Collected Works of Northrop Frye

VOLUME 17

Northrop Frye's Writings on the Eighteenth

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and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all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

Editorial Committee

General Editor
Alvin A. Lee
Associate Editor
Jean O'Grady

Editors
Joseph Adamson
Robert D. Denham
Michael Dolzani
A.C. Hamilton
David Staines

Advisers
Robert Brandeis
Paul Gooch
Eva Kushner
Jane Millgate
Ron Schoeffel
Clara Thomas
Jane Widdicombe
Northrop Frye's Writings
on the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries
VOLUME 17

Edited by Imre Salusinszky

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Imre Salusinszky
(preface, introduction, annotation) 2005

Printed in Canada

ISBN 0-8020-3824-7

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991.

Northrop Frye's writings on the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries / edited by Imre Salusinszky.
(Collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 17)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-3824-7
i. English literature - 19th century - History and criticism.
2. Romanticism - Great Britain. 3. English literature - i8th century
History and criticism. I. Salusinszky, Imre, 1955- II. Title.
HI. Series.
08417^79 2005 820.9 02005-902068-7

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from
Victoria University.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its

publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
For Robert Rawdon Wilson
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Preface
xi
Credits
xv
Abbreviations
xvii
Introduction
xix

On the Eighteenth Century

i The Young Boswell

3
2 Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility
7
3 Nature Methodized
16
4 Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility
24

On Romanticism

5 CBC Goethe Salute

41
viii Contents

6 Long Sequacious Notes

43
7 Lord Byron
50
8 Foreword to Romanticism Reconsidered
72
9 The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism
75
10 A Study of English Romanticism
92
Preface 92
I The Romantic Myth 93
11 Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 125
III Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 150
IV Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 176

ii John Keats
206
12 Kathleen Hazel Coburn
215
13 How It Was
218
14 In the Earth, or In the Air?
219

On the Nineteenth Century

15 Review of Patience and The Silver Box
229
16 Review of H.M.S. Pinafore
233
17 lolanihe
236
Contents ix

18 Review of lolanthe
237
19 Review of Bradbrook's Ibsen the Norwegian
239
20 James, LeFanu, and Morris
240
21 An Important Influence
241
22 Review of Joan Evans's John Ruskin
242
23 Emily Dickinson
245
24 The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century
271
25 Dickens and the Comedy of Humours
287
26 The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris
309
27 The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifal
326
28 Some Reflections on Life and Habit
341

Notes
355
Emendations
383
Index
385
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 Preface

This volume contains Frye's published writings on the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, including his short book, A Study of English Roman-
ticism. It also includes his previously unpublished speech inducting the
distinguished Coleridge scholar, Kathleen Coburn, into an honorary de-
gree at the University of Toronto in 1978. The chief omissions are, of
course, Frye's writings on Blake, which appear in volumes 14 and 16 of
the Collected Works, Fearful Symmetry and Northrop Frye on Milton and
Blake. The items in the present volume have been arranged in three
sections, and, within those sections, chronologically, according to date of
first publication. In the case of items that were originally delivered as
lectures, the dates given are those of the lectures, but the texts are taken
from the printed versions.
Headnotes to the individual items specify the copy-text (in the form
"From such-and-such a text"), list all known reprintings in English of the
item, and note the existence of typescripts and where they can be found
in the Northrop Frye Fonds in the E.J. Pratt Library of Victoria Univer-
sity. The copy-text chosen is generally the first edition, which was often
the only one carefully revised and proofread by Frye himself. In some
cases he did reread essays for inclusion in his own collections, such as
The Stubborn Structure, which then become the source of the authoritative
text. All substantive changes to the copy-text are noted in the list of
emendations. All authoritative versions have been collated.
In preparing the text, I have followed the general practice of the
Collected Works in handling published material from a variety of sources.
That is to say, since the conventions of spelling, typography, and to some
extent punctuation derive from the different publishers' house styles
rather than from Frye, I have regularized them silently throughout the
xii - Preface

volume. For instance, Canadian spellings have been substituted for Ameri-
can ones, commas have been added before the "and" in sequences of
three, titles of poems have been italicized, and the presentation of dates
has been made consistent throughout. Sometimes, where editors have
added commas around such expressions as "of course," these have been
silently removed to conform with the more characteristic usage in the
typescript.
Notes identify the source of all quotations. Shakespearean and Biblical
sources have been placed in square brackets in the text; and, in review
items, citations from the text under review are also provided in square
brackets in the text. Notes provided by Frye himself are identified by
"[NF]" following the note. Square brackets in Frye's original texts have
been replaced with braces. Within quotations, where necessary, punc-
tuation has been silently altered to conform with the edition cited in the
notes; more significant changes, however, are noted in the emendations.
Authors and titles mentioned in passing are not annotated, but life dates
and date of first publication of books are provided in the index.

Acknowledgments

Many friends and colleagues have helped in the preparation of this

volume. At the Northrop Frye Centre of Victoria University, Alvin Lee
and Jean O'Grady have been invaluable in their advice and friendly
encouragement. Naomi Savage scanned or typed the articles; Ward
McBurney prepared the index and provided expert scholarly help of
various kinds. Certainly my greatest debt at the Frye Centre, or any-
where, is to Christopher Jennings and Mary Ellen Kappler, without
whose superb research skills this volume could never have been com-
pleted, at least not by me. Finally, Margaret Burgess provided meticu-
lous copyediting at the Press.
Numerous colleagues at the University of Newcastle and elsewhere
also provided assistance with the notes. My thanks to: John Baird, Kevin
Berland, Vincent Bissonette, Will Christie, Deirdre Coleman, Hugh Craig,
Tim Dolin, Michael Ewans, Tony Gibbs, Nick Halmi, Paul Hamilton,
Peter Holbrook, Ivor Indyk, Heather Jackson, Robin Jackson, Rosslyn
Jolly, Peter Kuch, Eva Kushner, William Levine, David Matthews, Dianne
Osland, Christopher Pollnitz, Alistair Rolls, Terry Ryan, Rosalind Smith,
Caroline Webb, Joanne Wilkes, Geoff Windon, and Ken Woodgate. I
would also like to offer my awed thanks to Google.
Preface xiii

To echo a remark by Michael Dolzani in his preface to volume 9 of the

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

We wish to acknowledge the following sources for permission to reprint

works previously published by them. We have not been able to deter-
mine the copyright status of all the works included in this volume, and
welcome notice from any copyright holders who have been inadvert-
ently omitted from these acknowledgments.

The Trustees of Boston University for "How It Was" and "The Meeting of
Past and Future in William Morris," from Studies in Romanticism (1982).

The Carleton Germanic Papers for "The World as Music and Idea in
Wagner's Parsifal" (1984).

Columbia University Press for "Foreword" and "The Drunken Boat: The
Revolutionary Element in Romanticism," from Romanticism Reconsidered:
Selected Papers from the English Institute (1963).

The Johns Hopkins University Press for "Towards Defining an Age of

Sensibility/' from English Literary History and "Varieties of Eighteenth-
Century Sensibility," from Eighteenth-Century Studies (1990-91).

With the exception of those listed above, all works are printed by cour-
tesy of the Estate of Northrop Frye/Victoria University.
This page intentionally left blank
 Abbreviations

AC Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1957.
Ayre Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989.
CW Collected Works of Northrop Frye
D The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham.
CW, 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
E The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V.
Erdman. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
EAC The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-1990. Ed. Robert D.
Denham. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
FI Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1963.
GC The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
K The Complete Writing of William Blake: With Variant Readings. Ed.
Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
LS Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936-1989: Unpublished
Papers. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 10. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2002.
MM Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Ed. Robert D.
Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.
NF Northrop Frye
NFCL Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review
Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978.
NFF Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library
NFHK The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp. 2 vols. Ed.
xviii Abbreviations

Robert D. Denham. CW, 1-2. Toronto: University of Toronto

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

This edition presents Frye's reflections on three literary periods that he

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

Victoriana (nos. 15-18), the student magazine at Victoria College, are

trifles—albeit precocious and surprisingly acidic ones—so perhaps it
makes more sense to note how often Frye returns to eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century themes during the period of his most intense intellec-
tual activity, and growing fame: the 19505 and 19605. But as further
evidence of the sheer longevity of Frye's interest in these periods, con-
sider two very early items not included here. Frye's extraordinary 35,000-
word student essay on Romanticism (see Northrop Frye's Student Essays,
1932-1938 [SE], 11-83), written in 1933 when Frye was twenty, has been
described by Robert D. Denham as "the first sustained instance we have
of what were to become several of Frye's trademarks: his conceptual
expansiveness, his ability to organize a large body of ideas, and his
schematic way of thinking" (SE, xix). And in another student essay
written two years later, "A Study of the Impact of Cultural Movements
upon the Church in England during the Nineteenth Century" (SE, 273-
304), Frye sets out the essentials of an account of the nineteenth century's
search for tokens of meaning in the aftermath of Romanticism. In more
subtle form, this account will become Frye's 1964 essay on "The Problem
of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century" (no. 24).
The weight of Frye's ruminations on the eighteenth century falls on the
period up to, and immediately following, Anatomy of Criticism; the weight
of his reflections on Romanticism and on the nineteenth century, how-
ever, falls on the period after Anatomy of Criticism. Those reflections
therefore have an entirely different context within Frye's own canon, and
form part of the thinking towards the "Third Book" that Frye intended to
follow Fearful Symmetry and the Anatomy. As Michael Dolzani explains in
his introduction to The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye (TEN),
while the "Third Book" was never written, the notes Frye made towards
that book became the engine room for many other books that he did
write. Again and again in those notes, Frye returns to a gigantic eight-
volume project that he called his "ogdoad," and to a diagram that con-
trolled that project, the "Great Doodle."1 The Great Doodle resembles the
mythic wheel of the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, except that it
comprehends philosophy and history as well as literature, describing
myths to live by, and not just to imagine. Frye uses the Doodle to
structure all his work, post-Anatomy, including, as we shall see, A Study
of English Romanticism (no. 10). But what we learn from the "Third Book"
Notebooks is that the phase of the ogdoad concerned with romance, and
the post-Romantic literary and philosophical universe, is called Rencontre.
Introduction xxi

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

II

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

scribed it as "the most popular characterization of the second half of the

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

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

The idea of a "unit of culture complete in itself" that Frye articulates in

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

Eighteenth-Century Sensibility." Frye is surely reminding his readers,

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

not be obvious in Frye's published works, any reader of the notebooks

(see, especially, Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance) will hear the echo
of Frye's own investment in the mysticism of language, in following
word chains and word magic into whatever unlikely places they may
lead. It is clear, then, that a good deal in Frye's temper—its wit and sense
of play, its tendency to encyclopedic elaboration, and its ultimately sa-
tirical delight in the clash of ideas—derives from his early, and deep,
immersion in the culture of the eighteenth century.

Ill

"Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," with its dismissal of Romanti-

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

In his 1959 essay on Byron (no. 7)—which, like the encyclopedia article
on Keats (no. 11), is a fine example of the clarity and ease with which
Frye can perform the role of the ordinary, jobbing critic—Frye says that
Byron's poetry challenges our critical presuppositions "because it con-
tains nothing that 'modern' critics look for: no texture, no ambiguities, no
intellectualized ironies, no intensity, no vividness of phrasing, the words
and images being vague to the point of abstraction" (56). It is a clear
reference to the, by then, decadent New Critics.
Of course there are unmistakably Romantic elements to Frye's own
outlook, including a militantly idealistic account of the revelatory func-
tion of the poetic imagination, outlined in The Educated Imagination and
many other places. Because the poetic imagination reveals, beneath the
corrupt forms of our existing societies, an ideal permanent society, there
is the argument, common to Frye and the major Romantic writers, that
poetry has become the chief medium through which religion may be
understood. It is a visionary, not a positivistic, criticism that is required
to approach this truth. Thus, Frye is to the criticism of the second half of
the twentieth century what Wallace Stevens is to its poetry: his "order of
words" and Stevens's "supreme fiction" are as close to being examples of
the Romantic sublime as the period affords.
But Frye's reservations about High Romanticism are as profound as
his affinities with it, and they are pointedly stated in the closing remarks
on Collins's Ode on the Poetical Character, Smart's Jubilate Agno, and Blake's
Four Zoas in "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility":

In these three poems, especially the last two, God, the poet's soul, and
nature are brought into a white-hot fusion of identity, an imaginative fiery
furnace in which the reader may, if he chooses, make a fourth. All three
poems are of the greatest complexity, yet the emotion on which they are
founded is of a simplicity and directness that English literature has rarely
attained again. With the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, secondary imagina-
tion and recollection in tranquillity took over English poetry and domi-
nated it until the end of the nineteenth century. (14)

Again and again, it is some version of this point—that the fully-fledged

Romantic imagination represents a falling away, or sentimentalization,
of the imagination found in the age of sensibility—that Frye introduces
into his critique of Wordsworth and Coleridge. And while Frye's relation
to the Romantic imagination eventually shifts ground, the critique of
xxviii Introduction

Coleridge and Wordsworth doesn't. Rather, to give a more positive

account of Romanticism, Frye leapfrogs straight to second-generation
Romantics like Byron, Shelley, and Keats. But that development occurs
in the mid-1960s. In his 1961 essay on "Myth, Fiction, and Displace-
ment," Frye relegates Wordsworth and Coleridge to a tradition of "criti-
cal naturalism." His comments there illuminate the claim in "Towards
Defining an Age of Sensibility," five years earlier, that Romanticism
shares Augustanism's "conservative" view of imagination as an essen-
tially reflective faculty. Coleridge, says Frye, "does not really think of
imagination as a constructive power at all. He means by imagination . . .
the reproductive power, the ability to bring to life the texture of charac-
terization and imagery" (FI, 30).
With all of that, it must be added that there is one important source of
identification with Coleridge. As Michael Dolzani has pointed out (see
TEN, xxiv), it is impossible, now, to read Frye's review of Coleridge's
notebooks (no. 6) and not be struck by a kind of submerged autobio-
graphical element. While repeating some of his reservations about
Coleridge's view of imagination, Frye notes that Coleridge "proposed
more books than he ever disposed of"; experienced his thoughts as "a
series of aphorisms crystallizing from his reading"; detested "either-this-
or-that" thinking; was "much preoccupied with tables of contents, meth-
odological axioms, schemes for others to work out, and intellectual projects
and agendas of all kinds"; and found his most "appropriate prose form"
in the notebook itself. As Frye's own unpublished works have filtered
into the public domain, since his death, it has become increasingly clear
that all of these comments could be applied to Frye himself—and there is
no doubt that he would have inwardly recognized as much as he was
writing the review in 1953. Indeed, much later, Frye acknowledges the
connection:

The way I begin a book is to write detached aphorisms in a notebook, and

ninety-five percent of the work I do in completing a book is to fit these
detached aphorisms together into a continuous narrative line. I think that
Coleridge worked in the same way, though he seems to have had unusual
difficulty when it came to the narrative stage, and so instead of completing
his great treatise on the Logos he kept much of what he had to say hugged
to his bosom in the form of fifty-seven notebooks.12

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

Frye's review of a biography of another nineteenth-century polymath,

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

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

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

cline of the West, and Frye is unambiguous in recognizing its affinities

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

or the intelligible order; the universal mind, or risen man; death, or

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

In its detailed and subtle outlining of that myth, A Study of English

Romanticism is an important transitional work for Frye, carrying him
from The Modern Century, his 1967 study of modernity and alienation, to
The Critical Path and his development of the myth of concern. In The
Modern Century Frye says that some modern myths of concern are "open"
or "liberal," in that they can moderate their own ideological anxieties
and allow space for other discourses to operate (114-15; NFMC, 64-5). In
A Study of English Romanticism we learn that, through its recovery of
projection, Romanticism is precisely an "open" rather than a "closed"
expression of what concerns, or unites, the human community—it thus
comprehends its own version of "freedom," and is the only form in
which a modern mythology can remain vital enough to provide an
alternative vision to that of science and technology:

The Romantic myth is the form in which the Romantic poet expresses the
recovery, for man, of what he formerly ascribed to gods, heroes, or the
forces of nature. When man is recognized to be a myth-making animal,
mythical language is also recognized to be the language, not for what is
true, but for what could be made true. Mythology, thus, with Romanticism,
as we have seen, ceases to be fables about the actions of superior powers
and becomes a structure of human concern. It thereby takes over some
aspects of religion. This does not mean that poetry becomes a religion or a
substitute for religion. It means that what was formerly a structure of belief
understood rationally, through doctrinal and conceptual statement, is now,
from the Romantic movement onward, increasingly understood and inter-
preted imaginatively, as a structure of what might and could be true.
Naturally, this change from what we have called a "closed" to an "open"
social use of mythology is bound to make changes in the structure of
comprehension itself, chiefly in the direction of making it more flexible.
(177)

IV

In his 1964 essay on "The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nine-

teenth Century" (no. 24), Frye reiterates what he has defined as the
central metaphor of Romantic and post-Romantic "inside and down"
symbology:

Wherever we turn in nineteenth-century thought we meet some version of

a "drunken boat" construct, where the values of humanity, intelligence, or
Introduction xxxv

cultural and social tradition keep tossing precariously in a sort of Noah's

ark on top of a menacing and potentially destructive force. This is the
relation of the world as idea to the world as will in Schopenhauer, of ethics
to evolution in Darwin and Huxley, of the ascendant class to the proletariat
in Marx, and, later, of ego to libido and id in Freud. (284)

Frye's writings on the nineteenth century are investigations into the

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

"The Problem of Spiritual Authority" is a more subtle, and less sche-

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

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

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

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

find in Shakespeare, in Dickens any alternative reality is located in "a

vast secret world, the world of privacy, where there is little or no com-
munication." This is a world "associated mainly with dreams, memories,
and death," which Frye argues will lead to the preoccupation in ironic
twentieth-century fiction with "the bedroom and bathroom world of
ordinary privacy" (303). It is also, of course, related to the Romantic
myth that Frye has traced in A Study of English Romanticism, particularly
in the Beddoes chapter. The post-Romantic energies that flow upwards
from such a world cannot revitalize society, at least in anything like its
presently constituted form, which is why Frye attaches words like "ab-
surd" and "nihilistic" (307) reconstitutes society on its sexual basis of the
family, the shadowy old fathers and mothers being replaced by new and
livelier successors" (307). Essentially withdrawn and subjective, but also
devoid of any superhuman perspective in how they frame their prob-
lems and solutions, Dickens's endings thus satisfy both the "fragmenta-
tion" and "recovery of projection" criteria for belonging in the Rencontre
project. But if Dickens's novels, as George Orwell also famously ar-
gued,22 are devoid of anything but a vaguely anarchistic social message,
the recovery of projection insures that they are anything but ahistorical.
As Frye says in one of the "Third Book" notebooks:

The principle emerging at the end of my Dickens paper is something like

this: the traditional belief in Providence, or a designing force in life, is a
projected literary conception. The Word of God tells human life as his story,
and if we knew the whole story we could see the design. This existential &
immanent design is to be distinguished from the objective or teleological
design in nature. When we stop projecting the latter, we get science; when
we stop projecting the former, we get a philosophy of history. (TEN, 102)

This variety of "self-consciousness"—that humanity is in charge of its

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

take final precedence over what ought to be" (308). Implicit in that
assertion is that the larger human story, too, is a man-wrought history,
and not a divine given.
In its combination of individual insights with a broad coordinating
perspective, there is a kind of perfection about "Dickens and the Comedy
of Humours" that would surely earn it a place in an anthology of the
indispensable practical criticism of the twentieth century. And while
almost any of the longer pieces in Northrop Frye's Writings on the Eight-
eenth and Nineteenth Centuries would fit the purpose, I think that this is
the essay that I would give to a young student of literature today to show
him or her what modern criticism in its heyday, and in the hands of its
central critic, could do.
This page intentionally left blank
On the Eighteenth Century
This page intentionally left blank
 1
The Young Boswell
Spring 19511

Review of Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. Frederick A.A. Pottle

(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950). From Hudson Review, 4 ( Spring 1951):
143-6. Reprinted in NFCL, 165-9.

It is now well known that a great mass of Boswelliana, recovered from

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

clo is to give us some idea of how this strange creature with his spastic
will managed to keep sprawling and shambling up to the top of one of
the dizziest technical pinnacles of art.
In the art of Boswell's biography two things are remarkable. One is the
endless patience and skill with which he drew Johnson out through
cunningly chosen questions and situations: Johnson comes to life as a
result of what one can only call an exhaustive biographical dialectic, a
Platonic dialogue in reverse. The other is his powerful grasp of the
organic consistency of Johnson's character: his ability to show that the
tenderness and the brutality, the outraged bellows and the flashing
epigrams, the heartiness and the misanthropy, were inseparable parts of
the same man. He saw the wistful Quixote behind the coffee-house
buccaneer, and he saw that Johnson's arrogance was really a high cour-
age because of the loneliness it had to conquer. Boswell possessed a very
rare kind of sympathetic Einfiihlungg[empathy! which he applied to
others besides Johnson. He succeeded in gaining introductions to both
Rousseau and Voltaire by writing a Rousseauist letter, exclamatory and
self-deprecating, to Rousseau and a Voltairean one, witty and epatant
[sparkling, provocative], to Voltaire. To call the motive for these letters
snobbery gets us nowhere: we might as well call it original sin. It is at
least fairer to Boswell to notice how well he understood the weaknesses
of these men, and how uncynical and tolerant that understanding was. In
this journal, after a day of letter-writing, he says: "I have touched every
man on the proper key, and yet have used no deceit" [328].
Tolerance, like charity, begins at home in self-tolerance, a quite differ-
ent thing from self-indulgence or self-conceit, however much of either
Boswell also had. The present journal gives one more respect for Yeats's
"mask" conception of the psychology of the writer.2 The writer, says
Yeats, compensates for his personal deficiencies by projecting an ideal
self which is the exact opposite of his real self; his ability as a writer then
crystallizes around and expresses this ideal self. Boswell, at twenty-two,
noted in himself an infantile confidingness, a desperate urgency to be
noticed, and a wit that seemed to come off best when the victim of it was
himself. And so, being like other self-conscious young men much preoc-
cupied with social rhythms, he tried to become as exquisitely poised and
disciplined as Castiglione's courtier. He assumed that it was possible to
grow into the character of "what God intended me and I myself chose"
[62] by an act of conscious will. Because his social defences were apt to
fall with a crash at the first moment of contact, he stresses the importance
The Young Boswell 5

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

the subject is naive rather than simple, and Boswell the writer is corre-
spondingly candid.
Naive, because, being a prey to conflicting moods, he allows each
mood to project its own image of himself and the world in turn. He tries
to get a commission in the Guards, and remarks, "I do think my love of
form for its own sake is an excellent qualification for a gentleman of the
Army" [128]. He climbs into bed with Louisa and says, "I surely may be
styled a Man of Pleasure" [140]. And candid, because he records all his
moods, and does not conventionalize himself. Aristotle remarks that
morally there is little to choose between the boaster and the ironic or self-
deprecating man, as they both lie about themselves.4 And, from a literary
point of view, they both produce rather facile autobiographies. Boswell
shows an uncanny knack of hitting a tone exactly in the middle, vain and
ironic at the same time. "I have an honest mind and a warm friendship.
Upon my soul, not a bad specimen of a man. However my particular
notions may alter, I always preserve these great and worthy qualities"
[80]. Or, perhaps with more obvious artfulness: "I really conducted this
affair with a manliness and prudence that pleased me very much. The
whole expense was just eighteen shillings" [140]. This kind of thing is the
very essence of human self-revelation, and is far above a mere willing-
ness to tell the worst of oneself.
It is fascinating too to read the famous 1763 bits of the Lifeein relation to
Boswell instead of Johnson. Like most people who struggle for impossi-
ble masks, Boswell had father-trouble, and this journal polarizes him
between his own father and a new father-figure. We notice for the first
time how Boswell's opening conversations with Johnson turn on the
relation of father and son, and on the limits of obedience and authority.
Boswell's own father, Lord Auchinleck, was a provincial Scotch Presby-
terian who despised literature in general and Boswell's writings in par-
ticular, and insisted that Boswell should go into law (which, Boswell
observes, would force him "to be obliged to remember and repeat dis-
tinctly the dull story, probably of some very trivial affair" [202]). Johnson
was a Londoner, an Episcopalian monarchist, and a literary figure who
specifically encouraged Boswell to keep a journal. A letter to Boswell
from his father is printed in an appendix: it is the first document of a long
tradition, culminating in Macaulay's essay, which can see nothing in the
man Boswell but a deplorable ass.5 Meanwhile, Boswell had been com-
posing, with all his usual tact and skill, his letter of introduction to
posterity, which has taken much longer to be delivered, but should give
him the last word.
 2
Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility
June 1956

From FI, 130-7. First published in ELH, A Journal of Literary History, 23

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

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

As for the term "pre-Romantic," that, as a term for the age itself, has
the peculiar demerit of committing us to anachronism before we start,
and imposing a false teleology on everything we study. Not only did the
"pre-Romantics" not know that the Romantic movement was going to
succeed them, but there has probably never been a case on record of a
poet's having regarded a later poet's work as the fulfilment of his own.
However, I do not care about terminology, only about appreciation for
an extraordinarily interesting period of English literature, and the first
stage in renewing that appreciation seems to me the gaining of a clear
sense of what it is in itself.
Some languages use verb tenses to express, not time, but the difference
between completed and continuous action. And in the history of litera-
ture we become aware, not only of periods, but of a recurrent opposition
of two views of literature. These two views are the Aristotelian and the
Longinian, the aesthetic and the psychological, the view of literature as
product and the view of literature as process. In our day we have ac-
quired a good deal of respect for literature as process, notably in prose
fiction. The stream of consciousness gets careful treatment in our criti-
cism, and when we compare Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf on the
subject of Mrs. Brown we generally take the side of Virginia Woolf.2 So it
seems that our age ought to feel a close kinship with the prose fiction of
the age of sensibility, when the sense of literature as process was brought
to a peculiarly exquisite perfection by Sterne, and in lesser degree by
Richardson and Boswell.
All the great story-tellers, including the Augustan ones, have a strong
sense of literature as a finished product. The suspense is thrown forward
until it reaches the end, and is based on our confidence that the author
knows what is coming next. A story-teller does not break his illusion by
talking to the reader as Fielding does, because we know from the start
that we are listening to Fielding telling a story—that is, Johnson's argu-
ments about illusion in drama apply equally well to prose fiction of
Fielding's kind. But when we turn to Tristram Shandy we not only read
the book but watch the author at work writing it: at any moment the
house of Walter Shandy may vanish and be replaced by the author's
study. This does break the illusion, or would if there were any illusion to
break, but here we are not being led into a story, but into the process of
writing a story: we wonder, not what is coming next, but what the author
will think of next.
Sterne is, of course, an unusually pure example of a process writer, but
Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility 9

even in Richardson we find many of the same characteristics. Johnson's

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

And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a-year,4

the extra assonance is a deliberate discord, expressing the difficulties of

constipated genius. Similarly with the alliteration in

Great Gibber's brazen, brainless brothers stand,5

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

assonances, alliterations, inter-rhymings, and echolalia:

Mie love ys decide,

Gon to hys death-bedde .. .6

With brede ethereal wove,

O'erhang his wavy bed .. 7

The couthy cracks begin whan supper's o'er,

The cheering bicker gars them glibly gash . . .8

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet.. .9

In many of the best-known poems of the period, in Smart's Song to David,

in Chatterton's elegies, in Burns's songs and Blake's lyrics, even in some
of the Wesley hymns, we find a delight in refrain for refrain's sake.
Sometimes, naturally, we can see the appropriate literary influences
helping to shape the form, such as the incremental repetition of the
ballad, or Old Norse alliteration in The Fatal Sisters. And whatever may
be thought of the poetic value of the Ossianic poems, most estimates of
that value parrot Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's criticisms of Ossian's
imagery are quite beside the point. The vague generalized imagery of
Ossian, like the mysterious resonant names and the fixed epithets, are
part of a deliberate and well-unified scheme. Fingal and Temora are long
poems for the same reason that Clarissa is a long novel: not because there
is a complicated story to be told, as in Tom Jones or an epic of Southey, but
because the emotion is being maintained at a continuous present by
various devices of repetition.
The reason for these intensified sound patterns is, once again, an
interest in the poetic process as distinct from the product. In the compos-
ing of poetry, where rhyme is as important as reason, there is a primary
stage in which words are linked by sound rather than sense. From the
point of view of sense this stage is merely free or uncontrolled associa-
tion, and in the way it operates it is very like the dream. Again like the
dream, it has to meet a censor principle, and shape itself into intelligible
patterns. Where the emphasis is on the communicated product, the
qualities of consciousness take the lead: a regular metre, clarity of syntax,
epigram and wit, repetition of sense in antithesis and balance rather than
Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility 11

of sound. Swift speaks with admiration of Pope's ability to get more

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

poetry continuous were faced in a more experimental way, experi-

ments largely ignored by the Romantics. Oracular poetry in a long form
often tends to become a series of utterances, irregular in rhythm but
strongly marked off one from the other. We notice in Whitman, for
instance, that the end of every line has a strong pause—for when the
rhythm is variable there is no point in a run-on line. Sometimes this
oracular rhythm takes on at least a typographical resemblance to prose,
as it does in Rimbaud's Saison en Enfer, or, more frequently, to a discon-
tinuous blend of prose and verse in which the sentence, the paragraph,
and the line are much the same unit. The chief literary influence for this
rhythm has always been the translated Bible, which took on a new
impetus in the age of sensibility; and if we study carefully the rhythm
of Ossian, of Smart's Jubilate Agno, and of the Blake Prophecies, we can
see three very different but equally logical developments of this semi-
Biblical rhythm.
Where there is a strong sense of literature as aesthetic product, there is
also a sense of its detachment from the spectator. Aristotle's theory of
catharsis describes how this works for tragedy: pity and fear are de-
tached from the beholder by being directed towards objects. Where there
is a sense of literature as process, pity and fear become states of mind
without objects, moods which are common to the work of art and the
reader, and which bind them together psychologically instead of sepa-
rating them aesthetically.
Fear without an object, as a condition of mind prior to being afraid of
anything, is called Angst or anxiety, a somewhat narrow term for what
may be almost anything between pleasure and pain. In the general area
of pleasure comes the eighteenth-century conception of the sublime,
where qualities of austerity, gloom, grandeur, melancholy, or even men-
ace are a source of romantic or penseroso feelings. The appeal of Ossian
to his time on this basis needs no comment. From here we move through
the graveyard poets, the Gothic-horror novelists, and the writers of tragic
ballads, to such fleurs du mal as Cowper's Castaway and Blake's Golden
Chapel poem in the Rossetti MS [£4677X163].
Pity without an object has never to my knowledge been given a name,
but it expresses itself as an imaginative animism, or treating everything
in nature as though it had human feelings or qualities. At one end of its
range is the apocalyptic exultation of all nature bursting into human life
that we have in Smart's Song to David and the ninth Night of The Four
Zoas. Next comes an imaginative sympathy with the kind of folklore that
Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility 13

peoples the countryside with elemental spirits, such as we have in Collins,

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

take than the kind of agony which is expressed with an almost definitive
poignancy by Smart in Jubilate Agno:

For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent
me to sea for pearls.15

It is characteristic of the age of sensibility that this personal or bio-

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

ism of Blake and Smart revived in France with Rimbaud and Gerard de
Nerval, but even this development had become conservative by the time
its influence reached England, and only in a few poems of Dylan Thom-
as, and those perhaps not his best, does the older tradition revive. But
contemporary poetry is still deeply concerned with the problems and
techniques of the age of sensibility, and while the latter's resemblance to
our time is not a merit in it, it is a logical enough reason for re-examining
it with fresh eyes.
 3
Nature Methodized
August 1960

Review of Bonamy Dobree, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Cen-

tury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). From the Griffin, 9 (August
1960): 2-11, which introduces some section headings not here reproduced.
Reprinted in NFCL, 147-55-

What is the point of literary history? It must be different from that of

ordinary history. If one were to write the history of English literature
from 1700 to 1740 simply as history, it might still be a fairly interesting
book, because this age happened to be one in which the major writers,
Defoe, Swift, and Pope, were deeply involved with the events of their
time. But even so the main emphasis would fall on such works as Swift's
The Dmpier's Letters and Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters. All
really major works of the imagination—Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Trav-
els, The Dunciad—take us into something that is not history, and even the
relation to history that they still have is a curious one.
Mr. Dobree, naturally, devotes much attention to the political events of
his period, and to his writers' involvements with them. But he also
comments on the naivete and the black and white melodrama of Pope's
political satire, and remarks: "[I]t is this very innocence which gives
these satires their pure quality" [553]. A poet can hardly help being a bad
politician: he must retain an imaginative simplicity that has little rel-
evance to what goes on in party conflict. Milton saw the Restoration of
Charles II as the giving up, by a people chosen by God for the gospel (as
Israel was chosen for the law) of its Promised Land, and turning to "a
captain back for Egypt."1 Charles himself saw it as a sign that the power-
ful and wealthy class which had risen in revolt against his father had
Nature Methodized 17

achieved its ends. Charles's view of it was shrewd and accurate and
Milton's was preposterous; but it was Milton's apocalyptic fantasies that
made him Milton. And if great literature is always out of historical focus,
the literary careers of minor or more retired writers are hardly in history
at all. Mr. Dobree's book has a chronological table of the main literary
events of his period—publications, birth and death dates of authors, and
the like—and this useful but hardly fascinating apparatus is really all that
literary history, considered as a branch of ordinary history, amounts to.
No: The point of literary history is not to articulate the memory of
mankind by putting a mass of documents into an ordered and coherent
narrative. Its documents are far better worth reading than any history of
them could ever be. Its task is to reawaken and refresh our imaginative
experience by showing us what unexplored riches of it lie within a
certain area. In every age there is a large group of writers who seem to be
more or less all the same size. Those who eventually turn out to be the
greatest writers are seldom wholly ignored in their own day; but even
more seldom are they regarded as greatly superior to their contemporar-
ies. The tragedies of Webster remind us of Shakespeare at every turn
because our imaginations are possessed by Shakespeare. But Webster
himself lists his influences as first Chapman, then Ben Jonson, then
Beaumont and Fletcher, then Shakespeare, Dekker, and Heywood, and
we have no reason to suppose that he was being disingenuous. Many
decades have to elapse before the final comparative standards emerge.
Even Dryden, while writing with great accuracy about Shakespeare,
could still say, "[H]owever others are now generally preferr'd before
him."2 Comparative standards are established by what may be called the
usefulness of the writer to the culture that follows and absorbs him, the
slow and gradual discovery, in general cultural practice, that he is indis-
pensable. They cannot be established by the value judgments of indi-
vidual critics, which are the effects and not the causes of his usefulness.
Once they are established, the dilettante is apt to assume that any
writer he has not heard of has been "forgotten," and that anyone who has
been forgotten deserved to be, because posterity, including himself, is
infallible in such matters. The literary historian, trying to absorb himself
into the period he is studying, finds himself recapturing some of its
perspective, and discovers at once that posterity is the laziest and most
incompetent of critics. If, for instance (to switch to another art: the princi-
ples of every mode of cultural history are the same), he is writing the
history of eighteenth-century music, it is no sign of his feeling for the
i8 On the Eighteenth Century

period if he likes Bach and Mozart: it is merely a sign that he is not quite
a fool. If Soler or Mattheson or Cimarosa also burst on him with astonish-
ment and delight; if he has an insatiable zest for rediscovering the most
obscure music and the most humdrum composers; if he can sympathize
with (which does not mean agreeing with) the councillors of Leipzig in
their desire to get Telemann or Graupner for their organist rather than
Bach, then he has some claims to historical sense. For even the errors of
an age are inseparable from its integrity. A critic who loves Keats may
produce fine criticism on Keats; but he will not have a genuinely histori-
cal approach to Keats unless he can understand why Croker reviewed
Endymion as he did,3 and feels that he might well have written much the
same review in the same situation.
This is not to say that the literary historian should not use his hind-
sight, but merely that literary history does not consist entirely of hind-
sight. For bringing our imaginative experience of the past to life there can
be no substitute for history. The Rape of the Lock, embalmed in a freshman
survey course, may well seem to the freshman to be little more than a
long poem in heroic couplets about airy fairies. There is a limit, in other
words, to what a limited literary experience can get out of any poem.
And if such a poem is removed from its historical context and presented
as one of the few memorable works of its age, limited experience, gazing
at itself in the mirror of the poem, may only conclude that the other
works must be pretty dismal. If one has read, with gradually increasing
relish, and without worrying about any comparative standards, Gay's
Trivia, Mandeville's Grumbling Hive, Philips's Splendid Shilling, and Mat-
thew Green's The Spleen, then The Rape of the Lock will grow, with its
reader's experience, into something more like its proper proportions.
The literary historian is the man who has read everything in his field
with equal interest: he has lost his sense of comparative values in order
to find them again in their genuine form, when the greatest writers of an
age are seen to be mountain peaks and not passing clouds. And moun-
tain peaks should be reached by climbing and descent, not by dropping
on and off in a twentieth-century helicopter.
The literary historian begins in the "background" which is the subject
of the second part of Mr. Dobree's book, in the buzzing gossip of letters
and memoirs, the random impressions of travellers, the network of allu-
sions and value judgments in criticism and history writing. The literary
historian needs a sharp eye for the historical epiphany, as a student of
Joyce might call it: for the kind of remark that sums up not only the
Nature Methodized 19

expressed opinions but also the unconscious assumptions of an age.

When Mr. Dobree quotes Lady Wentworth as saying, in her aristocratic
spelling, that "mony now adays is the raening passion" [344], we can see
the kind of social milieu out of which Pope's Moral Essays, with their
stress on the "ruling passion," emerged. Again, Mr. Dobree quotes the
critic Gildon, who is echoing Dennis, as saying:

Poetry is an Art; for since it has a certain End, there must be some certain
Way of arriving at that End. No Body can doubt of so evident a Truth, that
in all Things, where there may be a Right and a Wrong, there is an Art, and
sure Rules to lead you to the former, and direct you to avoid the latter.
biop

Every age produces these "there must be" statements, full of the desper-
ate pathos of the effort to find values that time and chance will not
happen to. But only the eighteenth century could have grounded a
defence of the "rules" in so uncertain a pun on "certain."
From "background," the literary historian goes on to the foreground,
the periodicals and magazines like The Tatler and The Spectator, where the
cultural tastes of the age are formed and reflected, where literary and
critical issues are discussed and the thought of the time is absorbed into
polite conversation. Addison, that round peg in the round hole of his
time, is a storehouse of the kind of cultural aphorism that characterizes
an age. The arts, says Addison, "are to deduce their Laws and Rules from
the general Sense and Taste of Mankind, and not from Principles of those
Arts themselves; or in other Words, the Taste is not to conform to the Art,
but the Art to the Taste."5 Nothing could be more wrong, or more
characteristic of the culture Addison is reflecting, with its confidence in
its taste, its absence of any sense of the shaping power of tradition, its
conviction that every artist starts all over again to grapple directly with
Nature.
From this we go on to the intellectual issues of an age, as literature
treats them. What Newton and Berkeley meant is important, certainly;
but what their contemporaries thought they meant is at least equally
important to the literary historian. Nowadays many people feel that
there is something about "relativity" or the "principle of indeterminacy"
that gives them the best of both worlds: an up-to-date scientific doctrine
which enables them to preserve their moral and religious intuitions. But
this is tame compared to the kind of excitement that Newton aroused,
2O On the Eighteenth Century

with his mathematical genius and his deep religious convictions, his
irrefutable laws of motion and his suggestion that space was the senso-
rium of God.6 Hence, as one poet said, "Newton demands the Muse," the
title of a lively study by Miss Marjorie Nicolson7 that Mr. Dobree follows
in his penultimate chapter, which deals with the great mass of philo-
sophical poetry in the period, from James Thomson down. Such
Newtonian poetry raises an interesting critical problem. Mr. Dobree
quotes several passages such as this:

Let curious Minds, who would the Air inspect

On its Elastic Energy reflect. [5O2]8

Why does this kind of writing not come through to us, when Pope's
Essay on Man, certainly no better intellectually, does? To answer this one
would need a clear insight into the difference between poetry and discur-
sive writing, between the poet's task of putting words into patterns and
the philosopher's task of putting them into propositions, between poetic
language of analogy and identification and the scientist's language of
accurate description.
All this is the literary historian's underpainting, so to speak, the tem-
pering of tones and colours that makes the greatest achievements of an
age shine in depth. Here the literary historian meets his real test. It is
extremely easy to belittle writers by a historical treatment, through some
such formula as this: "Swift and Pope are rationalistic writers in contrast
to the Romantics, who put imagination and emotion in the ascendancy."
Such formulas assume that a writer's age limits him to half a reality,
however great he may be. There is no such blither in Mr. Dobree's book,
but there is plenty of it in the kind of pseudohistorical material that
inexperienced students are afflicted with. To make a great writer gain
rather than lose by a historical treatment takes a sense of the interlocking
relevance of all the literature of his age, conceived as a unit of culture
complete in itself. The true literary historian can see, under the surface,
the conflict of party interests and of social and cultural cliches taking the
form of an imaginative vision of life which the great masterpiece reveals.
Thus Defoe is an overworked journalist writing incessantly about free
trade and inflation and the cost of living and the rise and decline of
manufacturing. In his age, the stereotype of the middle-class Englishman
was formulated in Arbuthnot's History of John Bull. The paradoxes of
Nature Methodized 21

Mandeville's Fable of the Bees about public benefits depending on private

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

When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or human race

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

Swift is a Christian bishop in attitude if not in fact, and these measured

words carry with them the whole weight of the Christian tradition.
Man's nature is human nature, which is civilized; he has fallen into
physical nature but cannot adjust to it as a gifted animal might do; he
must either rise above it into humanity or sink below it into sin and filth;
sin and filth are where he spends most of his time. So Gulliver returns to
his people, with a hatred not of the human race, but of pride. In Swift this
vision runs headlong into the new views of a "natural society," pro-
pounded tentatively by Bolingbroke in Swift's day, later developed by
Rousseau and now, on the other side of Darwin, one of our central
preoccupations. Swift's blistering contempt for the notion that man is
primarily a child of nature may be wrong, but in the age of lonesco and
Beckett it can hardly be called antiquated. Literary history fulfils itself by
ceasing to be history, when its great masterpieces enter our own age, not
to be judged by us, but as themselves judges.
What I have outlined is, of course, an ideal literary history. Mr. Dobree's
book is not ideal, but it contains the kind of material that the reader in
search of such a history would be looking for, and could perhaps con-
struct out of it to his own taste. Apart from the apparatus which all the
books in the Oxford series have—a general bibliography, shorter bibli-
ographies of the major writers arranged alphabetically, a chronological
table, and brief biographical footnotes on the minor writers—the text
itself contains a full and clearly written account of every writer of
significance in the period. The overall arrangement may be somewhat
confusing at first, with the three major writers, Defoe, Swift, and Pope,
being split between the first and third parts, but everything essential is
covered.
Mr. Dobree's sense of proportion is sound: he knows that cliches about
the age of reason will not fit the English eighteenth century; he knows
Nature Methodized 23

that such movements as Deism affected only a small fraction of the

intellectual life of the time; his introductory chapter gives a good account
of what is both distinctive and traditional in the social background of the
age. What one misses, perhaps, is that final unification of material which
is the mark of the completely realized history, in whatever field: what
one has, however, is a most useful reference work in which there is also a
great deal of sensitive criticism. I know of no other book which brings
together so great a volume of material: from the philosophy of Berkeley
to the poetry of Prior, from the incredible profusion of Defoe pamphlets
to the spare and articulate paradoxes of Mandeville, any reader or stu-
dent who loves the period will find it here in all its variety.
 4
Varieties of Eighteenth-Century
Sensibility
26 April 1990

From Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24, no. 2 (Winter 1990-91): 157-72.

Reprinted in EAC, 94-108. This was the Joseph Warren Beach Lecture at the
University of Minnesota. Three typescripts, two with corrections and one clear,
are in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 8.

