition in, 304; symbolisme in, 145; Among School Children (1927), 317, 391; Countess Cathleen (1892), 119; A Dialogue of Self and Soul (1933), 316; Leda and the Swan (1924), 261; Sailing to Byzantium (1928), 135, 454–5; The Sorrow of Love, 459–60; Vacillation (1932), 316; A Vision (1937), 308 Yoga, 206; and time, 291 Young, Edward (1683–1765), 258; Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), 259 Zen Buddhism, 292, 373 Zeus, 29, 152; and fate, 423 Zimmer, Heinrich R. (1890–1943): The King and the Corpse (1948), 210 Zola, Émile (1840–1902), 138, 142 Zulu language, 193