It seems clear that my present assignment is not to produce a scholarly

paper, but something in the convention of Denham's famous seven-
teenth-century poem Cooper's Hill, where the poet climbs a height to
survey the available landscape, and is led from his sight of the Thames
river to prophesy an age of smooth and unstoppable couplets:

Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,

Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.1

Such an attempt is bound to be, in its present stage of development at

least, a very sketchy, perhaps even tacky essay. Before you start walking
out, however, I should add two qualifications. One is that an audience
that knows far more about the eighteenth century than I do can fill in
some of my gaps from their superior knowledge, assuming that there is
anything between the gaps. The other is that certain critical initiatives I
derived from my early study of Blake and the reading around his period
that I did fifty years ago may still be of interest to you. The reading
affected much more than my Blake study: for example, I took the word
Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility 25

"archetype" not from Jung, as is so often said, but from a footnote in

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

between Blifil and Tom Jones, or between Joseph and Charles Surface, is
closely related.
The age of wit became an age of satire because human beings are what
they are, and it became an age of satire by subordinating the vertical
perspective of literature, the sense of worlds above and below normal
human experience. Poets had been told by Boileau that the revelations of
Christianity were too high for poets and the puerilities of Classical my-
thology too low.3 Eighteenth-century literature in England begins with
the final chorus of Dryden's Secular Masque:

Thy Chase had a Beast in View;

Thy Wars brought nothing about;
Thy Lovers were all untrue.4

These lines are addressed respectively to Diana, Mars, and Venus, and
are linked, however obliquely, with a marked decline of interest in
mythological language. The Olympian personnel were not totally dis-
missed like the false gods in the Nativity Ode: the elitism of eighteenth-
century culture kept mythology in the poetic vocabulary. But it became
increasingly unfunctional: Cowper's reference to Philomela's "mechanick
woe"5 and the fact that Gray's line "And reddening Phoebus lifts his
golden fire"6 was so obviously trade slang for "the sun rises" indicate
that we are close to Wordsworth's demythologizing of poetic diction.
True, Wordsworth's revolution did not outlive him, but it ends a period
when Ovid went, comparatively speaking, out of fashion, and Horace,
the incarnation of the man of the world, dividing his time between his
rural retreat and the streets of Rome, moved into the foreground.
Dryden and Pope were more interested in religious themes than Boileau
would have recommended, but Dryden is concerned with the authority
of tradition and the social, even the political, application of religious
principles. So far as any enthusiasm for adventuring into the mysteries of
revelation is concerned, Religio Laid starts with the word "dim" and goes
on from there. Pope's Messiah, though a superb paraphrase of Isaiah [9:2-
7; 11:1-9] and Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, similarly does not express the
direct impact of religion on experience, like the hymns of Watts, Wesley,
and Cowper later in the century, and Swift tends to think of Christian
dogma and ritual as a kind of leash necessary to restrain a particularly
vicious dog.
The aspect of the eighteenth century that we associate with Gold-
Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility 27

smith's term "Augustan"7 is an intensely social aspect: one immediately

thinks of the coffee-houses and the various literary circles in what was
then, at that social level, the small and gossipy town of London. We
know how much London, with its full tide of human existence at Charing
Cross, meant to Johnson: the contrast with Blake, for whom London was
equally essential, but who went about almost totally unrecognized for
what he was, is striking enough. Being a trend within a culture, even
though a dominant one for much of the period, the Augustan age kept
creating, in true Hegelian style, its own opposite, a cultural climate
concerned with solitude, melancholy, the pleasures of the imagination,
meditations on death, and the like. In an early article81 tried to character-
ize a part of this trend as an "age of sensibility," though the word "age"
should not be taken too narrowly. The counter-Augustan trend gradu-
ally increases as the century goes on, but of course such categories are
liquid, not solid. Augustans survive to the end of the century, and poets
of sensibility like Anne Finch emerge in Dryden's time.
The eighteenth century has a unique symmetry about it: from the
Whig Revolution of 1688 to the French Revolution of 1789, from Locke's
Treatises of Government in 1690 to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in
France in 1790, from the Secular Masque in 1700 to the second edition of
the Lyrical Ballads in 1800, it seems to have some sense of what it means to
be a century, and to show a proper respect for the decimal system of
counting. I think there is also some symmetry or interpenetration be-
tween Augustan and counter-Augustan tendencies, especially in the
relation of individual to society, and that we can almost see the begin-
ning and end, within the century, of a kind of double-helix movement.
First follow nature, the Augustans said, and not many disputed the
axiom. The decline of interest in the evangelical, the marvellous, the
mythological, was not felt to be a limitation or sacrifice: the Augustans
inherited the framework of Locke's Essay and Newton's Principia, and
they felt that a new world of reason and sense experience was opening
up to be explored in depth by the poets as well, a world full not merely of
interest and beauty but of new kinds of reality. Their enthusiasm for such
themes often betrayed them into literary tactlessness: everyone knows
the famous lapses like "Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!"9 or Stephen
Duck's reaction to the microscope:

Dear Madam, did you never gaze,

Thro' Optic-glass, on rotten Cheese?10
28 On the Eighteenth Century

But the stimulus of new discovery was a genuine one, and it extended
from the writer to his reader. This was the first age in which the critic
moved up to a position of major importance in literature, as the spokes-
man of a public that looked first and last for entertainment in its litera-
ture and demanded to be pleased. Many writers of the time, including
notably Addison, tell us that literature in every age must conform to the
expectations of its readers, that the taste of the age is the formal cause of
poetry. The famous proof-text here is, of course, Johnson's couplet:

The Drama's Laws the Drama's Patrons give,

For we that live to please must please to live.11

Granted that this is perhaps more obviously true of drama than of any
other genre, the principle was assumed to apply everywhere. Literature
was closely associated with a background of good talk and cultivated
conversation, verbal communication preserved in amber. In the second
of the Night Thoughts Edward Young concludes a panegyric on language
in phrases that may sound more ambiguous now than they would have
done in his time:

'Tis Thought's exchange, which like th' alternate Push

Of waves conflicting, breaks the learned Scum,
And defecates the Students standing Pool.12

Johnson's essay on Dryden treats him as having accomplished a revo-

lution in literature, in effect parallel to those of Locke in philosophy and
Newton in science. His statement that Dryden found English literature
brick and left it marble is an epigram derived from Suetonius's statement
about Augustus, and one that helped to build up the Augustan stere-
otype.13 For us, the revolution accomplished by Dryden in prose was
more lasting, and his easy direct speaking style crept into the subtext of
English prose rhythm and has stayed there ever since. Before Dryden in
verse there were Denham and Waller, and in prose (even though not
published at the time) the letters of Dorothy Osborne, but such things do
not affect Dryden's originality. The Locke-Newton framework, we no-
tice, was largely a Whig formation, and the great writers—Dryden, Pope,
Swift—formed a Tory counter-environment: forming counter-environ-
ments is one of the main activities of literature in all ages.
The trouble with finding a language brick and leaving it marble is that
Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility 29

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

When Ajax strives, some Rock's vast Weight to throw,

The Line too labours, and the Words move slow.14

But whenever literature or any other art is improving, it is moving

toward a dead end. What has been done to perfection has been done: the
appearance of a "faultless painter" like Browning's Andrea del Sarto
means that a convention has exhausted its possibilities, and there is
nothing for the next painter to do but to start being faulty. This sense of
having reached a dead end haunts even Joseph Warton's essay on Pope;15
however appreciative it may be, The Lives of the Poets reflects a similar
dilemma. It begins by telling us what was wrong with pre-Augustan
poetry, notably Milton's and Cowley's, but the comments on Collins,
Gray, and Goldsmith show Johnson's resistance to a dimension of cul-
ture in which his standards, flexible as they were, would no longer
wholly apply. Johnson's criticism reflects the strengths and weaknesses
of all "great tradition" criticism:16 he is nearly always first-rate on the
people with whom he is in sympathy, but he can be insensitive or even
perverse about those not quite in his mainstream centre.
The feeling of an intensely social view of literature within the Augustan
trend has to be qualified by an interpenetration of social and individual
factors that was there from the beginning. The base of operations in
Locke's Essay is the individual human being, not the socially conditioned
human being: Locke's hero stands detached from history, collecting sense
impressions and clear and distinct ideas. Nobody could be less solipsistic
than Locke, but we may notice the overtones in Spectator 413, referring to
"that great Modern Discovery . . . that Light and Colours . . . are only
Ideas in the Mind."17 The author is speaking of Locke on secondary
3O On the Eighteenth Century

qualities. All Berkeley had to do with this modern discovery was to deny
the distinction between primary and secondary qualities to arrive at his
purely subjective idealistic position of esse est percipi, "to be is to be
perceived."18 If we feel convinced, as Johnson was, that things still have a
being apart from our perception of them, that, for Berkeley, is because
they are ideas in the mind of God. It is fortunate both for the permanence
of the world and for Berkeley's argument that God, according to the
Psalmist, neither slumbers nor sleeps [Psalm 121:4]. But Berkeley indi-
cates clearly the isolated individual at the centre of Augustan society
who interpenetrates with that society.
The same sense of interpenetration comes into economic contexts. In
the intensely laissez-faire climate of eighteenth-century capitalism there
is little emphasis on what the anarchist Kropotkin called mutual aid:19
even more than the nineteenth century, this was the age of the work
ethic, the industrious apprentice, and the entrepreneur: the age, in short,
of Benjamin Franklin. A laissez-faire economy is essentially an amoral
one: this fact is the basis of the satire of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, with
its axiom of "Private Vices, Publick Benefits."20 The howls of outrage that
greeted Mandeville's book are a little surprising: it looks as though the
age was committed to the ethos of capitalism, but had not realized the
intensity of its commitment. The reaction to Mandeville is oddly similar
to the reaction to The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, where Defoe's hoax
form was the only possible way of showing bigots how brutal their
prejudices were.
Of course much has to be allowed for the polemical and strident tone
of Mandeville: later in the century Adam Smith could say that avarice
was the spur of industry, and say it to general applause. And of course
Mandeville may have been raising issues far beyond the amoral nature
of the open market. Browning's poem on Mandeville celebrates him as a
prophet who penetrated a false antithesis of good and evil to discern that
God brings good out of evil.21 At least I think that is what the poem says,
but as it is written in the gabbling doggerel of Browning's later idiom, it
is hard to be sure.
The same feeling of the interaction of good and evil in the economic
world accounts for the eighteenth-century vogue for picaresque fiction.
The heroes and heroines of Defoe may be thieves and whores to begin
with, though Defoe carefully explains how they got that way, and shows
how it was practically impossible that they could have been anything
else. They do not like being thieves and whores, and fully intend to
Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility 31

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

runs through Defoe and Richardson and spills over into Jane Austen
seems to me in this respect a more mature one.
In a novel of Robert Bage two heroines, one conventional and the other
pragmatic, are discussing the position of women in a Turkish harem. The
conventional one says, "I prefer death a thousand times," and the prag-
matic one says, "And I prefer a thousand times—to death."25 In Bage's
much better-known Hermsprong the heroine is an insipid idiot of a type
common in the minor fiction of the time, with a morbid sense of duty to a
father who has no claim to it. But as she is contrasted with a considerably
more sensible friend, and as her lover makes a point of the fact that he
has not only read but been impressed by Mary Wollstonecraft, it seems
clear that deliberate satire is involved. The vogue for horror fiction
produces many situations that play a sadistic cat-and-mouse game with
its heroines, keeping them surrounded with menace and threats of viola-
tion, even though they are often rescued by a divine providence heavily
disguised as a public demand on the author. Nevertheless, we occasion-
ally get a glimpse of the frustration and helplessness of an isolated
female in a society where she is unable to manipulate any of the social
machinery to her advantage, and the glimpse is far more genuinely
horrifying than the conventional scary props.
The male picaresque heroes of Defoe and Smollett are more obviously
related to the ethos of an expanding empire, being adventurers who are
often close to being pirates. There is seldom, understandably, the empha-
sis on violated innocence that we get so often with female protagonists.
In Smollett's novels, especially Ferdinand Count Fathom, they are not very
likeable, but then Smollett is a tough satirist, and is not out to make you
like his characters, but to drive home a thesis closely parallel to
Mandeville's. Ferdinand of course "repents" at the end, but that is only
to get his repellent story finished, and to satisfy a public like the one
assumed to be clamouring for a reprieve at the end of The Beggar's Opera.
However, it is only such a time that could have produced the gigantic
Robinson Crusoe, the story of the solitary individual cast away on an
island who proceeds to reconstruct every element of the expanding
British imperial power he belongs to. He makes clothes, surrounds a
space to make some privacy for himself, opens a journal and ledger, and
governs the "native" Friday with the greatest assurance. As long as the
British Empire possessed the will to govern there was never any question
of "going native." In his brief reference to Robinson Crusoe in Das Kapital,
Marx underlines the interpenetration of individual and social themes in
Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility 33

the book. He also speaks with contempt of Crusoe's amusing himself

with religious exercises and the like,26 though one might have expected
Marx, of all people, to understand that preserving one's sanity is mostly
a matter of preserving one's social conditioning.

II

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

sight of a genuinely natural society, on one level of nature instead of two.

Hence the persistence of the pastoral tradition, with its celebration of a
simple life in direct contact with the physical world. The pastoral con-
vention was accepted by the Augustans as a complement rather than a
contradiction of its prevailingly urban tone: this was of course also the
role it had in Virgil and Horace. What is particularly significant about the
pastoral tradition, from our present point of view, is its conventional
assumption that its simple shepherds are also spontaneous poets, untaught
but inspired. Here we have the growing point of a conception of different
contexts of the primitive and of a different kind of natural society.
Swift at one end of the eighteenth century and Burke at the other are
uncompromising defenders of the older two-level view. In the fourth
part of Gulliver's Travels Gulliver encounters a society of intelligent horses
who have formed a natural society on one level of nature. The filthy and
degraded Yahoos illustrate what man would be like if he were purely an
animal, and although the Houyhnhnms recognize Gulliver to be of the
Yahoo species, they also see that he is a very different kind of Yahoo,
being rational and capable of discourse. But as Gulliver goes on talking
to his Houyhnhnm master about the conditions of eighteenth-century
human life, the latter discovers that all discourse in Gulliver's world is
shot through and through with "saying the thing that is not," or lying, a
vice incomprehensible to the conscious horses. As for reason, Gulliver's
master says, the Yahoos of Gulliver's nation merely have some quality
that intensifies their natural viciousness, turning a merely animal feroc-
ity into a uniquely hideous malice and sadism. So Gulliver comes, when
looking at his reflection in the water, to hate himself more than the
Yahoos, precisely because he is a clean and rational Yahoo.27 But he is
stuck with being human on two levels of nature; a natural-rational soci-
ety on one level of nature is possible only for intelligent animals. So
Gulliver returns to his own social context at the end, the same as before,
except that his pride in being what his religion calls a fallen creature has
been obliterated.
For Burke, especially in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, man's
social contract is his present social context, the particular continuum of
past, present, and future of beings into which he happens to have been
born. This continuum provides a structure of authority he is bound to
submit to, for "natural rights" do not exist, except as duties connected
with safeguarding the health and stability of his cultural tradition, for,
Burke says, "Art is man's nature."28 By Burke's time, however, the con-
Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility 35

ception of a natural society on one level of nature had made considerable

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

All these contributed to the process of pushing back the boundaries

imposed on poetic experience that were assumed by most of the
Augustans. These expanded directions give us three new contexts for the
primitive, of particular importance: the marvellous, the prophetic, and
the cultural. The marvellous provides the vogue for Gothic romance, the
prophetic the renewed sense of the relevance of the Bible to the literary
imagination, and the cultural the fairly new but rapidly growing sense of
the social affinity of poetry with the simplest and most untutored states
of life.
There are some curious confusions here. A great deal of remarkable
historical scholarship accompanied these developments: we have Lowth's
very influential lectures on Biblical poetry, Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and
Romance, Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry, Mallett's Northern
Antiquities. The poets responded to this scholarship, and such poems as
the Song to David and The Fatal Sisters could not have been written
without it. But it is characteristic of these new breeds of primitive that
they have no history, their social context not having yet been born. It is
obvious that when we turn from Richardson or Fielding to The Castle of
Otranto we are in a more primitive world, and this time an unhistorical
one: the word "Gothic" to describe such a story means little more than
"once upon a time." Ossian, an essential touchstone of sensibility in this
period, wanders in an even hazier past; hermetic documents jostle Plato
and Aristotle in Berkeley's Sin's; Percy's Reliques may mingle old and
new within the same ballad; bards, minstrels, and Druids cover the light
of history with the clouds of legend.
One by-product of all this primitivism is the rise of the formulaic
fiction that has grown so prodigiously since. The forms of the horror
story, the detective story (with Mrs. Radcliffe), the Western story (even
though the "West" was still very close to the Atlantic coast), were taking
shape in this period. One New World story that interests me as a Cana-
dian is Frances Brooke's remarkable epistolary novel Emily Montague,
written in Quebec soon after the British occupation, which contains
much first-hand observation of Indian life. Formulaic fiction includes the
"historical" novel developed later by Scott, though, except for sporadic
revivals (e.g., Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose) this form went out of
fashion after the nineteenth century, having perhaps fulfilled most of its
cultural functions by providing libretti for nineteenth-century Italian
operas. Waverley and Rob Roy, however, though they belong to the nine-
teenth century, record one of the great cultural tragedies of the eight-
Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility 37

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

fallacy there is. Surrounding him is the verbalism of the book itself. If we
look at some of the inserted stories—the man who drops a hot chestnut
into his open fly; the abbess and novice who try to start a pair of balky
mules by shouting obscene words at them (again turning on a linguistic
fallacy, that certain words are inherently obscene apart from their con-
text)—we may say that, however exquisitely told, these stories as regards
content are simply nothing. Yet we cannot say that they are all style and
no substance, because style is itself substantial. We never emerge into a
"real world" here, because reality itself has become verbal. Sterne prefig-
ures the cosmos of Mallarme where the function of everything that exists
is to border on (aboutir) a book. More immediately, he prefigures the
change from eighteenth-century discourse into nineteenth-century lan-
guage, from wit and Hartleian association into verbal organism, a proc-
ess completed by Coleridge when he turned against Hartley and began
his great treatise on imagination and the Logos, which also remained in
embryo.
I began the Anatomy of Criticism long ago by remarking that every
serious subject, including criticism, seems to go through a kind of induc-
tive metamorphosis, in which what has previously been assumed with-
out discussion turns into the central problem to be discussed [15]. Thus
biology assumed that it was a study of the forms of life, but it was only
when forms of life became the study instead of the basis of the study that
evolution developed and biology became a fully mature science. Years
later, when I came to read Michel Foucault's Order of Things, I saw a
parallel though greatly expanded thesis in it: that up to the end of the
eighteenth century humanity had been assumed to be the basis for study-
ing everything in the human cosmos, and that from the nineteenth cen-
tury on we have been living in a world in which humanity itself is the
study. Therefore, says Foucault, "Before the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, man did not exist."311 confess to being puzzled, even baffled, by this
way of putting it: it leaves me very unsure what Pope thought the proper
study of mankind was. But if the conception "man" emerged after the
eighteenth century, it must have been developing during it, which would
be sufficient reason for re-examining it, even as tentatively as I have just
tried to do.
On Romanticism
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 5
CBC Goethe Salute
7 October 1949

From the Varsity, 7 October 1949.

The CBC last Wednesday night presented Canada's most important

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

surely a far more genuinely tragic situation. Goethe's Egmont calls him-
self, in a remarkable speech, a kind of sun-god driven to a predestined
heroic career by an overmastering force.1 But it is difficult to disentangle
this force from the force represented by Alva, the solemn and owlish
march of stupidity and cruelty over all man's efforts to gain peace and
freedom. Alva also talks about destiny, and has also a romantic attach-
ment, the fruit of which, his bastard son Ferdinand, is an irresolute
weakling who hankers to be like Egmont. In short, Egmont accepts too
much of Alva's attitude to life to illustrate the complete contrast between
liberty and tyranny which is the play's theme.
Lister Sinclair's adaptation seemed excellent, and preserved an archaic
quality in the language which, for an English listener, is well suited to a
play that has so many echoes of Shakespeare (especially Julius Caesar).
The reading was excellent too: perhaps one may make special mention of
Margot Christie for building up the minor figure of Margaret of Parma
into an integral part of the play.
 6
Long Sequacious Notes
Winter 1953

From Hudson Review, 5 (Winter 1953): 603-8. Review of Inquiring Spirit:

A New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished
Prose Writings, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon, 1951); and The
Notebooks of Matthew Arnold, ed. Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young, and
Waldo Hilary Dunn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952). Reprinted in
NFCL, 170-7.
Coburn was a colleague of Frye's in the Department of English at Victoria
College. She was slightly older than he, and had even taught the young Frye
when she was a sessional fellow and he was a first-year student in 1929-30. For
her early friendship with Frye's future wife Helen Kemp, see NFHK, passim. At
NFHK, 1:388, 395-6, Kemp upbraids Frye for being rude to Coburn and he
apologizes with a description of what he dislikes about her, including "her
complete and pedantically smug ignorance of her subject" (letter of 16 January
1935). But for his gracious tribute to her scholarship later, see no. 12.

Most of us think of Coleridge, at least for a time, as a writer of bits and

pieces. I can still remember the nugget I had to memorize about him in
grade 8: "A writer of great powers and promise, but incapable of steady
work." There is a good deal of patronizing biography and criticism in the
same tone, implying that if the critic had had Coleridge's genius and his
Wedgewood pension, he would have laid off the opium, not married
until he met the right Sara, finished his books and poems, and led a tidier
life. But it is slowly becoming apparent that, while Coleridge certainly
proposed more books than he ever disposed of, the impression of bits
and pieces is not altogether due to Coleridge. Within the last twenty
years more and more of the vast bulk of what he actually did write has
44 On Romanticism

been coming into view. His letters, his table talk, his Shakespearean and
other literary criticism, all form big collections, and Miss Kathleen Coburn,
who has already edited his Philosophical Lectures, is now, as she says,
"working towards an edition of Coleridge's note books" [23], of which
there must be at least fifty-four, the highest number in her references.
Preparatory to this, she offers us a collection of over three hundred
numbered short notes and aphorisms, gathered partly from the unpub-
lished notebooks and marginalia, partly from prose writings not re-
printed in this century, such as The Friend and Aids to Reflection. It makes
excellent reading, and though the editing is unobtrusive, the selection
could not have been made without a complete and thoroughly well-
proportioned knowledge of Coleridge. For the student of English litera-
ture I should say it was practically indispensable, even though some of it
can be found in other Coleridge collections. By the time all of Coleridge
has been printed, we shall be unlikely ever to ask again, Why couldn't he
finish anything he started? If we have a question of such a type, it is more
likely to be, Why did a man who may well have had a profounder mind
than Goethe, and was at least intellectually nearly as versatile, have
failed so utterly to make Goethe's impact on modern culture?
Coleridge's thoughts obviously came to him much as the images of
Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner did, as a series of aphorisms crystal-
lizing from his reading. Because these aphorisms contained his essential
ideas, the process of translating them into a continuous prose narrative
was, in theory, a mechanical piece of copying, to be done at any leisure
time. In practice, of course, it turned out to be a deadly dull and painful
drudgery, in which he found that he had, so to speak, no gear low
enough to keep him moving. Hence he would assert that books were
finished because, in one sense, that was true, though in any sense that
would interest a publisher they had not been begun. His reputation has
suffered from the fact that literature has not yet developed anything
analogous to the sculptor's stonecutter.
Everyone is familiar with the way that he floundered through the
Biographia Literaria. He hung a donkey's carrot in front of himself in the
form of a great chapter on the imagination, to which the earlier chapters
were the prolegomena. Eventually the chapter arrived, "On the Imagina-
tion, or Esemplastic Power," followed by three portentous harrumphs in
English, Latin, and Greek quotations, and a preliminary flourish on the
history of philosophy. Then his will power digs its heels in and balks; his
pen trails off: he writes a long letter to himself advising himself to
Long Sequacious Notes 45

postpone his chapter until he has time to write a supercolossal work on

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

himself—remains in the centre, and everything radiates from it. The

Biogmphia Literaria starts with this form, and that is why it is the most
sustained of his writings. But it is too strongly attracted toward the
systematic treatise to remain in the tradition of, say, Montaigne, or even
of the Rabelais whom Coleridge, rather unexpectedly, admired. Carlyle's
grasp of romantic ideas was not as secure as Coleridge's, but Sartor
Resartus is a far better attempt at finding a form in which to expound
them.
A great achievement results from the union of a great mind with a
great idea: Coleridge had both, but some coagulating or—well—
esemplastic power seems to be lacking. The failure to find a prose form is
not the cause of this, but one result of it. The glib explanations of the
cause—opium, weak will, unhappy love, and the like—clearly will not
do, even if Coleridge himself offers them. I give my own guess for what it
is worth. Coleridge seems to have lacked the kind of detachment which
is usually the product of a comfortable egotism (he says of Milton, no.
131, "The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit"). Miss Coburn
is, rightly, impressed by Coleridge's many-sidedness, and has arranged
his aphorisms in various divisions: psychology, philosophy, science, public
affairs, linguistics, religion, and others. A certain remoteness from the
subject seems to be an emotional advantage to Coleridge. He never
claimed to be a man of affairs, and the political section is of an almost
unvarying decency and good sense. He never claimed to know much
about science and medicine, and he makes some fascinating speculations
about them.
But in fields where he was more expert, a panting desire to teach and
improve gives a bothered, blustery, self-conscious quality to his style. He
can hardly write about the moral side of religion for very long without
beginning to scream. In his literary criticism one never knows when he is
going to be seized by a moral spasm, and when he strikes a virtuous
pose, he can be more pachydermatous than Johnson at his worst. As
value judgments in criticism are largely based on moral metaphors, his
sense of literary values suffers accordingly. In his ceaseless denigration
of everything French he is little better than the culture-blatherers of our
own day who see everything in German thought from Luther to Nietzsche
as potential Nazism. His remarks about Gibbon are embarrassing; his
persistent undervaluing of Virgil is clearly derived from his moral disap-
proval of the Second Eclogue, and so on.
Miss Coburn's only editorial appearance in the text is in the headings
Long Sequacious Notes 47

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

Miss Coburn remarks, "The more one reads Coleridge the more im-
pressed one becomes with what can only be called a psychological ap-
proach to all human problems" [14], and goes on to suggest that the
whole shape of Coleridge's thought is psychological. Her opinion is
authoritative, and she doubtless has reams of evidence for her statement
in the notebooks of which I know nothing. But such an approach to
Coleridge seems to me to be bound up with the indefensible view that in
Coleridge, as in Blake, the central coordinating principle is the psycho-
logical one of imagination. The imagination is instrumental in Coleridge:
it is the power that unifies, but not the thing to be unified, the real
coordinating principle. The latter is the Logos, and every aspect of
Coleridge's thought is an application of this conception. It leads him, in
politics, to see human destiny as emanating from the Incarnation, in
contrast to the "psilanthropic" liberal humanism that starts by trying to
improve human nature.8 It leads him in religion to the same perspective,
and to a theism which makes the knowledge of nature depend on reason,
and reason on the presence of the Logos in the mind (see no. 99). It leads
him in philosophy to hail the "second triumphant Coming" of medieval
realism, after a reign of nominalism that ran through Bacon and Descartes
to the French philosophes (no. 99, and compare the powerful analysis of
Cartesianism in no. 52). It leads him in criticism to the conception of all
literature as contained within an order of words identical with one
personal Word—perhaps his greatest legacy to modern thought, and one
still unexplored. It leads him even in science to a type of speculation
aimed at restoring the system of analogies and correspondences on which
medieval symbolism was based (compare no. 185). And although
Coleridge's thought remains fragmentary, the fragments are priceless
not because they are imaginative but because they are logia. Just as Blake
urges us to see the world in a grain of sand, so in Coleridge we have to
see the vast ramifying body of the Logos in all the brilliant facets and
prisms of these aphorisms, as they come tumbling over one another in a
wonderful sweep of mental richness, like the drops in the Cumberland
waterfalls that he loved so much to watch.
The reader unacquainted with The Notebooks of Matthew Arnold should
be told immediately not to expect anything like Miss Coburn's "basket of
plucked plums and windfalls" [23], as she calls it. There is hardly any-
thing by Arnold in them; they are not strictly his notebooks but his
commonplace books, lists of sentences quoted from his reading. They are
in Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, and English, the first five being
Long Sequacious Notes 49

left untranslated "By the wishes of the members of Arnold's family and
of the publishers" [xiv], according to the preface. Such lists of adagia or
sententiae are a normal part of the training of a humanist scholar: they
help him to see his reading as a program of life, and focus in his mind the
best that has been thought in the way in which it has best been said. They
throw a light too on Arnold's stylistic habit of repeating a thematic
phrase all through a book. Along with the supplementary lists provided
by the editors at the end of the book, it forms a valuable guide to
Arnold's reading. Otherwise it is difficult to know what to say about this
book, which has been edited with great pains and erudition, and is
clearly the product of a touching personal devotion to Arnold. The long
series of sentences in Greek from the New Testament and Marcus Aurelius,
for instance, do not seem to illustrate the way Arnold read them as his
published writings do. One can, perhaps, build up a picture of a harassed
nineteenth-century contemplative, turning eagerly to Senancour and a
Kempis, but forced to listen also to Goethe bellowing into his other ear
about the vast and vague merit of getting something done. The conclu-
sion of the main part of the book, a series of quotations dated a week
after his death [see 438], has in it the melancholy withdrawing roar of the
sea of faith, leaving beached a number of shored fragments like those at
the end of The Waste Land:

When the dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest; and be comforted
for him when his spirit is departed from him. (Ecclesiasticus [38:23])

Ipse suas artes, sua munera, laetus Apollo

Augurium citharamque dabat celeresque sagittas.
Ille, ut depositi proferret fata parentis,
Scire potestates herbarum usumque medendi
Maluit, et mutas agitare inglorius artes. (Aeneid, 12>9

Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts

can exercise little effect. (Karl Marx)10

Si est gaudium in mundo, hoc utique possidet puri cordis homo.

(Imitation of Christ)11
 7
Lord Byron
1959

From FI, 168-89. Originally published as "George Gordon, Lord Byron," in

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

It is hardly possible to discuss Byron's poetry without telling the story of

his life in some detail. His father was Captain Jack Byron, a nephew of
the fifth Baron Byron, and a psychopathic spendthrift and sponger on
women who had run through the fortunes of two heiresses. The first, a
marchioness, he had acquired by divorce from her husband, and by her
he had a daughter, Augusta Byron, later Augusta Leigh, the poet's half-
sister. The second was a Scotswoman, Catherine Gordon of Gight, an
explosive, unbalanced, ill-educated but affectionate woman whose only
child was the poet. Byron was born in London on 22 January 1788, in
great poverty and distress as his mother was returning from France to
Scotland to get some relief from her rapacious spouse. He was handi-
capped at birth with a lameness that embittered his life (what was
wrong, and which leg was affected, are still uncertain points), and he
also had some glandular imbalance that forced him to a starvation diet in
order to avoid grotesque corpulence. The mother brought up her boy in
Aberdeen, where his religious training was naturally Presbyterian, giv-
Lord Byron 51

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

became the "Florence" of some of Byron's love poems, and on to Alba-

nia. Byron and his party were hospitably received by a local ruler, Ali
Pasha, who found Byron as attractive as most people did, besides having
political reasons for welcoming English visitors. Once, on suspicion that
was no more than gossip, he had had fifteen women kidnapped and
flung into the sea. Another woman narrowly escaped the same fate on a
charge of infidelity: this incident was used by Byron as the basis for his
tale The Giaour, and rumour maintained that Byron himself had been her
lover. Next came Greece and Asia Minor, where Byron duplicated
Leander's famous swim across the Hellespont, pondered over the sites of
Marathon and Troy, and deplored the activities of Lord Elgin, who was
engaged in hacking off the sculptures now called the Elgin Marbles from
the ruined Parthenon and transporting them to England. Byron's satire
on Lord Elgin's enterprise, The Curse of Minerva (i.e., Athene, the patron
of Athens), was not published until 1815. Meanwhile he had begun to
write a poem about his travels, Childe Harold, the first two cantos of the
poem we now have.
On his return to England in July, 1811, he went back to Newstead, the
estate of the Byrons, where he had established himself before he left, a
rambling "Gothic" mansion he was later forced to sell. His mother died
suddenly soon after his arrival, and the deaths of three close friends
occurred about the same time. The relations between Byron and his
mother had always been tense, especially after she had begun to see
some of his father's extravagance reappearing in him, but they were fond
enough of each other when they were not living together. Byron now
entered upon a phenomenally successful literary and social career. Childe
Harold, as he said, made him famous overnight, and it was followed by a
series of Oriental tales, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and
Lara, which appeared in 1813 and 1814. He wrote with great speed,
completing the thousand-odd lines of The Bride of Abydos in four days,completing the thousand-odd lines of The Bride of Abydos in four days,
and he seldom revised. "I am like the tyger," he said: "[Ilf I miss my first
Spring—I go growling back to my jungle. There is no second. I can't
correct; I can't, and I won't."1
When Byron said in Beppo:

I've half a mind to tumble down to prose,

But verse is more in fashion—so here goes, [st. 52]

the last statement, incredible as it may seem now, was true when he
wrote. Nobody would turn to poetry for stories nowadays, but in Byron's
Lord Byron 53

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

woman for him would be an earnest, humourless, rather inhibited fe-

male who would represent everything that was insular and respectable
in English society. His choice fell on Annabella Milbanke, heiress to a
title in her own right and niece of Lady Melbourne, and who otherwise
reminds one a little of Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. She was highly
intelligent and had many interests, including mathematics (Byron called
her the "Princess of Parallelograms," as in those days any woman with
such an interest could expect to be teased about it), but her mind ran to
rather vague maxims of general conduct, and to an interest in the moral
reformation of other people which boded ill for marriage to an unreformed
poet with an unusually concrete view of life.
The marriage lasted a year (January 1815 to January 1816) and then fell
apart. A separation (they were never divorced) was agreed upon, and
Lady Byron obtained custody of their daughter, Augusta Ada. Byron
appears to have gone somewhat berserk in his matrimonial bonds, and
his wife's doubts about his sanity were probably genuine. The situation
was aggravated by financial difficulties and by the fact that gossip had
begun to whisper about Byron and his half-sister Augusta. That there
were sexual relations between them seems obvious enough, though the
matter is hotly disputed, and the relevant documents have been carefully
removed from the prying eyes of scholars. The combination of this ex-
ceptionally delicious scandal with the matrimonial one, along with his
expression of some perverse pro-French political views, made things
unpleasant for Byron, and although social disapproval was perhaps not
as intense as he pretended or thought, he felt forced to leave England
once more. He set out for the Continent on 25 April 1816, never to return
to England.
He made his way to Geneva, where he met, by prearrangement, Shelley
and his wife Mary Godwin, along with her stepsister, Claire (or Jane)
Clairmont. The last named had visited Byron before his departure from
England and had thrown herself, as biographers say, at his head, the
result of this accurate if morally unguided missile being a daughter,
Allegra, whom Byron eventually placed in an Italian convent to be
brought up as a Roman Catholic, and who died there at the age of eight.
The association with Shelley, one of Byron's few intellectual friends, is
marked in the new poetry that Byron now began writing—the third
canto of Childe Harold; Manfred; the two remarkable poems Darkness and
The Dream; and the most poignant of his tales, The Prisoner of Chilian.
Shelley's reaction to Byron may be found in his poem Julian and Maddalo,
Lord Byron 55

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

have of Don Juan—sixteen cantos and a fragment of a seventeenth. Mean-

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

II

The main appeal of Byron's poetry is in the fact that it is Byron's. To read
Byron's poetry is to hear all about Byron's marital difficulties, flirtations,
love for Augusta, friendships, travels, and political and social views.
And Byron is a consistently interesting person to hear about, this being
why Byron, even at his worst of self-pity and egotism and blither and
doggerel, is still so incredibly readable. He proves what many critics
declare to be impossible, that a poem can make its primary impact as a
historical and biographical document. The critical problem involved
here is crucial to our understanding of not only Byron but literature as a
whole. Even when Byron's poetry is not objectively very good, it is still
important, because it is Byron's. But who was Byron to be so important?
Certainly not an exceptionally good or wise man. Byron is, strictly,
neither a great poet nor a great man who wrote poetry, but something in
between: a tremendous cultural force that was life and literature at once.
How he came to be this is what we must try to explain as we review the
four chief genres of his work: the lyrics, the tales (including Childe Harold),
the dramas, and the later satires.
Byron's lyrical poetry affords a good exercise in critical catholicity,
because it contains nothing that "modern" critics look for: no texture, no
ambiguities, no intellectualized ironies, no intensity, no vividness of
phrasing, the words and images being vague to the point of abstraction.
The poetry seems to be a plain man's poetry, making poetic emotion out
of the worn and blunted words of ordinary speech. Yet it is not written
Lord Byron 57

by a plain man: it is written, as Arnold said, with the careless ease of a

man of quality,4 and its most striking and obvious feature is its gentle-
manly amateurism. It is, to be sure, in an amateur tradition, being a
romantic, subjective, personal development of the kind of Courtly Love
poetry that was written by Tudor and Cavalier noblemen in earlier ages.
Byron's frequent statements in prefaces that this would be his last work
to trouble the public with, his offhand deprecating comments on his
work, his refusal to revise, all give a studious impression of a writer who
can take poetry or leave it alone. Byron held the view that lyrical poetry
was an expression of passion, and that passion was essentially fitful, and
he distrusted professional poets, who pretended to be able to summon
passion at will and sustain it indefinitely. Foe was later to hold much the
same view of poetry, but more consistently, for he drew the inference
that a continuous long poem was impossible,5 whereas Childe Harold has
the stretches of perfunctory, even slapdash writing that one would ex-
pect with such a theory.
In Byron's later lyrics, especially the Hebrew Melodies of 1815, where he
was able to add some of his Oriental technicolour to the Old Testament,
more positive qualities emerge, particularly in the rhythm. The Destruc-
tion of Sennacherib is a good reciter's piece (though not without its diffi-
culties, as Tom Sawyer discovered),6 and anticipates some of the later
experiments in verbal jazz by Poe and Swinburne. Some of the best of his
poems bear the title Stanzas for Music, and they have the flat conventional
diction appropriate to poems that depend partly on another art for their
sound:

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.7

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

Byron was equally conventional, because his personal experience con-

formed to a literary pattern. Byron's life imitated literature: this is where
his unique combination of the poetic and the personal begins.
Byron was naturally an extroverted person, fond of company, of travel,
of exploring new scenes, making new friends, falling in love with new
women. Like Keats, in a much more direct way, he wanted a life of
sensations rather than of thoughts. As he said: "I can not repent me (I
try very often) so much of any thing I have done—as of anything I have
left undone—alas! I have been but idle—and have the prospect of early
decay—without having seized every available instant of our pleasur-
able year."8 In the records of his journeys in his letters and Hobhouse's
diaries, it is the more introverted Hobhouse who dwells on the dirt and
the fleas, and it is Hobhouse too who does the serious studying and
takes an interest in archaeology.9 It is Byron who swims across the
Hellespont, learns the songs of Albanian mountaineers, makes friends
with a Moslem vizier, amuses himself with the boys in a monastery
school, flirts with Greek girls, and picks up a smattering of Armenian.
He was continually speculating about unknown sensations, such as
how it would feel to have committed a murder, and he had the nervous
dread of growing older that goes with the fear of slowing down in the
rhythm of experience. His writing depends heavily on experience; he
seldom describes any country that he has not seen, and for all his
solitary role he shows, especially in Don Juan, a novelist's sense of
established society.
It was an essential part of his strongly extroverted and empirical bent
that he should not be a systematic thinker, nor much interested in people
who were. He used his intelligence to make commonsense judgments on
specific situations, and found himself unable to believe anything that he
did not find confirmed in his own experience. In his numerous amours,
for example, the absence of any sense of sin was as unanswerable a fact
of his experience as the presence of it would have been to St. Augustine.
He thought of sexual love as a product of reflex and mechanical habit,
not of inner emotional drives. When he said, "I do not believe in the
existence of what is called Love,"10 we are probably to take him quite
literally. Nevertheless, his extroversion made him easily confused by
efforts at self-analysis, and he flew into rages when he was accused of
any lack of feeling. One reason why his marriage demoralized him so
was that it forced such efforts on him.
Now if we look into Byron's tales and Childe Harold we usually find as
Lord Byron 59

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

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,

An erring spirit from another hurled, [canto i, st. 28]

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

or more-sinned-against-than-sinning, role, but in either case misanthropic,

misunderstood, and solitary, with strong diabolical overtones. The devil
is a powerfully erotic figure, his horns and hoofs descending from the
ancient satyrs, and the various forms of sadism and masochism glanced
at in these thrillers helped to make them extremely popular, not least
with the female part of the reading public.
Childe Harold and the other lowering heroes of Byron's tales not only
popularized a conventional type of hero, but popularized Byron himself
in that role. For Byron was a dark and melancholy-looking lord with a
reputation for wickedness and free thought; he seemed to prefer the
Continent to England, and took a detached view of middle-class and
even Christian morality. He owned a gloomy Gothic castle and spent
evenings with revellers in it; he was pale and thin with his ferocious
dieting; he even had a lame foot. No wonder he said that strangers whom
he met at dinner "looked as if his Satanic Majesty had been among
them."11 The prince of darkness is a gentleman, and so was Byron.
Again, when a "nameless vice" was introduced into a Gothic thriller, as
part of the villain's or hero's background, it generally turned out, when
named, to be incest. This theme recurs all through Romantic literature,
being almost obsessive in Shelley as well as Byron, and here again a
literary convention turns up in Byron's life. Even a smaller detail, like the
disguising of the ex-Corsair's mistress in Lara as the pageboy Kaled,
recurs in Byron's liaison with Caroline Lamb, who looked well in a
page's costume.
Byron did not find the Byronic hero as enthralling as his public did,
and he made several efforts to detach his own character from Childe
Harold and his other heroes, with limited success. He says of Childe
Harold that he wanted to make him an objective study of gloomy misan-
thropy, hence he deliberately cut humour out of the poem in order to
preserve a unity of tone.12 But Byron's most distinctive talents did not
have full scope in this part of his work. Most of the Gothic thriller writers
were simple-minded popular novelists, but the same convention had
also been practised on a much higher level of literary intelligence. Apart
from Goethe's early Sorrows of Werther, an extraordinarily popular tale of
a solemn suicide, Addison in The Vision ofMirza and Johnson in Rasselas
had used the Oriental tale for serious literary purposes. Also, Horace
Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764) and William Beckford in Vathek
(1786) had written respectively a Gothic and an Oriental romance in
which melodrama and fantasy were shot through with flickering lights
Lord Byron 61

of irony. They were addressed to a reading public capable, to use mod-

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

Deep in yon cave Honorius long did dwell,

In hope to merit Heaven by making earth a Hell [canto i, st. 20]

he obviously has in mind the demure remark in the opening of Vathek:

"[H]e did not think . . . that it was necessary to make a hell of this world
to enjoy paradise in the next."13 But though Byron is the wittiest of
writers, the Byronic hero cannot manage much more than a gloomy
smile. Here, for instance, is Childe Harold on the "Lisbon Packet":

The sails were fill'd, and fair the light winds blew,
As glad to waft him from his native home . . .
And then, it may be, of his wish to roam
Repented he, but in his bosom slept
The silent thought, nor from his lips did come
One word of wail, whilst others sate and wept,
And to the reckless gales unmanly moaning k e p t . . . [canto i, st. 12]
62 On Romanticism

And here is Byron himself in the same situation:

Hobhouse muttering fearful curses,

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

The same inability to combine seriousness and humour is also to be

found in the plays, where one would expect more variety of tone. The
central character is usually the Byronic hero again, and again he seems to
cast a spell over the whole action. Byron recognized this deficiency in his
dramas, and to say that his plays were not intended for the stage would
be an understatement. Byron had a positive phobia of stage production,
and once tried to get an injunction issued to prevent a performance of
Marino Faliero. "I never risk rivalry in any thing," he wrote to Lady
Melbourne,14 and being directly dependent on the applause or booing of
a crowd (modern theatres give us no notion of what either form of
demonstration was like in Byron's day) was something he could not face,
even in absence. Besides, he had no professional sense, and nothing of
the capacity to write for an occasion that the practising dramatist needs.
Hence, with the exception of Werner, a lively and well-written melo-
drama based on a plot by somebody else, Byron's plays are so strictly
closet dramas that they differ little in structure from the tales.
The establishing of the Byronic hero was a major feat of characteriza-
tion, but Byron had little power of characterization apart from this fig-
ure. Like many brilliant talkers, he had not much ear for the rhythms and
nuances of other people's speech. Here again we find a close affinity
between Byron's personality and the conventions of his art. For instance,
in his life Byron seemed to have curiously little sense of women as
human beings. Except for Lady Melbourne, he addressed himself to the
female in them, took a hearty-male view of their intellectual interests,
and concentrated on the ritual of love-making with the devotion of what
an earlier age would have called a clerk of Venus. This impersonal and
ritualistic approach to women is reflected in his tales and plays, where
again it fits the convention of Byronic romance. It is difficult for a heroine
of strong character to make much headway against a gloomy misan-
Lord Byron 63

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

love of angels for human women recorded in some mysterious verses of

Genesis, and ends with the coming of Noah's flood. Angels who fall
through sexual love are obvious enough subjects for Byron, but Heaven
and Earth lacks the clear dramatic outline of Cain. All Byron's plays are
tragedies, and as Byron moved further away from the easy sentiment of
his earlier tales he moved toward intellectual paradox rather than trag-
edy. It is particularly in the final scenes that we observe Byron becoming
too self-conscious for the full emotional resonance of tragedy. In
Sardanapalus, for example, we see the downfall of a king who pursued
pleasure because he was too intelligent to want to keep his people plunged
into warfare. His intelligence is identified by his people with weakness,
and his pursuit of pleasure is inseparably attached to selfishness. What
we are left with, despite his final death on a funeral pyre, is less tragedy
than an irony of a kind that is very close to satire. Byron's creative
powers were clearly running in the direction of satire, and it was to satire
that he turned in his last and greatest period.
In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers Byron spoke of Wordsworth as
"that mild apostate from poetic rule" [1. 236]. This poem is early, but
Byron never altered his opinion of the Lake Poets as debasers of the
currency of English poetry. His own poetic idol was Pope, whom he
called "the moral poet of all civilization,"16 and he thought of himself as
continuing Pope's standards of clarity, craftsmanship, and contact with
real life against the introverted metaphysical mumblings of Coleridge
and Wordsworth. Byron's early models were standard, even old-fash-
ioned, later eighteenth-century models. English Bards is in the idiom of
eighteenth-century satire, less of Pope than of Pope's successors, Church-
ill, Wolcot, and Gifford, and the first part of Childe Harold, with its
pointless Spenserian stanza and its semi-facetious antique diction—for-
tunately soon dropped by Byron—is also an eighteenth-century stock
pattern. Byron was friendly with Shelley, but owes little to him techni-
cally, and in his letters he expressed a vociferous dislike for the poetry of
Keats (considerably toned down in the eleventh canto of Don Juan). His
literary friends, Sheridan, Rogers, Gifford, were of the older generation,
and even Tom Moore, his biographer and by far his closest friend among
his poetic contemporaries, preserved, like so many Irish writers, some-
thing of the eighteenth-century manner.
It was also an eighteenth-century model that gave him the lead for the
phase of poetry that began with Beppo in September 1817, and exploited
the possibilities of the eight-line (ottava rimd) stanza used there and in
Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment. Byron seems to have derived this
Lord Byron 65

stanza from a heroi-comical poem, Whistlecraft, by John Hookham Frere,

whom Byron had met in Spain, and which in its turn had owed some-
thing to the Italian romantic epics of the early Renaissance. Byron went
on to study the Italian poems, and translated the first canto of one of the
best of them, Pulci's tale of a good-natured giant, Morgante Maggiore. But
there was one feature in Frere that he could not have found in the
Italians, and that was the burlesque rhyme. In Italian the double rhyme is
normal, but it is a peculiarity of English that even double rhymes have to
be used with great caution in serious poetry, and that all obtrusive or
ingenious rhymes belong to comic verse. This is a major principle of the
wit of Hudibras before Byron's time, as of W.S. Gilbert and Ogden Nash
since, and without it the wit of Don Juan is hardly conceivable:

But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,

Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all? [canto i, st. 22]

Armed with this new technique, Byron was ready to tackle a narrative
satire, and in narrative satire he found not only a means of exploiting all
his best qualities, but of turning his very faults as a poet into virtues. He
could digress to his heart's content, for digression is part of the fun in
satire—one thinks of Tristram Shandy and the "Digression in Praise of
Digressions" in A Tale of a Tub. He could write doggerel, but doggerel in
satire is a sign of wit rather than incompetence. He could be serious if he
liked, for sudden changes of mood belong to the form, and he could
swing back to burlesque again as soon as he was bored with seriousness,
or thought the reader might be. It is particularly the final couplet that he
uses to undercut his own romantic Byronism, as in the description of
Daniel Boone in canto 8:

Crime came not near him—she is not the child

Of solitude; Health shrank not from him—for
Her home is in the rarely trodden wild,
Where if men seek her not, and death be more
Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled
By habit to what their own hearts abhor—
In cities caged. The present case in point I
Cite is, that Boon lived hunting up to ninety, [st. 62]

In the new flush of discovery, Byron wrote exultantly to his friend

Douglas Kinnaird: "[Don Juan] is the sublime of that there sort of writ-
66 On Romanticism

ing—it may be bawdy—but is it not good English?—it may be profli-

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

This narrative is not meant for narration,

But a mere airy and fantastic basis,
To build up common things with common places, [canto 14, st. 7]
Lord Byron 67

Its wit is constantly if not continuously brilliant, and Byron's contempt of

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

clearly the moral inferior of every human creature he drowns. In The

Vision of Judgmenttthe sycophantic Southey is contrasted with John Wilkes,
who fought King George hard all his life, but who, when encouraged to
go on persecuting him after death, merely says:

I don't like ripping up old stories, since

His conduct was but natural in a prince, [st. 70!

This is a decent human attitude, consequently it must be the least we can

expect from heaven, and so the poet takes leave of the poor old king
"practising the hundredth psalm" [st. 106].

Ill

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

I wish men to be free

As much from mobs as kings—from you as me. [canto 9, st. 35]

Among English readers the reputation of the Romantic and sentimental

Byron has not kept pace with his reputation as a satirist, but it would be
wrong to accept the assertion, so often made today, that Byron is of little
importance apart from his satires and letters. An immense amount of
imitation and use of Byron, conscious or unconscious, direct or indirect,
Lord Byron 69

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

. . . the publisher declares, in sooth,

Through needles' eyes it easier for the camel is
To pass, than those two cantos into families, [canto 4, st. 97]
70 On Romanticism

A more important barrier was raised by the lack of any sense of moral
involvement in Don Juan, already mentioned. With the British Empire
developing, and a greater number of poets and intellectuals issuing
stentorian calls to duty, such detachment seemed inadequate, except for
the fact that Byron himself took matters out of Don Juan's hands and
died for a cause in Greece. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle summed up the later
view of Byron as a poet who had gone through a gloomy stage of denial
and defiance, an "Everlasting No," had then moved into a "Centre of
Indifference," but had never gone on to the final "Everlasting Yea." For
this final stage, Carlyle recommended, "Close thy Byron; open thy
Goethe."21
However, Carlyle himself hardly succeeded in closing his Byron, as
when he went on to work out his conception of the Great Man what he
actually produced was a vulgarization of the Byronic hero. The author of
The Corsair would have raised a quizzical eyebrow at Carlyle's hero
journeying forward "escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the
Archdemons and Archangels."22 This tendency to underestimate Byron
without surpassing him has recurred more than once. Bernard Shaw, in
the preface to his Don Juan play, Man and Superman, dismissed Byron's
Don Juan as a mere "vagabond libertine."23 Yet Byron had certainly
anticipated Shaw's central idea, that woman takes the lead in sexual
relations and that Don Juan is consequently as much a victim as a
pursuer. No, Byron will not stay closed. It is a better idea to open Goethe,
and when we do we find a more liberal view of Byron. Goethe in fact was
fascinated by Byron, who dedicated Sardanapalus to him, and he referred
to him in the second part of Faust as Euphorion, a kind of Eros-figure
whose passion for liberty, if self-destructive, is also an acceptance of life
simply because it is there, and has nothing of the compulsion to justify
existence that is often close to a distrust of its worth.
We have not yet shaken off our nineteenth-century inhibitions about
Byron. A frequent twentieth-century jargon term for him is "immature,"
which endorses the Carlyle view that Byron is a poet to be outgrown.
One thinks of Yeats's penetrating remark that we are never satisfied with
the maturity of those whom we have admired in boyhood.24 Even those
who have not admired Byron in boyhood have gone through a good deal
of Byronism at that stage. There is certainly something youthful about
the Byronic hero, and for some reason we feel more defensive about
youth than about childhood, and more shamefaced about liking a poet
who has captured a youthful imagination. If we replace "youthful" with
Lord Byron 71

the loaded term "adolescent" we can see how deeply ingrained this
feeling is.
Among intellectuals the Southey type, who makes a few liberal ges-
tures in youth to quiet his conscience and then plunges into a rapturous
authoritarianism for the rest of his life, is much more common than the
Byron type, who continues to be baffled by unanswered questions and
simple anomalies, to make irresponsible jokes, to set his face against
society, to respect the authority of his own mood—in short, to retain the
rebellious or irreverent qualities of youth. Perhaps it is as dangerous to
eliminate the adolescent in us as it is to eliminate the child. In any case
the kind of poetic experience that Byronism represents should be ob-
tained young, and in Byron. It may later be absorbed into more complex
experiences, but to miss or renounce it is to impoverish whatever else we
may attain.
 8
Foreword to Romanticism Reconsidered
1963

From Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Insti-

tute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), v-ix.
Page references in the text are to this volume. Frye's piece introduces his own
essay, "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism" (no. 9
below), and three other essays: ''English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age,"
by M.H. Abrams; "The Fate of Pleasure: Wordsworth to Dostoevsky," by Lionel
Trilling; and "Romanticism Re-Examined," by Rene Wellek.

This book consists of four papers read at the English Institute in Septem-
ber, 1962, under my chairmanship. The four contributions are entirely
independent of one another, and whatever similarity there may be, such
as the fact that the first three papers all quote the same passage from
Wordsworth, is pure accident. Consequently the resemblances among
them, and the unity which they present, are all the more significant.
The anti-Romantic movement in criticism, which in Britain and America
followed the Hulme-Eliot-Pound broadsides of the early 19205, is now
over and done with/ and criticism has got its sense of literary tradition
properly in focus again. That this movement should ever have had so
much authority is an impressive negative tribute to the coherence of
critical theory in our time. There are a few references to the movement in
my own paper, which is intended to serve as a general introduction both
to the topic and to the three papers that follow. But it was not the
influence of this movement which was the main reason for holding a
session on the subject of "Romanticism Reconsidered" at this date. The
main reason was to examine the degree of real content which the term
"Romanticism" has. It is a datum of literary experience that when we
cross the divide of 1798 we find ourselves in a different kind of poetic
Foreword to Romanticism Reconsidered 73

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

perversion of puritanism, seeking the principle of its own being in a pure

detachment which rebuffs everything that it might come to depend on or
be indebted to, especially pleasure. The undying ego, whose rasping,
querulous monologue enters literature with Dostoevsky's Notes from
Underground, is a parody of what used to be called an immortal soul; and
pleasure, so often thought of as a threat to that soul, turns out to be the
most dangerous enemy of the ego, so that Wordsworth's conception of
pleasure as "the naked and native dignity of man"4 is rejected but not
refuted. Many features of Mr. Trilling's eloquent paper indicate that
contemporary culture is post-Romantic, in other words still a part of
what began with the Romantic movement.
Both Mr. Abrams's paper and Mr. Trilling's deal with central and
essential aspects of the Romantic movement. Still, they could conceiv-
ably have been written without using the term "Romanticism." The
question still remains, Is this term a necessary or functional one for
studies of what happened between the fall of the Bastille and our own
day? The question cannot be answered until it has been properly asked.
Poets work with images rather than concepts; hence an historical literary
term, such as "Romanticism," really belongs to the history of imagery
rather than to the history of ideas in the sense of concepts or theses. Mr.
Wellek's exhaustive and erudite survey indicates that attempts to define
the term "Romanticism" have been successful in proportion as they have
moved away from the dead end of Lovejoy's conceptual approach, to-
ward studying what the Romantics did with images and symbols, in
their effort "to identify subject and object, to reconcile man and nature,
consciousness and unconsciousness by poetry" [133].
It is a hazardous enterprise to introduce three papers that one has not
read, and my attempt at doing so was perhaps more fortunate than it
deserved to be. Their main theses are to some extent adumbrated in my
introduction. That Romanticism is primarily a revolution in poetic im-
agery; that it is not only a revolution but inherently revolutionary, and
enables poets to articulate a revolutionary age; that as the noumenal
world of Fichte turns into the sinister world-as-will of Schopenhauer,
Romanticism's drunken boat is tossed from ecstasy to ironic despair—
these are the chief points I make, and they are the ones so fully docu-
mented and analysed later. At the very least, the editor can say with
some confidence that there is enough which is both new and important
in the present book to encourage the reader to reconsider Romanticism
for himself.
 9
The Drunken Boat:
The Revolutionary Element in
Romanticism
1963

From StS, 200-17. Originally published in Romanticism Reconsidered: Se-

lected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1963), 1-12. For Frye's comments on this paper,
see no. 8, above. Expanded into chapter lofA Study of English Romanticism.

Any such conception as "Romanticism" is at one or more removes from

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

Third, even in its application to the creative arts "Romanticism" is a

selective term, more selective even than "Baroque" appears to be becom-
ing. We think of it as including Keats, but not, on the whole, Crabbe;
Scott, but not, in general, Jane Austen; Wordsworth, but not, on any
account, James Mill. As generally used, "Romantic" is contrasted with
two other terms, "Classical" and "realistic." Neither contrast seems satis-
factory. We could hardly call Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads
antirealistic, or ignore the fact that Shelley was a better Classical scholar
than, say, Dryden, who, according to Samuel Johnson, translated the first
book of the Iliad without knowing what was in the second. Still, the
pairings exist, and we shall have to examine them. And yet, fourth,
though selective, Romanticism is not a voluntary category. It does not see
Byron as the successor to Pope, or Wordsworth as the successor to
Milton, which would have been acceptable enough to both poets: it
associates Byron and Wordsworth, to their mutual disgust, with each
other.
Accepting all this, we must also avoid the two traps in the phrase
"history of ideas." First, an idea, as such, is independent of time and can
be argued about; an historical event is not and cannot be. If Romanticism
is in part an historical event, as it clearly is, then to say with I.E. Hulme,
"I object even to the best of the Romantics"2 is much like saying, "I object
to even the best battles of the Napoleonic War." Most general value
judgments on Romanticism as a whole are rationalizations of an agree-
ment or disagreement with some belief of which Romantic poetry is
supposed to form the objective correlative.
This latter is the second or Hegelian trap in the history of ideas, which
we fall into when we assume that around 1790 or earlier some kind of
thesis arose in history and embodied itself in the Romantic movement.
Such an assumption leads us to examining all the cultural products we
call Romantic as allegories of that thesis. Theses have a way of disagree-
ing with each other, and if we try to think of Romanticism as some kind
of single "idea," all we can do with it is what Lovejoy did: break it down
into a number of contradictory ideas with nothing significant in com-
mon.3 In literature, and more particularly poetry, ideas are subordinated
to imagery, to a language more "simple, sensuous, and passionate" than
the language of philosophy.4 Hence it may be possible for two poets to be
related by common qualities of imagery even when they do not agree on
a single thesis in religion, politics, or the theory of art itself.
The history of imagery, unlike the history of ideas, appears to be for
The Drunken Boat 77

the most part a domain where, in the words of a fictional Canadian

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

problem was more complex, and Milton's heaven and hell are outside
the cosmos, in a kind of absolute up and down. After Milton comes
Newton, and after Newton ups and downs become hopelessly confused.
What I see first of all in Romanticism is the effect of a profound change,
not primarily in belief, but in the spatial projection of reality. This in turn
leads to a different localizing of the various levels of that reality. Such a
change in the localizing of images is bound to be accompanied by, or
even cause, changes in belief and attitude, and changes of this latter sort
are exhibited by the Romantic poets. But the change itself is not in belief
or attitude, and may be found in, or at least affecting, poets of a great
variety of beliefs.
In the earlier framework, the disorder of sin, death, and corruption
was restricted to the sublunary world of four elements. Above the moon
was all that was left of nature as God had originally planned it before the
fall. The planets, with their angel-guided spheres, are images of a di-
vinely sanctioned order of nature which is also the true home of man.
Hence there was no poetic incongruity in Dante's locating his Paradise in
the planetary spheres, nor in Milton's associating the music of the spheres
with the song of the angels in the Nativity Ode, nor in using the same
word "heaven" for both the kingdom of God and the sky. A post-
Newtonian poet has to think of gravitation and the solar system. New-
ton, Miss Nicolson has reminded us, demanded the muse,6 but the
appropriate muse was Urania, and Urania had already been requested
by Milton to descend to a safer position on earth for the second half of
Paradise Lost.
Let us turn to Blake's poem Europe, engraved in 1794. Europe surveys
the history of the Western world from the birth of Christ to the beginning
of the French Revolution, and in its opening lines parodies the Nativity
Ode. For Blake all the deities associated with the planets and the starry
skies, of whom the chief is Enitharmon, the Queen of Heaven, are projec-
tions of a human will to tyranny, rationalized as eternal necessity and
order. Christianity, according to this poem, had not abolished but con-
firmed the natural religion in the Classical culture which had deified the
star-gods. The doom of tyranny is sealed by the French Revolution, and
the angel who blows the last trumpet as the sign of the final awakening
of liberty is Isaac Newton. The frontispiece of Europe is the famous vision
of the sky-god Urizen generally called the Ancient of Days, holding a
compass in his left hand, and this picture is closely related to Blake's
The Drunken Boat 79

portrait of Newton, similarly preoccupied with a compass and oblivious

of the heavens he is supposed to be studying.
Blake's view, in short, is that the universe of modern astronomy, as
revealed in Newton, exhibits only a blind, mechanical, subhuman order,
not the personal presence of a deity. Newton himself tended to think of
God still as "up there"; but what was up there, according to Blake, is only
a set of interlocking geometrical diagrams, and God, Blake says, is not a
mathematical diagram. Newtonism leads to what for Blake are intellec-
tual errors, such as a sense of the superiority of abstractions to actual
things and the notion that the real world is a measurable but invisible
world of primary qualities. But Blake's main point is that admiring the
mechanisms of the sky leads to establishing human life in mechanical
patterns too. In other words, Blake's myth of Urizen is a fuller and more
sophisticated version of the myth of Frankenstein.
Blake's evil, sinister, or merely complacent sky-gods—Urizen,
Nobodaddy, Enitharmon, Satan—remind us of similar beings in other
Romantics: Shelley's Jupiter, Byron's Arimanes, the Lord in the Prologue
to Faust. They in their turn beget later Romantic gods and goddesses,
such as Baudelaire's female "froide majeste" [icy majestyl,7 Hardy's
Immanent Will, or the God of Housman's The chestnut casts his flambeaux,
who is a brute and blackguard because he is a sky-god in control of the
weather, and sends his rain on the just and on the unjust. The association
of sinister or unconscious mechanism with what we now call outer space
is a commonplace of popular literature today which is a Romantic inher-
itance. Perhaps Orwell's 1984, a vision of a mechanical tyranny informed
by the shadow of a Big Brother who can never die, is the terminal point of
a development of imagery that began with Blake's Ancient of Days. Not
every poet, naturally, associates mechanism with the movements of the
stars as Blake does, or sees it as a human imitation of the wrong kind of
divine creativity. But the contrast between the mechanical and the or-
ganic is deeply rooted in Romantic thinking, and the tendency is to
associate the mechanical with ordinary consciousness, as we see in the
account of the associative fancy in Coleridge's Biographia or of discursive
thought in Shelley's Defence of Poetry. This is in striking contrast to the
Cartesian tradition, where the mechanical is, of course, associated with
the subconscious. The mechanical being characteristic of ordinary expe-
rience, it is found particularly in the world "outside"; the superior or
organic world is consequently "inside," and although it is still called
8o On Romanticism

superior or higher, the natural metaphorical direction of the inside world

is downward, into the profounder depths of consciousness.
If a Romantic poet, therefore, wishes to write of God, he has more
difficulty in finding a place to put him than Dante or even Milton had,
and on the whole he prefers to do without a place, or finds "within"
metaphors more reassuring than "up there" metaphors. When
Wordsworth speaks, in The Prelude and elsewhere, of feeling the pres-
ence of deity through a sense of interpenetration of the human mind and
natural powers, one feels that his huge and mighty forms, like the spirits
of Yeats,8 have come to bring him the right metaphors for his poetry. In
the second book of The Excursion we have a remarkable vision of what
has been called the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers,
cast in the form of an ascent up a mountain, where the city is seen at the
top.9 The symbolism, I think, is modelled on the vision of Cleopolis in the
first book of The Faerie Queene, and its technique is admirably controlled
and precise. Yet surely this is not the real Wordsworth. The spirits have
brought him the wrong metaphors; metaphors that Spenser used with
full imaginative conviction, but which affect only the surface of
Wordsworth's mind.
The second level of the older construct was the world of original
human nature, now a lost paradise or golden age. It is conceived as a
better and more appropriate home for man than his present environ-
ment, whether man can regain it or not. But in the older construct this
world was ordinarily not thought of as human in origin or conception.
Adam awoke in a garden not of his planting, in a fresh-air suburb of the
City of God, and when the descendants of Cain began to build cities on
earth, they were building to models already existing in both heaven and
hell. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the agencies which helped
to raise man from the physical to the human world were such things as
the sacraments of religion, the moral law, and the habit of virtue, none of
them strictly human inventions. These were the safe and unquestioned
agencies, the genuinely educational media. Whether the human arts of
poetry and painting and music were genuinely educational in this sense
could be and was disputed or denied; and the poets themselves, when
they wrote apologies for poetry, seldom claimed equality with religion
or law, beyond pointing out that the earliest major poets were prophets
and lawgivers.
For the modern mind there are two poles of mental activity. One may
be described as sense, by which I mean the recognition of what is pre-
The Drunken Boat 81

sented by experience: the empirical, observant habit of mind in which,

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

Hence in Romantic poetry the emphasis is not on what we have called

sense, but on the constructive power of the mind, where reality is brought
into being by experience. There is a contrast in popular speech between
the romantic and the realist, where the word "romantic" implies a senti-
mentalized or rose-coloured view of reality. This vulgar sense of the
word may throw some light on the intensity with which the Romantic
poets sought to defy external reality by creating a uniformity of tone and
mood. The establishing of this uniformity, and the careful excluding of
anything that would dispel it, is one of the constant and typical features
of the best Romantic poetry, though we may call it a dissociation of
sensibility if we happen not to like it.14 Such a poetic technique is,
psychologically, akin to magic, which also aims at bringing spiritual
forces into reality through concentration on a certain type of experience.
Such words as "charm" or "spell" suggest uniformity of mood as well as
a magician's repertoire. Historically and generically, it is akin to ro-
mance, with its effort to maintain a self-consistent idealized world with-
out the intrusions of realism or irony.
For these reasons Romanticism is difficult to adapt to the novel, which
demands an empirical and observant attitude; its contribution to prose
fiction is rather, appropriately enough, a form of romance. In the ro-
mance the characters tend to become psychological projections, and the
setting a period in a past just remote enough to be recreated rather than
empirically studied. We think of Scott as within the Romantic move-
ment; Jane Austen as related to it chiefly by her parodies of the kind of
sensibility that tries to live in a self-created world instead of adapting to
the one that is there. Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, Catherine in
Northanger Abbey, and, of course, everybody in Love and Freindship, are
examples. Crabbe's naturalistic manifesto in the opening of The Village
expresses an attitude which in itself is not far from Wordsworth's. But
Crabbe is a metrical novelist in a way that Wordsworth is not. The
soldier in The Prelude and the leech-gatherer in Resolution and Independ-
ence are purely romantic characters in the sense just given of psychologi-
cal projections: that is, they become temporary or epiphanic myths. We
should also notice that the internalizing of reality in Romanticism proper
develops a contrast between it and a contemporary realism which de-
scends from the pre-Romantic tradition, but acquires a more purely
empirical attitude to the external world.
The third level of the older construct was the physical world, theologi-
cally fallen, which man is born into, but which is not the real world of
The Drunken Boat 83

human nature. Man's primary attitude to external physical nature is thus

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

the association of natural force, creative power, and revolutionary out-

break. As Carlyle says, in an uncharacteristically cautious assessment of
Napoleon, "What Napoleon did will in the long-run amount to what he
did justly, what Nature with her laws will sanction."17
Further, the Romantic poet is a part of a total process, engaged with
and united to a creative power greater than his own because it includes
his own. This greater creative power has a relation to him which we may
call, adapting a term of Blake's, his vehicular form. The sense of identity
with a larger power of creative energy meets us everywhere in Romantic
culture, I think even in the crowded excited canvases of Delacroix and
the tremendous will-to-power finales of Beethoven. The symbolism of it
in literature has been too thoroughly studied in Professor Abrams's The
Mirror and The Lamp and in Professor Wasserman's The Subtler Language
for me to add more than a footnote or two at this point. Sometimes the
greater power of this vehicular form is a rushing wind, as in Shelley's
Ode and in the figure of the "correspondent breeze"18 studied by Profes-
sor Abrams. The image of the Aeolian harp, or lyre—Romantic poets are
apt to be sketchy in their orchestration—belongs here. Sometimes it is a
boat driven by a breeze or current, or by more efficient magical forces in
The Ancient Mariner. This image occurs so often in Shelley that it has
helped to suggest my title; the introduction to Wordsworth's Peter Bell
has a flying-boat closely associated with the moon. Those poems of
Wordsworth in which we feel driven along by a propelling metrical
energy—Peter Bell, The Idiot Boy, The Waggoner, and others—seem to me
to be among Wordsworth's most central poems. Sometimes the vehicu-
lar form is a heightened state of consciousness in which we feel that we
are greater than we know, or an intense feeling of communion, as in the
sacramental corn-and-wine images of the great Keats odes.
The sense of unity with a greater power is surely one of the reasons
why so much of the best Romantic poetry is mythopoeic. The myth is
typically the story of the god, whose form and character are human, but
who is also a sun-god or tree-god or ocean-god. It identifies the human
with the nonhuman world, an identification which is also one of the
major functions of poetry itself. Coleridge makes it a part of the primary
as well as the secondary imagination. "This I call I," he says in the
Notebooks, "identifying the Percipient & the Perceived."19 The "Giant
Forms" of Blake's Prophecies are states of being and feeling in which we
have our own being and feeling; the huge and mighty forms of
Wordsworth's Prelude have similar affinities;20 even the dreams of De
The Drunken Boat 85

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

A power, a thirst, a knowledge . . . below

All thoughts, like light beyond the atmosphere, [canto 6, st. 30]

The Kubla Khan geography of caves and underground streams haunts all
Shelley's language about creative processes: in Speculations on Metaphys-
ics, for instance, he says: "But thought can with difficulty visit the intri-
cate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose
86 On Romanticism

rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards.... The caverns of the mind
are obscure, and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautifully bright
indeed, but shining not beyond their portals."23
In pre-Romantic poetry heaven is the order of grace, and grace is
normally thought of as descending from above into the soul. In the
Romantic construct there is a centre where inward and outward manifes-
tations of a common motion and spirit are unified, where the ego is
identified as itself because it is also identified with something which is
not itself. In Blake this world at the deep centre is Jerusalem, the City of
God that mankind, or Albion, has sought all through history without
success because he has been looking in the wrong direction, outside.24
Jerusalem is also the Garden of Eden where the Holy Word walked
among the ancient trees; Eden in the unfallen world would be the same
place as England's green and pleasant land where Christ also walked;
and England's green and pleasant land is also Atlantis, the sunken island
kingdom which we can rediscover by draining the "Sea of Time and
Space"25 off the top of the mind. In Prometheus Unbound Atlantis reap-
pears when Prometheus is liberated, and the one great flash of vision
which is all that is left to us of Wordsworth's Recluse uses the same
imagery:

Paradise, and groves

Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was ? . . .
—I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation. [11. 800-4, 809-11]

The Atlantis theme is in many other Romantic myths: in the Glaucus

episode of Endymion and in De Quincey's Savannah-la-Mar, which speaks
of "human life still subsisting in submarine asylums sacred from the
storms that torment our upper air."26 The theme of land reclaimed
from the ocean plays also a somewhat curious role in Goethe's Faust.
We find the same imagery in later writers who continue the Romantic
tradition, such as D.H. Lawrence in the Song of a Man Who Has Come
Through:
The Drunken Boat 87

If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge

Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we
shall find the Hesperides.27

In The Pilgrim's Progress, Ignorance is sent to hell from the very gates of
heaven. The inference seems to be that only Ignorance knows the precise
location of both kingdoms. For knowledge, and still more for imagina-
tion, the journey within to the happy island garden or the city of light is a
perilous quest, equally likely to terminate in the blasted ruin of Byron's
Darkness. In many Romantic poems, including Keats's nightingale ode, it
is suggested that the final identification of and with reality may be or at
least include death. The suggestion that death may lead to the highest
knowledge, dropped by Lucifer in Byron's Cain, haunts Shelley continu-
ally. A famous passage in Prometheus Unbound associates the worlds of
creation and death in some inner area, where Zoroaster meets his image
in a garden [11. 191-202]. Just as the sun is the means but not a tolerable
object of sight, so the attempt to turn around and see the source of one's
vision may be destructive, as the Lady of Shalott found when she turned
away from trie mirror. Thus the world of the deep interior in Romantic
poetry is morally ambivalent, retaining some of the demonic qualities
that the corresponding pre-Romantic lowest level had.
This sense that the source of genius is beyond good and evil, that the
possession of genius may be a curse, that the only real knowledge given
to Adam in Paradise, however disastrous, came to him from the devil—
all this is part of the contribution of Byron to modern sensibility, and part
of the irrevocable change that he made in it. Of his Lara Byron says:

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,

An erring spirit from another hurl'd;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
By choice the perils he by chance escaped;
But 'scaped in vain, for in their memory yet
His mind would half exult and half regret...
But haughty still and loth himself to blame,
He call'd on Nature's self to share the shame,
And charged all faults upon the fleshly form
She gave to clog the soul, and feast the worm;
88 On Romanticism

Till he at last confounded good and ill,

And half mistook for fate the acts of will, [canto i, st. i8]28

It would be wrong to regard this as Byronic hokum, for the wording is

very precise. Lara looks demonic to a nervous and conforming society, as
the dragon does to the tame villatic fowl in Milton. But there is a genu-
inely demonic quality in him which arises from his being nearer than
other men to the unity of subjective and objective worlds. To be in such a
place might make a poet more creative; it makes other types of superior
beings, including Lara, more destructive.
We said earlier that a Romantic poet's political views would depend
partly on whether he saw his inner society as concealed by or as mani-
fested in actual society. A Romantic poet's moral attitude depends on a
similar ambivalence in the conception of nature. Nature to Wordsworth
is a mother-goddess who teaches the soul serenity and joy, and never
betrays the heart that loves her; to the Marquis de Sade nature is the
source of all the perverse pleasures that an earlier age had classified as
"unnatural." For Wordsworth the reality of Nature is manifested by its
reflection of moral values; for de Sade the reality is concealed by that
reflection. It is this ambivalent sense (for it is ambivalent, and not simply
ambiguous) of appearance as at the same time revealing and concealing
reality, as clothes simultaneously reveal and conceal the naked body,
that makes Sartor Resartus so central a document of the Romantic move-
ment. We spoke of Wordsworth's Nature as a mother goddess, and her
psychological descent from mother-figures is clearly traced in The Prel-
ude. The corn-goddess in Keats's To Autumn, the parallel figure identified
with Ruth in the Ode to a Nightingale, the still unravished bride of the
Grecian urn, Psyche, even the veiled Melancholy, are all emblems of a
revealed Nature. Elusive nymphs or teasing and mocking female figures
who refuse to take definite form, like the figure in Alastor or Blake's
"female will" types; terrible and sinister white goddesses like La Belle
Dame Sans Merci, or females associated with something forbidden or
demonic, like the sister-lovers of Byron and Shelley, belong to the con-
cealed aspect.
For Wordsworth, who still has a good deal of the pre-Romantic sense
of nature as an objective order, nature is a landscape nature, and from it,
as in Baudelaire's Correspondances, mysterious oracles seep into the mind
through eye or ear, even a bird with so predictable a song as the cuckoo
being an oracular wandering voice. This landscape is a veil dropped over
The Drunken Boat 89

the naked nature red in tooth and claw29 which haunted a later genera-
tion. Even the episode of the dog and the hedgehog in the Prelude is told
from the point of view of the dog. But the more pessimistic, and perhaps
more realistic, conception of nature in which it can be a source of evil or
suffering as well as good is the one that gains ascendancy in the later
period of Romanticism, which extends to our own day.
The major constructs which our own culture has inherited from its
Romantic ancestry are also of the "drunken boat" shape, but represent a
later and a different conception of it from the "vehicular form" described
above. Here the boat is usually in the position of Noah's ark, a fragile
container of sensitive and imaginative values threatened by a chaotic
and unconscious power below it. In Schopenhauer, the world as idea
rides precariously on top of a "world as will" which engulfs practically
the whole of existence in its moral indifference. In Darwin, who readily
combines with Schopenhauer, as the later work of Hardy illustrates,
consciousness and morality are accidental sports from a ruthlessly com-
petitive evolutionary force. In Freud, who has noted the resemblance of
his mythical structure to Schopenhauer's, the conscious ego struggles to
keep afloat on a sea of libidinous impulse. In Kierkegaard, all the "higher"
impulses of fallen man pitch and roll on the surface of a huge and
shapeless "dread." In some versions of this construct the antithesis of the
symbol of consciousness and the destructive element in which it is im-
mersed can be overcome or transcended: there is an Atlantis under the
sea which becomes an Ararat for the beleaguered boat to rest on.30
I give an example from Auden, partly to show that the Romantic
structures of symbolism are still ours. In Freud, when the conscious mind
feels threatened by the subconscious, it tries to repress it, and so devel-
ops a neurosis. In Marxism, the liberal elements in an ascendant class,
when they feel threatened by a revolutionary situation, develop a police
state. In both cases the effort is to intensify the antithesis between the
two, but this effort is mistaken, and when the barriers are broken down
we reach the balanced mind and the classless society respectively. For the
Time Being develops a religious construct out of Kierkegaard on the
analogy of those of Marx and Freud. The liberal or rational elements
represented by Herod feel threatened by the revival of superstition in the
Incarnation, and try to repress it. Their failure means that the effort to
come to terms with a nature outside the mind, the primary effort of
reason, has to be abandoned, and this enables the paradise or divine
presence which is locked up inside the human mind to manifest itself
9O On Romanticism

after the reason has searched the whole of objective nature in vain to find
it. The attitude is that of a relatively orthodox Christianity; the imagery
and the structure of symbolism is that of Prometheus Unbound and The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
In Romanticism proper a prominent place in sense experience is given
to the ear, an excellent receiver of oracles but poor in locating things
accurately in space. This latter power, which is primarily visual, is asso-
ciated with the fancy in Wordsworth's 1815 preface, and given the subor-
dinate position appropriate to fancy. In later poetry, beginning with
symbolisme in France, when there is a good deal of reaction against earlier
Romanticism, more emphasis is thrown on vision. In Rimbaud, though
his Bateau ivre has given me my title, the poet is to se faire voyant,^ the
illuminations are thought of pictorially; even the vowels must be visually
coloured. Such an emphasis has nothing to do with the pre-Romantic
sense of an objective structure in nature: on the contrary, the purpose of it
is to intensify the Romantic sense of oracular significance into a kind of
autohypnosis. The association of autohypnosis and the visual sense is
discussed in Marshall McLuhan's book, The Gutenberg Galaxy?2 Such an
emphasis leads to a technique of fragmentation. Foe's attack on the long
poem is not a Romantic but an anti-Romantic manifesto, as the direction
of its influence indicates. The tradition of symbolisme is present in imagism,
where the primacy of visual values is so strongly stated in theory and so
cheerfully ignored in practice, in Pound's emphasis on the spatial juxta-
posing of metaphor, in Eliot's insistence on the superiority of poets who
present the "clear visual images" of Dante.33 T.E. Hulme's attack on the
Romantic tradition is consistent in preferring fancy to imagination and in
stressing the objectivity of the nature to be imitated; less so in his primi-
tivism and his use of Bergson.34 The technique of fragmentation is per-
haps intended to reach its limit in Pound's publication of the complete
poetical works of Hulme on a single page.35
As I have tried to indicate by my reference to Auden, what this anti-
Romantic movement did not do was to create a third framework of
imagery. Nor did it return to the older construct, though Eliot, by stick-
ing closely to Dante and by deprecating the importance of the prophetic
element in art, gives some illusion of doing so. The charge of subjectivity,
brought against the Romantics by Arnold36 and often repeated later,
assumes that objectivity is a higher attribute of poetry, but this is itself a
Romantic conception, and came into English criticism with Coleridge.
Anti-Romanticism, in short, had no resources for becoming anything
The Drunken Boat 91

more than a post-Romantic movement. The first phase of the reconsid-

eration of Romanticism is to understand its continuity with modern
literature. All we need do to complete it is to examine Romanticism by its
own standards and canons. We should not look for precision where
vagueness is wanted; not extol the virtues of constipation when the
Romantics were exuberant; not insist on visual values when the poet
listens darkling to a nightingale. Then, perhaps, we may see in Romanti-
cism also the quality that Melville found in Greek architecture:

Not innovating wilfulness,

But reverence for the Archetype.34
 10
A Study of English Romanticism
1968

From A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968).

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

Preface

This book is an attempt to introduce the reader to the conception of

"Romanticism," more particularly as found in English literature. The
first chapter grows out of an earlier essay, to be found in Romanticism
Reconsidered (1963), which treated the Romantic movement as primarily
a change in the language of poetic mythology, brought about by various
historical and cultural forces. This thesis is then illustrated by critical
discussions of three major works of Romantic English literature: Beddoes's
Death's Jest-Book, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Keats's Endymion.
Any reader who finds the approach to these poets somewhat peripheral
is asked to remember that this is not a book on Beddoes or Keats or
Shelley, but a book on Romanticism as illustrated by some of their works.
There is a good deal of excellent and central criticism available on the
major Romantic poets, and the present book makes no effort to compete
with it, much less replace any of it.
The Romantic Myth 93

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

N.F.
Toronto, 1967

The Romantic Myth

The word "Romanticism" is a cultural term, and partly a historical one as

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

phorical nature of the god who is both a person and a class of natural
objects makes myth, rather than folk tale or legend, the direct ancestor of
literature. It also gives to myth, in primitive cultures, a particular impor-
tance in establishing a society's views of its own origin, including the
reasons for its divisions into different classes or groups, its legal sanc-
tions, and its prescribed rituals. The canonical significance which distin-
guishes the myth from less important fictions also causes myths to form
large unified structures, or mythologies, which tend to become encyclo-
pedic in extent, covering all aspects of a society's vision of its situation
and destiny. As civilization develops, mythology divides into two main
aspects. Its patterns of stories and images, attracting and absorbing those
of legend and folk tale, become the fictions and metaphors of literature.
At the same time, there are also germs of conceptual ideas in myths
which extend into theology, philosophy, political theory, and, in earlier
ages, science, and become informing principles there as well.
There are thus two structures in a culture which descend from mythol-
ogy: one is literature, which inherits the fictional and metaphorical pat-
terns of mythology, and the other is a body of integrating or cohering
ideas, also mainly fictional, in religion, philosophy, and kindred disci-
plines. At any given period of literature the conventions of literature are
enclosed within a total mythological structure, which may not be explic-
itly known to anyone, but is nevertheless present as a shaping principle.
In every age, the most ambitious literary structures, such as the works of
Dante, Milton, Victor Hugo, or Joyce, tend to become cosmological, and
hence nearest to suggesting what the total structure is like. Such
cosmological works have conceptual forms analogous to and roughly
contemporary with them: thus Dante's Commedia has a conceptual anal-
ogy in the summa form of St. Thomas. In Western Europe an encyclopedic
myth, derived mainly from the Bible, dominated both the literary and
the philosophical traditions for centuries. I see Romanticism as the begin-
ning of the first major change in this pattern of mythology, and as fully
comprehensible only when seen as such.
The starting point of most mythologies is a creation myth, the story of
how things came to be. This myth has normally two parts, a cosmological
myth of the origin of the world, and a proto-historical myth of the origin
of man. It is probable that the earliest creation myths were sexual and
cyclical in shape, assuming that man and the world simply came into
existence in the same way that babies are born and seeds grow in spring.
The etymology of the Latin natura and the Greek physis connects them
The Romantic Myth 95

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

Paradiso is symbolized by the heavenly bodies, and the starry spheres,

with their unheard harmonies, form the central image of nature as God
had originally designed it, before the lower part of it "fell" with man into
an unsymmetrical chaos. God's work in nature was most clearly re-
vealed in what Sir Thomas Browne calls "the mysticall Mathematicks of
the City of Heaven,"2 and except in the most refined and sophisticated
aspects of philosophy, his connection with the sky was considerably
more than a poetic metaphor.
Occasionally one glimpses what may be traces of an older matriarchal
mythology, partly outlawed and partly absorbed into its successor. Chris-
tianity replaced the earth-goddess and her dying god with a Queen of
Heaven receiving her crown from the son whom she had nursed and
whose death she had lamented. Nietzsche's formula "Dionysus versus
Christ" is present in institutional Christianity too, in reverse. The en-
emies of Christ and his mother are the devil and his dam: the devil has
the horns and hoofs of a woodland god, and his dam is incarnate in the
witch who worships him. The theory that a cult of a "horned god"3
identified with the devil actually existed in the Middle Ages is difficult to
swallow, but that the symbolic outlines of a "Satanic" perversion of
Christianity could be extracted from suspected witches by torture, in an
insane parody of psychoanalysis, is obvious enough. In the miracle plays
about the flood, Noah's wife is often recalcitrant and unwilling to enter
the ark, perhaps recalling an earlier version of the story in which the ark,
the container of all life, was her body and not his artefact. But in general
there was little opposition to the principle that there were no gods, or
goddesses either, in nature, and that if man looked to find deities there
they would turn into devils.
Man should see nature, the myth said, with his reason as the work of
God. If he attempted to approach it differently, in search of mysterious
power or the sense of the numinous, he found powerful forces pulling
him in the opposite direction, toward his own reason and his own soci-
ety. He found that he was a moral being capable of sin, and could not
imitate the innocence of animals. Christianity explained this by saying
that his nature was originally designed by God to be something essen-
tially different from animal nature, and that his present natural context
was a "fallen" one. Identification with the forces and powers of nature is
a tendency that Christianity regarded as pagan, the effective pagan gods,
from this point of view, being Eros and Dionysus, sexuality and emo-
tional abandon. To regain his true identity man had to keep the barrier of
The Romantic Myth 97

consciousness against nature, and think of himself first as a social being.

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

In its fully developed form this myth was, down to the seventeenth
century, comprehensive enough to unite the theologian and the philoso-
pher with the poet and the scientist. The poet, on the whole, accepted an
attitude to the world which put faith and reason above the response to
poetry, but the scientist was in a more difficult position. The attitude to
nature as an objective system is congenial enough to the scientist, for
whom nature is always the world out there, to be studied by the rational
consciousness. At the same time, the scientist was working within a
mythological construct which had been founded on identity and anal-
ogy, on correspondences and simple symmetries. His sciences, in short,
were full of myths, in which astronomy and chemistry had not yet been
completely separated from astrology and alchemy. To the scientist, myth
is simply illusion: or perhaps one should say that science creates its own
mythology. Sooner or later, as science developed, it was bound to break
loose from the mythological construct. And in proportion as it took on its
own form, it forced poets to look for another construct, and, in doing so,
to realize that all myths are poetic in origin.
For example: we said that for the sense of nature as created order the
primary images were those of the heavenly bodies, all that is now left of
nature as God had originally designed it. But from the point of view of
science, such imagery rested on illusion, the illusion of a geocentric
universe, of planets revolving in symmetrical spheres, probably guided
by angels, of mysterious correspondences of the seven planets with the
seven metals and seven aspects of human temperament. When the new
science of Copernicus and Galileo began to make its impact, this illusion
became more and more of a historical relic. Newton spiced his scientific
and mathematical findings with philosophical and religious speculations
which aroused great enthusiasm at the time. But the enthusiasm was
temporary and the poetry it inspired mediocre.4 The old feeling of heaven,
in the sense of the sky, as an image of heaven in the sense of the place of
the presence of God, was undeniably going, and could never return in
quite the same form. The more man learned about the heavenly bodies,
the less emotionally convinced he could be that they were different in
kind from the sublunary nature he was more familiar with. They were
not made out of quintessence, but out of the same elements as the lower
world; they did not move in perfect circles or symbolize an immortal
purity from corruption. The sky seemed just as indifferent to human
concerns, just as permeated with mindless law, as the least conscious
The Romantic Myth 99

part of the earth. An apocalyptic vision of a day when the sun would be
turned into darkness and the moon into blood had to give place to a
science which turned the sun into a blast furnace and the moon into a
stone. The crystal spheres of Milton's Nativity Ode, making up full con-
sort with the angelic symphony, eventually become Thomas Hardy's

Monsters of magnitude without a shape,

Hanging amid deep wells of nothingness.5

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

Thus it is with man;

He looks on nature as his supplement,
And still will find out likenesses and tokens
Of consanguinity, in the world's graces,
To his own being, [^.j.^-vj]7
ioo A Study of English Romanticism

Of all the great English Romantic poets, William Blake was the one
who grasped the implications of this change in mythology most com-
pletely. For Blake, the God who created the natural order is a projected
God, an idol constructed out of the sky and reflecting its mindless mecha-
nism. Such a God is a figment of man's alienation, for the tyranny of an
absurd and meaningless nature suggests and guarantees the tyranny of
exploiting ruling classes. Thus the projected sky-god is really Satan, the
accuser of man and the prince of the power of the air. The true God is
Jesus, who is identified with struggling and suffering humanity. In Eu-
rope (1794) Blake shows how the tyranny of the Roman Empire, backed
by the mysterious hierarchy of star-gods, was threatened by the Incarna-
tion, how eighteen centuries of institutional Christianity had managed to
contain the threat, and how, after Newton had blown the last trumpet for
its mythology, revolution had begun again in "the vineyards of red
France."8
Similarly Shelley argues for the "necessity of atheism,"9 and urges in
his notes to Queen Mob that "All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve,
and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews,
is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars."10 Whatever one thinks
of this argument, Shelley is right in maintaining that the miserable tale is
not an integral part of the modern science of astronomy, as it is, for
example, of the astronomical speculations of Dante's Convivio. At the
same time "the hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the
universe"11 remains unaltered for Shelley. That is, God, if he exists at all,
can exist only as existence, as an aspect of our own identity, and not as a
hypothesis attached to the natural order. In Prometheus Unbound Jupiter
is a projected sky-god of the same type as the sky-gods in Blake, Urizen,
Nobodaddy, and Satan. In Byron's Vision of Judgment and the Prologue to
Goethe's Faust the traditional conception of God as a miraculous juggler
of planets is only a subject for parody.
We are now in a position to see that one central element of this new
mythological construction is a recovery of projection. In the older myth,
God was ultimately the only active agent. God had not only created the
world and man: he had also created the forms of human civilization. The
traditional images of civilization are the city and the garden: the models
of both were established by God before Adam was created. Law, moral
principles, and, of course, the myth itself were not invented by man, but
were part of God's revelation to him. Gradually at first, in such relatively
isolated thinkers as Vico, then more confidently, the conviction grows
The Romantic Myth 101

that a great deal of all this creative activity ascribed to God is projected
from man, that man has created the forms of his civilization, including
his laws and his myths, and that consequently they exhibit human im-
perfections and are subject to human criticism. For Hooker in Eliza-
bethan times, law had its origin in the divine mind: the perfection of
natural law was a part of it, and obedience to laws of church and state
followed deductively from certain mythical premises like "natural right."
In the Romantic period an iconoclastic development of legal reform took
place (although very little of it was carried out by people that we think of
as Romantics), and the assumption of this reform was that such mythical
premises were mostly rationalizations of class privilege. Again, liberty,
for Shelley, is what man wants and what the gods he invents out of
cowardice and superstition oppose his getting. But in the pre-Romantic
period,12 even for the revolutionary Milton, liberty is what God wants for
man, and not anything that man naturally wants for himself.
Romanticism, thus considered, is the first major phase in an imagina-
tive revolution which has carried on until our own day, and has by no
means completed itself yet. (It may look from my account as though it
would be complete when everything formerly ascribed to God has been
transferred to man or nature, but that would in my opinion be far too
simple a solution.) This means that everything that has followed Roman-
ticism, including the anti-Romantic movements in France and England
of fifty to sixty years ago, is best understood as post-Romantic. Many
aspects of Romanticism become much more clearly understood if we
look forward to what later writers did with them. In particular, I find that
the major works of loyce, Eliot, Proust, Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence pro-
vide essential clues to the nature of literary trends and themes that began
with the Romantics. Then again, many Romantic writers, both philo-
sophical and literary, were deeply interested in contemporary science,
and made heroic efforts to unify the humanistic and scientific perspec-
tives, usually on some basis of a philosophy of organism. In English
literature, the social sciences13 had as much if not more prestige than the
physical sciences, De Quincey's enthusiasm for Ricardo being as typical
in its way as Goethe's interest in colour perception and comparative
anatomy.14 But with the hindsight of another century and a half, one
century of which has been after Darwin, we can see that the scientific
vision of nature was inexorably splitting away from the poetic and
existential vision of Romantic mythology. Every generation since then
has produced a cosmology attempting to unite the two again (Teilhard
1O2 A Study of English Romanticism

de Chardin is the leading example at present)/5 but cosmologies have a

high rate of mortality, and in any case are usually founded, not directly on
scientific principles, but on mythological analogies to scientific principles.
The separating of science from what we may call the myth of concern,
society's view of its situation and destiny, has another important conse-
quence. Romanticism is a new mythology, but society uses its mythology
in different ways. The Christian mythology of the Middle Ages and later
was a closed mythology, that is, a structure of belief, imposed by com-
pulsion on everyone. As a structure of belief, the primary means of
understanding it was rational and conceptual, and no poet, outside the
Bible, was accorded the kind of authority that was given to the theolo-
gian. Romanticism, besides being a new mythology, also marks the
beginning of an "open" attitude to mythology on the part of society,
making mythology a structure of imagination, out of which beliefs come,
rather than directly one of compulsory belief. Beliefs for a long time
continued much as they had been held, except that the Romantic expres-
sion of belief in, say, traditional Christianity often becomes vaguer and
more purely rhetorical in statement. At the same time, the new mythol-
ogy caused old things to be believed in a new way, and thus eventually
transformed the spirit of their belief. It also made new types of belief
possible, by creating a new mythical language that permitted their for-
mulation. Of these, two are of particular importance for the present
argument.
One is the revived sense of the numinous power of nature, as symbol-
ized in Eros, Dionysus, and Mother Nature herself. With the Romantic
movement there comes a return to something very like a polytheistic
imagination. The avenging spirit of the Ancient Mariner is a portent of
much to follow: the forsaken Classical gods who haunt so many German
Romantics, the spirits of Strindberg and Yeats, the angels of Rilke, the
dark gods of Lawrence. All these illustrate the principle which Freud
perhaps more than anyone else has made us aware of. When our atten-
tion is focused on ourselves and our existential relation to nature, as
distinct from the attention of science which is turned toward natural law
and the attention of theology which is turned toward an intelligent
personal God, we become immediately conscious of a plurality of con-
flicting powers. The second type of new belief comes from the ability that
Romantic mythology conferred of being able to express a revolutionary
attitude toward society, religion, and personal life. We shall return to this
in a moment.
The Romantic Myth 103

In the older mythology the myth of creation is followed by a gigantic

cyclical myth, outlined in the Bible, which begins with the fall of man, is
followed by a symbolic vision of human history, under the names of
Adam and Israel, and ends with the redemption of Adam and Israel by
Christ. The two poles are the alienation myth of fall, the separation of
man from God by sin, and the reconciling, identifying, or atoning myth
of redemption which restores to man his forfeited inheritance. Trans-
lated into Romantic terms, this myth assumes a quite different shape.
What corresponds to the older myth of an unfallen state, or lost paradise
of Eden, is now a sense of an original identity between the individual
man and nature which has been lost. It may have been something lost in
childhood, as in Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality, or it may
be something hazier like a racial or collective memory, but it haunts the
mind with the same sense of dispossession that the original Eden myth
did.
The context of what corresponds to the "fall," or the myth of aliena-
tion, changes accordingly. Man has "fallen," not so much into sin as into
the original sin of self-consciousness, into his present subject-object rela-
tion to nature, where, because his consciousness is what separates him
from nature, the primary conscious feeling is one of separation. The
alienated man cut off from nature by his consciousness is the Romantic
equivalent of post-Edenic Adam. He is forcefully presented in Coleridge's
figure of the Ancient Mariner, compelled recurrently to tell a story whose
moral is reintegration with nature. The Romantic redemption myth then
becomes a recovery of the original identity. For the sense of an original
unity with nature, which being born as a subjective consciousness has
broken, the obvious symbol is the mother. The lost paradise becomes
really an unborn world, a pre-existent ideal. As a result something of the
ancient mother-centred symbolism comes back into poetry. Wordsworth
leaves no doubt that he thinks of nature as Mother Nature, and that he
associates her with other maternal images. In the myth of recovery we
often have a bride whose descent from a mother-figure is indicated by
the fact that, in Shelley, in Byron obliquely, and in Blake's Preludium to
America, she is frequently a sister as well.
Wordsworth and Coleridge, especially Wordsworth, had, to an extent
that they hardly realized themselves, inherited a recent (i.e., eighteenth-
century) conception of a "natural society" which, for the first time in
many centuries, had raised a central question about human identity. In
the older myth, man was morally and intellectually separated from
1O4 A Study of English Romanticism

nature, hence his identity was primarily a social one, and the symbol of
that social identity was, as said above, the city. In his evolution as a child
of God, the city of God came first, then the garden of man. as its suburb.
Milton thinks of man's original nature in Eden as simple and pastoral but
nevertheless civilized; Adam, for Milton, does not become the archetypal
noble savage until after his fall. Rousseau had suggested that perhaps the
anomalies and injustices of civilization were so great as to make one
doubt whether this city-garden order is the right one or not. Perhaps man
should seek an identity with nature first, not nature in its humanized
form of a garden or park but simply nature as physical environment.
After that, the genuine form of human society may have a chance to
emerge. The sense of antagonism to the city, as a kind of cancerous
growth destroying the relation of man and nature, which later comes out
so strongly in Baudelaire's fourmillante cite, Eliot's "unreal city," and
Verhaeren's villes tentaculaires,16 is already emerging in the London scenes
of Wordsworth's Prelude. By contrast, it is rude or uncultivated nature,
nature "unspoiled" by man and not transformed into a narcissistic image
of himself, that comes to be thought of as complementing human nature
and completing its being.
In Wordsworth also man first finds his identity in his relation to
physical nature, in its rude or uncultivated form. In the older myth there
were two levels of nature: an upper level of human nature, represented
by the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age, which God had originally
intended for man, and a lower level of physical nature, permeated by
death, corruption, and, for man at least, sin, which man fell into. Accord-
ing to this construct, man is in the physical world but not of it, and only
an elaborate social training, comprising education, law, morality, and
religion, can help to raise him toward his proper level. In Wordsworth
the existing social and educational structure is artificial, full of inert
custom and hypocrisy. Nature is a better teacher than books, and one
finds one's lost identity with nature in moments of feeling in which one is
penetrated by the sense of nature's "huge and mighty forms."17 Thus
already in Wordsworth it is the "pagan" or latent numinous powers in
nature that man turns to. Wordsworth shook his head over the Hymn to
Pan in the first book of Keats's Endymion and called it "a very pretty
piece of paganism."18 But Wordsworth had done much, was probably
the decisive influence, in making the Hymn to Pan possible, and Keats in
his turn helped to create a new sensibility that ultimately led to the
rebirth of Eros and Dionysus in Yeats and D.H. Lawrence.
The Romantic Myth 105

Similarly, the redemption myth in the older mythology emphasized

the free act of God in offering man grace, grace being thought of as
essentially the transformation of the human moral will. Such grace pro-
ceeded from a divine love or agape. Romantic redemption myths, espe-
cially the revolutionary ones like those of Shelley, throw the emphasis on
an eros, or love rooted in the human sexual instinct. Such an eros develops
a distinctively human idealism, and for such idealism the redeeming
agent is also human-centred. The agape or love of God for man creates
grace, but what man's love and idealism create is essentially a gnosis, an
expanded knowledge or consciousness, and one that is more inclusive
and profound than the conscious knowledge of the detached subject.
This greater gnosis is identified with the imagination in Wordsworth's
Prelude and in Coleridge: it is often, as in Coleridge, considered to be a
superior kind of reason; it is explicitly identified with love (in the sense of
eros, of course) in Shelley; in many French and German Romantics it
acquires a quasi-occult or theosophical cast; in some, such as Novalis, it
could be called a mystical consciousness. In the more conservative and
nostalgic it is apt to become simply an overwhelming of the reason with
mysteries that only faith, thought of as an intuitive or nonanalytic mode
of consciousness, can reach. In any case it is the power both of creation
and of response to creation, just as the reason is equally the power which
can construct or follow a rational argument.
This transposition of the traditional myth makes for a considerable
change in the poet's view of his social function. Earlier poets and critics
had been well aware of the "creative" nature of the arts and of the poet's
role in articulating society, or being what Shelley calls an unacknowl-
edged legislator. But if nature was, to quote Sir Thomas Browne again,
the art of God/9 the human artist could hardly compete with nature, and
if the myths and moral principles of society were divinely revealed, the
primary instrument for understanding them was the reason. The fulfil-
ment of right knowledge is right action, but knowledge by itself does not
lead to virtuous action. The bridge is built, in the older mythology, by a
careful education in moral and religious behaviour, and poetry, rightly
used, is one of the instruments of this education. Hence the common-
place among pre-Romantic critics that poetry provides a vivid image, or
speaking picture,20 a kind of controlled hallucination, of virtue and of its
opposite vice, which persuades the emotions as well as the intelligence to
identify with virtue and repudiate vice. The poet is thus to be judged
rhetorically, by his skill in ornamenting or embellishing a certain kind of
io6 A Study of English Romanticism

content in such a way as to help the reader to pass from enlightenment to

moral freedom. This freedom is not, of course, a mere moralism: it
includes every aspect of civilized life, but then civilized life itself was
thought of as essentially moral, in the broad sense. Even Milton thought
of his authority as prophetic rather than strictly poetic: he was a great
poet and he knew it, but because he knew it he felt responsible for using
his genius rightly, that is, allied to certain moral and religious attitudes.
The Romantic conception of the poet had several new and revolution-
ary aspects. First comes the principle that if man has invented the forms
of his own civilization, then the artist becomes the man professionally
concerned with developing and shaping those forms, which makes him
the central figure in that civilization. Along with this goes the conception
of the serious writer, the writer who, in contrast to the popular enter-
tainer, does not aim to please but to enlighten and expand the conscious-
ness of his audience. Such a writer would instinctively set his face against
most of society, both in his art and in his mode of life. With Romanticism
came the conception of artists as forming a Davidsbund21 out to kill the
Goliaths or Philistine giants of the social establishment, a conception
which expanded into the later vie de Boheme and other expressions of art
as not only a social craft but a means of building up a kind of counter-
society. There is of course nothing new in the conception of the serious
writer as such: what is new is the conception of genius as autonomous, as
having an authority of its own apart from its moral context. Blake had a
strong sense of the moral responsibility of the poet, and understood very
well what Milton meant by "that one talent which is death to hide."22 But
Milton could never have uttered Blake's aphorism, "Genius has no Er-
ror."23 Hence a feature in Romanticism which at first glance seems con-
tradictory. The Romantic poet often feels, even more oppressively than
his predecessors, that his calling as a poet is a dedication, a total way of
life, and that a commitment to it has an importance for society far beyond
poetry itself. Yet it was the Romantic conception of the authority of
genius that finally made it possible for criticism to base itself on a purely
disinterested aesthetic response to which all moral factors have to be
subordinated. Both elements, the sense of dedication to art and of free-
dom from moral factors in the experience of art, were greatly intensified
later in the nineteenth century.
The conception of the autonomy of creative power reinforces the ques-
tion, Is this power a special function of the mind, distinct from reason or
memory? This takes us back to the gnosis already referred to, and which
The Romantic Myth • 107

is generally called imagination. The question of a special function hardly

needed to be raised as long as the poet's work was thought of rhetori-
cally, as a particular kind of expertise with words. But, we have seen,
Romantic poets felt that the reason of the detached consciousness was
something different from and inferior to the imagination or faculty of
bringing poetic forms into existence. Imagination participates with na-
ture as a process, and imitates specifically its power of bringing organ-
isms to birth. In English literature, Shakespeare is the most impressive
example of a poet who creates people, societies, even complete worlds,
much as nature herself does, and this conception of imagination raised
Shakespeare almost to divinity, as the supreme example of its power.
The imagination is a "sympathetic" faculty, as Hazlitt called it,24 allied to
love, in contrast to the reason, which is often aggressive and analytical.
The Romantics in general did not go so far as to suggest that the concep-
tion of God as creator and maker of the world had been projected from
the fact that man creates and makes things. What they felt was rather an
analogy between God and man as creators, between God's Word and the
poet's word, between God's revelation in the scriptural myth and the
poet's revelation, which for most Romantics was also a distinctively
mythopoeic revelation.
In the centuries before Romanticism, the poets worked out their im-
agery within a mythological structure derived from certain organizing
conceptions—the chain of being, the Ptolemaic universe, and the like.
The historians of science, of philosophy, and of religion will look at this
structure in different ways, and for the historian of literature it is differ-
ent again. It may most conveniently be summarized, for the purposes of
literary criticism, as a schema of four levels, the levels being best under-
stood, again within a critical context, as spatial. On the top level is God,
and the place of the presence of God, or heaven. The only language that
can describe this top level is analogical language, and, as we have seen,
the imagery of heavenly bodies was central to the analogy, the most
conspicuous example being Dante's Paradiso. A medieval poet would not
necessarily use such imagery in direct relation to God: Chaucer, for
instance, often makes it symbolize a malignant fate, as in the star-crossed
love of Troilus and in the address to the primum mobile in The Man of
Law's Tale. The malignant influence of the stars does not contradict their
divine associations, but constitutes a subordinate aspect of them. In
making so functional a use of astronomical imagery, and in seeing in the
sky the images of law, purpose, design, the cycle of seasons, and the
io8 A Study of English Romanticism

order of creation, as well as of fate and the source of tragedy, Chaucer is

almost closer in mental attitude to the builders of Stonehenge than he is
to us.
Next come the two levels of nature, an upper world of human nature,
where man was originally intended to live, and a lower world of physical
nature, established as man's environment after the fall of Adam. The
upper level is represented by the imagery of the Garden of Eden, the
Golden Age, and the City of God. Man is no longer in this world, but
everything that is good tends to detach him from physical nature and
raise him toward his proper level. We may adopt Blake's terms "inno-
cence" and "experience" to describe the two natures. Man fell from
innocence into experience: his education, religion, and social discipline
help him to recover (at least in part: the process is completed in purga-
tory) his freedom of will which he lost with his innocence. Below the two
levels of nature is the demonic world, or hell. We see that this schema has
a moral principle incorporated into it: God is good, hell bad, and the
human level of nature better than the physical one. Hence, though any
form of imagery can be used in either an idyllic or a sinister context, a
great deal of the imagery of literature before Romanticism tended to
conventionalize itself along moral lines. Reversals of the convention,
such as the use of paradisal imagery in a sinister sense, as in Spenser's
Bower of Bliss, are as a rule quite clearly marked as such. Again, the
structure is an inherently conservative one, providing no place for revo-
lutionary activity, unless initiated by God.
In the Romantic period this schema becomes profoundly modified.
There is of course nothing to stop a Romantic or post-Romantic poet
from employing the pre-Romantic structure, and we shall later on be
looking at a remarkable example of a Romantic poem written mostly in
the older tonality, Keats's Endymion. But most Romantic poems give
marked evidence of a change of attitude. We can still trace a schema on
four levels, and we shall try to outline it, for convenience, but the struc-
ture becomes much more ambiguous. In the first place, the tendency to
moral conventionalizing disappears: all four levels can be seen either as
ideal or as demonic, or as anything between. Secondly, we have traced
the process by which the imagery of the sky ceased to have a special kind
of significance attached to it, and became simply assimilated to the rest
of nature. From Blake on, there is a prevailing tendency to see the
machinery of the stars and its demiurge as demonic, because expressed
only in a mindless automatism. We meet this for instance in Thomas
The Romantic Myth 109

Hardy's Dynasts, where the medieval astronomical imagery of fate and

fortune is employed without any sense of an intelligent personal God
having a power of veto. The moon, largely because of its traditional
associations with "lunacy," enjoys a favoured position in the poetry of
Laforgue and Yeats, but, again, in an ironic context. Sometimes, of course,
the heavenly bodies may retain their older role as witnesses of order,
though with a stronger emphasis on their purely symbolic function in
inspiring a mood of what Tennyson calls higher pantheism.25 Sometimes
too, as frequently in Shelley and Foe, in Byron's Cain, and elsewhere, the
poet or hero is carried on a journey through the skies, usually in a "car"
or other symbol of technological exuberance, which gives him a new
(and occasionally, as in Byron, disastrous) knowledge. Out of this con-
vention comes a good deal of modern "science fiction" with its ambigu-
ous attitude to the mysteries of outer space.
The relation of the two levels of nature, human and physical, is also
transformed in Romantic poetry. Let us begin with the world of experi-
ence, the social structure we live in. In Romanticism we become aware of
an increased self-consciousness in historical perspective and in the sense
of tradition. The myth of the fall into self-consciousness is projected into
history as well, earlier ages being thought of as more spontaneous, naive,
and unspoiled in their relation to nature. The structure of contemporary
civilization is thought of more as having accumulated a past, as less
creative because later in time, and more preoccupied with its past be-
cause that past is the source of its very self-consciousness. The conserva-
tive Romantics who accept the structure of civilization, as something to
be imaginatively trusted, tend to stress the traditional elements in it, such
elements as church and aristocracy in particular, and lament their de-
cline or hope for their renewal. The Romantic period was a time when
aristocracy was fast losing its essential social functions, though its power
and prestige remained for much longer, and nostalgia for a vanishing
aristocracy is a large element in Romantic fiction. It comes into the
"Gothic" and medieval vogues that are so conspicuous in the period, and
the popularity of Scott has much to do with his idealizing of Jacobitism
and the feudal loyalties of the Scottish Highlands as against the middle-
class Hanoverian society that destroyed them.26 In this vanishing culture
the "last minstrel," or symbol of a decline in the traditional function of
poetry, also has a place.
In religion, many Romantics, especially on the Continent, adopted a
conservative or traditional Christian position, usually Roman Catholic,
no A Study of English Romanticism

and saw in Romanticism a revival of an age of faith, in reaction to the

sterile enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when a rational and
analytic perspective was thought to have reached an extreme. In British
Romanticism, Edmund Burke, with his conception of a continuous social
contract and his elegy over the passing of the age of chivalry with the
French Revolution, and Carlyle, with his effort to reactivate the aristoc-
racy and his vision of the "organic filaments"27 of a new religion, repre-
sent this conservative tendency, along with the later religious writings of
Coleridge. It is still surviving in the historical nostalgia of the early Yeats
and in the various mythical constructs28 which show us Western culture
as having steadily declined since the Middle Ages, a historical fall being
sometimes associated with a certain phase which the mythologist par-
ticularly dislikes, such as the Reformation, the philosophy of Bacon, the
secularism of the Renaissance, "usura" (Pound),29 or "dissociation of
sensibility" (Eliot).30
On the other hand, of course, civilization may be thought of in revolu-
tionary or Rousseauist terms as corrupt and perverted. This view of it
immediately involves its relation to the other order of nature, the "un-
spoiled" nature which corresponds to, yet contrasts with, the older inno-
cent nature. The more irrational society is, the more readily the reasonable
may be associated with the natural; and the more unnatural society is,
the more readily physical nature becomes the image of its regeneration.
For Rousseau, man has lost the identity with physical nature which is
also his own identity as a man, and in consequence his civilization has
grown artificial, in a new and pejorative sense of that word, in need of a
revolution which will recreate the natural society of liberty and equality.
This is of course an extreme formulation, though very influential for that
reason, of the central Romantic view of man's "fall," or what corre-
sponds to it, as a fall into a self-consciousness separated from nature.
The feeling that physical nature provides the missing complement to
human nature takes many forms. In proportion as the old celestial im-
agery declined, it was replaced by the "sublime," which included it but
gave it a different context. The sublime emphasized a sense of mystery
and vagueness, not of order or purpose, coming through uncultivated
nature, and addressing the individual or solitary man rather than the
community. There is nothing new in this as a principle, but locating the
sublime in mountains and oceans and wildernesses, where a solitary
traveller confronts it, is relatively new as an emphasis in poetic imagery.
Longinus, the main source of the theory of the sublime, had discussed it
The Romantic Myth 111

in a professional rhetorical context which is very different from its eight-

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

who is both destroyer and preserver, in the phrase of Shelley's Ode to the
West Wind [1. 14], which adopts the traditional Christian image of the
Holy Spirit, the wind, but transfers it to nature. The interaction of benefi-
cence and savagery in nature is so obvious that no poet can altogether
avoid the fact that nature is a moral riddle, and that the more directly it is
contemplated, the less easy it is to believe in it as something essentially
related to the moral structure of human life. Wordsworth's assertion that
the "external world is fitted to the mind"31 carries less conviction (except
for science, which is not what Wordsworth is talking about) than
Baudelaire's suggestion of a teasing, unpredictable, and ambivalent rela-
tion. But even so, such pre-Romantic symbolism as that of Spenser's
allegory of the Castle of Alma or Bunyan's Holy War, which depicts the
temperate or virtuous soul as a fortress beleaguered by an external
environment and resisting it on all fronts, gives place to the feeling that
the soul has much to learn from parleying with its traditional enemies.
The paradoxical relation of civilized and rude nature, a relation partly
antithetical and partly complementary, is often expressed in Romantic
fiction and drama by some variant of the struggle-of-brothers theme.
This has several Biblical archetypes—Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob,
Ishmael and Isaac—which become important in its development. In the
conventional interpretation of the Bible the figures of the social establish-
ment, Isaac and Jacob, are the accepted ones; with Romanticism, there
comes a transfer of sympathy to their exiled brethren. The so-called
Byronic hero is often a Romantic version of the natural man, who, like
Esau or Ishmael, is an outcast, a solitary much given to communing with
untamed nature, and who thus represents the potentially expanding and
liberating elements in that nature. He has great energy, often great pow-
ers of leadership, and even his vices are dignified enough to have some
aesthetic attraction. He is often aristocratic in birth or behaviour, with a
sense that, like Esau, he is the dispossessed rightful heir—here the theme
combines with the sense of nostalgia for a vanished aristocracy. When he
is evil, there is often the feeling that, as with Byron's Cain, his evil is
comprehensible, that he is not wholly evil any more than society is
wholly good, and that even his evil is a force that society has to reckon
with. The greatest of all his incarnations in English literature, Emily
Bronte's Heathcliff, has in full the sense of a natural man who eludes all
moral categories just as nature itself does, and who cannot be simply
condemned or accepted. In contrast, the Jacob-figure, the defender of the
establishment, often seems unheroic and spoiled by a soft or decadent
The Romantic Myth 113

civilization. It was of course Byron himself who popularized the moral

ambiguity of the Byronic hero, both in his poetry and, with his reputation
as a wicked and infidel lord, in his life. Childe Harold illustrates, like
Scott's last minstrel, the close relation of a distinctive social attitude with
a distinctive type of poetic imagination. In Byron the struggle-of-broth-
ers theme goes all the way back from Cain and Abel to the rivalry of
Lucifer, the dispossessed elder son of God, and the younger and more
favoured Son. Thus of Lara it is said:

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,

An erring spirit from another hurl'd. [canto i, st. 28]

In the Vision of Judgment Lucifer is an icily polite aristocrat: his rival does
not appear, but while the prince of darkness is a gentleman, St. Peter is
not quite a gentleman, and his chief is clearly operating a somewhat
square and bourgeois establishment, one that finds George III easier to
absorb than Wilkes.
In the older structure, human nature was almost invariably thought of
as above physical nature, in imagery as in value. Eden is usually on a
mountain-top, and the structure of civilization and social discipline raises
man above the level of physical nature, in imagery as in conceptual
metaphor. In Wordsworth physical nature has inherited a good deal of
the older conception of the lost state of innocence, hence it is easier to
think of it as above the state of experience. Wordsworth's Ode on Intima-
tions of Immortality follows the same general pattern as the poems by
Vaughan and Traherne in the seventeenth century, in which the infant
soul descends to a lower world. This spatial schema recurs later in
Nietzsche's Zarathustra, in Strindberg's Great Highway, in Ibsen's When
We Dead Awaken, where the mountain-top carries similar associations of
an escape from the limitations of ordinary experience. But for a more
conservatively pessimistic Romantic, such as Schopenhauer, it is easier
to think of the structure of civilization, or the state of experience, as on
top of a subhuman and submoral "world as will," an ark or bateau ivre
carrying the cargo of human values and tossing on a stormy and threat-
ening sea. This figure becomes the prevailing one later in the nineteenth
century, both for the revolutionary optimists, with Marx at their head,
who see the traditional privileges of a ruling class threatened with de-
struction from below, and for more sombre thinkers—Schopenhauer
himself, Freud, Kierkegaard—all of whom think of the values of intelli-
ii4 A Study of English Romanticism

gence and imagination as above, but very precariously above, a dark,

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

the depth
And labyrinthine home of the still soul,
Where the seen thing is imaged, and the whisper
loints the expecting spirit. [3.3.76-80]

This fourth region corresponds in situation to the hell or demonic world

of the previous schema, which was also usually underground, and it
carries over some echoes from its predecessor, as the mysterious depths
The Romantic Myth 115

of the soul may be a place of great wickedness as well as of inner

illumination, like Milton's Pandemonium with its fantastic lighting.
In the first place, the imagery of the oracular cave, so prominent in
Shelley and elsewhere, is a revival of a pre-Christian mythology that
goes back to the old earth-mother myths. The oracle of Apollo was taken
over from an earlier female chthonic cult, but even in its reformed
version it ceased to function at the coming of Christ, hence Shelley's use
of such imagery indicates an anti-Christian bias. Second, the identity
achieved may be with a God who is the ultimate reality of both man and
nature, or it may simply be with an amoral nature. Those who manifest
this inner identity are the great men, but some great men are creative and
others, like Napoleon, are destructive, and there is no guarantee which
form greatness will take. The ambiguity of "destroyer and preserver" is
found here too. Thirdly, the only point at which one visibly enters into an
identity with nature is death. Thus death is all we can usually see of what
may or may not be the fullest entering into life. This paradox haunts
many Romantic and post-Romantic poets. The suggestion dropped by
Lucifer in Byron's Cain, "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge"
[2.2.164], is amplified in Beddoes and Shelley, as we shall see. In Rimbaud
the poet descends not through death but through a dereglement de tous les
sens which is so sinister and disastrous that the world of identity becomes
simply the old demonic world again, and the poet's sojourn in it a saison
en enfer. Hence Rimbaud remarks that the old theologians were right
after all, and that hell is downward.32
The Romantic movement transforms all the generic plots of literature:
there is a new and Romantic form of tragedy, of irony, of comedy: there
is even—in fact there is very centrally—a new and Romantic form of
romance. We shall proceed to a brief review of the Romantic develop-
ments of these four types of fictional structure, beginning with romance
itself.
Conventionally, the poet is the celebrator of the hero, whose brave
deeds he chronicles and whom he follows at a respectful distance. But
this convention relates to a time so remote and primitive that, if it ever
existed, little if any literature has survived from it. The poet, as Aristotle
says, deals with the generic or universal event, not the particular histori-
cal one [Poetics, sec. 9], and it is the hero recreated by the poet who
becomes the hero of literature. As long as we have had written literature,
what the poet really is directly related to in society is not the hero but a
more settled order, usually presided over, in pre-Romantic times, by a
n6 A Study of English Romanticism

prince or patron in whose court or hall the poet recites his poems or
performs his dramas. In this setting the hero becomes a legendary figure
from an earlier age, and predominantly a tragic figure as well, like the
heroes of Ossian who went forth to battle, but always fell. This is as true
of Beowulf as it is of Achilles, and it is still true of King Lear and Hamlet.
In Shakespeare the balancing social figure, Queen Elizabeth or King
James, remains offstage, or is symbolized in such figures of comedy as
Duke Theseus in the last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The Romantics take the next step. In their age the patron is beginning
to disappear, and the poet is becoming immersed in society as a whole.
But though he loses his traditional specific social functions (unless he
preserves them by accident, like Goethe in Weimar), he gains a more
important function, at least in his own eyes. He sees society as held
together by its creative power, incarnate in himself, rather than by its
leaders of action. Thus he himself steps into the role of the hero, not as
personally heroic but simply as the focus of society. For him, therefore,
the real event is no longer even the universal or typical historical event,
but the psychological or mental event, the event in his own conscious-
ness of which the historical event is the outward sign or allegory. This
involves a rejection of history, which becomes a "gilded cheat" in Keats,33
a "devil's scripture" in Byron,34 and the literal Word of God (with over-
tones of St. Paul's observation that the letter kills) in Blake, as the main
source of poetic fictions.
It may seem very strange to describe Romanticism as antihistorical,
when we think of how central historical novels and narrative poems are
to it. Yet when we look more carefully at the historical fictions in Roman-
ticism, we see that earlier ages of history are being recreated in a specifi-
cally Romantic form, as symbols of certain aspects of the poet's own age.
In Schiller's terms, an age thought of as comparatively "naive" is ren-
dered in a self-conscious or "sentimental" way.35 Scott, in Ivanhoe and
elsewhere, and, later, William Morris both write historical fictions about
the Middle Ages. They are by no means uninformed about the Middle
Ages: Morris at least could be called a medieval specialist. But they are
not interested in rendering the Middle Ages directly. There is nothing in
the language of Middle English, for example, that corresponds even
remotely to Morris's brocaded Teutonic diction or to Scott's antiquated
lingo. What is being rejected, one feels, is the social reality of the earlier
age; what is being preserved is a latent or potential Utopia in it: a social
ideal with some meaning for the writer's attitude to his own time. Scott is
The Romantic Myth 117

conservative, and his medieval world is an age of chivalry contrasting

with his own age; Morris is radical, and his medieval world, deprived of
its two pillars, church and aristocracy, is similarly an ideal age of crafts-
manship confronting the nineteenth century.
Thus what is being called "gilded cheat" and "devil's scripture" is not
so much history as the social process of which actual history is the
record. The rejection of history in this sense is an antimimetic tendency, a
rejecting of social reality in favour of a social ideal. The people contem-
porary with Romanticism that we think of as realists we also think of as
outside the Romantic movement, like Crabbe in English literature. The
Middle Ages itself, like all ages, had its own antimimetic tendencies,
which it expressed in such forms as the romance, where the knight turns
away from society and rides off into a forest or other "threshold symbol"
of a dream world. In Romanticism this romance form revives, so signifi-
cantly as to give its name to the whole movement, but in Romanticism
the poet himself is the hero of the quest, and his turning away from
society is to be connected with what we have been discussing, the demot-
ing of the conception of man as primarily a social being living in cities.
He turns away to seek a nature who reveals herself only to the indi-
vidual.
The most comprehensive and central of all Romantic themes, then, is a
romance with the poet for hero. The theme of this romance form is the
attaining of an expanded consciousness, the sense of identity with God
and nature which is the total human heritage, so far as the limited
perspective of the human situation can grasp it. To use the traditional
metaphors, the great Romantic theme is the attaining of an apocalyptic
vision by a fallen but potentially regenerate mind. Such an event, taking
place in an individual consciousness, may become a sign of a greater
social awakening, but the latter is usually implied in it or takes place
offstage. Wordsworth's Prelude, certainly the great Romantic epic of
English literature, deals with the growth of the individual poet's mind;
more social aspects of the theme were contemplated but came to very
little. In Blake the great poem of individual awakening, Milton, is fol-
lowed by Jerusalem, a less completely concentrated poem partly because
of its attempt at a wider social vision. In Prometheus Unbound we are
aware of the extent to which social change is symbolized by a psycho-
logical change: mankind is treated as a single gigantic individual, which
Prometheus represents. Nor does Keats's Hyperion, as we have it, get
beyond the moment of Apollo's self-awareness, though the Moneta pas-
n8 A Study of English Romanticism

sages in the revised version indicate Keats's sense of the importance of

the social side of his subject.
It seems as though Romanticism finds it difficult to absorb the social
perspective, and we notice that the poems that deal with the attaining of
integrated consciousness often tend to bypass the more realistic tragic,
ironic, and comic themes. The "romantic" has in popular speech a repu-
tation for taking a facile or rose-coloured view of things, and even great
works of Romanticism sometimes show us a mental quest achieved
without having passed through any real difficulties or dangers on the
way. A reader completely unsympathetic to, for example, the conception
of the quest of the soul set out in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress could still
appreciate the honesty and realism of the Slough of Despond, the Valley
of the Shadow of Death, or the dungeons of Giant Despair. In contrast,
Wordsworth's Excursion employs the normally tragic or ironic figure of
the Wanderer; but Wordsworth is so nervous about the tragic and ironic
aspects of experience explored, for example, by Byron, so anxious to
"correct despondency"36 and avoid the seductions of a Voltairean spirit
of mockery, that The Excursion impresses us more as a barrier against the
great adventure of the soul than an account of it. The Prelude is, of course,
infinitely more successful, complete, and flexible, but the more tragic
Vaudracour and Julia episode is cut out of the 1850 version even of that
poem. Later, Matthew Arnold omitted Empedocles on Etna from his 1853
collection, on the grounds, really, that it added an ironic dimension to his
poetry which gave him great uneasiness.
Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus, gives us a Romantic quest of the soul which
passes through a tragic and Wertherean "Everlasting No," an ironic and
Byronic "Centre of Indifference," and finally reaches an "Everlasting
Yea." The last is, in the first place, the identifying of the individual,
symbolized, in the "sartor resartus" imagery, by George Fox's self-made
suit of leather. This stage corresponds in Wordsworth to the vision of the
leech-gatherer in Resolution and Independence, whose self-sufficiency cor-
rects the melancholy of the poet. There follows, in Carlyle, the integrat-
ing of the identified individual, through his productive capacities, with
society. Carlyle deserves every credit for attempting to unite the social
with the individual perspective, but unfortunately he reverts to the older
conception of the hero as the centre of society, to whom the rest of us,
including the poet, have first of all to relate.
There are two types of such leaders: leaders dejure, royal or aristocratic
figures like the Duke Theseus of Shakespeare, who symbolize the unity
The Romantic Myth 119

of their society, and leaders de facto, represented by the "captains of

industry" in Carlyle's day and by earlier tyrannos figures like Napoleon,
Cromwell, and Frederick the Great. This perspective was the natural one
for Shakespeare's historical plays, but for a Romantic poet, who sees
society in relation to the creative rather than the kinetic function, it is an
anachronism. And because Carlyle endorses, rather than simply observ-
ing, the view he adopts, one has a nagging feeling that his hero worship
is not only anachronistic but literally mistaken: the authentic form of
what was later to be called the trahison des clercs. When we look more
closely at his view of the hero we see one reason why it is mistaken: in
literature the hero is normally and naturally a tragic figure, and Carlyle's
conception of the hero is associated with a vulgar fear of tragedy. All his
heroes must be successful: if a great spirit appears in history, things
ought not to go wrong, and, by the same view, any man who makes a
considerable mark in history must be a hero.
We should expect to find tragic, ironic, and comic themes, because of
their more social and realistic setting, less completely developed in Ro-
manticism, but there are of course great Romantic contributions in all
three areas, especially in tragedy. From what we have said about Roman-
tic mythology, we should expect the dominant form of Romantic tragedy
to be the tragedy of self-awareness, the sense of losing the spontaneity of
one's relationship to nature and becoming an isolated and subjective
consciousness. The story of Faust, disillusioned with everything that the
conscious mind can give him, feeling that he wants nothing except a
return to a youthful state of spontaneity and yet finding his conscious
awareness betraying him once more, is a central Romantic tragedy. Pre-
Romantic tragedy was concerned mainly with the hero as social leader:
even the most psychological studies of a sick society in Jacobean drama-
tists still keep their central figures inseparable from their communities
and their social functions. The theme of the disintegration of society is
essential even to Hamlet, which makes the closest approach to the Ro-
mantic preoccupation with the excess of conscious awareness over the
power of action. Romantic tragedies of course often retain the general
form and structure of pre-Romantic tragedy, if only out of respect for its
prestige, but their central figures are more likely to reflect the vogue of
the "Byronic" hero already glanced at, the hero who is placed outside the
structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical
nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often of
leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting.
12O A Study of English Romanticism

Another modulation of this type is the exile or wanderer, who is

usually isolated by an introverted quality of mind. Byron's Childe Harold,
the Ancient Mariner, and Shelley's Alastor and Wandering Jew figures
show us, in very different contexts, aspects of the tragic situation, from a
Romantic point of view, of being detached from society and its conven-
tional values. None of these characters are thinkers: they are brooders or
visionaries, but the convention often assumes that they are thinkers,
centres of a mental activity too intense for social intercourse. Thus Childe
Harold:

Yet must I think less wildly:—I have thought

Too long and darkly, till my brain became,
In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought,
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame, [canto 3, st. 7]

Notice how natural it is for a Romantic poet to use the word "darkly" in
connection with thought. The archetype of all such brooding outcasts is
Rousseau, and Rousseau's Confessions illustrates two recurring features
of the Romantic tragic formula. The formula often expresses itself in a
confessional genre, where the main figure is apt to be a perfunctory mask
for the author himself, and it often uses the image of the lost mother as a
symbol for the fall into excessive awareness. The role of various maternal
figures in Rousseau, notably Madame de Warens, has much more than a
simply biographical significance. Perhaps the overtones of "Childe" in
Childe Harold also have echoes beyond the allusion to medieval ro-
mance: certainly Byron himself, and his publisher, were well aware of
the appeal of such heroes to women readers.
Other confessional forms, such as De Quincey's Confessions of an Eng-
lish Opium-Eater, gain considerably in significance if one relates them to
their proper context. We said that the central theme of Romanticism is
that of the attaining of an expanded consciousness, and this phrase, to a
reader in the 19605, suggests current talk about the virtues of LSD and
marijuana. But even from the point of view of Romanticism with its
isolated visionaries, there is still a distinction between the genuine or
creative consciousness and the introverted or subjective one. De Quincey's
account of his miserable exile from the maternal figure of Lady Carbery,
of his sterile union in bitter cold with Ann, and of the way in which his
vision broke up, under the influence of opium, into a shower of tantaliz-
ing and elusive glimpses, is, seen in relation to Romanticism as a whole,
The Romantic Myth 121

one of the profoundest and most moving of Romantic autobiographical

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

masochists, who complete the theory, the suffering) of pain. A society of

sadistic masters and masochistic slaves would therefore be a "natural"
society. There is no evidence that Rousseau's natural society ever did,
could, or will exist: the evidence that it is natural for man to form
societies that condemn the majority to misery and humiliation and give a
small group the privilege of enjoying their torments is afforded by the
whole of human history. The sense that ecstasy and pain are really the
same thing is connected with the fact, just mentioned, that for Romantic
mythology the greatest experiences of life originate in a world which is
also the world of death and destruction.
For the great ironic developments that come out of Romanticism we
have to turn to a later poetic tradition that begins with Baudelaire and a
fictional one that begins with Flaubert. In English there is of course
Byron's Don Juan, which belongs to the more militantly ironic form of
satire, Byron having an affinity with the more realistic age of Pope that
makes him unique among English Romantics. Shelley's Cenci, depicting
Beatrice's revolt against the sadistic onslaughts of her father, is revolu-
tionary so far as it creates a dramatic sympathy for Beatrice, and ironic so
far as it portrays her as involved in the evil she fights against. An almost
equally remarkable example of Romantic irony is Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein. This story is not, as it is often said to be, a precursor of
science fiction: it is a precursor rather of the existential thriller, of such a
book as Camus's L'Etmnger. The whole point about the monster is that he
is not a machine, but an ordinary human being isolated from mankind by
extreme ugliness, Blake's "different face."38 The number of allusions to
Paradise Lost in the narrative indicate that the story is a retelling of the
account of the origin of evil, in a world where the only creators that we
can locate are human ones. Frankenstein hunts down his monster in the
same way that moral good attempts to destroy the moral evil it has itself
created: Frankenstein is quite as much a death principle as his quarry,
and is surrounded by the vengeful spirits of the monster's victims.
The traditional structure of comedy is one which leads up to the birth
of a new society, usually crystallizing around the marriage of the hero
and the heroine, in the conventional "happy ending" of the final scene.
Certain individuals whose behaviour is threatening or eccentric, misers,
bragging soldiers, tyrannical parents, and the like, try to obstruct this
ending and are thwarted or converted. Comedy restructures society by
expanding it and making it more flexible; it exhibits the individual as
eccentric and makes society triumph over him. It thus tends to be a
The Romantic Myth 123

realistic form with a strongly social emphasis which is not particularly

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

think of it as a four-tiered structure, but it is much less concretely related

to the physical world as we ordinarily perceive it. What corresponds to
heaven and hell is still there, the worlds of identity and of alienation, but
the imagery associated with them, being based on the opposition of
"within" and "without" rather than of "up" and "down," is almost
reversed. The identity "within," being not purely subjective but a com-
munion, whether with nature or God, is often expressed in imagery of
depth or descent. (In contemporary theology there appears to be a deter-
mined effort to get rid of "up there" metaphors in relation to God, but
somehow it sounds right to say that God is the "ground" of being.) On
the other hand, the sense of alienation is reinforced, if anything, by the
imagery of what, since Pascal, has increasingly been felt to be the terrify-
ing waste spaces of the heavens.39
The two inner worlds of nature, human nature and physical nature,
are also still there, but their relation to each other is also usually reversed.
In pre-Romantic imagery the world of social and civilized life, however
evil or corrupt, and however thoroughly denounced, was still the gate-
way to identity: man for pre-Romantic poets was still primarily a social
and civilized being and could not progress except through his social
heritage. In a great deal of Romantic imagery human society is thought
of as leading to alienation rather than identity, and this sense increases
steadily throughout the nineteenth century as literature becomes more
ironic in both tone and structure. In Romanticism there is an emphasis on
the false identity of the conforming group—even for the most conserva-
tive Romantics the real social values are in a tradition which has prob-
ably been lost anyway—and, by contrast, on a kind of creative and
healing alienation to be gained from a solitary contact with the order of
nature outside society. For many writers today this sense of creative
alienation has disappeared, and only the ironic view of society remains.
But the Romantic appeal to nature is a mighty force yet, even in an age
when "nature" has become practically reduced to the human sexual
instinct.
The difficulty we mentioned in Romanticism of incorporating a social
theme with the theme of individual enlightenment is still with us. Ro-
manticism has brought into modern consciousness the feeling that soci-
ety can develop or progress only by individualizing itself, by being
sufficiently tolerant and flexible to allow an individual to find his own
identity within it, even though in doing so he comes to repudiate most of
the conventional values of that society. The bourgeois democracies of
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 125

America and Western Europe, Marxist countries, and fascist and nation-
alist movements, all of which have political principles derived from
different aspects of Romantic mythology translated into programs of
social action, have tried to overcome this situation in different ways,
sometimes with the help of some of the poets, as our comments on
Carlyle show. But the residual anarchism at the heart of the Romantic
movement is still with us, and will be until society stops trying to sup-
press it.

What follows are brief studies of the structure and imagery of three
major works of English Romantic literature. The sequence is not chrono-
logical, but is a series of phases of myth,40 in which each work in the
sequence takes in a wider scope than its predecessor. All three are works
of second-generation Romanticism, and all three take a liberal, some-
times a revolutionary attitude to religion and politics, in which the break
with the older symbolic language is easier to see. Beddoes revolves
around the heart of Romantic imagery, at the point of identity with
nature of which death is the only visible form. Shelley deals with the
theme of Romantic comedy as outlined above, the regenerating of the
alienated community through a renewed understanding of nature as the
complement of humanity. The theme of Keats's Endymion is the bringing
to birth of the imagination as the focus of society. The whole sequence
should give some idea of the range and scope of the mythical structure
within which the literature of our own day is still operating, and which
with the Romantic movement completed its first major phase.

Yorick: The Romantic Macabre

The masterpiece of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death's Jest-Book, never seems

really to have been integrated into the study of Romanticism. The rea-
sons are partly a matter of biographical accident. The poet published The
Bride's Tragedy in 1822: Shelley and Keats were dead, Byron was soon to
follow them, and Beddoes became with this work their only immediate
successor on anything like their level of achievement. Contrary to the
usual practice of Romantic criticism when faced with genius, The Bride's
Tragedy was generously praised, and Beddoes was well launched as a
poet. He then began several other projects, including Death's Jest-Book,
the first version of which was apparently complete by 1829. But instead
126 A Study of English Romanticism

of publishing it then,41 and making it the bridge between Keats and the
early Tennyson, he kept working at it and revising it until his suicide in
1849. As he had been living in Germany and studying medicine, he had
become a somewhat peripheral figure in English literature by the time of
his death. Hence Death's Jest-Book crept into English poetry almost unno-
ticed, an easy victim for the kind of generalizer who calls it "morbid." To
put such an epithet against this gorgeous plum pudding of a poem, filled
to bursting with heady lines and breathtaking images, is a sufficient
comment on the accuracy of critical cliches.
From the beginning Beddoes was possessed, not so much by death, as
by the idea of the identity of death and love, Thanatos and Eros. Both
states are themselves identifications of an isolated and conscious being
with something else not itself. The imagery of such songs as Dirge and
Hymeneal or The Two Archers tells us that the darts of love and death are
aimed at the same target, that all lovers are demon lovers, all brides
incarnations of Mother Earth. Frustration in love (as the character Athulf,
in Death's Jest-Book, shows us in particular) is very apt to turn into a
death wish. Thus the highest and most intense aspects of life, which
love represents, are not the opposite of death, but part of the drive
toward death which is the momentum of life itself. The complete iden-
tity with nature, which is the fulfilment of life, is achieved visibly only
by death; hence death is the most accurate symbol of the ultimate
meaning of life.
The question whether life drives to death or through it remains, for
most of us, an unanswerable question. Beddoes answers, not that there is
a "life after" death, but that life and death are different aspects of the
same world, related as day is to night, summer to winter. Man, says
Beddoes, is the seed of a ghost, and just as Samuel Butler remarks that a
chicken is an egg's way of producing another egg,42 so Beddoes presents
us with a world in which a human life is a ghost's way of producing
another ghost. The matter is not as straightforward as this, even in
Beddoes, but one principle is clear enough to go on with. In our account
of the Romantic myth we spoke of two orders of nature, one the world of
ordinary social human experience, the other a world connected with
uncultivated nature, the physical environment outside society. This lat-
ter world is the world of the "sublime," and it is Wordsworth's benevo-
lent teacher, but we noted that in later Romanticism it is often more
pessimistically regarded. It becomes, for example, Schopenhauer's world
as will. Beddoes makes a startling and yet oddly suggestive identifica-
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 127

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

the guilty blossom

His heart's blood stained. [1.1.59-60]

Certain thematic images are established: there is the imagery of flowers

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

For when our souls are born then will we wed;

Our dust shall mix and grow into one stalk. [2.3.76]
128 A Study of English Romanticism

There is also a suggestion of a cycle of death moving opposite to the cycle

of life, of ghosts begetting ghosts. To nerve himself for his murder
Hesperus stands on the grave of another murderer, and feels the latter's
spirit passing into himself. We understand that the real murderous im-
pulse is within him: as the Duke shrewdly remarks:

'Tis but one devil ever tempts a man,

And his name's Self. [2.6.H-12]43

And yet one feels that there is something sacrificial about all the deaths
in the play, the direction of the sacrifice being not, as with ritual sacrifice,
to safeguard the living, but to strengthen the community of death. Hints
are thrown out about forms of life beyond life, and Olivia's attendant
tries, as she says, to

persuade myself this intercourse

Of disembodied minds is no conjecture,
No fiction of romance. [5.3.81-3]

And although Hesperus goes through agonies of remorse and other

appropriate emotions, he seems oddly to have extended his experience
by his crime in a way that makes it something more than merely a crime.
Of various dramatic fragments that Beddoes began shortly after The
Bride's Tragedy, the most remarkable, and the most nearly completed, is
The Second Brother, over four acts of which survive. There are really three
brothers in this play: a Duke of Ferrara, who dies without appearing in the
action; Marcello, the next oldest, an exile presumed dead; and Orazio, the
heir apparent by default. The action opens with the return of Marcello and
his encounter with Orazio. The encounter is in the tonality of death con-
fronting life, the skeleton or death's head at the scene of festivity. Orazio,
handsome, popular, extravagant, with all eyes on him, is brought up short
in his public triumph by his beggared brother. In this moment of contact
they symbolize the opposition of living and dead worlds, as Marcello says:

We are like two mountain peaks,

Of two close planets, catching in the air:
You, King Olympus, a great pile of summer,
Wearing a crown of gods; I, the vast top
Of the ghosts' deadly world, naked and dark. [1.1.144-8]
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 129

Several other contrasts are involved, including one rather like that of
Mark Antony and Octavius. Orazio is a Dionysus, a lord of love and
wine, spilling over with life and energy; Marcello is a votary of Apollo,
who prays to a god he thinks of as remote and withdrawn:

Great solitary god of that one sun,

I charge thee by the likeness of our state. [1.1.221-2]

As an "Apollonian" he stands for order, form, everything that is fixed in

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

case his poetic instinct would have led him to a much more ambiguous
treatment of the death-fool theme than he suggests here.
The plot of Death's Jest-Book, which was not essentially altered by
revision, revolves around two brothers, Wolfram and Isbrand, disguised
as a knight and a court fool respectively, in the service of Melveric, Duke
of Miinsterberg. Isbrand has a melancholy and sardonic temperament
like the "malcontent" type popularized by Marston: more generally, he
is the kind of highly articulate tragic hero who can act as chorus to his
own action, of the family of Hamlet, Bosola, and Vendice.45 Isbrand is
dedicated to revenge on the Duke, who has killed their father: Wolfram,
a saintly and chivalric spirit, has renounced revenge and in a compli-
cated action, which takes place in Egypt, saves the Duke's life after the
Duke has tried to poison him, out of rivalry over the heroine Sibylla.
Exasperated by Wolfram's invulnerable virtue and his sense of inferior-
ity to it, the Duke finally succeeds in murdering him and returns to
Miinsterberg with Sibylla, followed by Isbrand. Once home, the Duke's
love slips back to the memory of his dead wife, in a way typical of
Beddoes's dramatic actions. Similarly, Hesperus can only love what he is
about to try to destroy, and Orazio does not really love the heroine
Valeria until after he has neglected her to the verge of killing her with a
broken heart.
The late Duchess's body, in a grisly scene, is exchanged for that of
Wolfram by Isbrand. The Duke attempts to call up the ghost of his wife
by necromancy; he thus, because of the exchange, calls up Wolfram
instead, who cannot be dismissed because he has been definitely sum-
moned. Wolfram's ghost, like the Sweet William of the ballads, renews
his earthly love for the now neglected Sibylla, who dies to join him.
Isbrand organizes a conspiracy against the Duke and is temporarily
successful, but once vested with authority he becomes tyrannical. The
main action for the latter half of the play shifts to the Duke's two sons, the
dutiful and heroic Adalmar and the self-indulgent Athulf. Isbrand has
planned their deaths as part of his revenge, but their love for the same
woman, Amala, which repeats the main theme in counterpoint, leads to
the same climax, with Athulf murdering his brother. In the amazing final
scene, where a danse macabre painted on the walls of a crypt comes to life,
Athulf stabs himself, Isbrand is killed by a blind devotee of liberty
named Mario, and Wolfram, who replaces Isbrand as fool in the last
scene, pulls the Duke down into his grave, "still alive, into the world o'
th' dead" [5.4.357], "dead" being appropriately the last word in the play.
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 131

This account gives little indication of the skill with which Beddoes man-
ages to make all these deaths individually plausible and cumulatively
convincing to the emotions.
It has been noticed that every great Romantic poet in English literature
leaves some major and central work unfinished, or revises and reworks it
incessantly.46 The reasons naturally vary, but some features recur. By-
ron's Childe Harold and Don Juan are unfinished because they are, in very
different moods, parodies of the Romantic completed quest. That is, they
are endless poems in their very inception, and could only be abandoned
when the author tired of the persona. Keats's Hyperion, Blake's Four Zoas,
and Wordsworth's Prelude were revised and reworked partly because
they were, in a sense, definitive poems, expressing the heart of what their
creators had to say. Both these reasons apply to Death's Jest-Book, and
with Beddoes something also has to be allowed for personal tempera-
ment. He tells us little about himself in his letters, but a tone of self-
deprecation recurs which suggests some doubts about his ability ever to
finish his work to his own satisfaction. There is nothing neurotic in his
writing, but an increasingly self-destructive streak in him, which de-
stroyed first a large body of his work and then his life, links him more
closely than any other English Romantic to some of the tormented and
self-mutilated geniuses of German Romanticism, such as Kleist and
Holderlin. A more technical reason for the long delay in giving Death's
Jest-Book to the world, however, was Beddoes's desire to make it a real
stage play, to be acted in a theatre. True, there was an audience for verse
tragedies in his time—Keats even had a notion that Otho the Great would
make money—but it is hard to see how Death's Jest-Book could have
succeeded on the stage. Yet, before we assign Beddoes to that unhappy,
obsessed, and somewhat masochistic band of modern poets who have
tried to "revive poetic drama," we should glance at the courage and
common sense with which he defines his attitude:

I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold

trampling fellow . . . . With the greatest reverence for all the antiquities of
the drama, I still think we had better beget than revive—attempt to give the
literature of this age an idiosyncrasy & spirit of its own, & only raise a ghost
to gaze on, not to live with.47

Beddoes had learned from the dramatists of Shakespeare's age how an

intense concentration on scenes of horror and violence impregnates the
132 A Study of English Romanticism

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

Some one of those malicious Gods who envy Prometheus his puppet
show have taught all confounded sorts of malcontent beasts, saucy birds
and ambitious shell-fish, and hopping creatures of land and water, the
knack of looking human to the life. How? is the mystery of the cookery-
book. [1.1.116-20]
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 133

The conception of the grotesque, and more particularly the conception

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

as a stage play, Beddoes saw clearly that tragedy could not be perma-
nently "revived" except in a grotesque, and consequently antiheroic,
context. To attempt a play in which death has the role of jester makes
Beddoes a precursor of the theatre of the absurd.
It was hardly possible for Beddoes to create such a theatre in his time,
but it is easiest to understand certain features of Death's Jest-Book in the
light of later theatrical developments. The play begins with an epigraph
from Aristophanes' Frogs, and The Frogs is perhaps closest of any earlier
play to Beddoes in its portrayal of a world of the dead related to the
world of life in a way that makes us wonder which is really which.
Beddoes's characters live in a kind of subterranean world like that of
Eliot's Waste Land, where the life of ordinary consciousness is, like the life
of the isolated Ancient Mariner, a life in death, the cemetery of reality.
The ship which carries the chief characters from Egypt to Germany is
called the Ban's, the name of Charon's ferry boat in the underworld, and
the fact that Isbrand and the Duke are both in disguise helps to empha-
size the feeling that the actors are "hollow men," or shadows. Wolfram
the ghost is no more but no less solid than the other characters; Ziba, the
necromancer who is the Duke's servant, is said to have been found in the
underworld, and Mandrake expresses the complementary view about
living people: "there is many a fellow with broad shoulders and a goodly
paunch who looks and behaves as if he were alive, although in soul and
spirit he be three times more dead than salt fish in Lent" [2.2.111-14].
We are constantly in a twilight world between life and death, like the
world of Beckett, or a world between physical objects and mysterious
forces of which the objects are symbols, like the world of lonesco, or a
world like the "Bardo" world between death and rebirth which Yeats
imported from the Orient.52 One of the most haunting songs in the play is
actually about reincarnation, in its grotesque form of rebirth into ani-
mals, and the three characters we meet in the first scene, Mandrake the
zany, whose name of Homunculus suggests something deformed or
dwarfish, the saintly Wolfram, and the court fool Isbrand, remind us of
the approaching chaos of the end of Yeats's lunar cycle of which "Hunch-
back and Saint and Fool are the last crescents."53 Yeatsian too is the sense
of a world moving from life to death interpenetrating with another
world moving in the reverse direction through dreams, in a continuous
weaving shuttle or "double gyre."
The characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, however melan-
choly and withdrawn in temperament they may be, are, we said earlier,
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 135

always essentially related to a society. But the characters in Beddoes are

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

British standards and practically revolutionary by Continental ones, are

consistent with his treatment of death. But the real setting is simply
Romantic Gothic, and its atmosphere is not that of a definite period of the
past, but of a historical essence suspended in time, like the curious
Roman-Renaissance background of Shakespeare's Cymbeline. There are
some deliberate anachronisms, references to Columbus and to English
critics, and Mario, the blind man who kills Isbrand, has "seen" the
assassination of Julius Caesar, perhaps not wholly in imagination. People
move about with the dignity, passion, and rhetoric of a generalized
traditional past: the absence of any definite historical community is one
of the things that create the sense of something alive and dead at the
same time. The feeling is similar to the later romances of William Morris
and the Celtic twilight period of Yeats, except that there is much less
sense of subjectivity: Beddoes differs from them somewhat as Strindberg
differs from Maeterlinck.
The tendency to fragmentation in Beddoes's work generally is another
significant feature. We may sometimes wonder whether Beddoes, like
Goethe,54 was less of a serious dramatist than a great lyrical poet who
was primarily interested, not in the overall dramatic structure, but in
decentralized emotional foci, especially those of the interspersed songs.
The lyrical element in the play actually increased as Beddoes went on
revising it: some of the finest of the songs are later additions. Further,
death is the fool, and one of the functions of the fool is to act as a
"touchstone," whose jokes indicate something central in the characters of
others. Death as fool is a touchstone in this way: everyone dies, as he has
lived, in a way distinctive of himself. The speech uttered at the point of
death in a tragedy is often a character's "signature" speech, summing up
what is most profoundly characteristic of him. This principle of the
signature in the death speech is particularly clear not only in Shake-
speare's tragedies but in The Duchess of Mai ft, where everyone who dies
says something essential to the understanding of his or her character in
the final words. Often in Beddoes, most remarkably in a fragment called
The Last Man, and again in the last scene with Sibylla in Death's Jest-Book,
the dramatic action leads up to, or even seems a mere pretext for, a
monologue uttered at the point of death. Perhaps Beddoes's real form, so
far as it was dramatic, was less the stage play than the kind of near-death
monologue represented by Browning's Bishop Orders His Tomb, Eliot's
Gerontion, or Tennyson's Ulysses.
We have several times referred to Eliot, whom Beddoes resembles in
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 137

the way in which he combines a close study of Jacobean dramatists with

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

desire to have a certain episode come next may be independent of the

requirements of the plot; or the plot may disappear in favour of a se-
quence depending solely on the author's will. This purely thematic,
rather than fictional, type of episodic sequence is often rationalized as
being like that of a dream, as in Strindberg's Dream Play, although the
construction of that play is not really dreamlike. Or it may be said to be
like that of a pointless and absurd universe, where everything is inconse-
quential, but this again is a rationalization of the fact that the dramatist
wants it that way. In Death's Jest-Book one has a feeling that the complex
plot is not the inevitable form of what Beddoes has to say, but a separable
artefact, and that he did not sufficiently realize that the plot was an
obstacle to his dramatic utterance. This is a question of technique which
strikes its roots into the centre of Romanticism, and we shall return to it
in discussing the plotless narratives of Shelley and Keats.
In his characterization, however, as we noted, Beddoes takes a freer
hand, and creates not fully realized people, but functional archetypes,
that is, characters who illustrate what he has to say rather than what the
plot demands that they do. It is natural that the sense of a hidden identity
between the inner life of man and the organic processes of nature, the
natura naturans, should have been accompanied by a good deal of quasi-
scientific and pseudo-scientific speculation about the new kinds of knowl-
edge that an apprehension of such an identity would reveal. We noticed
in the previous chapter how in "Gothic" fiction many ancient supersti-
tions—the making of homunculi, the conjuring of spirits, vampirism,
and the like—took on a new significance as symbolizing the kind of
knowledge, whether fascinating or merely sinister, that man might ob-
tain through his renewed contact with the mysteries of nature. Such
figures as the mysterious alchemist and mad scientist began to become
popular around the end of the eighteenth century, and have continued to
be so ever since. The first speaker in Death's Jest-Book is Homunculus
Mandrake, to whom we have several times referred, who announces that
he is going to abandon folly as a profession, thereby rejecting "all sober
sense" [1.1.5], and pursue wisdom, in such guises as the philosopher's
stone and the ointment of invisibility. His studies do not appear to be
very fruitful: perhaps this is reflected in the fact that the two lively songs,
Whoever has heard of Saint Gingo and Wee, wee taylor, are both parodies of
fertility. But still he does illustrate something of Blake's aphorism, "If the
fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."58 The fool in
Shakespeare often represents a spirit of mock logic, presenting plausible
arguments and pseudo-syllogisms and paradoxes which his patrons en-
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 139

courage him to "make good." Similarly, Mandrake explains how super-

stition and the sense of mystery have defined the essentially human
quality of folly, and how with the advance of enlightenment, as mystery
recedes, each man tends to carry his own death fool around with him, in
the form of a Mephistophelian spirit of denial:

O world, world! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert too wise; and
now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting from
thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall our grandchildren say, till
Master Merriman's kingdom was broken up: now is every man his own
fool, and the world's cheerless. [1.1.40-5]

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

It is this infinite invisible

Which we must learn to know, and yet to scorn,
And, from the scorn of that, regard the world
As from the edge of a far star. [4.1.15-18]

We almost forget his hideous crimes and watch him sympathetically,

feeling that at the end the citizens of Miinsterberg are right in preferring
him to Isbrand. It is typical of such a man that he should live outside of
himself, so to speak, in the present action, avoiding the reflectiveness
140 A Study of English Romanticism

that turns one to the past or the future. As he says to his son:

Think of now.
This Hope and Memory are wild horses, tearing
The precious now to pieces. [4.2.148-50]

It is also typical of a person whose real life is in his actions that whenever
he does reflect he should become the blackest of pessimists. As soon as
his world is separated from him and becomes objective, it turns into hell.
When he reflects, the horror of the past and the nothingness of the future
come crowding in on him and annihilate the exuberant rhythm of present
action:

The look of the world's a lie, a face made up

O'er graves and fiery depths; and nothing's true
But what is horrible. [4.1.7-9]

And yet at the same time a nihilism of spirit is always with him: this is
symbolized by Wolfram's haunting of him. When Wolfram first appears
he reacts with great courage, saying that he refuses to believe what is in
front of him and threatening to turn Wolfram into "my fool, ghost, my
jest and zany" [4.1.42], in the tonality of the central death-fool theme. But
he is entirely unable to avert Wolfram's appearance, partly because he is
already possessed by death.
The heroine Sibylla is first introduced to us as essentially a creation of
the Duke's, who has raised her out of prison and given her her first
glimpse of her brave new world. He talks of taking her home and
bestowing her on some lover destined for her, but as soon as the destined
lover turns up in the person of Wolfram, the Duke forgets his generosity
and begins to hate Wolfram. The implication is that what he loves is less
Sibylla than something in himself that he can make Wolfram a sacrifice
to. Later, as mentioned, Sibylla is carried off to the underworld by
Wolfram while the Duke turns to seek his own underworld bride, his
buried wife, who, being naturally older than Sibylla, is something of a
Demeter to her Proserpine.60 In his brooding over her grave the Duke
reminds us a little of the old man in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale who keeps
begging his mother Earth to readmit him to her body.
Isbrand is the chief spokesman for the death-fool equation, and, being
disguised as a fool, he is, for most of the play, closer to the human sense
of the identity of wisdom and folly. He is more reflective than the Duke
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 141

by temperament, partly because his mind, being engaged in plotting

revenge, is thrown forward to the future. Like Poe's Hop-Frog, he is a
jester whose disguise will make possible a revenge which will be an
epiphany of death:61 as he says in one of several passages which associate
the tolling of funeral bells with the bells of the fool's cap: "I shall triumph
like Jupiter in my fool's cap, to fetch the Duke and his sons to Hell, and
then my bells will ring merrily, and I shall jest more merrily than now:
for I shall be Death the Court-fool" [2.2.143-6].
His revenge is deflected, however, by his misuse of the success of his
political conspiracy against the Duke. Once in power, the cloud of his
revenge anxiety lifts, and he feels in himself the same exhilaration in
ruthless action that the Duke felt. Unlike the Duke, however, he tends to
intellectualize it in a Nietzschean superman philosophy, dramatizing
himself as a self-surpassing hero who is "tired of being no more than
human" [4.4.189]:

It was ever
My study to find out a way to godhead,
And on reflection soon I found that first
I was but half created; that a power
Was wanting in my soul to be its soul,
And this was mine to make. Therefore I fashioned
A will above my will, that plays upon it,
As the first soul doth use in men and cattle. [5.1.47-54]

He speaks well and convincingly, but he has lost his sense of irony, and is
betraying the essential humanity in himself which his fool's role symbol-
ized. Hence he is falling into the attitude of mind that he hated in the
Duke, though without the Duke's sense of detachment about doing a job
that he neither likes nor dislikes. Isbrand and the Duke are both quixotic
characters, men trying to be angels or gods, and consequently they are
arbitrary rulers, pulling away from the democracy that death the leveller
represents. The link between them is expressed by Isbrand when he
speaks of doing with his ambition what the Duke tried to do with his
wife:

The tools I've used

To chisel an old heap of stony laws,
The abandoned sepulchre of a dead dukedom,
Into the form my spirit loved and longed for;
142 A Study of English Romanticism

Now that I've perfected her beauteous shape,

And animated it with half my ghost;
Now that I lead her to our bridal bed . . . [5.1.13-19]

The exceptional person is exceptionally isolated, and may in himself

be a force for exceptional good or evil: as Isbrand says to himself when
plotting revenge:

Art thou alone? Why, so should be

Creators and destroyers. [1.1.315-16]

But of the three "brothers" (for Wolfram and the Duke are spoken of as
blood brothers), only Wolfram, with his gentle and forgiving spirit, so
compassionate that he even refrains from haunting the Duke until com-
pelled to do so, achieves a genuinely human combination of detachment
and engagement. The interpenetration of life and death, therefore, so
central in Beddoes's imagery, is not quite the same thing as the interpen-
etration of good and evil. We have already referred to the significance of
Byron in popularizing a new sense of moral ambiguity: the sense of the
curse of genius, the isolation caused by the possession of greater powers
than ordinary. In Byron this theme is treated more or less aesthetically:
that is, it is seen from a distance, and we can read about the Corsair's one
virtue and thousand crimes without being troubled by what the charac-
ters in The Playboy of the Western World felt to be an important distinction
after they had experienced both: the distinction between "a gallous story
and a dirty deed."62 This aesthetic approach to the moral complexity of
the human situation is reflected in Byron's style. Byron himself was a
witty, sociable, extroverted poet of great common sense and (much the
same thing) relatively few anxieties, hence it was easy for him to adopt,
in Don Juan, a persona of detached ironic amusement. At the same time
he could project the Byronic hero, as a kind of demonic shadow of
himself, into his tales and tragedies, including Childe Harold. But to have
identified the two would have destroyed his sense of identity, and he
never achieved or even attempted the fusion of the two moods in the
grotesque as Beddoes did (except perhaps in the last canto of Don Juan,
and there only on an Ingoldsby-Legends level).63
Beddoes's grotesque is thus an inseparable part of a less aesthetic and
more existential approach than Byron's, an approach which naturally
ensured that he would never be, like Byron, a popular poet. For Beddoes,
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 143

we are plunged into a world which, in spite of all the violence and irony,
is still a world of morally significant choices:

I know the moment: 'tis a dreadful one,

Which in the life of every one comes once;
When for the frighted hesitating soul
High heaven and luring sin with promises
Bid and contend. [1.2.367-71]

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

Then Amen is said

Unto thy time of being in this world. [1.2.307-8]

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

Look you, the round earth's sleeping like a serpent

Who drops her dusty tail upon her crown
Just here. [1.1.143-5]

Eternity, which includes both life and death, is the world of our full
144 A Study of English Romanticism

identity. To be born into an individual life and consciousness is therefore

to be thrown into an unbalanced state, "excepted from eternity" [2.2.37!,
as Sibylla says, and the proper function of death is to recover the balance.
In a figure which goes back as far as the Presocratic philosopher
Anaximander, one dies to pay the debt to nature incurred by being born,
to make "amends" (Sibylla's word [1.2.185]) f°r having been an indi-
vidual. Consciousness, then, is a kind of withdrawal from being, a death
principle which fulfils itself by possessing death. The death speech of the
heroine of the fragmentary Last Man, already mentioned, speaks of death
as a kind of flight of the alone to the alone, where the individual becomes
a universe in himself, a microcosm of the actual universe, and so attains a
genuine sense of being at the centre of reality:

And thou the sum of these, nature of all,

Thou providence pervading the whole space
Of measureless creation; thou vast mind

All hail! I too am an eternity;

I am an universe . . .
'Round and around the curvous atmosphere
Of my own real existence I revolve,
Serene and starry with undying love.
I am, I have been, I shall be, O glory!
An universe, a god, a living Ever.65 {Dies.}

It appears, then, that birth is a shifting of the centre from the universe
to the individual ego. To be born is to acquire a lost soul: everybody
therefore has a lost soul, and the important thing is to make sure that it
gets lost. The crimes, first of the Duke, then of his son Athulf, and the
hybris of Isbrand after his revolt, show that they are clinging to this lost
soul, and seeking identity through it. Hence, though in one sense they die
in the moment of their crimes, in another sense they are really trying to
resist the surrendering act of death, trying, once again, to be gods or
angels or demons in an egocentric eternity. Wolfram and Sibylla, on the
other hand, understand that "It is the earth that falls away from light"
[2.2.40] (elsewhere "day"), and for them death is the dragon guarding
the treasure of identity. For those who achieve that identity, death is the
death of death.
Time is what enables being to appear as the world, and the world is
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 145

eternity so far as we see it extended in space. But time itself is also death
and illusion, the power that carries everything away into nothingness.
The appearance of time in our world is symbolized in Beddoes, as it so
often is in Romantic and modern poets, by a river flowing to the sea of
eternity. As the world is what we see of eternity, the rest of eternity, the
world of death that we cannot see and so assume to have been annihi-
lated, is mostly the part of it that has been carried away by time. Many of
Beddoes's most remarkable images are based on the sense of the liquid-
ness of life, of the living body as a continuous stream which is never the
same twice. Athulf says of Amala, for instance:

but when she moves, you see,

Like water from a crystal overfilled,
Fresh beauty tremble out of her and lave
Her fair sides to the ground. [2.3.169-72]

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

like an old, haunted mountain,

Icy and hoary, shalt thou stand 'mid life.67

Similarly, the common Romantic image of the boat tossing on water is

linked by Beddoes with life journeying to its ultimate fulfilment through
death. Sibylla links the image of the resisting mountain to a Lohengrin-
like picture of her ghost lover:
146 A Study of English Romanticism

Speak as at first you did; there was in the words

A mystery and music, which did thaw
The hard old rocky world into a flood,
Whereon a swan-drawn boat seemed at my feet
Rocking on its blue billows. [4.2.48-52]

The "world," of course, as already said, is the visible or spatial world

which conceals a dark invisible world on the side turned away from us,
the kingdom of the black sun beyond. Long before we rejoin it we are
aware of the influence of the death world on us. It seeps into our lives in
the form of sleep and dream, and brings a refreshment and strengthen-
ing to us in a way that suggests that it is something considerably more
than a mere negation. Sibylla says after a night's sleep:

Deeply have I slept.

As one who doth go down unto the springs
Of his existence and there bathed, I come
Regenerate up into the world again. [1.2.64-7]

This takes us back to the traditional image of the underground oracle, as

well as to the Kubla Khan imagery of subterranean rivers. The world of
sleep and dream is thus also the world from which the poet and the
prophet draw their revelations, the poet being in our day the chief
transmitter of "the prophecies"

which flicker up
Out of the sun's grave underneath the world.68

Hence the poet is typically in the position of Wolfram, or of Samuel in the

Witch of Endor story, who has kept a communication line open to this
lower world.69 In another poem Beddoes thus describes a poet:

the truth was restless in him,

And shook his visionary fabrics down,
As one who had been buried long ago
And now was called up by a necromancer
To answer dreadful questions.70

The voice of this buried world has the peculiarly ambivalent quality of
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 147

the grotesque: it is at once oracular and witty, inspiring awe and yet
provoking the laughter of the intelligence. Strange rumours come to us
from this world, rumours of some indefinitely repeated process going on
in both nature and human life, of rebirth and reincarnation, of man's
present body as a seed of the tree of ghosts, of dreams as the spirits of the
dead living in us.
Simple and primitive societies, one character in the play suggests, are
more apt to be haunted by the dead because the dead of such societies
are lonely, and make their way back to a community of greater cheerful-
ness. As time goes on the dead become the majority—migravit ad plures
was a stock phrase about one recently dead—and great cities have been
formed in the dead world, so we may expect that "There will be no more
haunting" [3.3.396!. In proportion as death has become populous, it has
become the past of which our own knowledge is a recollection. It is the
realm of the permanent achievements of mankind, which are not lost in
time as they appear to be, but are simply carried away by time. Thus the
world of death acquires through time a kind of moral stability which
helps to balance our own lives.
It is an old assumption of tragedy that time—that is, death—will
discover crimes and that revenge may come through ghosts. In ordinary
life conscience and remorse are evidence of the permanence of what has
been done in the vanished past: of conscience Isbrand says that it "doth
prattle with the voices of the dead through the speaking trumpet of the
winds" [2.2.119-20]. Similarly, a man may conceal a crime from the
world of the living, as the Duke did his murder of Wolfram, but such a
crime makes one visible to the world of the dead, hence the tradition of
murderers being haunted by their victims. Athulf, after his murder of his
brother, understands how a "mortal" sin is in fact a death of the soul,
killing the sinner without making any apparent change in his status:

I am unsouled, dishumanized, uncreated;

My passions swell and grow like brutes conceived

I break, and magnify, and lose my form.

And yet I shall be taken for a man,
And never be discovered till I die. [4.3.379-80, 392-4]

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

admitting one's limitations, and so persisting in folly. Wolfram, who

suffers but does not inflict injustice, is emancipated into the world of
pure death: Isbrand, because he is vowed to conspiracy and revenge, acts
as a nemesis or agent of dark unseen forces that are nevertheless on the
side of a kind of rough justice in human affairs. Revolutions may also be
uprisings of the same hidden force which makes for a renewed order,
and are described, as is Isbrand's revenge, in the imagery of volcanoes
and earthquakes, an energy pushing up from below.
A question has already arisen: if death so interpenetrates with life, and
if there is such variety of good and evil in life, is there any variety in
death as well? Death seems too unvarying a category to be more than
accidentally connected with life. It is alike the punishment of the villain
and the reward of his victim, the end of revenge on Melveric and the
release of Sibylla. Beddoes, who is not working out his poems within any
definite structure of doctrine, religious or otherwise, does not give a very
clear answer to this. But it does seem that there is some difference
between death and deadness. Of Wolfram, Sibylla says (notice the three
words again, with "motion" substituted for "time"):

This utterance and token of his being

His spirit hath let fall, and now is gone
To fill up nature and complete her being.
The form, that here is fallen, was the engine,
Which drew a great motion of spiritual power
Out of the world's own soul, and made it play
In visible motion, as the lofty tower
Leads down the animating fire of heaven
To the world's use.71

For Wolfram, therefore, death seems to be a reintegration. But the deadness

of spirit that the Duke intermittently feels is rather a feeling of being cut
off:

I do begin to feel
As if I were a ghost among the men,
As all I loved are; for their affections
Hang on things new, young, and unknown to me:
And that I am is but the obstinate will
Of this my hostile body. [4.1.67-72]
Yorick: The Romantic Macabre 149

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

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

Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary

We have isolated one element in the Romantic revolution as the recovery

by man of a good deal of what he formerly projected on God. Creative
power, the desire for liberty, and the capacity to make myths and to
design the structures of civilization are increasingly regarded as originat-
ing in the human mind. One would expect, then, the growth of a secular
humanism in poetry, where man is seen as building a better world for
himself out of his own resources. Central among these resources would
be science, man's new direct knowledge of his environment, and technol-
ogy, his even newer ability to apply it. We do in fact get a certain amount
of such literature, mainly in France, where the social effects of the French
Revolution naturally centred. But we noted that there seems to have
been, since the Romantic movement at least, a persistent separation of
the scientific vision of nature, the informing language of which becomes
increasingly mathematical rather than verbal, from the existential myth
to which the poetic vision belongs. Poetry speaks, not the language of
fact or reason, but the language of concern, of hopes and fears and
desires and hatreds and dreams. Poets frequently announce that they are
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 151

about to make a functional use of contemporary science and technology

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

What is that Power? Some moon-struck sophist stood

Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown
Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood
The Form he saw and worshipped was his own,
His likeness in the world's vast mirror shown, [canto 8, st. 6]

Once they understand this, she remarks pointedly, their attitudes toward
a number of other things will also change:

Know yourselves thus! ye shall be pure as dew,

And I will be a friend and sister unto you. [canto 8, st. 18]

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

thought"), and who was martyred by the gods for his friendship to man.
Similarly, Prometheus's deliverance is achieved when the projected Jupi-
ter falls back into the cave of myths whence he originated, and becomes
identical with his phantasm, in accordance with Prometheus's remark to
the phantasm:

as thou art must be

He whom thou shadowest forth. [Prometheus Unbound, 1.1.246-7]

It is not surprising that Shelley's first major effort, Queen Mob, should be
in large part an essay in versified scientism, celebrating the superseding
of religion by a more rational and secular attitude.
Yet Queen Mob is so obviously not on the direct path of Shelley's poetic
development that we have to look further than the mere immaturity of
the poem itself for the reasons. A personal God, it is true, has no status in
the scientific vision: he is replaced by natural law, and natural law
operates most freely in the world of the dead or inanimate. In the world
of time and space, then, God is dead: he was of course never alive there,
but any God who can die is much better dead. But what we are then left
with is the scientific vision of law, in which the human mind confronts a
subhuman world. It is in the realm of the automatic and predictable that
science moves with most assurance, but human beings themselves clearly
belong, at least in large part, to a different realm, and we can perceive
nothing externally that is, to put it crudely, any better than we are. We
may gain intuitions of a superhuman process which unites us with
nature, but we do not perceive any such process as a conscious subject.
What we perceive, or rather infer from what we perceive, is what Queen
Mab, quite logically and consistently, leads up to: a vision of "Nature's
[elsewhere "Necessity's"] unchanging harmony."74
But this gives us a view of the human situation which is very like an
extremely rigorous Christian view, with nature substituted for God.
Nature forms a harmonious order from which man alone is excluded.
Man in his present state is the scapegoat or pharmakos of nature, the only
unnatural being, and nothing can help him except reconciliation with
nature. Nature's gospel is nature's law, which when accepted becomes
freedom as well as necessity. As with more conventional creeds, the
difficulty and complexity of regeneration is got around by being trans-
ferred to an anxiety symbol which substitutes for it. The eating of meat
occupies the same place in Shelley's poem that similar fetishes do in
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 153

institutional religion. Prometheus enters the footnotes to Queen Mab,

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

take on an increasingly geometrical form, and we realize that the visible

form of civilization is changing from a proportion related to the human
body to a proportion related to the mechanical extensions of the body. In
Romantic music and poetry we begin to notice an inner propulsion that
has something mechanical in it—though we must be careful not to use
this word, in a metaphor popularized by Romanticism itself, as a merely
pejorative term. This kind of propulsion comes into Wordsworth's Idiot
Boy, Peter Bell, and The Waggoner, where we hear a good deal about flying
boats. As the thief of fire, Prometheus of course has a technological side,
and the sense that a rapidly stepped-up conquest of space is not far off in
human destiny lurks in such poems as The Witch of Atlas, to say nothing
of Prometheus Unbound itself. We understand Shelley very well when he
says:

Whoever should behold me now, I wist,

Would think I were a mighty mechanist,
Bent with sublime Archimedean art
To breathe a soul into the iron heart
Of some machine portentous, or strange gin,
Which by the force of figured spells might win
Its way over the sea, and sport therein. [Letter to Maria Gisborne, 11.15-21]

However, we should expect to find most Romantic poets very cau-

tious, if not openly hostile, in their approach to such themes. Blake, for
instance, uses a good deal of mechanical and technological imagery, but
he emphasizes the sinister side of it: its connection with exploitation and
alienation, its development of improved ways of killing people in vast
numbers, its role in reinforcing brutally repressive regimes. An aware-
ness of the same general kind, which, if not sinister, is at least extremely
ambiguous, comes into De Quincey's powerful essay The English Mail-
Coach. The mail coach is part of a big spider web of a central intelligence,
a new kind of personality which is at once human and mechanical. As
that it is partly demonic, a Juggernaut with a baleful dragon-eye, bearing
news of victory and of death, which nearly crushes a helpless young
couple, and stirs up in the poet the central anxiety dream, the dream
which repeats the original fall of man.
The sense of the new technology as demonic is connected with the
sense of its aggressiveness. Man allies himself with the dead and me-
chanical in order to attack and conquer nature, which he is still thinking
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 155

of as objective, as set over against him. It is not set over against him,
however, but is part of himself, hence he is engaging in his old projecting
game of enslaving himself to what he creates. Or, as Shelley says, "man,
having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave."79 The automo-
tive boats and unidentified flying objects in Shelley, on the other hand,
represent rather a physical and mental identity with nature, where space
is receding because the human mind and its powers are expanding. The
swift vehicles are symbols of desire, and are swift because human emo-
tions are swift: as the Spirit of the Hour says of his "coursers":

I desire: and their speed makes night kindle;

I fear: they outstrip the Typhoon. [Prometheus Unbound, 2.4.169-70]

The same feeling comes into Shelley's natural imagery as well. In The
Cloud, to take a familiar example, we feel that we ourselves are riding on
the cycle of nature, participating in what might better be called its chang-
ing harmony; and similarly with the loving description in Prometheus
Unbound of the spirits of the elements riding up through the water in
bubbles and then going back again to repeat the process.
We notice that in painting, as well as in poetry, a new sense of man's
relation to nature is developing. With Rembrandt, painting reflects a
culture in which the subject-object relation is primary: in his pictures we
are looking at an objective order. Coleridge's conception of the artist
imitating nature by identifying himself with the natura naturans or living
process of nature, which we referred to in the first chapter, is implicit in
his remarks on the painting of Washington Allston.80 The remarks have
little to do with Allston, but, considered in connection with painting,
have a good deal to do with the pictorial development which began with
late Turner and carried on through the Impressionists. In such painting
we are still in the area of representation, even of "realism," but it is a
realism that renders a sense of rhythm and movement in nature, and that
demands a physical sense of participating in this rhythm from us. In
some of Shelley's colour fantasies something of the pictorial feeling of
late Turner is anticipated:

The point of one white star is quivering still

Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains: through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
156 A Study of English Romanticism

Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again

As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel in pale air:
Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow
The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not
The Aeolian music of her sea-green plumes
Winnowing the crimson dawn? [Prometheus Unbound, 1.2.17-27]

The negative or ironic pole of the poetic vision is the sense of nature as
objective and separated from the consciousness, but looked at by the
consciousness in the light of imagination and desire and not of reason.
Seen by the reason as an objective order, nature makes rational sense.
Seen by imagination, creativity, and desire, it makes no sense at all. It
presents us with an endless expanse of mindlessness: where it is alive it is
cruel; where it is dead it is empty. It presents us, therefore, with the sense
of the anguished and the absurd. This is the inevitable consequence, for
Shelley, of dropping the projected God of nature, and is foreshadowed in
the notes to Queen Mob: "But if the principle of the universe be not an
organic being, the model and prototype of man, the relation between it
and human beings is absolutely none."81
In Prometheus Unbound we have again what we had in Queen Mob, man
as the scapegoat of nature, the only power that resists Jupiter. But Shelley
has reversed his earlier notion of seeking reconciliation with Jupiter.
Prometheus is now the human mind confronting the objective world
with its own desire, and Jupiter is the mental block which prevents man
from trying to conceive and reshape a world beyond that order. The
reason that man clings to the notion of a personal God in nature as an
objective counterpart of himself is that, once this deity goes, he then
confronts a moral chaos, an absurdity. To be aware of the creation, as it
now is, is to be aware of anguish. In the notes to Queen Mob there occurs
the extraordinary phrase, "The supereminence of man is like Satan's, a
supereminence of pain,"82 and this is especially true of Prometheus. Yet
pain is the condition which keeps Prometheus conscious, and conscious-
ness is the only power that can be a threat to Jupiter. If man could lose his
specifically human consciousness, he would also lose his specifically
human pain and misery; but it would be a poor exchange.
Prometheus Unbound is based on two contrasting visions of nature. The
Jupiter death vision is the objective order perceived by what is in every
sense of the word a subject. The source of all error in religion is the notion
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 157

that this external order is a "creation." What it is is our own creation in a

degenerate form. Through automatic and unquestioning habit, what we
repeatedly see becomes familiar, and in proportion as it becomes famil-
iar, the counterpart of what perceives it, it becomes first separate, then
indifferent, then mindless, and finally a chaos. Genuine creation, or
poetry, "creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our
minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration," as Shelley
says in A Defence of Poetry.83 The fact that Jupiter's real impetus is toward
chaos rather than order comes out in the moment of his fall:

Let hell unlock

Its mounded oceans of tempestuous fire,
And whelm on them into the bottomless void
This desolated world, and thee, and me. [3.1.74-7]

The human society of ordinary experience is a part of the Jupiter

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

tic comedies. Shakespearean comedy, we said, begins with a world pre-

sented as a world of ordinary experience, often a court, with repressive
characteristics usually attached to it. This world collides with another
world associated with sleep, dream, magic, fairies, sexual desire, and a
more direct contact with a physical nature unspoiled by human perver-
sity. I call the latter world in Shakespeare, because it is so often a forest or
pastoral landscape, the "green world," a phrase occurring in both
Prometheus Unbound and Endymion (Beddoes, whose diction is habitually
more abstract, speaks of "the green creation" in The Bride's Tragedy) .^
The victory of the green world in the comic action indicates that desire
and love are not merely impotent expressions of a "pleasure principle"
feebly struggling against reality, as in Freud, but mighty powers capable
of subduing reality to themselves.
Two features of Shakespearean comedy are particularly relevant to
Shelley. First: in the traditional schema, unfallen nature, both human and
physical, possesses a harmony which the nature we know has lost. This
harmony is symbolized by the music of the spheres. The spheres of the
planets are, in many versions of the Ptolemaic cosmos, guided by angelic
intelligences. Below the lowest planet, the moon, comes the world of the
four elements. These elements, of course, have no angels, but there are, in
poetry and in some speculative thought, elemental spirits, who may be
controlled by magic. As an art, magic, in poetry, symbolizes the regain-
ing of a lost rapport with the "sublunary" part of the physical world,
assuming that the magic is morally benevolent. In A Midsummer Night's
Dream the fairies are expressly said to be spirits of the elements, whose
dissension causes bad weather. Yet they are able to intervene in the
actions of human beings too, their influence being in the direction of
promoting true love and evading the harsh senex-centred laws of Athens.
In The Tempest an entire society is recreated by Prospero's magic into a
higher order of nature, largely through the agency of elemental spirits,
Ariel in particular. What began as a shipwrecked group of clowns and
gangsters in which "no man was his own" [5.1.213] ends in a brave new
world, a society with its original structure intact, but permeated by a
spirit of reconciliation. Shakespeare, however, is (at least in The Tempest)
working with the older schema in which the higher level of nature is
purely human. Ariel, not being human, cannot enter such a world, and
has to be left to be free in his own element. In Prometheus Unbound there
are a great many spirits, and a number of them are expressly connected
with the elements. But in Shelley's Romantic cosmos there is no higher
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 159

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

called.86 Greek religion for Shelley was more flexible and less pedantic in
imposing belief; it preserved the intuitive sense of identity with natural
forces; its polytheism enabled the scientific and philosophical views of
the world to develop independently. The climax of Greek culture, the
age of Pericles, brought with it a belief in liberty, not, like the age of the
New Testament, a belief in the necessity of submission to tyranny. The
prospect of the political independence of Greece from Turkey thus seemed
to Shelley to be a genuine form of the crusade, and it stirred up specula-
tions in him about the world's great age beginning anew. The Wandering
Jew, who enters Queen Mob and re-enters Hellas, is a symbol for Shelley of
man enduring the tyranny of God until a better era dawns. For, accord-
ing to Queen Mob, the Wandering Jew was cursed out of pure malice by a
Christ who was only pretending to suffer on the cross.
Here we touch on the feature of Shelley's thought that so delighted
Yeats, the prophecy of a new religion "antithetical" to Christianity and
reverting to many features of Greek thought and culture. Shelley's ver-
sion of this new culture is, to speak plainly, much less vulgar than
Yeats's: it does not rest on a facile cyclicism or rationalize everything
brutal and degenerate in both Greek and modern culture as part of a
"tragic" or "heroic" way of life that is to be reintroduced, for Yeats, by
fascism. But still there are points in common, and Yeats was doubtless
right in seeing in Shelley's Prince Athanase ("immortal"), with his mother
and mysterious father, his tragic sense of life, and his courageous loyalty
to the destroyed pagan faith, an aesthetic and "antithetical" counterpart
to Christ, the tower under the moonrise being the antithesis of the cross
under the sunset. Prince Athanase's literary ancestor is, as Yeats says, the
pensive Platonist of Milton, reading Greek tragedies, pondering over
what spirits, whether of the elements or not, may transcend the Christian
cosmos, and eventually adopting a purely aesthetic religion of organ
music and stained glass windows.87 Milton, naturally, drew his penseroso
figure as the creature of a mood, not as the creator of reality, but for
Romanticism both penseroso and allegro narrators create the worlds
they are in, instead of merely responding to them, and hence are some-
thing much more significant than mere "humours." We shall meet this
point again in Keats.
In the original myth Prometheus was crucified by Zeus for not reveal-
ing a secret he held: that Zeus by marriage to Thetis would beget a son
greater than himself. Eventually Prometheus did reveal the secret, was
released, and Thetis was married off to a mortal, Peleus, their son being
Achilles, who, as a warrior, was an agent of, not a threat to, Zeus's
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 161

tyranny. In Shelley Jupiter announces the begetting of a Son who will

make him omnipotent: the scene is intended to recall the parallel an-
nouncement by God the Father in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, along
with its demonic counterpart, Satan's begetting of Death on a female Sin
in the second. In the Christian myth, as Shelley reads it, the Father
"redeems" man, that is, completes his ascendancy over him, by sending
his Son to earth as a spy in disguise:

Veiling His horrible Godhead in the shape

Of man. [Queen Mob, canto 7,11.164-5!

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

Within the silent centre of the earth

My mansion is; where I have lived insphered
From the beginning, and around my sleep
Have woven all the wondrous imagery
Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world.90
162 A Study of English Romanticism

If life is the dream of the Earth-Spirit, the poet is the interpreter of that
dream, who creates for us a version of the world which is much closer to
reality than the world we see. Unity with the Earth-Spirit is the primary
or existential identity of man; poetry creates a secondary identity which
has, in the words of the preface to Prometheus Unbound, "some intelligible
and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought."91 The
vision of reality which emerges from the caves of the imagination in
dreams, oracles, prophecies, and poems seems to us, from the point of
view of ordinary, or Jupiter-dominated, experience, a futile and hopeless
shadow-world, a Hades of gibbering bloodless bats. But that, in turn, is
what our world is like from its point of view. According to the allegory of
the cave in Plato, it is in ordinary experience that we find ourselves
staring at the flickering shadows of an objective world which is the
underworld of reality.
The traditional Christian virtues are faith, hope, and love: of these,
faith is the primary virtue, the response to God which enables the other
two to develop. Love is the greatest of the virtues, and Christian love is
love in the sense of agape or caritas, man's reproduction of the love that
God has for him. In Shelley hope and love retain their place, but his
refusal to regard faith as a virtue leads to some uneasy triads: we have
"Love, Hope, and Self-esteem" in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty [1. 37]
and "Hope, Love and Power" in Prometheus Unbound. For Shelley, love is
the primary virtue, and it begins in the human soul. It is therefore, as
mentioned, love in the sense of eros, the love of Plato's Symposium and
Dante's Vita Nuova, a human love founded on the sexual instinct. The
virtues in Shelley travel in the opposite direction from Christianity:
virtue begins in love and flows through hope into whatever Shelley's
equivalent of faith is.
Love still has for Shelley a great deal of its earlier speculative associa-
tions with attraction, an association still preserved in our word "like."
"Like" is the sign of analogy, and analogy is a weakened form of the
identity which is the fulfilment of love. "Love makes all things equal,"
which means, not that it makes everything uniform, but that it is the
power of creating unity out of the disparate and divided. In Epipsychidion
the union of lover and beloved identifies them into one person, and this
union in its turn is the matrix of the genuine creation concealed within
the chaos of ordinary experience. With the release of Prometheus this
creation reappears, from "its chaos made calm by love, not fear"
[Prometheus Unbound, 4.1.171] and man assumes the traditional power of
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 163

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

murmuring oracular caverns of the human poetic imagination. Such

knowledge, though secretly acquired, is extremely simple in content,
being the message of love that comes through hope. According to the
argument of Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus loves and is loved, and his
hope is unbreakable, hence he is bound to triumph in time. But when he
withdraws the curse on Jupiter, his knowledge and will to endure are
transformed into a vision that fulfils knowledge and makes further en-
durance needless. This attainment of vision corresponds in Shelley to the
miraculous transformation that, in Christianity, grace makes in the hu-
man will.
In Paradise Lost, an epic poem of heroic action, Milton had to decide
what, in Christian terms, a hero was and what an act was. All acts,
according to Milton, are good; Adam's disobedience and Satan's rebel-
lion are therefore not acts but pseudo-acts or parody-acts. A genuine act
is creative or redemptive, and, as I have tried to show elsewhere [.RE, 23;
M&B, 50], Christ is the hero of Paradise Lost by default, because he is the
only character in it who performs a genuine act. In Shelley, Prometheus
has many of the qualities of Milton's Satan, and because the heavenly
god of Shelley's poem is evil Prometheus's Satanic defiance has our
sympathy. But Shelley had noted in his preface that Satan's defiance of
God is chiefly what keeps God in business. When Prometheus with-
draws his curse, therefore, he becomes an Adam instead of a Satan, or, in
Blake's terms, he moves from the bound state of Luvah to the unbound
state of Albion. Prometheus is not a poet: he hears and understands what
the poets are saying, but he cannot himself hear what the poet hears.
Being immortal, the world of death, sleep, and dream is not a separate
world for him, hence he cannot formulate a message that is conveyed
only to mortals. In his bound state, he represents, not Man, but men, who
discover that, in the words of A Defence of Poetry, "there is no portal of
expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the
universe of things."94 Mortal men can respond individually but not as a
group, because they are too frightened to love. Shelley is never tired of
quoting Tasso's remark that only God and the poet are creators, but
Prometheus is closer to the universal human mind of Shelley's essay On
Life, of which Shelley says that it perceives but does not create.95 Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein is a creator, in a sense, and this story, which is
subtitled "The Modern Prometheus," suggests some of the difficulties
that man would get into if he simply tried to replace his projected god
with himself. That is, we now perceive the world as a mechanical order,
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 165

in the degenerate form of habit or familiarity; if we try to create our own

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

umph only in a spiritual world, like Christian martyrs. But Prometheus

triumphs by refusing to continue as a victim of a tyrant who does not
have to be there. The traditional myth said that man "fell" in the past,
and inherits an evil he cannot now resist. Shelley's myth says that as man
put his tyrant into power, man can annul that power, and the fall can be
annihilated at any time by an act of vision. Thus the equivalent of faith in
Shelley is a gnosis which is an act of vision and consciousness, and which
is therefore not an act in Milton's sense, nor a pseudo-act, nor a parody-
act, but a withdrawal from action. It might even be called an achieve-
ment of a state of nothingness or void in which reality appears. According
to St. Augustine the fall began the experience of time as we now have it.96
Similarly the annulment of the fall creates a moment of time or kairos, the
Car of the Hour, in which Jupiter, the son of Cronus (identified with
Chronos or time in later myth), is dethroned by Eternity, the name
Demogorgon gives to himself. What we ordinarily think of as action
takes place in a time which annihilates everything. In the withdrawal
from action which is also an expansion of consciousness, time is trans-
formed into what is traditionally its unfallen form: the dance or expres-
sion of energy and exuberance in life:

Once the hungry Hours were hounds

Which chased the day like a bleeding deer,
And it limped and stumbled with many wounds
Through the nightly dells of the desert year.

But now, oh weave the mystic measure

Of music, and dance, and shapes of light,
Let the Hours, and the spirits of might and pleasure,
Like the clouds and sunbeams, unite. [4.1.73-80]

If I seem to exaggerate the importance of Prometheus's recall of his

curse, it is to emphasize the unity of theme in the poem. It is almost
literally true to say that nothing happens in Prometheus Unbound. Man
achieves a state of awareness in which he is no longer trying to revenge
himself on a tyrant he has created, and so is no longer divided against
himself. Up till then, messages of love and hope have been coming
through poetry and dreams, and nature, to quote the very un-Shelleyan
St. Paul, has been groaning and travailing in pain [Romans 8:22]. But
now the central authentic voice of the imagination can be heard: Asia is
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 167

led to the profoundest depth of the oracular world by Panthea's dream

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

tive ones, a world which by definition cannot be known by ordinary

experience becomes sinister as soon as it is translated from the language
of concept into the language of concern. At best it encourages a greater
reliance on forms of consciousness which seem to evade or bypass ordi-
nary experience. Shelley's view of this situation is less sceptical and more
Platonic. There is a world "behind" the objects we see, and a world
"behind" the subjects that perceive it: these hidden worlds are the same
world; poetry is the voice of that world; and the vision of love, which
contains and transforms all opposites, can realize it. We are closer here to
the other great Romantic construct formulated by Hegel. For Shelley a
universal idea is actualizing itself in the world by the containing and
transforming of opposites: this idea is the idea of liberty, and liberty is a
creative force in a cosmological sense, the principle of order in the chaos,
or debased creation, of Jupiter's tyranny and Prometheus's torment.
Apostrophizing liberty, Shelley says:

But this divinest universe

Was yet a chaos and a curse,
For thou wert not. [Ode to Liberty, 11. 21-3]

For liberty is the actualization of the new world that the arrest of
Prometheus's habitual revenge energy has brought into being.
The liberating of Prometheus is, up to a point, something like a Hegelian
liberation, an expanding of consciousness which destroys the antithesis
of subject and object and creates a larger identity, as the "mask" falls
from man and the "veil" from nature. The transcending of opposites in
Shelley is expressed by the myth of the marriage with a sister-bride. The
release of Prometheus also releases the Eros-figure of the Spirit of the
Earth, who differs from Ariel in being a partaker of human and sexual
love. His sister-bride is the snow-maiden of the moon, now ready to be
thawed out and brought to life like Hermione or Pygmalion's statue.
Similarly in Epipsychidion the antithesis of Death and Life is also de-
scribed as "twin babes, a sister and a brother" [1. 303]. The symbol of the
sister-bride has a scandalous and incestuous sound to unemancipated
ears, but what it represents is the unifying power of Eros. In the state of
the bound Prometheus, fear is primary, and we love only what we fear
the least. Genuine love does not, like the soul in Emily Dickinson, select
its own society and shut the door: wherever it exists it creates liberty,
equality, and, along with fraternity, sorority. "Incest," says Shelley de-
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 169

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

Of that power which is the glass

Wherein man his nature sees. [11. 21-2]

A second spirit sees this abode as an underground cave, a chrysalis to be

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

Fourth Eclogue and the Bible, where Behemoth and Leviathan are explic-
itly linked with Egypt and Babylon.
Yet a miraculous transformation of the order of nature is clearly not as
consistent with Shelley's poetic postulates as it would be with Dante's,
for example, where an omnipotent will could be invoked to bring about
the transformation. Much in Shelley's account of the released exuberance
and inner happiness of subhuman nature, and of man's freedom in it,
depends, like the corresponding themes in Wordsworth, on a distanced
and aesthetic view of nature, a north-temperate-zone view, as it has been
called, of a nature largely tamed by human settlement. What is being
described is the attaining of an identity with the inner process of nature
and a transcendence of the old subject-object separation. But the terms of
the description ignore most of what seems to us the real inner process of
nature, the cruelty and ruthless fight to survive which impress us so
deeply in this post-Darwinian age, and revert to a new kind of contem-
plative objectivity. One often finds in Shelley, perhaps most explicitly in
Mont Blanc, a sense that the theme of the renewal of man and nature by a
union between them, which poetry attempts to communicate through
emotions of serenity, sublimity, and the like, does not fit into the concep-
tual language of the same and the other. It is no good rejecting a tyranni-
cal Jupiter merely to fall into a childish belief that God has really designed
nature for our convenience.
The question involved here, which meets us again in Keats, is central
to the whole Romantic movement, and needs to be formulated with
some care. Of course Shelley's main theme is the emancipation of man, to
which the spirits of nature form a chorus. The suggestion is that a great
deal of what we see in nature reflects our own condition: we see cruelty
and ojppression because that is our own state, and if we could escape
from this state we might see many of the same things as exuberance and
joy. A liberated vision would show us that things shine by their own
light, not by the reflection of ours. The suffering in nature is identical
with the suffering of man; and similarly, the creative power of man is
identical with the beauty and splendour of nature.
We have spoken of the importance of occult imagery in Romanticism
as symbolizing the new kind of natural knowledge that man is develop-
ing, and to this imagery Shelley's nature-spirits and the like belong.
When Hamlet says to Horatio, apropos of his father's ghost, that there
are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philoso-
phy [1.5.166-7], he is thinking of "philosophy" as the knowledge of a
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 171

visible objective world which may be extended or contradicted by the

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

Death is the veil that those who live call life:

They sleep, and it is lifted. [Prometheus Unbound, 3.3.113-14]

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

We have passed Age's icy caves,

And Manhood's dark and tossing waves,
And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray:
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee
Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day. [2.5.98-103]

The real world of death being that of ordinary life proceeding toward
death, the world which is mysterious and hidden from us is the world of
immortality. In his earlier essay On a Future State, and elsewhere, Shelley
rejects the conception of the survival of the individual ego after physical
death. But he retains his own view of immortality, a view which is more
closely related to the Phaedo than to the New Testament. His immortality
is not that of individual lives, but of such human states as love and joy
and desire and the perception of beauty, which are eternally a part of
man's identity with the Earth-Spirit, or whatever God is. From these
states human life is projected, and back to them life is withdrawn. These
immortal states or moods of humanity were formerly called gods, and
were perverted into different kinds of tyranny. Properly understood, it is
only the states connected with hope and love and knowledge that are
immortal: Venus is immortal, but Jupiter and Mars are not. To reverse
the aphorism of Browning,102 there must be heaven; meanwhile there is
hell. In The Sensitive Plant Shelley describes a paradisal garden under the
care of a lady like Dante's Matilda: both lady and garden die in the cycle
of nature, but the conclusion is:

For love, and beauty, and delight,

There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure, [pt. 3,11.134-7]

The fact that Shelley is a revolutionary thinker does not necessarily

make him a spokesman of political revolution of either the popular or the
nationalistic type. He shows sympathy with both, but in the vision of the
bound Prometheus the French Revolution, like the coming of Christ, is
an effort at freedom which failed. It was an attempt to dethrone Jupiter
by a force that merely continued his tyranny, because it did not alter the
mental attitude that kept Jupiter in existence. Similarly in Beddoes, the
genuine nemesis of the Duke does not proceed from Isbrand's seizure of
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 173

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

We come from the mind

Of human kind
Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind,
Now 'tis an ocean
Of clear emotion,
A heaven of serene and mighty motion. [4.1.93-8]
174 A Study of English Romanticism

But there is no temporal dimension; the dead past simply buries its dead;
the oracles of tyranny fall silent like the similar oracles in Milton's Nativ-
ity Ode, and what time has annihilated remains annihilated. It is true that
the motive force of Prometheus's liberation is the car of the "Spirit of the
Hour," but it is not clearly explained how it gets to be the right hour, at
least in the context of history. Like Dante, we scramble out into the light
of day on the other side of the earth, leaving the hell of history behind us
like a bad dream. History is a nightmare from which we awake, as the
very Shelleyan Stephen Dedalus remarked.105 Yet the feeling that any
genuine liberation would also be a harrowing of hell, a liberation of the
past and of history, clearly haunted Shelley: it is central to Hellas and to
the troubled and unfinished Triumph of Life. It is also central to the
argument of A Defence of Poetry.
Though never explicitly stated, one of the central ideas in A Defence of
Poetry is that of an authentic response to poetry, reading it not merely as
a product of its age, but as the prophetic voice of human imagination
itself. Every great work of literature speaks with this prophetic voice
under the disguise of the limitations and anxieties of its own time. Thus it
is imagination mixed up with, and concealed by, a more conceptual type
of thinking. The contemporary age, according to the essay of Peacock
which provoked Shelley's "defence," is a "brazen age" in which the poet
is a vestigial survival of an antiquated way of thinking.106 To Shelley, on
the contrary, it is an age when modern thinking can finally become
completely separated from poetic thinking. A good deal of modern
thought, as represented by the "Paley and Malthus" referred to in the
preface to Prometheus Unbound [207!, is aggressive: it attacks and defends
and refutes, and its chief motivation is ultimately to rationalize arbitrary
power in whatever form.
There are of course liberal conceptual thinkers—Locke, Gibbon, Voltaire,
Rousseau, and others listed in the Defence. But even they are of limited
social value compared to the great poets and to the more visionary
philosophers, because they preserve the aggressive and argumentative
form of thinking that can hardly, by definition, present anything except
half-truths. In the Essay on Christianity Rousseau's doctrine of equality is
compared with the genuine teachings of Jesus, before their perversion by
Christianity, and the comparison of course is intended to be high praise
for Jesus. But in The Triumph of Life Rousseau appears to have become the
typical bastard poet, whose influence promoted political instead of im-
aginative revolution, and who consequently merely helped to prolong
Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary 175

the tyranny of time. Aggressive thinking makes a great parade of "stub-

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

repetition prophesied by the final chorus is not a vision of the same thing
happening again, but of the old renewed. When Ahasuerus says

The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come [11. 852-3]

he is celebrating a theme of, so to speak, discarnation, in which the

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

Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic

We have been dealing with various aspects of a central theme of the

Romantic movement: a distinction between two kinds of reality. There is
the reality out there, which is studied by science and the reason from the
point of view of a conscious subject perceiving objects. There is also the
reality that we bring into being through an act of creation, which is the
special function of the arts, and which Romanticism regards as a larger
structure of reality including the given reality of experience. The arts
illustrate the form of the world that man is trying to create out of the
world he is in. They do many other things as well, but there is a powerful
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 177

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

and can thereby assimilate experience to its own form. When man is
born, the sense of identity with nature remains unborn, and the quest of
the soul is to bring it to birth.
The opening lines of Endymion explain to us how this Edenic myth
exists in our own minds, in the form of an awareness of beauty. Such an
awareness is not a mere solace in sorrow, though it is also that, but a
more intensely experienced kind of reality. The elements of ordinary
experience, our realization of the world out there, are consciousness and
sensation, and these, at a pitch of greater mental intensity, become joy
and the perception of the beautiful. In ordinary experience truth is what
we see and understand: in more intense experience, where truth is cre-
ated as well as recognized, truth is beauty. Whoever is saying this in the
Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats is certainly saying it in Endymion. The poem is
devoted to the theme of realizing beauty, making it true by creating it.
Keats, like Shelley, thinks in triads, and in a letter he divides reality into
three aspects: real things, "semireal" things "which require a greeting of
the Spirit to make them wholly exist," and "Nothings" which are "digni-
fied by an ardent pursuit."112 Without the third element, nothing made
something by effort, the distinctively creative aspect of experience would
not be there: without the other two, creation would be a private and
subjective fantasy identical with the dream.
Keats was, of course, deeply interested in the relation between sleep
and poetry, the dreaming and the creative operations of the mind. This is
partly the reason for his attraction to Endymion as a hero, for in the
myths Endymion spends most of his time asleep. A remarkable passage
in the fourth book of Endymion connects the wish-fulfilment element in
dreams with the ambition of the poet which drives him to realize his
aims. What is real about the dream is its illusion, its absence of objectiv-
ity, and the poet, like the dreamer, strives to contain his world. But
ultimately "The poet and the dreamer are distinct."113 The imagination,
Keats says, is like the dream of Adam, who awoke to find his dream
true.114 Art, as Plato says, is a dream for awakened minds [Sophist, 266c],
and the poet's function is to make the vision of beauty the awakened and
conscious opposite of a dream.
The student of Endymion finds it a difficulty that Keats was so rigorous
a critic of his own work, and felt so quickly that he had outgrown
Endymion. If he had felt more like defending it, instead of going on to
even greater things, we should at least have had more hints from him
about what he was trying to do in it. As it is, there are only three of much
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 179

significance. Endymion is, Keats says, a "huge attempt,"115 as it obviously

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

a different place from the ordinary world, but the same world in which
the moral and imaginative realization of a higher kind of experience
takes place. Similarly, Dante's Eden is on the top of the mountain of
purgatory, which is on the surface of the same world that we live in.
Spenser's interest in the realization of the greater powers of the soul is,
for most of the poem, moral rather than imaginative in its expression and
imagery. In other words, Faerie in Spenser is mostly a purgatorial world,
like the corresponding world in Dante. But Spenser does have one great
vision in which it is the imaginative rather than the moral powers that
are realized. The first book of the poem as we have it outlines the central
Biblical myth of redemption, in the traditional terms of a movement
from God to man through grace and the Word; the last or sixth book
seems to be focused on the human counterpart of this, the legend of
courtesy, where grace and .healing words appear in their human context.
The poet himself, symbolized as Colin Clout, plays a part in the climactic
scene in this legend on Mount Acidale. Keats's special fondness for the
sixth book, the story of Calidore, is obvious enough.
The action of Endymion begins in the second of four worlds, the world
corresponding to Spenser's Faerie and to Dante's and Milton's Eden,
where Adam had his dream. In the earlier poets this is the world man
lost long ago, and can regain only through a long process of discipline. In
Keats, who is adapting the traditional structure to a Romantic outlook, it
is the world of the pastoral myth in which poetic creation begins, a world
still present and potential. It is the state that we work from, not the place
we return to: in his letters Keats calls it the "chamber of maiden
thought."117 The word "maiden" indicates a youthful and presexual
aspect of life, which the prominence given to Endymion's sister empha-
sizes. The phrase also indicates the reason for a curious feature of the
poem, a feature that has put off many readers, including, to judge from
his revised preface, Keats himself. We first meet the poet-hero in a state
of deep melancholy, and recognize the old Courtly Love convention.
This is the same state of helpless pining grief in which we first meet
Romeo; fair enough. But why should a poet as vigorous as Keats, who so
disliked the thought of being made "a pet lamb in a sentimental farce,"118
have created a hero so languid that his sister has to move the branches
out of his way as he walks through the woods?
The reason is that Endymion's world is the imprisoning, paralysing
world of dream, the dream being partly about a great achievement in the
future, and so accompanied by all the anxieties that go with the disloca-
•Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 181

tion of time. We have said that when man is born, his vision of innocence
remains unborn, and has to be brought to birth. Endymion is not literally
unborn, but his achievement is, and his world has the fragility that goes
with something that is only potentially alive. We may compare The Book
of Thel, by the equally vigorous Blake, with its shadowy dissolving im-
agery, where things melt into other things without taking on definite
existence, a world Thel could have escaped from by getting born, which
she fails to do. Similarly, the first book of Endymion introduces us to a
world in which spirits "melt away and thaw" [i.5Oi],119 as though the
mind and its moods had no permanent reality:

Apollo's upward fire

Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre
Of brightness so unsullied, that therein
A melancholy spirit well might win
Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine
Into the winds. [1.95-100]

We may also recall the sensitive heroines of Gothic novels, already

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

sentimentalized childhood memories and other nostalgic pastoral themes.

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

Dread opener of the mysterious doors

Leading to universal knowledge [1.288-9]

who is associated with Christ in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender. The

heaven of Endymion is therefore the place of the presence of Pan, an
"Elysium" [1.372] and "eternal spring" [1.378] of final reunion and hap-
piness. The old men of Endymion's society are on the verge of entering it,
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 183

and it is also described in New Testament language as a world where lost

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

Where soil is men grow,

Whether to weeds or flowers; but for me,
There is no depth to strike in. [2.159-61]

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

world of the diva triformis from the moon-drawn sea to the moon:

There is a triple sight in blindness keen;

Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befel
To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell. [To Homer, 11.12-14]

We have just referred to the rose-garden episode in Burnt Norton, and

in a passage that curiously parallels it, Endymion finds a magic rose that
bursts suddenly into bloom. A butterfly on the rose leads him, like Eliot's
thrush, to a fountain, where the butterfly, whose name is presumably
Psyche, turns into a nymph, and tells him that he must descend lower,
down through the worlds of earth and water, to accomplish his quest.
Both lower worlds are described as labyrinthine—

winding passages, where sameness breeds

Vexing conceptions of some sudden change [2.235-6]

—and the physical ups and downs of the landscape correspond roughly,
though by no means invariably, to the symbolic ups and downs of the
four levels. The two middle worlds of the cosmos are associated mainly
with the colour green, the heavenly and submarine extremities with
blue. The middle two both belong to the cycle of nature, the images of
Endymion's pastoral home being more particularly related to the earlier
phases of the cycle, youth, spring, and dawn. It is sexual love that makes
the cycle of nature go round, and the central image of this driving force
in Spenser (though in Spenser it is located in the world of Faerie above) is
the place of seed, or Garden of Adonis, where Adonis sleeps and dreams
through the winter and revives to life in summer. Endymion's coming at
the turn of the season helps to revive Adonis (unless his arrival at that
time was coincidence, which seems unlikely), and several other figures
of the same type of seasonal and dying-god mythology are introduced,
including a reference to Vertumnus and Pomona and a beautiful if
somewhat inconclusive vision of Cybele. In A Midsummer Night's Dream
there is a reference to "a fair vestal throned by the west" [2.1.158], with
the customary overtones of Queen Elizabeth, Diana, and the moon.
Cupid shoots an arrow at her, which falls short of her: its trajectory,
symbolizing the cycle of life and death under the moon, falls on a flower
and turns it purple, the red or purple flower being the emblem of the
Eros-Thanatos world of the gods of sexual love and death. This symbol
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 185

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

Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core

All other depths are shallow: essences,
Once spiritual, are like muddy lees,
Meant but to fertilize my earthly root. [2.904-7]

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

from a hard centre. In proportion as the subjective consciousness is

enclosed in itself, the object shuts itself up too and withdraws from
human approach. The traditional symbol of this descent down the chain
of being is metamorphosis, the stories of how female spirits (usually) fled
from the passion of male gods and became enclosed in vegetable or
animal forms. The poets of metamorphosis, Ovid and Apuleius, were
favourites of Keats, and Endymion is intensely Ovidian, a revival not only
of Spenser but of the Elizabethan Ovidian mythological poem, of which
Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and
Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla are examples. Whatever Keats's knowledge of
Elizabethan poetry, all these stories are incorporated into Endymion,
along with the story of Alpheus and Arethusa referred to above, which
haunts Milton's Lycidas and Arcades. This separation of subject and object
by metamorphosis was apparently the sequel of the conflict portrayed in
Hyperion, which refers to

that second war

Not long delay'd, that scar'd the younger Gods
To hide themselves in forms of beast and bird. [bk. 2,11. 70-2]

In Apuleius the changing of Lucius into an ass is a progressive degra-

dation against which the lovely story of Cupid and Psyche floats up in
the opposite direction, a particular favourite of Keats because it is late
enough to be a myth created rather than believed, as myths for a Roman-
tic poet essentially are. In Ovid, as in later writers, the central figure
symbolizing metamorphosis as degeneration is the enchantress Circe,
and Circe's connection with the story of Glaucus and Scylla is the reason
why she is the presiding deity of Endymion's lowest world, the hell
under the sea, where we might have expected rather the diva triformis
herself in her infernal aspect of Hecate.
Just as the great Spenserian image of the Gardens of Adonis is at the
centre of the earthly and sexual world, so the Bower of Bliss, which also
has marine associations in Spenser, is at the centre of the water world.
The words "bower" and "bliss" occur in lines 418 and 427 of book 3. We
are introduced to it, however, at a time when the delusory feeling of bliss
has vanished and nothing but the sense of frustration and impotence
remains. Keats's attitude to this world is not moral, like Spenser's: it is
rather, however unpoetical the word may sound, epistemological. It is
the world in which the separation of the conscious subject from every-
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 187

thing it wants and loves is at its greatest, another version of the world of
the bound Prometheus.
Even in the world of earth above, the love of Venus for Adonis is
already much more possessive than the love of Phoebe for Endymion,
much more that of a Blakean "female will" who keeps the lover bound to
a cycle of possession and loss. But Glaucus turns from his loved Scylla to
Circe, a Jungian "terrible mother" who puts him into a "specious heaven"
[3.477] where he is a pure subjective consciousness. Like Milton's Satan
after he separates himself from the community of God, Glaucus finds the
new feeling of individuality exhilarating at first:

To interknit
One's senses with so dense a breathing stuff
Might seem a work of pain; so not enough
Can I admire how crystal-smooth it felt,
And buoyant round my limbs. At first I dwelt
Whole days and days in sheer astonishment;
Forgetful utterly of self-intent. [3.380-6]

But of course it quickly becomes, as with Satan, an imprisonment which

reduces him to the narrowest of all prisons, the one he carries around
with him as his own subjectivity. In this state of impotence he resembles
Eliot's aged fisher king or Blake's Albion sleeping on the Couch of Death
in Atlantis under the sea. The "fabric crystalline" [3.628] in which Glaucus
finds the dead Scylla suggests, like the "orbed diamond" [2.245] °f the
previous book, a world which is visible but not approachable. Its poetic
relatives include the crystal cabinet of Blake's poem in which the narra-
tor struggles unsuccessfully to reach an "inmost Form,"124 and the self-
enclosed world of the unproductive and narcissistic beautiful youth of
Shakespeare's sonnets, a "liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass."125
The dead and shipwrecked lovers in the world of Circe's malignity
remind us of the traditional Courtly Love convention, the cruel mistress
gloating over her collection of slain lovers. Several times in Keats this
nadir of human reality is presented as a world of ghosts frozen in a
wintry world of death, an impotent shadowy Hades where "men sit and
hear each other groan."126 Closest to the Courtly Love convention, of
course, are the victims whom La Belle Dame Sans Merci has in "thrall" in
a barren landscape of late autumn and withered sedge.127 There are also
the "be-nightmared" and palsy-ridden creatures left behind by the es-
i88 A Study of English Romanticism

caping lovers in the bitter chill of The Eve of St. Agnes, including the
Bedesman who remains "aye unsought for" in spite of all his prayers [st.
42]. A similar group appears to be clustering in The Eve of St. Mark.
During the illness which forcibly separated him from Fanny Brawne,
Keats felt that he himself had fallen into a world which he describes as

that most hateful land,

Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand
Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life. [To —, 11. 31-3]

In general, the ghost or subjective shadow symbolizes this nadir world,

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

What is this soul then? Whence

Came it? It does not seem my own, and I
Have no self-passion or identity. [3.475-7]

Saturn uses the word in a similar sense in Hyperion. Of course the deci-
sive temperament may be found in creative people too: for Keats it
certainly is in Byron, and there is a touch of it in the "egotistical sub-
lime"129 of Wordsworth. The purest creative temperaments, however,
notably Shakespeare, show least admixture of it.
The point is that there are two kinds of identity. They might be distin-
guished as identity as and identity with, and they represent respectively
the two poles of Endymion's cosmos, the worlds of Circe and of Phoebe.
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 189

Both kinds begin as consciousness or self-awareness, but one develops a

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

its in the prisons of subject and object alike. There are also echoes of
Hercules releasing Theseus in the lower world, and a good deal of
imagery suggesting a version of the Theseus story in which all the
previous sacrifices to Minos were delivered from the labyrinth. Echoes of
the Christian Harrowing of Hell are less explicit. References to Arion in
book 2 and to Amphion, who appears to be assimilated to Arion, in book
3, and images of whales and dolphins, suggest the stories of Jonah and
other voyagers to the viscera of Leviathan. The dolphin, however, is
traditionally the image of salvation from the water, and reminds us
rather of Lycidas, who visited the bottom of the monstrous world but
became a protecting genius of the shore and also a saint in heaven.
Lycidas makes a remarkable reappearance in the lively little poem Staff a,
one of the figures in the more Shelleyan cosmos that Keats began to
develop after Endymion, in which renewed powers rise from below.
During his descent Endymion had feared the total loss of his identity,
and that he would suffer the traditional sparagmos fate of the god in the
underworld and be torn "piece-meal" [3.263]. But instead it is the scroll
that is torn up and that fertilizes the sunken world with a new life. The
student of Romantic poetry should compare the image of the torn-up
fertilizing scroll with the almost identical image in the speech of Ore in
Blake's America, plate 8.
The anabasis, or return to the upper states, has all the expected images
of rebirth. We have Atlantis, the rainbow following the deluge, the
reappearance of the sea-born Venus, and the description of Neptune's
throne as "emerald" [3.812], which indicates a reunion of the sphere of
water with that of the green earth. The hymn to Bacchus in book 4, sung
by the Indian maid, balances the hymn to Pan in book i, but is a product,
not simply of a state of innocence, but of a new energy that has returned
to that world from experience. Endymion then takes to the air, and seems
ready for his final ascent to the fire world of the gods where Phoebe is.
But overtones of Icarus and Bellerophon in the imagery warn us that all
is not plain flying, and Endymion receives an abrupt check. He attempts
a renewed pastoral life of the "Come live with me and be my love" type
with his sister and the Indian maid, attempting to consolidate his gains
and stay where he is, like Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration. It seems
a sensible enough solution: it is clear that the four levels of the poem's
cosmos are not a Platonic ladder, as Platonism is generally understood. It
would be inconsistent with everything we know of Keats to assume that
we ascend from the body into a higher world of the soul, abandoning the
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 191

sexual basis of Eros, a basis which is also the matrix of all one's love and
compassion for society. The only real Phoebe, on Keats's own postulates,
would be an incarnate Phoebe, identical with the Indian maid. In Eliot's
Burnt Norton, the "still point of the turning world" [1. 136] is a middle
point identical both with the zenith of the vision of correspondence
preceding it, and the vision of death under the yew tree following it.
Similarly, as truth and beauty are the same thing, the goal of the quest for
beauty above and the goal of the quest for truth below would be the
same point, and that point in turn identical with the worlds of Peona and
the Indian maid in the middle.
The trouble is that Endymion's quest cannot be completed by an act of
will. That was why the Courtly Love tradition, although it demanded the
most strenuous efforts from the poet-lover, still made his ultimate suc-
cess depend on the grace of his lady. Hence Endymion has to wait until
he is "spiritualiz'd" [4.993] by an "unlook'd for change" [4.992], at which
point Phoebe, like Ligeia in Poe/31 takes over the Indian maid, and
carries Endymion off to her own world. The world of this final assump-
tion is still continuous with the physical and sexual world, but has
transformed it in a metamorphosis which goes in the opposite direction
from those celebrated by Ovid. The conclusion repeats an earlier theme
in the fourth book. Endymion had previously found himself, just after his
abortive flight, in the cave of Quietude, a cave of dreams like the Cave of
Nymphs in the Odyssey from whence Ulysses returned home, a cave
which also can be entered only involuntarily:

Enter none
Who strive therefore: on the sudden it is won. [4.531-2]

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

the difference between sleep and poetry, dream and vision, chaos and
creation.
An extraordinary number of fascinating mythical themes are touched
on, explicitly and implicitly, in the fourth book of Endymion. Coming so
late in the poem, they seem almost to suggest the need of a fresh start,
and in fact there are signs of impatience and of a desire to begin again
with the story of Apollo. Different as Endymion is from The Prelude, it is
equally a poem about the growth of the poet's mind. The process of
growth is presented through myth and archetype, and consequently has
an impersonal and universalizing quality about it: it deals with the poet
rather than, like The Prelude, with a poet. But the direction of the theme,
and its personal reference to Keats, are both unmistakable:

There came a dream, showing how a young man,

Ere a lean bat could plump its wintery skin,
Would at high Jove's empyreal footstool win
An immortality, and how espouse
Jove's daughter, and be reckon'd of his house. [4.376-80]

What we have now to try to determine is what the relation of Endymion is

to Keats's whole poetic vision. That is, what kind of poetry results from
Endymion's experience, or, thinking of him in his final role as a god,
from his inspiration?
The fourth book, along with the end of the third, is the part of Endymion
that incorporates the pre-Romantic structure of myth, derived mainly
from Spenser, into a Romantic cosmos. The nadir of this cosmos is the
world normally symbolized in Keats, as in Beddoes, by ghosts or a
paralysed life in death. Blake calls it a world of "spectres," which in-
cludes both the people who live egocentric and jealous lives, the strong
identities of Keats's letters, and the kind of abstract and generalized
views of the world that such minds produce. The word "spectre" indi-
cates a state where neither the subject nor the object is real: the real
objective world is a world in itself, hidden behind the things we see and
know, and our real selves are hidden behind our subjective egos. The
poet can escape from this spectral world by his power of being able to
articulate the language of "symbol-essences," a language which exists
only through human creation, but which expresses the identity of the
real subject and the real object. In Keats, as in Shakespeare and Shelley,
this poetic power is symbolized by the magician who can command the
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 193

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

the poet would need to work backward to the beginning in the poet's
mind, as The Fall of Hyperion attempts to do; to solve the second he would
need to go on with the story, in a narrative that would have taken him at
least through the "second war" of metamorphosis.
It is clear from what we have said that one essential function of poetry,
for Keats, is to help us move upward on Keats's version of the chain of
being, toward an identity with, or communion. The poetry that brings to
birth the unborn vision of beauty, we said, is the opposite in theme of the
poetry of metamorphosis, or the separating of subject and object, com-
memorated in Ovid and Apuleius, which is based on an alienation or fall
archetype. We should not read the great odes, for example, as subjective
contemplations of objects, which is the exact opposite of what they were
designed to be. They are rather a recovery, by poetry, of the myth
formerly projected as the worship of a god or numinous presence. In
Christianity this act of worship is expressed in a symbolic act of com-
munion, in the response of faith to a revelation symbolized by a divine
Word, and in the forming of a church, or community of response. The
Romantic counterparts of these would be, respectively, communion, or
the identity of the poet and his theme which the poem itself articulates;
communication, or the reader's understanding of the poem; and commu-
nity, or the forming of a society of readers, or a literary tradition.
If I say "this pencil is green," I am making a statement about a sensa-
tion of my own, identifying the pencil with my own experience, that I
cannot directly share with others. What makes it a statement of fact, or
enables it to pass for one, is a verbal consensus: other people agree when
I say it is green, though for all I know they may be seeing what I would
call red. Thus communication is a by-product of communion, the verbal-
izing of the identity of one's inner life. Communication in its turn is the
focus of community. As long as everyone agrees when I say this pencil is
green, the possibility of their seeing what to me is red is one I can afford
to ignore. And however trivial a statement about the colour of a pencil
may be, it is obvious that the verbal consensus which makes statements
of fact possible is the basis of human culture. A statement of imagination
is more flexible than a statement of fact, but the same three principles are
involved. (The argument from here on has a few parallels with Heidegger's
essays on Holderlin, where three similar principles are described as
world, language, and history.)133
The poem, then, begins in the poet's experience of communion or
identity with. This seems to be a private and subjective communion in
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 195

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

images of sight and sound. The traditional symbols of communion are

eating and drinking, and in communion poems we need draughts of
vintage and the bursting of Joy's grape on the palate to complete the
sense of identity with. The Fall of Hyperion, though its argument leads up
to a contrast between poet and dreamer, begins with a narcotic drink
symbolizing the total immersion of the poet in his dream world. The
display of food in The Eve of St. Agnes has not much to do with the plot,
but has everything to do with the imagery and atmosphere. And just as
all five senses have their place in a poetry of identity, so thought and
reflection have a place equal to sensation. The famous remark, "O for a
Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!"134 may be interpreted, using
Eliot's categories, as an expression either of dissociated sensibility135 (O
for a life of sensations instead of thoughts) or of unified sensibility (O for
a life in which thoughts have the immediacy of sensations, instead of a
life in which sensations are as unsubstantial as thoughts). The latter is the
only possible meaning consistent with the odes, which identify truth
with beauty as well as Grecian urns with the poet and his reader. The
theme of sexual fulfilment is touched very lightly, but the odes are
sufficiently about love to make it clear that what they celebrate includes
what Blake would call an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
Unified sensibility of this sort also demands a catharsis of moods, a
raising of emotions which frees one from their domination. Moods are
like colours: all real experience is a blend of them, and to see life from
within a single mood is a deliberately summoned up illusion, like putting
on coloured spectacles. Such an illusion is an entirely valid form of poetic
experience, and there is no reason why a poet should not reduce his
world, if he so wishes, to a green thought in a green shade.136 Milton's
L'Allegro and II Penseroso are an extraordinary tour de force of mood
poetry, each projecting an entire life through one of the two major and
dominating moods, the gay and the grave. The eighteenth-century libret-
tist who arranged these poems for Handel is said to have added a third
section of his own, II Moderate, depicting a properly balanced state of
mind in the middle. We may perhaps take this as a symbol of everything
that Keats disliked about the eighteenth century, and attacked in Sleep
and Poetry. For Keats, joy and sorrow can only unite at the point of the
greatest intensity of both, not in a lukewarm mediocrity halfway be-
tween them. This union is already present in the hymn to Bacchus in the
fourth book of Endymion, which is enclosed in a song to sorrow, and it
expands in the later work, where "Welcome Joy and welcome Sorrow" is
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 197

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

uncertainties of taste in Endymion, such as the clanging rhymes, are also

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

there ever rolls

A vast idea before me, and I glean
Therefrom my liberty; thence too I've seen
The end and aim of Poesy. [Sleep and Poetry, 11. 290-30--3}]
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 199

Like Shelley, too, he thought of the poet's creation, which ultimately is a

renewed human society, as greater than the creation, in the sense of an
objective world which is largely a projection of our own cowardice or
laziness. At any rate he speaks of the universe as containing "materials to
form greater things . . . [than] our Creator himself made,"139 his meaning
here being clearly more serious than his tone. In the few years he had,
Keats constructed the two inner parts of his temple: the outer court of a
poetry of experience had yet to come. The inference seems to be that
Keats was a minor poet who would have become a major one if he had
had a few more years of life and health. This seems very reasonable,
except that every reader of Keats knows that it is wrong, and that his
existing work has to be discussed in very different terms.
Keats, unlike Shelley, has no specific philosophical or religious affini-
ties, but the ideas that come tumbling out of his letters are all the more
endlessly suggestive. We have stressed the significance of the fact that
we cannot read the great odes, in particular, as subjective contemplations
of objects. The mind that contemplates, the poet with his negative capa-
bility, is the focus of a universal human mind, like Wordsworth's "mo-
tion and a spirit"140 with which the poet identifies himself. What is
contemplated is a deity, or, like the Grecian urn, an emblem of a divine
or paradisal existence. But the divine existence is not a substantial god, or
rather, for Keats, goddess: the goddess is created by the poetic imagina-
tion, the agent of the creative human mind, which according to the
Romantic myth is the real divine presence involved. We move into a
sphere of being where the difference between art and nature, between
the creature and the object, has ceased to exist. The music of the spheres
and the poetry of man are the same thing, as Mnemosyne implies when
she says to Apollo:

Thou hast dream' d of me; and awaking up

Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side,
Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast
Unwearied ear of the whole universe
Listen'd in pain and pleasure at the birth
Of such new tuneful wonder. [Hyperion, bk. 3,11. 62-7]

Keats could get little help here either from a Christian monotheism or
a Greek polytheism. For analogies to the kind of assumptions underlying
his poetry we have to turn to Oriental religions, and when Keats in his
2oo A Study of English Romanticism

letters says that "any one grand and spiritual passage serves [man] as a
starting post towards all 'the two-and-thirty Pallaces/"141 the Oriental
sound of the last phrase is significant. There are types of lyrics in Chinese
and Japanese literatures which seem to be doing something deceptively
simple, merely observing or recording a scene in nature. There is a
famous Japanese haiku, for example, which says in effect, in seventeen
syllables, only "Frog; pool; splash." But such poems do not really present
the seeing of objects by subjects: the poet's mind surrounds and contains
what he describes, and as his mind, according to the principles of most of
the philosophies and religions contemporary with such poetry, is united
to a universal mind in which all things are, he is presenting a scene of
nature in its proper context, where it is both what the poet creates and
what is really there.
The traditional term for the appearance of a divine presence in human
life is "epiphany," a term used in Christianity for certain appearances of
Christ, in particular to the Magi. Joyce uses the word as a critical term in
Stephen Hero, and appears to have adopted it because of his full agree-
ment with the Romantic tendency to associate all manifestations of di-
vinity with the creative spirit of man. But Joyce seems to have thought of
the basis of the epiphany, in its literary context, as an actual event,
brought into contact with the creative imagination, but untouched by it,
so that it preserves the sense of something contained by the imagination
and yet actual in its own terms. As Stevens says, one is more apt to
confide in what has no concealed creator.142 Wordsworth was the great
pioneer, almost the discoverer, of epiphany in this sense, as something
observed but not essentially altered by the imagination, which yet has a
crucial significance for that imagination. Such poems as Simon Lee are
based on epiphanies in Joyce's usual sense of actual (or, at least, readily
credible) incidents, and The Prelude is in the same sense an epiphanic
sequence, a series of incidents in the poet's life which by their arrange-
ment take the form of an imaginative quest. The more recent cults of
"found objects" in the visual arts, of "happenings" in the dramatic ones,
and of chance progressions in music, testify to the continued vitality of
the association between the random and the oracular.
Joyce and Wordsworth are mainly concerned with the kind of poetry
of experience that Keats did not develop. Keats's odes are epiphanic in a
narrower and more traditional sense. They are not concerned with ob-
jects or experiences found at random, but with icons or presences which
have been at once invoked and evoked by a magical spell, and held as a
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 201

focus of meditation. The contrast in itself is obvious but has important

implications.
Another striking and powerful idea that peeps out of the letters and a
few phrases in the poetry is also Oriental in most of its developments—
an idea of interpenetration. "Eve[r]y point of thought is the center of an
intellectual world/' Keats says.143 Every soul is at once the centre and the
circumference of the universe, hence the society the poet is trying to help
form is an interpenetrating society, with the macrocosm present in each
microcosm: "They interassimulate," as he says in an inspired portman-
teau word.144 In such a world no one could be objective to anyone else.
"Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbour,
and thus by every germ of Spirit sucking the Sap from mould ethereal
every human might become great, and Humanity instead of being a
wide heath of Furse and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine,
would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees."145 For such a society
the outer court of experience would not need to exist, and even poetry
would recover its original power of silence, retreating from communica-
tion to pure communion and becoming the "spirit ditties of no tone."146
The home of such poetry could only be in a renewed or regenerate
Nature, of the kind indicated by the Zen master who speaks of the beauty
of cherry trees when a disciple asks him how to attain Buddhahood, or
by Wordsworth when he finds "the types and symbols of Eternity"147 in
an ordinary traveller's journey, or by Shelley in his enigmatic symbolism
about a nature restored to health with the liberation of man. In such a
nature everything would be epiphanic, with the world present in a grain
of sand and heaven in a wild flower.148
Shelley also uses the word "interpenetrate" in The Defence of Poetry^9
in a way which indicates that the conception is in his thought too, but it
seems even more central to Keats, and better illustrated by Keats's prac-
tice. This seems strange at first, for Keats is not an apocalyptic seer in the
way that Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth at times, and many Oriental poets
are. He is closer to Eliot in stressing the effort of meditation, and the
discipline necessary to quiet the soul and the restlessness of an activistic
conscience. "The Soul," he says, "is a world of itself and has enough to do
in its own home."150 Keats is a poet of the temenos, the marked-off holy
place, the magic circle of The Eve of St. Agnes with the lovers inside and
hostility and bitter cold outside. His paradise is not a timeless and
spaceless Eden, but a Castle of Alma surrounded by malignant ghosts.
Keats's three great pre-Romantic predecessors had all looked at the
2O2 A Study of English Romanticism

paradisal vision in the context of the fall: for them it was something man
has lost, and cannot regain through his own efforts. His efforts are
essential, but they are moral efforts: man cannot create or recreate para-
dise, though God may put him back into it after the moral quest has been
completed. Dante's Eden is explicitly on top of the mountain of purga-
tory, but Spenser's Faerie and Milton's "Paradise within thee, happier
far,"151 also, we saw, belong to a Purgatorio rather than a Paradiso.
Similarly, Keats speaks in his Epistle to Reynolds of the imagination being
lost in a "Purgatory blind" [1. 80], and the vale of soul-making spoken of
in the letters is also a purgatorial conception. The moral earnestness of
Keats drew him closer to these predecessors than to any direct tran-
scendence of experience. The kind of nature mysticism we have just
associated with Wordsworth, Shelley, and Zen Buddhism seems to be
talking about a nature which, like the myth of Paradise itself, is more of a
picture of nature than existential nature, something to be contemplated
but not lived in. It may be true as far as it goes, but if we compare it with
the ferocity and horror that nature, including human nature, actually
exhibits, once we enter into its processes, our "natural piety" would soon
make Dr. Pangloss look like a realist by comparison.152 In the soul-
making passage Keats says: "But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort
of perfectibility—the nature of the world will not admit of it—the inhab-
itants of the world will correspond to itself. Let the fish philosophise the
ice away from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual
play in the tepid delight of summer."153 In the Epistle to Reynolds, just
mentioned, he goes on to speak of "an eternal fierce destruction" as the
essence of his vision of nature [1. 97!.
The traditional solution of the problem of attaining an innocent vision
in the midst of a ferocious nature is, of course, that the real end of the
innocent vision is not in this life at all, but in what Keats calls this life's
"spiritual repetition"154 in another world. The soul, Keats says, achieves
its identity through the interaction of three principles, a mind or intelli-
gence, a "heart," and the "World or Elemental space."155 It is this last in
particular that is the purgatorial element. The interpenetrating world,
just described, is clearly a world without space, and once the soul's
identity has been achieved, the "World or Elemental space" would dis-
appear. In the world of immortality, Keats says, "there will be no space,"156
and nothing left of what Blake calls the cloven fiction of subjects and
objects. This brings us to the great vision which is at the heart of Endymion,
the upper world that Endymion finally attains, described in a passage
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 203

which, as we know from a letter to his publisher Taylor/57 Keats re-

garded as crucial:

Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks

Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
Full alchemiz'd, and free of space. Behold
The clear religion of heaven! [1.777-81]

In its context, this spaceless world is, by definition, the world of a

future life, as distinct from the present life where world and space are the
same thing. It is also the lost paradise or innocent vision of a previous
life: we notice how the word "forlorn," with its overtones of something
glimpsed but out of reach, echoes in the Ode to a Nightingale. Similarly,
the vision of being without becoming suggested by the Grecian urn is the
kind of paradox that we are forced to use in searching for some analogy
in language to describe a higher kind of existence. At the same time,
Keats's conception of poetry as the voice of an interpenetrating world is
Romantic in the sense that it regards human creative power as the only
thing which gives us any clue to what another dimension of life may be
like. Eliot, more distrustful of what the Romantic movement brought,
tells us that it is the function of art to bring us to a state of serenity and
then to leave us, "As Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a region where
that guide can avail us no farther."158 Keats sees in poetry a power that
can bring us into an interpenetrating world in which the word "farther"
ceases to mean anything. Perhaps his intuition is not only profounder
and saner than Eliot's, but is one more relevant to a civilization like ours.
The Romantic movement began, in English literature, with the sense
that the individual subject was no longer a self-explanatory unit of expe-
rience. Philosophers and theologians had always known this, as a matter
of theory, but now it became a question of practical life as well. For
Wordsworth, the individual subject found its identity in a larger unity
gained through an imaginative contact with a "nature" standing outside
and apart from human society. Wordsworth regarded his account of this
sense of larger identity as consistent with its more traditional religious
formulations, but in traditional religious terms his own expression of it
was vague and loose, as it had to be and as it should have been. Coleridge
was more belligerently Christian in insisting that the primary imagina-
tion was an existence repeating the infinite "I am" of God/59 and in
2O4 A Study of English Romanticism

feeling that every argument he advanced on the point was one in the eye
for atheism, scepticism, and "psilanthropism."160 In Burke we see, much
more clearly than in Coleridge, that this new sense of identity does have
a real enemy. Burke identifies the enemy with the Jacobinism of the
French Revolution. Burke's view of the French Revolution itself, how-
ever, is not very rewarding: what is important is his prophetic vision of
the kind of society that we now call totalitarian, where the sense of
identity is restricted to society, where the sense of the continuity of
tradition is annihilated, and where the general will of society is uncondi-
tioned by any reference to a goal beyond the immediate objects of those
in power.
The Romantic poets, especially Keats, preserve the feeling that at the
heart of the best and fullest life is something antisocial, or more accu-
rately something beyond society which is still essential to human iden-
tity. It is not important what we call this, or rather, it is important that
different people should call it different things. Today, technology has
created for us a society in which each man is made aware of an entire
world of experience, interpenetrating with the awareness of all his neigh-
bours. Human nature being what it is, its first response to this situation is
to create out of it a hell of unparalleled hysteria. We can no longer live in
the relatively comfortable and quiet hell of The Waste Land, where "each
man fixed his eyes before his feet" [1. 65!, but are plunged into the
whirlwind of the mob itself, where there is no rest and no escape. When
we search for the inner resources that the sane mind can draw on in
trying to deal with a demonic interpenetrating world, poetry takes on a
new importance, especially the poetry that seems most directly opposed
to it. Thus the Romantic vision of Keats itself acquires, in the course of
time, the militant and crusading quality of a poetry of experience.
This is merely a special case of the general principle that no poetry of
high intensity covers a part only of the imaginative world: it covers its
entire range, by implication at least. We saw how the impetus of Keats's
imagination was carrying him in the direction of a poetry of concern and
compassion, of songs of experience in which the connection of sleep,
with its wish-fulfilment dreams, and poetry had finally been broken off.
But in the course of time his written poetry becomes also, for us, what his
unwritten poetry would have been. When the poet has done all he can in
communion and communication, the responsibility for forming the third
element of literature, the community of response, rests on us. In the
Bhagavadgita Arjuna, fighting his kinsmen on a battlefield, wanted to
Endymion: The Romantic Epiphanic 205

escape from the fight to a world of greater reality. His charioteer, the god
Krishna in disguise, convinced him that there was nowhere to go, and
after that, Arjuna saw on the battlefield the epiphany of the universe in
the body of Krishna. The song of the nightingale, the "cold Pastoral" of
the Grecian urn [1.45], the magic casements in the castle of the soul that
open to the warm love rising from the perilous seas seem to us, at first,
images of a poetry of refuge, a dream of a lost paradise. That is a possible
but shallow response: the disciplined response understands that these
poems are visions on and of the battlefield itself, not the subjective
fantasies of retreat. Only a community which has disciplined itself to
respond can even hear the voice of Keats's whispering democracy, the
voice of a society which includes both nature and humanity, a being
solidly rooted in a ground of being, and uniting death to life.
 11
John Keats
1968

From Encyclopedia Americana, 16 (1968 and subsequent editions): 328-31.

Frye's piece is followed by a lengthy bibliography of editions and critical and
biographical studies.

KEATS (kets), John, English poet: born London, England, October 31,
1795; died Rome, Italy, February 23,1821. He was born at the Swan and
Hoop livery stable, Finsbury Pavement, and baptized at St. Botolph's
Church, Bishopsgate, on December 18, 1795, where in the baptismal
register the date of his birth is given as above. His father Thomas Keats,
who kept the livery stable, had married Frances Jennings, the daughter
of his former employer, a fairly well-to-do businessman. John was the
eldest of four children surviving infancy: George was born in 1797,
Thomas in 1799, and Frances (Fanny) in 1803. In 1804 his father died as a
result of being thrown from a horse on the night of April 15/16. The
mother was remarried in June to a William Rawlings, but this marriage
was evidently a mistake, and the family moved to the home of her
mother, Mrs. Jennings, in Edmonton. John had been sent in 1803 to a
school at Enfield, two miles away, where he remained until 1811, and
where the son of the headmaster, Charles Cowden Clarke, became a
close friend. The poet's mother died in 1810, and as a result of a will
drawn up by Mrs. Jennings (who died herself in 1814), two guardians for
the Keats children were appointed of whom one, Richard Abbey, a tea
merchant, seems to have assumed full responsibility.
At school Keats is said by a schoolmate to have been chiefly interested
in fighting the other boys, although he won book prizes and is said to
have completed by 1811 a prose translation of the Aeneid, now lost. He
John Keats 207

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

verses, then three poems in the form of "epistles" in which he discusses

his poetic ambitions, then a group of sonnets, including the three men-
tioned above, and finally the remarkable Sleep and Poetry, with its blast of
invective against the Classical or Augustan tradition in English poetry.
For all its polemical vigour, and in spite of some friendly reviews (by
friends of Keats, it is true, including Hunt), the book attracted little
attention.
Most of 1817 Keats spent very quietly writing his long mythological
poem Endymion. This poem was begun at Carisbrooke, on the Isle of
Wight, late in April, and in its opening lines states that the poet, thus
beginning it in spring, hopes to complete it in the autumn. After visits to
Margate and Canterbury, Keats settled with his two brothers George and
Tom at Well Walk, Hampstead. In September he went to Oxford to visit
his friend Benjamin Bailey, where he completed the third book of the
poem. It was to Bailey that he wrote his famous letter on the imagination
(November 22, 1817), containing the phrase, "O for a Life of Sensations
rather than of Thoughts!"1
Endymion was finished in late November at Burford Bridge in Surrey,
and in December Keats was back in Hampstead, enjoying the company
of Haydon and Hunt and attending the theatre. He wrote a series of
articles on some theatrical productions by the famous actor Edmund
Kean, which appeared in a paper called The Champion. It was at this time
that Keats first met William Wordsworth, and Haydon in his autobiogra-
phy has left a lively account of an "Immortal Dinner" given in his studio
on December 28, 1817, at which Keats, Wordsworth, and a very intoxi-
cated Charles Lamb were present.2 Keats's deep admiration for
Wordsworth's poetry did not extend to his personality, and he speaks of
Wordsworth's genius as "the egotistical sublime."3 On the other hand, "a
very pretty piece of paganism"4 was Wordsworth's only comment when
Keats read him the great Hymn to Pan in the first book of Endymion,
With Endymion finished, Keats was able, while revising and recopying
it, to turn his attention to other work. In a drear-nighted December com-
memorates the December of 1817, and the fine but unluckily prophetic
sonnet, When I have fears that I may cease to be, belongs to January of 1818.
On February 4, at an evening at Leigh Hunt's, Hunt, Keats, and Shelley
vied with one another in composing sonnets on the Nile, of which Hunt's
is the best.5 It was also in February that Keats began the first of his later
major poems, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, a story from Boccaccio's Decameron
retold in ottava rima stanzas. This poem, never a favourite with Keats
John Keats 209

himself, was probably completed in April. From March to early May,

Keats was in Devonshire, at Teignmouth, grumbling humorously in
letters at the inhabitants and the incessant rain, correcting the proofs of
Endymion, and writing to his new publisher, John Taylor of Taylor and
Hessey, one of his most discerning and generous friends. Endymion was
published in April 1818, with a preface by Keats concerned mainly with
pointing out its faults.
In June his brother George married Georgiana Wylie, to whom Keats
had already addressed some affectionate poems, and the couple deter-
mined to emigrate to America, eventually settling in Louisville, Ken-
tucky. Keats meanwhile had planned a walking trip through northern
England and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown (later Charles
Armitage Brown), "to make a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to
pursue—that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest
expence."6 The tour began on June 25, 1818, after leaving George and
Georgiana at Liverpool. The pair went first through the lake country,
Keats attempting unsuccessfully to call on Wordsworth at Rydal, then
entered Scotland, visiting various Burns shrines. Ireland proved on a
brief visit too expensive to live in, and they returned to Scotland, seeing
Ailsa Craig, the Staff a caves, and Ben Nevis. In late July, on the Island of
Mull, physical fatigue, rain, exposure, and rough diet gave Keats a vio-
lent cold, which became so serious that a doctor in Inverness advised
immediate return to London.
Keats returned to London by boat in August 1818 and found his
brother Tom, who had been ill for months, fatally stricken with con-
sumption. In August too a noisily abusive review of Endymion appeared
in Blackwood's Magazine, one of a series of lampoons on the "Cockney
School." The article (anonymous, as the custom then was, but written by
John Gibson Lockhart, later the biographer of Scott) dwelt much on
"Johnny" Keats as an overambitious apothecary's apprentice, and rec-
ommended that he return to his pills and plasters. Another review ap-
pearing in September in the Quarterly Review, also anonymous, by John
Wilson Croker, was scarcely less violent, if less personally so. Such
writing, especially the Blackwood's article, was inspired by political ri-
valry and personal intrigue more than by any real critical standards,
however mistaken, but nevertheless these reviews (along with a third in
the British Critic, if possible the most offensive of the three) succeeded in
doing a great deal of the harm that they were designed to do, both to
Keats's sales and to his reputation.7
2io On Romanticism

By September Keats had plunged into another mythological poem,

Hyperion, dealing with the theme of the defeat of the Titans by the
Olympian gods and cast in the convention of Miltonic epic, as Endymion
had been in that of Spenserian romance and allegory. On December i,
1818, Tom Keats died, and the poet moved to Wentworth Place, also in
Hampstead, to live with Brown. He said in a letter that his concern for his
family kept all thoughts of other love out of his mind;8 but now Tom was
dead, George was in America, and his sister Fanny, to whom he was
devoted and wrote many delightful letters, was at school and kept from
him by her well-meaning but small-souled guardian Abbey, who greatly
disapproved of Keats's mode of life. By December we find references in
the letters to a Miss Fanny Brawne, who was obviously interesting him
much more than he pretended she was. The date of his engagement to
her is uncertain, the traditional date, Christmas Day of 1818, being much
too early; it was probably after she and her mother moved in next door at
Wentworth Place, near the beginning of April.
In January of 1819 Keats began, while staying in the cathedral town of
Chichester, what became, as the result of a painstaking revision not
completed until September, the flawless masterpiece The Eve of St. Agnes.
The tantalizing fragment The Eve of St. Mark followed in February, re-
ferred to, and later copied out, in the wonderful journal letters written by
the poet to George and Georgiana in Kentucky. March was an unproduc-
tive month, but in April, when he finished what we have of Hyperion,
Keats wrote the ode To Psyche, the first (and according to T.S. Eliot the
best)9 of the great odes, as well as the haunting ballad that has inspired a
whole literature in itself, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The lovely sonnet
Bright Star, which was written on a blank page in a volume of Shake-
speare during the journey to Italy and is often regarded as Keats's last
poetic effort, may also belong to this time; a recent critic suggests Octo-
ber of 1818 for its first version. In May 1819 Keats reached the peak of his
creative powers with the Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode
on Melancholy, and (perhaps in early June) the Ode on Indolence. The first
two appeared in a periodical called Annals of the Fine Arts in July 1819
and January 1820 respectively.
Meanwhile Keats's financial situation was becoming serious. His po-
etry had of course brought him no money, and he had been living on
advances from Abbey on his grandmother's legacy. An impulsive Chan-
cery suit brought by an aunt to decide the apportioning of an unallotted
sum of money seems to have immobilized the poet's resources. The
John Keats 211

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

from America to collect his share of the family legacy did little for his
spirits and nothing for his purse. On February 3 came an attack of blood-
spitting which Keats, with his medical training, recognized for what it
was. "I know the colour of that blood," he said to Brown: "it is arterial
blood—I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop of blood is my
death-warrant—I must die."12
In March he was ordered by his doctor to give up all work, and in a
few months a poet of bounding health and energy had become a passive
invalid. His greatest misery was caused by the hopelessness of his love
for Fanny Brawne. Though some of Keats's friends disliked her, there is
no reasonable doubt of her devotion to him, but she had health and he
had not; she engaged in social activities he could not share in, and his
letters and poems to her often show a desperately possessive jealousy.
With the good services of his publishers and the barrister Richard
Woodhouse, a most competent editor, transcriber, and critic, who from
the beginning had recognized Keats as the greatest genius since Milton,
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems was published in the
beginning of July. The "other poems" included Hyperion and the great
odes to the Nightingale, the Grecian Urn, Melancholy, Psyche, and Au-
tumn. La Belle Dame Sans Merci was not included: it was first published in
the Indicator, another magazine of Leigh Hunt's, on May 20, over the
gloomy pseudonym of "Caviare" (echoing Hamlet's "caviare to the gen-
eral" [Hamlet, 2.2.436-7!). The 1820 volume, as it is usually called, had a
considerably better critical reception than Endymion, but Keats was past
caring, in spite of a rally in health which deceived his doctor. Hemorrhages
set in again on June 22, and he moved restlessly about, taking shelter
with Leigh Hunt and then with Fanny Brawne and her mother.
As it seemed obvious that another winter in England would be a death
sentence, plans were made to get the ailing poet away. Offers of help
came from various quarters, including a very generous one from a total
stranger, a Scotsman named John Aitken. Shelley invited Keats to his
home in Pisa, an invitation which Keats, who never warmed up to
Shelley, put aside, in the letter which contains the famous phrase, "[Y]ou
might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every
rift' of your subject with ore."13 Keats sailed for Italy on September 18,
1820, in the company of the painter Joseph Severn, a friend of long
standing, enduring a rough voyage, quarantine, and a badly equipped
ship, and arriving in Naples on October 21. Keats took a dislike to what
he considered an atmosphere of tyranny in Naples, and in November
John Keats 213

they pushed on to Rome, where a kindly resident English doctor, James

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

agree with the impression given by his letters of candour, loyalty, a

genius for friendship, and a natural sweetness of disposition. He appears
to less advantage as a lover than as a brother or friend, though the horror
of such Victorian critics as Matthew Arnold and Coventry Patmore at the
Fanny Brawne letters is difficult to understand today.17 The attractive-
ness of Keats's personality has done much to make him a favourite as
well as a classic, and the remark made in a letter by his publisher John
Taylor, written in 1818—"if you knew him, you would also feel that
strange personal Interest in all that concerns him"18—is equally true
today. In more than one sense he is a poet who can never grow old, and
for most of his readers the line from The Tempest, "Nothing of him that
doth fade" [1.2.400], would be more appropriate for his tombstone than
the one he chose.
 12
Kathleen Hazel Coburn
13 June 1978

Citation for an honorary degree from the University of Toronto, from the
typescript in NFF, 1988, box 6, file o. Coburn was a long-time colleague of
Frye's in the Department of English at Victoria College. She had become general
editor of Coleridge's Collected Works, and exemplified a type of scholarship that
was at the opposite pole from Frye's, involving meticulous documentation and
textual work.1 Frye refers in the text to her anthology of Coleridge's writings,
Inquiring Spirit (1951, reviewed in no. 6, above), and also to two of her public
lectures: the 1979 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, published as
Experience into Thought: Perspectives in the Coleridge Notebooks (1979),
and the 1973 Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Newcastle, pub-
lished as The Self-Conscious Imagination (1974).

Mr. Chancellor:
In a forthcoming CBC documentary on the Massey family, Hart Massey
is quoted as saying, "My mind was formed by Victoria College." I think
Miss Coburn's mind was also formed, if not by Victoria College, at least
at it, because hers is one of those proud generations in which this univer-
sity possessed two powerful mind-forming agencies, the autonomous
college and the structured Honour Course. Having squandered these,
the university can no longer form the minds of its arts students on such a
scale, though it may occasionally catch one and train it. Miss Coburn
knows very well how fortunate she has been, and has said so in her
charming autobiography, In Pursuit of Coleridge, which I warmly com-
mend to your attention. She entered the Philosophy and English Honour
Course, where her chief mentors were G.S. Brett in philosophy and
Pelham Edgar in English. For Edgar the sun rose and set on the great
216 On Romanticism

English Romantics, and for Brett the keystone of the history of philoso-
phy was Kant; hence, for a lively and imaginative student mind exposed
to such influences, a special interest in Coleridge was a natural enough
development.
She went on to Oxford, and, by a series of accidents which were clearly
not really accidents, she gained access to the fifty-odd notebooks of
Coleridge in possession of the Coleridge family, and later discovered the
lost manuscript of Coleridge's Philosophical Lectures, an edition of which
was her first publication. I was a student at Oxford myself at the time,
and remember something of the consternation caused by the news of her
taking so commanding a place in Coleridge studies.2 Besides being young
and unknown, she was, after all, a woman, and in those days some
Oxford professors would still walk into a classroom half full of women
and begin their lecture with the word "gentlemen." Then again, she was
a colonial, and the illiteracy of colonials was a favourite topic of Oxonian
senior common rooms. What those who did not know her missed was
what everyone who did know her recognized at once: the quiet authority
which conveyed that, of the dozens of academics panting to edit the
Coleridge notebooks, or at any rate sit on them to keep others from doing
it, this was the one who could, who should, and who would.
She made the courageous but obviously right decision to get the whole
editorial strategy clear in her mind before publishing the first volumes,
which delayed their publication but made them permanent when they
did appear. Annotation was simpler in principle, because for annotating
Coleridge only one requirement is needed, namely omniscience. Largely
through her efforts, scholarly interest in Coleridge expanded to the point
at which a collected edition of his works became a practical possibility,
and Miss Coburn, of course, became general editor of this colossal enter-
prise. In shorter compass, there are two anthologies of Coleridge and two
volumes of public lectures, one the brilliant series of Alexander Lectures
given on this campus last fall. She has also edited the letters of Sara
Hutchinson and has a most comprehensive knowledge of the whole
Romantic period, but her centre of gravity has always been Coleridge,
and she has done more than anyone else to make us realize that, even in a
period of such incredible vitality, Coleridge is the one who comes nearest
to Goethe in the range and versatility of his mental powers.
The study of the humanities without the possession of humanity is a
mockery, and I refer you to her own writings for a sense of the personal-
ity behind all this industry, erudition, and organizing skill. It comes out
Kathleen Hazel Coburn 217

in her attitude to Coleridge himself, to whose greatness as a genius she is

appreciative without idolatry, to whose weaknesses as a man she is
compassionate without condescension. Her capacity for friendship has
attracted the loyalty and devotion of a great variety of people, from the
Indians of her beloved Georgian Bay to the normally quarrelsome breed
of specialized scholars. Her cultural and imaginative roots go very deeply
into Ontario soil: coming herself from a North Irish family, she has
watched the transformation of the province by later waves of immigra-
tion, and has studied the pattern in her striking novel The Grandmothers.
Her Nonconformist conscience kept her in a teaching position at Victoria
long after she could have escaped from such duties, and, during the war,
made her a defender of the civil rights of the victims of wartime hysteria.
Her quality of balanced sanity has, I think, been well if unconsciously
characterized by Coleridge himself, in one of those blockbusting sen-
tences of his which I have somewhat abridged:

For myself . . . in the performance of my public duties as Editor . . . I shall

always deem myself acting most judiciously when I employ those feelings,
which the Supreme Wisdom has interwoven with my existence, in the
enforcement of those truths and duties . . . which the same Wisdom or-
dained to be the characteristic of our nature, and the end and object of our
being.3

Mr. Chancellor, in the name of the Governing Council I ask you to confer
the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Miss Kathleen Coburn.
 13
How It Was
Winter 1982

From Studies in Romanticism, 21 (Winter 1982): 571. The piece, headed

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

When I was a very green student in the graduate school here, sometime
around 1935 or 1936, we had a Graduate English Club, and I remember a
very bright paper on Shelley, full of such remarks as the word "unpre-
meditated" in the Skylark poem being more suggestive of a typewriter
than a bird. It was quite a bright paper, as I say, but I had read Eliot's
early essays by that time, and suddenly in the middle of it I realized that
I was watching a bandwagon going by. Incredible as it sounds, it had
never occurred to me before that the study of English literature could be
just as full of vogues and fashions as anything else. So I decided to
develop an interest in the Romantics (I was already interested in Blake)
as much out of perversity as anything else. That is, I was damned if I was
going to start rushing this way and that in obedience to a trend. The seed
of doubt in the importance of value judgments generally was also deeply
implanted in me at this point.
 14
In the Earth, or in the Air?
17 January 1986

From Times Literary Supplement, 17 January 1986,51-2. Review of Paul de

Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Guildford: Columbia University Press,
1984). Typescripts are in NFF, 1991, box 40, file 5.

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

Critical theory is popular enough by now to have generated its own

kind of gossip literature, and in it de Man is often characterized as a
having a magisterial style, a "rhetoric of authority," as though, being at
the centre of the Yale school of critics, one of his intentions was to suggest
that all was well with God and man at Yale. Evidently, in a field where so
few people really know what they are talking about, it is somewhat bad
form to suggest that one does, even implicitly in the style. But in his
practical criticism, at least, de Man has acquired his authoritative style in
the legitimate way. Blindness and Insight, for example, has an essay on
obscurity in modern poetry, where he picks up some facile twaddle on
the subject telling its readers that Mallarme abandoned representation
for arid allegory, and then shows, by a superb explication of the Tombeau
de Verlaine, that Mallarme never did anything of the kind. In the present
book, one essay tackles the very difficult and elusive passage on Rousseau
in Holderlin's Der Rhein, with just a little more care and patience than the
next critic, and extracts from it the historical significance that Holderlin
saw in Rousseau, and that we, by implication, all ought to see in Rousseau.
The rhetoric of Romanticism, according to de Man, began with the
arguments over "allegory" and "symbol" in late eighteenth-century Ger-
many. He discusses this in the essay in Blindness and Insight, "The Rheto-
ric of Temporality," which is really an essential addition to the present
book. What emerged from the discussion was not a coherent definition of
either term, but the growing realization that Western culture had up to
that point been dominated by distinctive ideologies, which formed the
"allegories" enclosing it. All dominant ideologies are structures of au-
thority, and, unless they are merely tyrannies enforced by terror, they are
aesthetic structures as well. Romanticism was primarily the realization
that in human society a conflict of ideologies was inescapable, as every
thesis or proposition contains, in fact has already expressed, its own
opposite.
The resulting conflicts take many forms. Politically, attitudes range
from an extreme conservatism that invokes the revival of some earlier
type of authoritative ideology to an extreme radicalism that regards
conflict as an end in itself. Culturally, one extreme tries to invent a new
aesthetic order, as even Yeats does to a considerable degree, and the
other tries to get rid of the aesthetic orders altogether and live directly in
nature without a cultural and verbal envelope sheltering us from it. In
our day the sense of ideological deadlock has produced a general sense
of ironic lassitude among critics, except for those who try to break out of
In the Earth, or in the Air? 221

it by seizing one ideology, generally one with Marxist affinities, and

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

misses its own main point. The physical location of this place of the new
relation is the old heaven, which in pre-Romantic ideology was both the
place of the presence of God and the metaphor for that presence, the
lower heaven or the sky. De Man notes the religious colouring of the
language in all three poets he quotes, but not the curious parody (it really
amounts to that) of the older vision of natura naturata, the structure or
system of nature that traditionally forms a second word of God.
A very deep-seated dilemma for the poet appears here. As long as it
continues to use words, literature can never be as purely abstract an art
as painting or music. Nouns and verbs still have to name things and
actions, and if a poet feels that his world is divided between an earth
where words grow like flowers and some kind of ionosphere where there
are no phenomena any more, what kind of words can he use for the
latter? He can stare at this world with fear, reverence, or dislike; he can
talk about its emotional effect on him; but he can't incorporate it into his
poetry without using clay-born imagery. The only alternative is an occa-
sional tour de force, such as Mallarme achieves in speaking of the terrify-
ing and haunting "azur" in the poem [L'Azur] that so bewildered his
contemporaries. De Man denies that Mallarme's "azur" really belongs to
this nonphenomenal conception of nature, because he is anxious to keep
Mallarme among the earth-based poets. But when no poet can get off the
ground and sustain himself in the "azur" anyway, I doubt if this objec-
tion means much.
In another essay de Man starts off with a remark of Nietzsche's that
truth is metaphor, metonymy, and anthropomorphism, and then analy-
ses two sonnets of Baudelaire that are clearly intended to form a contrast,
the famous Correspondances and Obsession. The first tells us that nature
communicates infinite mysteries; the second tells us that nature com-
municates nothing at all with any human relevance. Nobody who thinks
of this kind of thing as a "contradiction" ought to be reading poetry: de
Man sees the contrast, which is what it is, as the same contrast as the one
between nature as man's home and nature as the alienating otherness
just mentioned.
We notice that de Man does not take the word "apocalypse" seriously
(in striking contrast to, for instance, Meyer Abrams's Natural Super-
naturalism), as describing a form of imaginative comprehension, although
it appeared in the quotation from Wordsworth in the opening essay.
Apocalypse is revelation, and to reveal is to be at a distance, communi-
cating, but suggesting an infinite possession—from which the revelation
In the Earth, or in the Air? 223

comes. Correspondances is an apocalyptic poem in this sense, though not

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

with Attis's image on it at the beginning of Vacillation is an emblematic

tree. The function of the first is to resolve the antitheses of Plato and
Aristotle, nuns and mothers, transfiguration and rebirth, soul and body,
votive candles and children, holy presences and self-born mockers, that
the earlier part of the poem sets out. Along with the dancer, this tree
represents a permanent integration or unity of being that we can neither
attain nor leave alone. The tree is there, but not conscious; the dancer is
conscious, but cannot go on dancing indefinitely.
The function of the Vacillation tree, in contrast, with its mythical
(Mabinogion) ancestry, is to announce the theme of the conflict of heroism
and sanctity that the narrator, in common with the rest of the human
race, who are all part of Attis's image, "vacillates" between. But de Man
insists that the two trees are the same, and that the leaf, blossom, and
bole of the chestnut correspond to the lushness, the fire, and the Attis
image of the second. He also maintains that Yeats was absorbed by the
beauty of Byzantine culture to the point of repudiating the Platonic sense
of an incarnate Eros in his later work. The fact that practically all Yeats's
poetry and his explicit statements on the subject say the exact opposite is
evidently just resistance or defensiveness. But surely Yeats is par excel-
lence the poet who realized that no one can do without either images or
emblems and still be a poet: he repudiates the way of the saint, not for
being what it is, but because it destroys the poetic impulse by renouncing
even emblematic images: Byzantine art itself is not anti-erotic or super-
erotic: it is a later development of the union of the erotic and the math-
ematical which, according to The Statues, was planned by Pythagoras as
well as practised by Phidias.
What is true, I think, and what gives the essay cogency in spite of its
dubious readings, is that, for example, the chestnut tree, as a natural
image, resonates against the emblematic tree of Vacillation and its counter-
parts elsewhere. For Yeats there are two worlds, out of many, that
particularly concern the poet. The poet's workshop is the "preposterous
pig of a world" we see about us, and the "foul rag-and-bone shop of the
heart" that we see within us.4 But there is also an emblematic world of
beauty and dignity that can be invoked, and it gives meaning to what the
poet struggles with in roping his pig. The result is the aesthetic-violence
interaction described so clearly in the Kleist essay. In Sailing to Byzantium
there is a distant vision of unflawed beauty and order; in Byzantium, the
view of the process behind this construction, there is a kind of alchemical
blast furnace burning up the blood and filth of human life.
In the Earth, or in the Air? 225

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

that the central aim of deconstruction is to reveal the assumptions, more

particularly the unconscious assumptions, underlying what a writer is
saying through his choice of metaphors and images, Rousseau, accord-
ing to de Man, does not need any such deconstruction, because he knows
from the first that he is creating a fiction and not asserting objective truth.
In other words, every work of Rousseau is best deconstructed by reading
his other works.
If I were explaining this situation in my own words, I should say that
an ideology expresses secondary and derivative human concerns, and
that what ideologies are derived from is mythology, which expresses the
primary desires of existence, along with the anxieties attached to their
frustration. The real object of deconstruction, then, is to reveal the mytho-
logical basis under the ideology, and the writers least in need of such
analysis are the great reshapers of myth, of whom Rousseau is obviously
one. I doubt that this is really so far removed from de Man's view,
whatever his visceral reaction to the word "myth" would have been. I
introduce the point because ideology is always nostalgic for the past or
expectant of the future, or both, whereas mythology transposes every-
thing into a present directly confronting the reader. Hence the immense
importance, for understanding Rousseau's historical function, of the pas-
sage in the fifth walk of the Reveries, where he speaks of the superlative
happiness gained by a self-recollecting consciousness dwelling purely in
the present, with no chains binding it to future or past.5 De Man under-
stands the importance of this passage for Holderlin's view of Rousseau:
he even understands its importance in itself, but some lurking secularized
sense of original sin seems to prevent him from coming to grips with it.
Another poem that uses Rousseau as a Virgilian guide is Shelley's
Triumph of Life, on which there is also an essay in The Rhetoric of Romanti-
cism. I have space only to point to the virtuosity of the explication in this
essay. De Man may be "right" or "wrong" about the poem—an unfin-
ished poem is too boggy a ground textually to fight over—but he follows
the metaphors and figures of the poem with an intensity that is utterly
"right" in itself. He shows us how the narrative of a ^oo-line poem can
contain more surprising twists of plot, more cliff-hanging suspense, more
sudden alternation of vision and concealment, than a thousand pages of
commonplace romantic adventures. In the course of the essay de Man
remarks that the death of the poet, which prevented him from finishing
the poem, is an integral part of the imagery. Whatever one does with this
observation, it gives additional poignancy to the fact, certainly regretta-
ble enough in itself, that there will be no more essays from Paul de Man.
On the Nineteenth Century
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 15
Review of Patience and The Silver Box
March 1932

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

Patience

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

the choice of the piece was not a wise one. That seemed to be the general
impression. I should like to quote with approval the words of one of the
principals: "The closer the Music Club keeps to the Pirates of Penzance
sort of thing, the better off they will be."
In spite of this initial difficulty, and in spite too of their very obvious
lack of depth of insight into the music, the Club put on a capable and
entertaining performance. Easily the best work was done by Bessie Moun-
tain as Lady Jane—probably the most difficult part as well. Her truly
superb piece of restrained clowning was not only the highlight of the
performance, but toned down almost to the vanishing point the glaring
weakness of Gilbertian comedy—the theory that it is uproariously funny
to make fun of an old woman. Aubrey Smith as Bunthorne was fairly
effective, but in him the regrettable tendency spoken of above to over-
burlesque the performance found its clearest expression. Space precludes
detailed mention of other principals, all of whom sang well and carried
off their parts admirably. The best acting, among those who had a chance
to act, was probably done by Bessie Mountain, Ray McKnight, and Roy
Wood.
The main attractiveness of the performance was in the performers
themselves rather than in the work they did. The freshness, enthusiasm,
spontaneity, and wholesomeness of the stage atmosphere, combined
with a technique sufficiently good not to be in itself positively jarring or
annoying, disarms criticism and results in the Club getting far better
write-ups than they deserve. It is easy enough for anyone with a pair of
ears to say sarcastic things about inaccurate singing, sloppy diction,
badly balanced group work, unexpected modulations, and obvious nerv-
ousness, but in the last analysis no one can resist the kids in the Music
Club. Their faults aid rather than hinder this, which accounts for the
patronizing way in which the Toronto papers criticize them. I think,
therefore, that Mr. Crawford would have been quite justified in giving
to, say, Patience and Saphir the parts they had whether they could have
sung them acceptably or not.
I should like to recommend that the Music Club repertoire be confined
to Gilbert and Sullivan. Light and catchy music is essential to keep up the
interest, and these operas are greatly preferable to the long and involved
works of German composers or Ethel Smyth, which are far too difficult
for the organization. American light opera is often, as with De Koven,
at best a feeble imitation of their work, or else lacks the breezy and
diatonic straightforwardness which appeals so strongly to the musi-
Review of Patience and The Silver Box 231

cally uninitiated and makes of the great Mid-Victorian team such an

excellent drawing card.2

The Silver Box

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

in the Society, and perhaps it facilitated the sale of tickets, but the major
production calls for the best players and for them only—players, more-
over, who can work as a unit and have a coherent conception of the piece,
which those who were present on both nights would miss. The first
performance was easily better than the second, the stars in it being Hal
Vaughan, Muriel Code, R.W. Christie, and Olive Smith. All the parts
were quite acceptably filled. Hal Vaughan was on both nights, and not
only turned in a good performance of his own, but in some unaccount-
able way took the edge off the very obvious immaturity of the produc-
tion. Muriel Code probably gave the best consistent piece of acting of the
two nights. The play was, on the whole, a decided success. It is far better
than anything else we have ever seen the Society do; perhaps even better
than we ever expected to see it do. The unfortunate organization seems
to be on the right track at last.
 16
Review of H.M.S. Pinafore
April 1933

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

As the departmental contributor detailed to turn the monocle toward

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

artistic conscience of the Music Club rises to defend itself, and I listen
with the respectful attention it deserves. If there ever was a time when
Pinafore could be well done, it argues, that time has long since passed.
Considered as a whole the farce is clumsy and ill-conceived, besides
being unendurably hackneyed, and it simply cannot be sustained on its
own momentum. No human power can prevent that unspeakable finale
from dragging painfully and dismally to a limping and inept close. All
the standard actors of the Music Club are good for lots of entertainment,
says the conscience, but they could do nothing with their parts; they had
to kick them off the stage and substitute themselves. The cast of charac-
ters in Pinafore are all stuffed shirts and artificially bulged chemises, O
critic, but those who took their places are wholesome happy youngsters
who are all friends of yours, and you for one know that the fairy
changelings are infinitely more attractive.
This sounded plausible, and I began to review the principals in accord-
ance with this idea. Bessie Mountain as Lady Jane I had acclaimed last
year for doing that very thing. But she was helpless in Buttercup's iron
grip; she did all she could, in fact she did all there was to be done, but the
part was too badly written for her to do much. Aubrey Smith was more
fortunate in having a role large enough to replace the effete stock figure
of Sir Joseph Porter by the stocky but by no means effete figure of Aubrey
Smith, and to say that the audience appreciated the substitution would
be putting it mildly. Jean Welford knew that she was Jean Welford,
beautiful, graceful, and an exquisite singer, and she has as little interest
as her audience in the anemic and fatuous mid-Victorian bore Gilbert
meant her to represent. But Betty Oram, who as a singer and stage figure
is perhaps the Club's most valuable asset, could do nothing but stand
around and help the chorus. Dick Jolliffe, if somewhat immature as yet,
gave the chorus a rich carpet of bass to walk on, but the biggest thrill of
his performance was his low D which Sullivan had not thought of.
Murray Babe's part was large enough for him to fill it comfortably and
Johnny Copp's high fluent tenor quite adequate for anything he had to
sing. The one figure who seemed to grow naturally out of his part was
John Bates as Dick Deadeye.
Hence, if John was the best performer on the stage, as he indubitably
was, it should not be forgotten that he was the only one who had a part
he could do anything with. For the rest, including the chorus, some
impetus stronger than that supplied by the opera itself was necessary.
The more I think of Pinafore, the more I see the necessity for extraneous
Review of H.M.S. Pinaforee 235

(pardon me, spontaneous) humour. I respect the Music Club for their
sincere and genuine effort to act Pinafore off the stage. Taken in small
doses, of course, the opera, though still easily the worst of the Gilbert and
Sullivan repertoire, is not so bad as all this. Some of Gilbert's work is
brilliant and clever; there is much excellent satire on the blackguardism
which Victoria is trying to fight at the present time, and many of the
songs, notably the one beginning "An Englishman is a soaring soul," are
delightful. The music, though less distinguished, is catchy and pleasing
enough at times, and Sir Joseph Porter's part-song is in Sullivan's best
vein of parody. A cross-section almost anywhere in Pinafore would
probably yield something fairly amusing. But what I am talking about is
the organic unity of the opera, the sense of form that makes it go across
with a swing and gives to the characters vitality and interest. From this
point of view—and it is the one by which the work must, finally as well
as initially, be judged—Pinafore is an unqualified flop.
The Music Club as it stands has very little right to its name. One of the
members of the executive-elect has asked my opinion concerning the
organization, on the side, of a glee club after the manner of the Hart
House and WUA [Women's Undergraduate Association] songsters, but
yielding a more systematic training. This is a reform long overdue. A
great musician visiting Toronto would no doubt be delighted at the large
amount of good music played and listened to here, but if he were further
informed that there was only one "Music Club" on the campus and that
it spent all its energy in the production of one Gilbert and Sullivan light
opera a year he might get a rude shock. I am not opposed to the annual
production, if one at all worth four months' work is chosen, because
there is a colour and glamour, an excitement and wholesome fun about
the big performance which it would be a pity to take away. But its value
as a training in or appreciation of music is negligible. The college has
matured a good deal in its attitude to music and an awakening of
intelligent and critical interest in the most magnificent of all arts is
obvious. It is incumbent upon a "Music Club," therefore, to aid this
interest and meet its challenge.
 17
lolanthe
December 1935

Article on Gilbert and Sullivan's lolanthe, from Acta Victoriana, 60 (Decem-

ber 1935): 26. Frye was now enrolled at Emmanuel College and teaching at
Victoria College; at this time professors and alumni as well as undergraduates
contributed to Acta.

The Music Club goes back this year to Gilbert and Sullivan, which is a big
relief. The peculiar combination required for light opera seems to be tart,
acrid, witty satire in the libretto and graceful, fluent, good-humoured
music. This is the relation between the bitter and neglected Gilbert and
the Sullivan who was the darling of Queen Victoria's court; as it is to
some extent, on another plane, the relation of Beaumarchais and Mozart.
Without satire the light opera is apt to become insipid, as the last two
productions of the Music Club undoubtedly did.
There is no doubt the Music Club can do lolanthe; they have done it
before, and they have done more difficult things. The same thing hap-
pens every year: there will be uneasy intonation in the chorus, discordant
squawks at decent intervals from the principals, and probably the usual
irresponsible horseplay on the last night; but there will also be an enor-
mous good time had by all, performers and audience. No other activity
quite provides the thrill and excitement of the annual opera. That, I
think, is the essential function of the Music Club, so that those who feel
that a Music Club should train students in music as a Dramatic Society
trains them in drama and a Debating Society in debating are doubtless
arguing from a false analogy.
 18
Review of lolanthe
April 1936

Review of Gilbert and Sullivan's lolanthe, from Acta Victoriana, 60 (April

1936): 34-5.

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

more than one encore for each song, as the usual practice is for the actors
to hit the first encore with everything they possess and make the others
an anticlimax. Gord Turner, though a little heavy in the part of Strephon—
two-thirds mortal, shall we say—had a clear, forceful voice and got all of
his lines across; Evelyn David as lolanthe struggled bravely with a col-
ourless part; Pat Lundy as Phyllis left little to be desired in both her
singing and her stage presence. Dick Jolliffe and Marg Da vies, with their
impressive resonant voices and their commanding and awe-inspiring
appearances, provided a punch that a good deal of the performance
lacked, and the clarity of their utterances rescued much of the dialogue
from a chaos of whispers and sibilants; their singing was occasionally
marred by poor intonation, but no one could feel uneasy when they were
on the stage. Arthur Steed and Fred Ongley filled their roles well, to the
great advantage of the play: it is precisely this type of part which is apt to
be slurred over in an amateur performance. Their quartet in the second
act with the Sentry and Phyllis provided, I think, the best singing of the
evening.
Of the sets, the first was neutral, the second excellent. And may I
protest that a recitative, which looks easy, is really quite difficult to sing
properly. This was perhaps the most neglected feature of the singing,
and as a result the scenes depending for their effect on its proper han-
dling, such as the summoning of lolanthe in the first act, sounded rather
sloppy.
I think that this level of performance, depending for its effect on the
enthusiasm of the actors rather than on anything resembling professional
competence, is one that the Music Club would do well to stay on. If it gets
any worse, the audience will complain; if it gets any better, the faculty
will complain. As it is, the Music Club can go on indefinitely without
worrying anybody but Mr. Crawford.
 19
Review of Bradbrook's
Ibsen the Norwegian
27 August 1947

Review of M.C. Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian: A Revaluation (London:

Chatto & Windus, 1946). From Canadian Forum, 27 (August 1947): 120.

Ibsen badly needs a "revaluation," for he has been somewhat neglected

of late in comparison with such contemporaries as Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky, not obviously greater writers. The neglect is all the more
copious in view of the current rage for Kierkegaard, who deeply influ-
enced Ibsen, and who is now so fashionable among the sort of people he
spent his life denouncing. Miss Bradbrook thinks that Ibsen was unfortu-
nate in being launched outside Norway by readers who cared little for
poetry and a great deal for "advanced" ideas. Hence a few manipulated
experiments like Ghosts got far too much attention, and when the ad-
vanced ideas dated, so did Ibsen. She has tried to achieve a better per-
spective by treating Ibsen as a symbolic poet whose imagination was
essentially conditioned by the language and environment of his own
country. She complains that the existing English translations of Ibsen,
though faithful, are insensitive, especially where the original is in verse.
Her study is, if somewhat slight, very readable, and she gives many
useful hints about the references in the plays which demand a knowl-
edge of Norway.
 20
James, Le Fanu, and Morris
April 1948

Review of Henry James, What Maisie Knew; Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass

Darkly: Stories, with an introduction by V.S. Pritchett; and William Morris,
On Art and Socialism: Essays and Lectures, selected and with an introduc-
tion by Holbrook Jackson, all published in the Chiltern Library series (London:
John Lehmann, 194.7)- From Canadian Forum, 28 (April 1948): 22.

Now that publishing has become big business, the legitimate book is in
danger of being crowded out by erotic bestsellers, and the serious reader
finds it more and more difficult to buy the kind of book he wants to see
on his shelves. Good new books are rare enough at any time, but they
will always appear somehow or other: it is the keeping of good old books
in print that is important. A certain number of publishing houses, like
Random House in its Modern Library, have gone in for selling the
classics, but that does not help—it rather hinders—other classics which
happen not to be on the curricula of enough universities. The inaccessi-
bility of the sort of charming and mellowed book that one reads for
pleasure rather than instruction constitutes a bad enough problem here
and an absurd one in England, where the small ration of paper has
almost ruined the reprint trade. Most of what paper there is goes into
new books, and it is probably harder to buy Shakespeare in England
right now than Sir Oswald Mosley's new book on the futility of democ-
racy.1 One is therefore all the more grateful for and appreciative of the
Chiltern Library, published by John Lehmann, which so far contains
twelve excellently chosen titles, including the three listed above, two
other novels of Henry James, and two of Mrs. Gaskell, along with her
famous life of Charlotte Bronte.
 21
An Important Influence
July 1948

Review of Andrew Jackson Mathews, La Wallonie, 1886-1892: The Symbol-

ist Movement in Belgium (Morningside Heights, N.Y.: King's Crown Press,
1947). From Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 72 (July 1948): 231.

La Wallonie was a little Belgian magazine which featured such writers as

Andre Gide, Stuart Merrill, Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, Valery, and Henri
De Regnier, along with many others whose careers and work are dis-
cussed by the author. It was thus connected most closely, as these names
show, with the symbolist movement, yet its social influence was enough
to revive and give official sanction to the word "Wallonia" as a name for
the French-speaking section of Belgium. Its importance is therefore two-
fold. It is one of the struggling "little reviews" which formed the back-
bone of the late nineteenth-century French poetry, possibly one of the
richest outcroppings of lyrical genius in history. It is also a document of
the literary regionalism which helped to make poets more sensitive to
their immediate surroundings and to develop an enthusiasm for writing
• in smaller centres. Thus it illustrates the two requirements of healthy
poetry which are superficially inconsistent with each other: that it should
be completely international, and that it should be the product of an
intimate contact between the poet and his environment.
 22
Joan Evans's John Ruskin
March 1955

Review of Joan Evans's John Ruskin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954). From
Canadian Forum, 34 (March 1955): 285.

Miss Evans's book forms an excellent introduction to Ruskin for the

general reader. It is less aimless than Quennell, less ponderous than
Leon, and, though also much less incisive than Wilenski, more up to
date: a great deal of biographical source material has come to light since
Wilenski's book appeared in 1933.1 Ruskin's diaries, which Miss Evans is
helping to edit, form part of this material, though they seem unlikely, to
judge by her quotations from them, to alter our conception of Ruskin to
any startling degree. Certainly the structure of her book is conventional
enough. In general outline it follows Ruskin's own autobiography,
Praeterita, and summarizes briefly the themes of his major works in
chronological order.
Few people require more charity and patience from a biographer than
Ruskin. "A tragedy without a villain" is Miss Evans's excellent phrase
for his life [422]. Going through it, from childhood, a mixture of coddling
and stupid severity that gave him a parental fixation all his life, through
the squalor of his unconsummated marriage and annulment, through
the deeper squalor of the dreadful Rose La Touche business, through all
the low comedy of Winnington school, the St. George's Guild, and the
Whistler libel suit,2 into the final misery of madness that lasted for at
least a quarter of his life, one finds pathetically few moments of the
dignity and nobility that most of us feel ought to be the normal insulation
of greatness. And then through it all is the constant downpour of words—
thirty-nine huge closely printed volumes of them, much of it wonderful
Review of Joan Evans's John Ruskin 243

stuff certainly, but full of roller-coaster rhetoric and bushel baskets of

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

sense of direction, which is not toward the interpretation of art but

toward the discovery of the principles on which it imitates nature, and
which would end ultimately in a kind of personal conquest of art. Miss
Evans quotes his remark to Lord Conway at the very end of his sane life:
"I have come to the conclusion that it is not Art that I loved but Nature: in
fact I believe I have hated Art!" [402]. This terrible flash of self-revelation
might well become the basis of someone's study of Ruskin.
 23
Emily Dickinson
1962

From FI, 193-217. Originally published in Major Writers of America, ed.

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

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the Connecti-

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

There was a strong family feeling among the Dickinsons, and neither
Emily nor her younger sister Lavinia married or left home. The older
brother, Austin, went to Harvard Law School, where Emily pelted him
with affectionate letters telling him how much he was missed, then
returned to Amherst to practise law. Gossip said that the father's posses-
siveness kept his daughters beside him ministering to his domestic com-
forts, but this may not be true. The image of awful integrity he inspired,
which made his daughter say at his death, "His Heart was pure and
terrible, and I think no other like it exists" [1,418], may have grown on her
gradually, as her youthful remarks in letters to Austin sound normally
bratty. Thus: "Father and mother sit in state in the sitting-room perusing
such papers, only, as they are well assured, have nothing carnal in them"
[L63]. Her mother she was never close to until later years. Austin's wife,
Susan Gilbert, was another person whom Emily Dickinson seems always
to have loved passionately, in spite of a good deal of tension and occa-
sional open ruptures. To Sue, across the fence, Emily sent nearly three
hundred poems, besides messages, epigrams, gifts, and other symbols of
affection.
At seventeen, Emily left the Amherst Academy and went to Mount
Holyoke College, or Seminary, as it was then called, a few miles away in
South Hadley. The discipline there was strict but humane, and she seems
to have enjoyed herself in spite of the religious instruction, but her father
withdrew her after a year. Emily thus had, for a poet, relatively little
formal education. It is unlikely that she read any language except her
own. She knew the Bible (involuntarily), she knew Shakespeare, she
knew the Classical myths, and she took a good deal of interest in contem-
porary women writers, especially Elizabeth Browning, George Eliot, and
the Brontes. The Bronte references in earlier letters are to Charlotte, but
"gigantic Emily Bronte" [1,742] haunts the later ones. Dickens and Robert
Browning appear in her rare literary allusions; there are one or two
echoes of Tennyson; and, of the more serious American writers, she
knew Emerson and something of Thoreau and Hawthorne. Her main
literary instructors, however, were her dictionary and her hymnbook.
She has a large vocabulary for a poet so limited in subject matter, and
most of her stanzas, as has often been pointed out, are the ordinary hymn
stanzas, the eight-six-eight-six "common metre" and the six-six-eight-six
"short metre" being especially frequent.
Creative people often seem to need certain types of love or friendship
Emily Dickinson 247

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

back of an invitation to a "candy pulling" sent her twenty-six years

earlier. Her impetus to write seems to have come on her in a flood, as the
poems written or copied out in the year 1862 alone average one a day.
With Wadsworth gone, another "preceptor" was urgently needed, this
time a literary critic. Having liked an article by Thomas Wentworth
Higginson she had read in the Atlantic Monthly, Emily sent the author a
letter, enclosing her card and four poems, and asking if in his opinion her
poetry was "alive" and "breathed" [L26o]. Higginson had been a Unitar-
ian clergyman but had resigned his pastorate to devote himself to writ-
ing, and was then on the point of organizing a Negro regiment to fight in
the Civil War (hence his later title of Colonel Higginson).
Higginson was an influential critic, and as such a natural target for
amateur poets pretending that they wanted his frank opinion of their
work when what they really wanted was advice on how to get published.
He saw at once that Emily Dickinson was more serious business than
this. She said explicitly that she wanted her work criticized by the liter-
ary standards that he knew about, and he was bound to be misled by
that. But he realized, perhaps more quickly than she did, that she did not
want specific criticisms of her poems, which she had no intention of
altering for anyone's views. Nor was she interested in publication, as she
made clear. All she wanted was contact with a sympathetic reader of
informed taste and knowledge of the world of thought and action.
Higginson had the sense to be flattered by her confidence, and seems to
have responded with unfailing courtesy to her gentle but persistent
nudgings to write her. She may have been exaggerating when she told
him that he had saved her life, but she was not underestimating the
service he did her, nor should we. At the same time, she was never in
love with Higginson, and her attitude toward him was one of devotion
tempered by an ironic detachment.
After 1862, the poet became increasingly a recluse, dressing in white,
apparently with reference to her inner "Calvary" drama of renunciation.
For the last decade of her life she did not leave her house and refused to
see any strangers, her experience bounded by her house and garden, her
social life completely absorbed in the brief letters she constantly sent to
friends and neighbours, which sometimes contained poems and often
accompanied small gifts of flowers or fruit. She expected her friends to
be cultivated and tolerant people, and most of them were, prizing her
enigmatic notes and respecting her privacy. There was no mistaking the
Emily Dickinson 249

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

physical or psychic weakness. Emily Dickinson's perceptions were so

immediate that they absorbed her whole energy, or as she says, "The
mere sense of living is joy enough" [L342a]:

To be alive—is Power—
Existence—in itself—
Without a further function— [677]

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

Little Cousins,
Called back.
Emily. [LiO46]

A few days later she was dead.

A life in which such things as the death of her dog or an unexpected
call by Wadsworth are prominent incidents is not simply a quiet life but
a carefully obliterated one. There are poets—and they include Shake-
speare—who seem to have pursued a policy of keeping their lives away
from their readers. Human nature being what it is, it is precisely such
poets who are most eagerly read for biographical allusions. We shall find
Emily Dickinson most rewarding if we look in her poems for what her
imagination has created, not for what event may have suggested it.
When, under the spell of Ik Marvel's Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), a
favourite book of hers, she writes:
Emily Dickinson 251

Many cross the Rhine

In this cup of mine.
Sip old Frankfort air
From my brown Cigar [123]

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

ence forms what, for Emily Dickinson, was the only genuine kind of
human community, the small body of friends united in love and under-
standing. "Please to need me," as she wrote to Bowles [L3OO].

By a flower—By a letter—
By a nimble love—
If I weld the Rivet faster—
Final fast—above—

Never mind my breathless Anvil!

Never mind Repose!
Never mind the sooty faces
Tugging at the Forge! [109]

II

At her death Emily Dickinson was the author of seven published poems,
all anonymous, some issued without her authorization, six of them at
least in what she would have considered garbled versions, altered by
editors to make them more conventional. Her friends knew that she
wrote poetry, but nobody, not even her sister Lavinia who had lived with
her all her life, had any notion that she had written close to eighteen
hundred poems. She left instructions to Lavinia that her "papers" were
to be destroyed, as was customary at that time, but no instructions were
given about the piled-up packets of verse that Lavinia, to her astonish-
ment, discovered in her sister's room. Lavinia took the packets to Sue,
with a demand that they be transcribed and published immediately,
meeting all complaints about the length and difficulty of the task with,
"But they are Emily's poems!"5 Sue proved to be indolent, and perhaps
jealous, and after a long wait Lavinia took them to Mrs. Mabel Loomis
Todd, wife of an Amherst professor of astronomy, an attractive and
highly accomplished young woman, who knew Emily, so to speak, by
ear, having played the piano in the Dickinson house while the poet sat
invisibly in the dark hall outside and commented on the music.
Higginson's help was enlisted. At first he felt that it would be a
mistake to publish Emily Dickinson, perhaps thinking of an appeal she
had made to him to talk Helen Jackson out of publishing Success. But he
gradually became, first interested, then fascinated, by what he found,
and helped publicize her by writing articles about her. The two editors,
Emily Dickinson 253

Mrs. Todd and Higginson, produced Poems by Emily Dickinson in 1890,

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

unknown poet today could achieve such a success, unless fortified by

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

Her conscientious Voice will soar unmoved

Above ostensible Vicissitude, [1395]

she is using what medieval poets called "aureate diction," big soft bum-
bling abstract words that absorb images into categories and ideas. She
does not—like, for example, D.H. Lawrence—try to get inside the bird's
skin and identify herself with it; she identifies the bird with the human
consciousness in herself. Many of her poems start out by making some
kind of definition of an abstract noun:

Presentiment—is that long Shadow—on the Lawn— [764]

Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue— [745]

Emily Dickinson 255

Publication—is the Auction

Of the Mind of Man— [709]

and most of her best-loved poems are in one of the oldest and most
primitive forms of poetry, the riddle or oblique description of some
object. In A route of evanescence there is no explicit mention of a humming-
bird, because the poem tries to catch the essence of the feeling of the bird
without mentioning it. Similarly with the snow in It sifts from leaden
sieves, and with the railway train in I like to see it lap the miles.
Such popular features in her work have their own difficulties, and
there are others inherent in her peculiar style. She has for the most part
no punctuation, except a point represented in the Johnson edition by a
dash, which, as the editor points out, is really a rhythmical beat, and is of
little use in unravelling the syntax. She also shows a curious preference
for an indirect subjunctive form of expression that appears in such phrases
as "Beauty be not caused" [516], and she has what seems a most unrea-
sonable dislike of adding the s to the third person singular of verbs. The
effect of such sidelong grammar is twofold: it increases the sense of
epigrammatic wit, and it makes her poetry sound oracular, as though the
explicit statements of which her poetry is so largely made up were
coming to us shrouded in mystery. As she says:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-

Success in Circuit lies. [1129]

The result is not invariably success: sometimes we may agree with en-
thusiasm:

How powerful the Stimulus

Of an Hermetic Mind— [711]

at other times we can only say, with the captain in Pinafore confronted
with a similar type of gnomic utterance, "I don't see at what you're
driving, mystic lady":

Endanger it, and the Demand

Of tickets for a sigh
Amazes the Humility
Of Credibility—
256 On the Nineteenth Century

Recover it to Nature
And that dejected Fleet
Find Consternation's Carnival
Divested of its Meat. [1658]

Every age has its conventional notions of what poetry ought to be like,
and the conventional notions of Emily Dickinson's day were that poetry
should be close to prose in its grammar and syntax, and that its vocabu-
lary should be more refined than that of ordinary speech. Thus Robert
Louis Stevenson was outraged by the word "hatter" in a poem of
Whitman's, and asserted that using such a word was not "literary tact."7
Emily Dickinson deliberately flouts both conventions. Her beat punctua-
tion and offbeat syntax go with an abrupt and colloquial diction. The
tang of her local speech comes out in such spellings as "Febuary" and
"boquet," in such locutions as "it don't" and "it is him," and in such
words as "heft" for "weight." Speaking of heaven, she writes:

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the Checks were given— [1052]

meaning railway checks, the guarantee the conductor gives that one is
proceeding to the right destination. Her editors altered this to "chart,"
which was a more conventionally poetic word, being slightly antique.
Emily Dickinson could easily have provided such a word herself, but
preferred to form her diction at a humorously twisted angle to the
conventional expectations of the reader.
There is little in Emily Dickinson, then, of the feeling that a writer must
come to terms with conventional language at all costs. When she meets
an inadequacy in the English language she simply walks through it, as a
child might do. If the dictionary does not provide an abstract noun for
"giant," the poet will coin "gianture" [641]; if the ordinary "diminution"
does not give her enough sense of movement, she will substitute
"diminuet" [1615]. Similarly the fact that there is no singular form for
"grass" or "hay" does not stop her from speaking of "every Grass"
[1037],or from writing, to Higginson's horror,

The Grass so little has to do

I wish I were a Hay— [354]
Emily Dickinson 257

A similar teasing of the conventional reader's ear comes out in her

slanting rhymes, which often have the effect of disappointing or letting
down one's sense of an expected sound. At the same time even a conven-
tional reader can see that her commonplace stanza forms could hardly
achieve any variety of nuance without some irregularities. This is par-
ticularly true of the sinewy rhythm that syncopates against her rigid
hymnbook metres and keeps them so far out of reach of monotony or
doggerel:

Those not live yet

Who doubt to live again—
"Again" is of a twice
But this—is one—
The Ship beneath the Draw
Aground—is he?
Death—so—the Hyphen of the Sea—
Deep is the Schedule
Of the Disk to be—
Costumeless Consciousness—
That is he— [1454]

In sophisticated poetry close attention is paid to the sounds of words:

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

And Kinsmen as divulgeless

As throngs of Down— [1445]
258 On the Nineteenth Century

with "Kindred as responsive," "Clans of Down," "And Pageants as

impassive / As Porcelain"—or, presumably, any combination of these—
as possible variants.9 It is rather more disconcerting to find "New"
suggested as an alternate for "Old" in a poem ending with a reference to
"Our Old Neighbor—God" [623].10
What we find in Emily Dickinson's poetry, then, is a diffused vitality
in rhythm and the free play of a lively and exhilarating mind, crackling
with wit and sharp perception. These were clearly the qualities that she
herself knew were there and especially prized. She asked Higginson
simply whether her verse was "alive." As a poet, she is popular in the
sense of being able, like Burns or Kipling or the early Wordsworth, to
introduce poetry to readers who have had no previous experience of it. She
has, on the other hand, a withdrawn consciousness and an intense intellec-
tual energy that makes her almost esoteric, certainly often difficult.
In any case she seems, after her early valentines, to have reached her
mature style almost in a single bound. It is otherwise with her prose, no
doubt because we have so much more of it from her early years. Her
schoolgirl letters, with their engaging mixture of child's prattle and
adolescent's self-consciousness, show a Lamb-like gift for fantasy and a
detached and humorous shrewdness. She speaks of other girls who "are
perfect models of propriety," and remarks, "[T]here 'most always are a
few, whom the teachers look up to and regard as their satellites" [L6]—
which is sharp observation for a fourteen-year-old. After her writing of
poetry begins, her prose rhythm moves very close to verse. The first
letter to Higginson is really a free-verse poem; some of her earlier poems
were originally written as prose, and she often falls into her favourite
metrical rhythms, as in the opening of a letter to Bowles: "I am so far
from Land—To offer you the cup—it might some Sabbath come my
turn—Of wine how solemn—full!" 1X247], which is a short metre stanza.
Her later letters show a remarkable command of the techniques of dis-
continuous prose: they were most carefully composed, and the appear-
ance of random jottings is highly deceptive. Continuous or expository
prose assumes an equality between writer and reader: the writer is
putting all he has in front of us. Discontinuous prose, with gaps in the
sense that only intuition can cross, assumes an aloofness on the writer's
part, a sense of reserves of connection that we must make special efforts
to reach. The aphoristic style of her later letters is, if slightly more
frequent in Continental literatures, extremely rare in England or America,
yet she seems to have developed it without models or influences.
Emily Dickinson 259

Her Grace is all she has—

And that, so least displays—
One Art to recognize, must be,
Another Art, to praise. [810]

III

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

Further than Guess can gallop

Further than Riddle ride—
Oh for a Disc to the Distance
Between Ourselves and the Dead! [949]

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

that is meaningless and cruel in life. She remarked to Higginson that her
family were all religious except her, "and address an Eclipse, every
morning—whom they call their 'Father'" [L26i]. She read with distaste
the stories of Elisha and the bears ("I believe the love of God may be
taught not to seem like bears") [L230], of the sacrifice of Isaac, of the
drowning of the world in a divine tantrum and the corresponding threat
to burn it later:

No vacillating God
Created this Abode
To put it out; [1599]

of Adam who was asserted to be alone responsible for his fall:

Of Heaven above the firmest proof

We fundamental know
Except for it's marauding Hand
It had been Heaven below. [1205]

The whole "punishing" aspect of religious doctrine struck her as "a

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

I shall know why—when Time is over—

And I have ceased to wonder why—
Emily Dickinson 261

Christ will explain each separate anguish

In the fair schoolroom of the sky— [193]

At other times, she seems to accept Jesus as everything that Christianity

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

What News will do when every Man

Shall comprehend as one
And not in all the Universe
A thing to tell remain? [1319]

Such an experience is based, not on the compelling argument, but on the

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

Circumference thou Bride of Awe

Possessing thou shalt be
Possessed by every hallowed Knight
That dares to covet thee [1620]

and (where "their" means the world of her bodily impulses)

To their apartment deep

No ribaldry may creep
Untumbled this abode
By any man but God— [1701]

Awe is not a dogmatic God, and is tolerant enough to satisfy not only the
poet's Christian longings but the paganism that makes her feel that there
ought to be a god for every mood of the soul and every department of
nature:
Emily Dickinson 263

If "All is possible with" him

As he besides concedes
He will refund us finally
Our confiscated Gods— [1260]

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

Thrice to the floating casement

The Patriarch's bird returned,
Courage! My brave Columba!
There may yet be Landl [48]

To this person of God, Emily Dickinson continually turned when other

things in Christianity puzzled her imagination or were rejected by her
reason. She seems to associate him with the power which "stands in the
Bible between the Kingdom and the Glory, because it is wilder than
either of them" [1.583]. In the detached comment on the Atonement
which she superimposes on the famous proverb, "God tempers the wind
to the shorn lamb,"12 the "Wind" is the power that escapes from the
breakdown of doctrinal machinery:

How ruthless are the gentle—

How cruel are the kind—
God broke his contract to his Lamb
To qualify the Wind— [1439]

In a congratulatory message on the occasion of a wedding, the divine

power of making one flesh out of two bodies is associated, not with the
264 On the Nineteenth Century

Father or the Son, but with the wind that bloweth where it listeth:

The Clock strikes one that just struck two—

Some schism in the Sum—
A Vagabond from Genesis
Has wrecked the Pendulum— [1569]

The confusion with a female principle, as when she says that "the Little
Boy in the Trinity had no Grandmama, only a Holy Ghost" 1X979], is at
least as old as the apocryphal Gospels, where Jesus speaks of the Holy
Spirit as his mother.13 When she says, "The Bible dealt with the Centre,
not with the Circumference" [1.950], she means apparently that the Bible
considers man in his ordinary state of isolation, separated from God by a
gulf that only God can cross. Such a God is thought of as coming from the
outside; but while God is known "By his intrusion" [1462], his movement
in the human soul is to be compared rather to the tides moving in the sea.
"They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as
somewhat of a recluse" 1X551]. If so, it takes a recluse to find him, and to
discover him as the inmost secret of consciousness.
The first fact of Emily Dickinson's experience, then, was that whatever
the Bible may mean by Paradise or Eden, the world of lost innocence and
happiness symbolized by the unfallen Adam and Eve, it is something
that is already given in experience. It is attainable; the poet has attained
it; it is not, therefore, a "superhuman site" 1X391], nor could it survive the
extinction of the human mind. Earth is heaven, whether heaven is heaven
or not: the supernatural is only the natural disclosed: the charms of the
heaven in the bush are superseded by the heaven in the hand—to para-
phrase almost at random. To her the essence of the Gospel was the
proclamation of the paradisal vision in such passages as "consider the
lilies" [Matthew 6:28]. But the Bible also speaks of regaining this Para-
dise and living in it eternally after death. If so, then the experience of
Paradise in life is identical with the experience of eternity.
The people we ordinarily call mystics are the people for whom this is
true. Eternity to them is not endless time, but a real present, a "now"
which absorbs all possible hereafters. Emily Dickinson also often speaks
with the mystics of death as a rejoining of heaven, of "Forever" as
"composed of Mows" [624], of an eternal state of consciousness symbol-
ized by a continuous summer and noon, of a coming "Aurora," a dawn
that will have no night. But in her background there were two powerful
Emily Dickinson 265

antimystical tendencies at work. One was the rationalism of her genera-

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

Inebriate of Air—am I—
And Debauchee of Dew—
Reeling—thro endless summer days—
From inns of Molten Blue— [214]

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

more traditional wine, the word "sacrament," as in the poem Exhilara-

tion—is within, is seldom far away, for such imaginative drunkenness is a
genuine communion. Still, it can lead to hangovers, "With a to-morrow
knocking" [1679], and, whatever it is or means, it goes and is replaced by
ordinary experience.
Ordinary experience is the sacramental or ecstatic experience turned
inside out. Here the mind is not a circumference at all, but a centre, and
the only circumference is an indifferent and unresponsive Nature—
"Nature—in Her monstrous House" [400]. We may still realize that such
"Vastness—is but the Shadow of the Brain which casts it" [1,735], but in
this state the brain cannot cast any other shadow. Where the mind is a
centre and nature the circumference, there is no place for any divinity:
that has vanished somewhere beyond the sky or beyond life. This is the
state of "Those Evenings of the Brain" [419], in which the body, so far
from being a circumference incorporating its experience, is a "magic
Prison" [1601], sealed against all intimations of immortality:

The Rumor's Gate was shut so tight

Before my Mind was sown,
Not even a Prognostic's Push
Could make a Dent thereon— [1576]

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

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell. [1732]

But she has nothing of Blake's social vision, and the state that he associ-
ates with child labour, Negro slavery, prostitution, and war she associ-
ates only with loneliness.
Her two states are often associated with summer and winter, or, less
frequently, with day and night. Often, especially in poems addressed to
Sue, she speaks of a "Summer—Sister—Seraph!" [18] who inhabits the
Emily Dickinson 267

paradisal world, in contrast to herself as a "dark sister/' a "Druid" [44!

spirit of winter, frost, and the north, waiting for the birds to come back,
like Noah's dove, to tell her of a sunnier world beyond. Hence the times
of year that have the greatest significance for her are the equinoxes, the
March when the birds return and the white dress of winter breaks into
colour, and the moment in late summer when the invisible presence of
autumn enters the year and makes "a Druidic Difference" [1068] in
nature. The association of this latter period with the moment at which
human life faces death makes it particularly the point at which the two
lines of her imagination converge:

God made a little Gentian—

It tried—to be a Rose—
And failed—and all the Summer laughed—
But just before the Snows
There rose a Purple Creature—
That ravished all the Hill—
And Summer hid her Forehead—
And Mockery—was still—

The Frosts were her condition—

The Tyrian would not come
Until the North—invoke it—
Creator—Shall I—bloom? [442]

Emily Dickinson is an impressionist in the sense that she tends to

organize her visual experience by colour rather than outline, and pur-
ple, the colour of mourning and of triumph, is the central symbol for
her of the junction between life and death. Various synonyms of it such
as "Iodine," "Amethyst," and the "Tyrian" above run through her
writings.
At times the poet speaks of the paradisal vision as being, not only a
"stimulant" given in cases of despair or stupor, but a light by which all
the rest of life can be lived, as providing a final answer to the question
raised by its passing:

Why Bliss so scantily disburse—

Why Paradise defer—
Why Floods be served to Us—in Bowls—
I speculate no more— [756]
268 On the Nineteenth Century

At other times, in such poems as those beginning "Why—do they shut

Me out of Heaven?" [248! and "If I'm lost—now" [256] she laments over
a lost vision that hints at a still greater loss. Such sudden changes of
mood would be inconsistent if she were arguing a thesis, but, being a
poet, what she is doing is expressing a variety of possible imaginative
reactions to a central unsolved riddle. The fact that her vision is transient
sharpens the intensity of her relation to it, for

In Insecurity to lie
Is joy's insuring quality. [1434]

Two recurring words in her poems are "suspense" and "expanse." The
former refers to the shadow that falls between an experience and the
realization that it has happened, the shadow that adumbrates death; the
latter to the possession of the spiritual body which, for us, brings vision
but not peace. "These sudden intimacies with Immortality, are expanse—
not Peace—as Lightning at our feet, instills a foreign Landscape" [L64i].
She deals mainly with the virtues of faith, hope, and love, but her life had
shown her that love, which normally tends to union, may incorporate a
great deal of its opposite, which is renunciation. Similarly with faith and
hope: "Faith is Doubt" 1X912], she says, and hope is the thinnest crust of
ice over despair:

Could Hope inspect her Basis

Her Craft were done—
Has a fictitious Charter
Or it has none— [1283]

Like the Puritans before her, who refused to believe that their own
righteousness would necessarily impress God into recognizing them,
Emily Dickinson refused to believe that her own vision of Paradise
guaranteed the existence of Paradise, even though she had nothing else
to go on. And—Puritan to the last—she even faced the possibility that the
Spirit of life within her might turn out to be Death, hence the ambiguous
tone of such poems as Doubt Me! My Dim Companion! and Struck, was I,
nor yet by Lightning. She told Sue that if Jesus did not recognize her at the
last day, "there is a darker spirit will not disown it's child" 1X173]. She
means death, not the devil, though her pose recalls the demonic figures
in Hawthorne. There are many poems about the physical experience of
Emily Dickinson 269

dying, some tranquil, some agonizing, some dealing with death by ex-
ecution, by warfare, by drowning—in at least two poems the poet is an
Andromeda swallowed by a sea monster. The region of death to be
entered, or traversed, is usually a sea, sometimes a forest, or a "Mael-
strom—in the Sky" [721], or simply "a wild Night and a new Road"
[1,332], and in I never told the buried gold, it is an underworld guarded by a
dragon.
The world of death is not one that we have to die to explore: it is there
all the time, the end and final cause of the vision of the centre, just as
Awe is the end and final cause of the vision of circumference. "I suppose
there are depths in every Consciousness," she says, "from which we
cannot rescue ourselves—to which none can go with us—which repre-
sent to us Mortally—the Adventure of Death" [1.555]. Some of her psy-
chological poems take us into this buried jungle of the mind. There are a
few about ghosts, where the two aspects of the self are treated in the vein
of Henry James's The Jolly Corner. But Emily Dickinson's sharp inquiring
mind has little in common with the ectoplasmic, and these poems im-
press us as made rather than born. A more genuine fear comes out at the
end of this:

Remembrance has a Rear and Front—

Tis something like a House—
It has a Garret also
For Refuse and the Mouse.

Besides the deepest Cellar

That ever Mason laid—
Look to it by its Fathoms
Ourselves be not pursued— [1182]

This is as near to hell as she ever brings us, as the original version of the
last two lines indicates:

Leave me not ever there alone

Oh thou Almighty God!1?

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

madness near" [1,388]. Emily Dickinson has a poem about Enoch and
Elijah, the two Biblical prophets who were taken directly to heaven, but
the figure she identifies herself with is Moses, standing on the mountain
top with the wilderness of death on one side and the Promised Land on
the other, able to see his Paradise if not to enter it:

Such are the inlets of the mind—

His outlets—would you see
Ascend with me the Table Land
Of immortality— [1421]

Many, perhaps most, of Emily Dickinson's readers will simply take

their favourite poems from her and leave the rest, with little curiosity
about the larger structure of her imagination. For many, too, the whole
bent of her mind will seem irresponsible or morbid. It is perhaps as well
that this should be so. "It is essential to the sanity of mankind," the poet
remarks, "that each one should think the other crazy."16 There are more
serious reasons: a certain perversity, an instinct for looking in the oppo-
site direction from the rest of society, is frequent among creative minds.
When the United States was beginning to develop an entrepreneur capi-
talism on a scale unprecedented in history, Thoreau retired to Walden to
discover the meaning of the word "property," and found that it meant
only what was proper or essential to unfettered human life. When the
Civil War was beginning to force on America the troubled vision of its
revolutionary destiny, Emily Dickinson retired to her garden to remain,
like Wordsworth's skylark, within the kindred points of heaven and
home. She will always have readers who will know what she means
when she says, "Each of us gives or takes heaven in corporeal person, for
each of us has the skill of life" [L388]. More restless minds will not relax
from taking thought for the morrow to spend much time with her. But
even some of them may still admire the energy and humour with which
she fought her angel until she had forced out of him the crippling
blessing of genius.
 24
The Problem of Spiritual Authority
in the Nineteenth Century
1964

From StS, 241-56. Originally published in Literary Views: Critical and

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

The aspect of Victorian literature represented by such names as Carlyle,

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

of authority may be thought of as overriding the actual one. For self-

interest also has a separate authority.
Spiritual authority is usually connected, of course, with religion, God
being normally thought of as a sovereign spirit. Our cultural tradition
has inherited from the Old Testament a conception of the will of God
which may often be in the sharpest possible opposition to the will of
man, especially an Egyptian or Babylonian or Philistine will. But if a
religion can find an accredited human representative, the two kinds of
authority again tend to merge. The medieval theory of the Pope's right to
temporal power and the post-Renaissance conception of the divine right
of kings are examples of an effort to make the spiritual order a guarantee
of the stability of the temporal one. As far as the normal workings of the
human mind can go, the will of God differs in degree but not in kind
from the will of man, and the metaphors applied to it, such as the
metaphor of divine "sovereignty," are drawn from the more primitive
forms of human society. When Greek philosophers began to frame ethi-
cal conceptions of justice and righteousness, they ran into similar prob-
lems. Their traditional gods, as they appear in Homer, still had all the
arbitrary and whimsical quality of a human aristocracy, and submitting
to a human conqueror would not be psychologically very different from
praying to Poseidon the irascible earth-shaker. In Christianity the human
product of spiritual authority is supposed to be charity, but Christian
charity has usually been, down to quite recent times, supported by
temporal power, and it may be significant that the word "charity" itself
has come to mean chiefly a form of voluntary taxation.
Ordinary social consciousness usually begins in a sense of antithesis
between what the ego wants and what society will allow it to have.
Hence temporal authority comes to the individual first of all in the form
of an external compulsion. In this stage freedom is identified with the
ego's side of this antithesis. But education, and more particularly educa-
tion of the reason, introduces us to a form of necessity or compulsion
which is not opposed to freedom but seems to be rather another aspect of
it. To assent to the truth of a geometrical demonstration is psychologi-
cally a contrast to assenting to the will of a social superior. Hence reason
can do what faith, hope, and even love by themselves cannot do: present
us with the model or pattern of an authority which appeals to the mind
rather than to the body, which compels but does not enforce. Such
authority confers dignity on the person who accepts it, and such dignity
The Problem of Spiritual Authority 273

has no context of hierarchy: there is nobody at whose expense the dignity

is achieved.
The nineteenth-century social and political writers in Great Britain had
inherited from Milton a conception of spiritual authority of this sort, and
a singularly lucid and powerful one. For Milton the source of spiritual
authority was a revelation from God, more particularly the revelation of
the gospel which had spiritualized the law, and delivered those under
the gospel from the sense of external constraint. St. Paul tells us that
where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, and those under the gospel
should do as they like, because what they like to do is the will of God, not
the illusory pseudo-acts suggested by passion or selfishness. For Milton,
again, the accredited human agent of spiritual authority is the church in
the sense of the society of individuals who are under the gospel, among
whom the one who has authority is the apostle or saint, which according
to Milton is what the New Testament means by an episcope or overseer.1
Such authority clearly has no relevance to magistrates or penal codes.
Revelation from God accommodates itself to man primarily in the form
of reason. Reason manifests itself in the decisive acts of a free life ("rea-
son is but choosing," Milton says in Areopagitica, annexing Aristotle's
conception of proairesis to the Christian logos),2 and as revelation is the
opposite of mystery, there is no conflict between spiritual authority and
reason. A revelation from an infinite mind may transcend the reason of a
finite one, but does not contradict or humiliate it.
Human society, as Milton saw it, is conditioned by the inertia of
original sin to seek the habitual and customary, to do things because they
have been done before, to make an idol of tradition. The impact of
revelation, coming through reason, is always subversive and revolution-
ary: it is bound to shake up the somnambulism of habit and confront it
with the eternal opposition of God and fallen man. Such reason is also
liberty, which man does not naturally want, but which God wants him to
have. Purely social changes are, at best, gradual adjustments: genuine
liberty is sudden and apocalyptic:

In state many things at first are crude and hard to digest, which only time
and deliberation can supple and concoct. But in religion, wherein is no
immaturity, nothing out of season, it goes far otherwise. The door of grace
turns upon smooth hinges, wide opening to send out, but soon shutting to
recall the precious offers of mercy to a nation.3
274 On the Nineteenth Century

Temporal authority, however essential, is also provisional, the result of

the permanent emergency in human affairs caused by the fall. It can
never be accepted as an end in itself: the reason why it is there is stated in
scripture, and all nonscriptural ways of trying to justify it are suspect.
There is no inherent authority, in other words, in tradition or custom or
precedent, on which temporal authority may rest as a basis. Hence no
church which bases its claim to authority on tradition can be a genuine
embodiment of revelation. Milton's regicide pamphlet, The Tenure of
Kings and Magistrates, is a work of extraordinary originality of thought,
outlining an early theory of contract and being one of the earliest efforts
to try to give some functional place to revolution in history. But even this
involves an appeal to precedent, and Milton embarks on an appeal to
precedent with the greatest unwillingness: "But because it is the vulgar
folly of men to desert their own reason, and shutting their eyes, to think
they see best with other men's, I shall show, by such examples as ought
to have most weight with us, what has been done in this case hereto-
fore."4
We have, then, in Milton, a spiritual authority with its roots in revela-
tion and manifesting itself largely in reason, and a temporal authority
which is to be acknowledged and obeyed in its own sphere, but should
not be rationalized by arguments drawn from precedent or custom.
Temporal authority is primarily something that is there, whether we like
it or not. If we don't like it, we turn to a conception of spiritual authority
and subordinate the temporal power to it as far as possible, if only in our
own minds. If we do like it or want to defend it, on the other hand, we
tend to see in tradition, custom, habit, in short the process by which
temporal authority came to be, some kind of inherent right. We may note
in passing that if social revolution is not, for Milton, organically related
to precedents, it is not organically related to the future either. The rebel-
lions of the Jews against their overlords, as recorded in the Old Testa-
ment, had varying degrees of success, but none were permanently
successful. Hence the significance of such a rebellion is typological, mani-
festing the power of the true God for and at the moment. The extent to
which Milton was able to reconcile himself with the failure of the revolu-
tion of his own day is perhaps indicated in Samson Agonistes, where the
temporary victory of Samson in destroying the Philistine temple has this
kind of significance.
In the eighteenth century the conception of the natural society in
Bolingbroke and Rousseau brought a new kind of revolutionary dialectic
The Problem of Spiritual Authority 275

into social argument. Rousseau thought of man in his context as a child

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

there: prudence is the greatest of political virtues, and prejudice the only
valuable form of deductive thinking. It is the revolutionary action lead-
ing to tyranny which is deductive, like the "metaphysical" French Revo-
lution which had begun with a set of major premises about the abstract
rights of man, and had then attempted "a decomposition of the whole
civil and political mass, for the purpose of originating a new civil order
out of the first elements of society."8 Hence reason, given its full deduc-
tive and speculative head, is not an emancipating but a destructive and
ultimately enslaving power in politics. Spiritual authority, at least, is
something to which we owe loyalty, and loyalty is not primarily rational;
hence society is held together by profounder forces than the reason can
express or reach.
In the second place, most temporal authority is vested in the ascendant
class: this class is faced with a strong revolutionary bid for power coming
from further down in society: the maintenance of the health of the social
organism, which means the maintenance of spiritual authority, is there-
fore bound up with preserving the existing rights and privileges of the
ascendant class. "We must suppose (society) to be in that state of ha-
bitual social discipline in which the wiser, the more expert, and the more
opulent conduct, and by conducting enlighten and protect, the weaker,
the less knowing, and the less provided with the goods of fortune."9
Burke goes on to say that "the state of civil society which necessarily
generates this aristocracy is a state of Nature"10—i.e., once again, the
genuine form of natural society. The ascendant class includes the church,
as for Burke the church is a continuous social institution, and its spir-
itual authority is inconceivable without that continuity. Hence Burke
says, in what from our present point of view is a key statement of his
thought:

Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the
good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization,
have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two princi-
ples; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a
gentleman, and the spirit of religion.11

The ascendant class, therefore, and more particularly the aristocracy,

comes to represent an ideal authority, expressed in the term "gentle-
man," at the point in history at which its effective temporal authority had
begun to decline (though, of course, its privileges and much of its pres-
The Problem of Spiritual Authority 277

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

has spoken, as unmistakably as it spoke from the burning bush. Ernest

considers this situation carefully, and finally decides:

I see it all now. The people like Towneley are the only ones who know
anything that is worth knowing, and like that of course I can never be. But
to make Towneleys possible there must be hewers of wood and drawers of
water—men in fact through whom conscious knowledge must pass before
it can reach those who can apply it gracefully and instinctively like the
Towneleys can.14

We are reminded of the respect paid in Erewhon to those who are

handsome, healthy, and rich, and how Erewhon considers it a crime to be
ill or unfortunate. In Huxley's terms, society's sympathies are with na-
ture, rather than with ethics, even though society itself is an ethical
creation. Yet Ernest's solution is still a trifle immature, and Erewhon
brings us a little closer to Butler's real view of spiritual authority. Most of
the Erewhonians, according to Butler, are unthinking, instinctive con-
servatives, whose values are determined entirely by habit and prejudice:
worshippers, as he says, of the goddess Ydgrun. But there is also in
Erewhon a small group of "high Ydgrunites," whom Butler describes as
the best people he met in Erewhon. Of them he says: "They were gentle-
men in the full sense of the word; and what has one not said in saying
this?"15 The high Ydgrunite would be somebody like Montaigne, pre-
sumably: able to live in and with society, able to see not only the power
but the real significance of convention and prejudice, yet remaining
intellectually detached from them. Such gentlemen are not only the
natural aristocracy but the genuine apostles of society, correcting instinct
by reason and reason by instinct, and never allowing the two to make
that fatal alliance which is the mark of all bigots, whether reactionary or
revolutionary.
The problem of spiritual authority, we see, has as its crucial point the
problem of defining the community of such an authority. The writers we
have been quoting, all of whom are deeply conservative, associate this
community with the ideal aristocracy which the term "gentleman" con-
veys. For a revolutionary thinker, such as William Morris, spiritual au-
thority would be isolated from society, confined to the small conspiratorial
group of those who repudiate its values and are shut out from its ben-
efits. It is perhaps worth noting that Morris's revolutionary ideal, as
outlined in the future Utopia depicted in News from Nowhere, is the
The Problem of Spiritual Authority 279

assimilating of the conception of a natural aristocracy to the whole of

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

II

We have just traced a parabola from the counter-revolutionary polemic

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

opposition of Conservative and Liberal as the symbol of an ideal or

intellectual opposition of conservative and liberal attitudes. As the lib-
eral opposition is intellectually always a minority, it has the peculiar
problem of getting enough mass support to be effective in a democratic
election. Some of Mill's devices, such as a plurality of votes for the
educated, are sufficiently desperate to indicate that this is a matter of
some difficulty. To grasp the nature of the ideal opposition we have to
grasp two principles. First, the majority is always right, for the majority
is the source of temporal authority. Second, the majority is always wrong,
for it is not the source of spiritual authority. The latter is to be found in
the intellectual opposition, for "almost all the greatest men who ever
lived have formed part of such an Opposition."18
Authority in its two forms, therefore, rests on a paradoxical and illogi-
cal tension between majority rule and minority right. The minority are
not a class but an elite, and no social epithet like "gentleman" will apply
to them. In practice most of them may be gentlemen, but that is not why
they belong there. The gentleman behaves according to a social conven-
tion, and for Mill the toleration of unconventional or eccentric behaviour
is the mark of a mature society. What holds this elite together is some-
thing intellectual, though it is certainly not intellectual agreement. To put
the question in another way, what gives a minority a right? Criminals are
a minority, but clearly have no right to be criminals. In the essay On
Liberty the right appears to be the ability to contribute something to the
area of free thought and discussion, of what for Mill is the real parlia-
ment of man, the ideological debate that is close to being the source of
spiritual authority because it supplies the vision for temporal power. To
permit freedom of thought is to direct freedom of action, as unrestricted
speculation is the best check so far discovered on premature, spasmodic,
or panic-stricken action. Here again we run into a Hegelian element in
Mill's thought: no idea contributed to this social debate has any real
effectiveness unless it contains its own opposite: unless, therefore, the
possibility of refuting it is also present. Mill draws our attention to the
peculiar importance of Rousseau in challenging the validity of the struc-
ture of society itself.
Burke's counter-revolutionary argument was based on a completely
inductive conception of political action; Mill's argument attempts to
associate his liberal opposition with a more deductive point of view. He
remarks, for example, that "the non-existence of an acknowledged first
The Problem of Spiritual Authority 281

principle has made ethics not so much a guide as a consecration of men's

actual sentiments."19 The Utilitarian philosophy held his loyalty because
it provided a major premise for majority behaviour. That people will
seek what they consider pleasure and avoid what they consider pain is
individually probable and statistically certain. But this purely descrip-
tive principle supplies no standard or value, no way even of distinguish-
ing reality from illusion in the conception of pleasure. In Milton, who in
Areopagitica presents a similar conception of truth as something arrived
at dynamically through the conflict of opinion, the major premises come
from scripture. Milton never conceived the possibility of a free society
trying to find truth without the aid of scripture. In Mill there is no clear
source of the premises of debate of this kind, no set of standards and
assumptions that can be taken as given. The absence of such a source
may be one reason for his curious attraction toward the most uncongenial
types of political dogmatists, including Carlyle and Comte (it would take
us too far afield to apply this principle to Harriet Taylor),20 as though he
felt that they held some missing piece he was looking for.
In Newman, on the other hand, the source of spiritual authority is the
church catholic: his great strength as a nineteenth-century thinker lay in
his unvarying acceptance of that view. At no time in his adult life was
Newman ever anything that a Protestant would call a Protestant: his
problem was only to decide whether the Anglican or the Roman com-
munion was the genuinely catholic one. He takes our present argument a
step further by finding the road to spiritual authority through education.
Education for him is partly social, and retains the social aim of producing
the "gentleman" which we met in Burke and Butler. Even its intellectual
characteristic, a disinterested or liberal quality in it which is "its own
end,"21 has an analogy with the social ideal which is detachable from the
necessity of earning a living. On its intellectual side, liberal education is
essentially a discipline of reason, as in Milton, and, as in Mill, it seems to
have something to do with a "master view of things,"22 a deductive or
synoptic sense of intellectual form which gets one's head above the habit
of living:

The principle of real dignity in Knowledge, its worth, its desirableness,

considered irrespectively of its results, is this germ within it of a scientific
or a philosophical process. This is how it comes to be an end in itself; this is
why it admits of being called Liberal.23
282 On the Nineteenth Century

But the university turns out to be a function of the church, and the
education it gives confronts the student with a dilemma: he must either
attach himself along with his education to the church or keep his educa-
tion as a private possession. Recurrently we have come to this crucial
point of having to define the community of spiritual authority. The
individual can readily be seen to be capable of understanding more than
society in general, and hence of possessing standards and values, with an
authority superior in kind if not in power. But the conception "gentle-
man," however interpreted, defines the superior individual rather than
the superior group, even granted that one may recognize the individual
as one of a group. For Newman only the church provides this commu-
nity, and of the gentlemen who cannot commit themselves to it he says:
"When they do wrong, they feel, not contrition, of which God is the
object, but remorse, and a sense of degradation They are victims of an
intense self-contemplation."24
In Newman's view of the church there is no place, as there would have
to be in Protestant thought, including Milton's, for a dialogue between
scripture and church. The church for Newman is the definitive teacher of
doctrine, hence it encloses scripture, and operates on ordinary society
very much as the British constitution does in Burke. For Burke the con-
flict of classes and their interests, in a free society, is settled by a legal
compromise which preserves the rights of both parties, and these com-
promises then form a series of precedents diffusing freedom through
society, as the quarrels of king and barons produced Magna Carta and
the quarrels of king and Parliament the Bill of Rights. Newman sees
church doctrine as developing in a somewhat similar way, being evolved
out of the crises of history, defining a dogma here, marking off a heresy
there, in an endless pilgrimage toward the City of God. Thus spiritual
authority in Newman is, as in Milton, a revelation, but a revelation that
has no place for metamorphosis, for the revolutionary and apocalyptic
transformation of society.
In Arnold, the conception "culture" is the basis from which we have to
start. In using the phrase spiritual authority to describe a pervasive prob-
lem of nineteenth-century thought, I have been putting unfamiliar con-
ceptions into the minds of some of my writers. For Mill, the problem is
not exactly one of spiritual authority, and for Butler, it is not exactly a
problem of authority. But Arnold is quite explicit about the authoritative
nature of culture:
The Problem of Spiritual Authority 283

If we look at the world outside us we find a disquieting absence of sure

authority. We discover that only in right reason can we get a source of sure
authority; and culture brings us towards right reason.25

The traditional elements of gentleman and liberal education are both

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

nity, the problem of defining the community of spiritual authority is

still with us.
The question of the origin of spiritual authority, and of whether that
origin is purely human, partly human, or wholly superhuman has come
up at various times in this inquiry. Anyone working out this question in
Christian terms, whether Catholic or Protestant, would be likely to say
that its origin is out of human reach, though the fact that Christ is at once
God, Man, and Logos guarantees the validity of human reason as a
means of receiving it, at least up to a point. For Burke and Butler, in
different ways, spiritual authority, or whatever is homologous with it,
comes to us as a process of nature, a datum or something given, which
we may modify but must first of all accept. We have seen that spiritual
authority begins in the recognition of truth, and truth usually has about it
some quality of the objective, something presented to us. But for a liberal
thinker, such as Mill, there can hardly be any real spiritual authority
apart from what man himself creates. A revolutionary thinker would go
a step farther and see in truth itself a human creation which, as man
continues to create it, he may also recreate. Marx's second thesis on
Feuerbach makes this quite clear:

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is

not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the
truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking.28

Arnold's "culture" unites these qualities of the datum and the continu-
ous creation, being a human construct which, so far as it is rooted in the
past, possesses an objective authority. This authority, we should note, is
not exclusively intellectual, for "many things are not seen in their true
nature and as they really are, unless they are seen as beautiful,"29 and the
imagination as well as the reason may recognize a monument of its own
magnificence.
Wherever we turn in nineteenth-century thought we meet some ver-
sion of a "drunken boat" construct, where the values of humanity, intelli-
gence, or cultural and social tradition keep tossing precariously in a sort
of Noah's ark on top of a menacing and potentially destructive force.
This is the relation of the world as idea to the world as will in
Schopenhauer, of ethics to evolution in Darwin and Huxley, of the as-
cendant class to the proletariat in Marx, and, later, of ego to libido and id
in Freud. There are also many variants of a "saving remnant" theory,
The Problem of Spiritual Authority 285

ranging from Coleridge's "clerisy" to various pleas for a new kind of

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

only be the world revealed to us through the study of the arts and
sciences, the total body of human achievement out of which the forces
come that change ordinary society so rapidly. Of this world the universi-
ties are the social embodiment, and they represent what seems to me
today the only visible direction in which our higher loyalties and obliga-
tions can go.
 25
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours
1967

From StS, 218-40. Originally published in Experience in the Novel, English

Institute Essays, 1967, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1968), 49-81.

Dickens presents special problems to any critic who approaches him in

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

A refinement of the same view sees the real story in Dickens's novels
as a rather simple set of movements within a large group of characters.
To this a mechanical plot seems to have been attached like an outboard
motor to a rowboat, just to get things moving faster and more noisily.
Thus our main interest, in reading Little Dorrit, is in the straightforward
and quite touching story of Clennam's love for the heroine, of their
separation through her suddenly acquired wealth, and of their eventual
reunion through her loss of it. Along with this goes a preposterous
melodrama about forged wills, identical twins, a mother who is not a
mother, skulking foreigners, and dark mysteries of death and birth which
seems almost detachable from the central story. Similarly, we finish Our
Mutual Friend with a clear memory of a vast panoramic pageant of
Victorian society, from the nouveau-riche Veneerings to Hexham living
on the refuse of the Thames. But the creaky Griselda plot, in which John
Harmon pretends to be dead in order to test the stability of his future
wife, is something that we can hardly take in even when reading the
book, much less remember afterwards.
Some works of fiction present a clearly designed or projected plot,
where each episode seems to us to be logically the sequel to the previous
episode. In others we feel that the episode that comes next does so only
because the author has decided that it will come next. In stories with a
projected plot we explain the episode from its context in the plot; in
stories lacking such a plot, we are often thrown back on some other
explanation, often one that originates in the author's wish to tell us
something besides the story. This last is particularly true of thematic
sequences like the "Dream Play" of Strindberg, where the succession of
episodes is not like that of a projected plot, nor particularly like a dream
either, but has to be accounted for in different terms. In Dickens we often
notice that when he is most actively pursuing his plot he is careless, to the
verge of being contemptuous, of the inner logic of the story. In Little
Dorrit, the mysterious rumblings and creakings in the Clennam house,
referred to at intervals throughout, mean that it is about to fall down.
What this in turn means is that Dickens is going to push it over at a
moment when the villain is inside and the hero outside. Similarly,
Clennam, after a good deal of detective work, manages to discover
where Miss Wade is living on the Continent. She did not expect him to
ferret out her address, nor had she anything to say to him when he
arrived; but, just in case he did come, she had written out the story of her
life and had kept it in a drawer ready to hand to him. The outrage on
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 289

probability seems almost deliberate, as does the burning up of Krook in

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

stored to his original status at the end. In drama such a theme involves
expounding a complicated antecedent action, and however skilfully done
not all audiences have the patience to follow the unravelling, as Ben
Jonson discovered to his cost at the opening of his New Inn. But in
narrative forms, of course, it can have room to expand. Shakespeare gets
away with it in The Winter's Tale by adopting a narrative-paced form of
drama, where sixteen years are encompassed by the action.
Dickens is, throughout his career, very conventional in his handling of
the New Comedy plot structure. All the stock devices, listed in Greek
times as laws, oaths, compacts, witnesses, and ordeals,3 can be found in
him. Oliver Twist and Edwin Drood are full of oaths, vows, councils of
war, and conspiracies, on both benevolent and sinister sides. Witnesses
include eavesdroppers like the Newman Noggs of Nicholas Nickleby or
Morfin the cello player in Dombey and Son. Ordeals are of various kinds:
near-fatal illnesses are common, and we may compare the way that
information is extracted from Rob the Grinder by Mrs. Brown in Dombey
and Son with the maltreating of the tricky slave in Menander and Plautus.
Many thrillers (perhaps a majority) use a stock episode of having the
hero entrapped by the villain, who instead of killing him at once imparts
an essential piece of information about the plot to him, after which the
hero escapes, gaining his wisdom at the price of an ordeal of facing
death. This type of episode occurs in Great Expectations in the encounter
with Orlick.
Every novel of Dickens is a comedy (N.B.: such words as "comedy" are
not essence words but context words; hence this means: "for every novel
of Dickens the obvious context is comedy"). The death of a central
character does not make a story tragic, any more than a similar device
does in The King and I or The Yeomen of the Guard. Sydney Carton is a man
without a social function who achieves that function by sacrificing him-
self for the congenial society; Little Nell's death is so emotionally luxuri-
ous that it provides a kind of muted festivity for the conclusion, or what
Finnegans Wake calls a "funferall."4 The emphasis at the end of a comedy
is sometimes thrown, not on the forming of a new society around the
marriage of hero and heroine, but on the maturing or enlightening of the
hero, a process which may detach him from marriage or full participa-
tion in the congenial group. We find this type of conclusion in Shaw's
Candida: Dickens's contribution to it is Great Expectations. Again, there is
usually a mystery in Dickens's stories, and this mystery is nearly always
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 291

the traditional mystery of birth, in sharp contrast to the mystery of death

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

realistic portraits, like the characters of Trollope, nor "caricatures," so far

as that term implies only a slightly different approach to realistic portrai-
ture. They are humours, like the characters in Ben Jonson, who formu-
lated the principle that humours were the appropriate characters for a
New Comedy plot. The humour is a character identified with a charac-
teristic, like the miser, the hypochondriac, the braggart, the parasite, or
the pedant. He is obsessed by whatever it is that makes him a humour,
and the sense of our superiority to an obsessed person, someone bound
to an invariable ritual habit, is, according to Bergson, one of the chief
sources of laughter.6 But it is not because he is incidentally funny that the
humour is important in New Comedy: he is important because his
obsession is the feature that creates the conditions of the action, and the
opposition of the two societies. In The Silent Woman, everything de-
pends on Morose's hatred of noise; covetousness and gullibility set
everything going in Volpone and The Alchemist respectively. Thus it is
only the obstructing society which is "humorous," in the Jonsonian
sense, as a society. In Dickens we find humours on both sides of the
social conflict, genial, generous, and lovable humours as well as absurd
or sinister ones. But the humours in the congenial society merely diver-
sify it with amiable and harmless eccentricities; the humours of the
obstructing society help to build up that society, with all its false stand-
ards and values.
Most of the standard types of humour are conspicuous in Dickens, and
could be illustrated from Bleak House alone: the miser in Smallweed; the
hypocrite in Chadband; the parasite in Skimpole and Turveydrop; the
pedant in Mrs. Jellyby. The braggart soldier is not much favoured: Major
Bagstock in Dombey and Son is more of a parasite. Agreeably to the
conditions of Victorian life, the braggart soldier is replaced by a braggart
merchant or politician. An example, treated in a thoroughly traditional
manner, is Bounderby in Hard Times. Another Victorian commonplace of
the braggart-soldier family, the duffer sportsman, whose pretensions are
far beyond his performance, is represented by Winkle in The Pickwick
Papers. There are, however, two Winkles in The Pickwick Papers, the duffer
sportsman and the pleasant young man who breaks down family oppo-
sition on both sides to acquire a pleasant young woman. The duality
reflects the curious and instructive way that The Pickwick Papers came
into being. The original scheme proposed to Dickens was a comedy of
humours in its most primitive and superficial form: a situation comedy
in which various stock types, including an incautious amorist (Tupman),
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 293

a melancholy poet (Snodgrass), and a pedant (Pickwick), as well as

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

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

Humours are, at least dramatically, "good" if they are on the side of

the congenial society, "bad" or ridiculous if on the side of the obstructing
one. Thus the humour comedy has an easy and natural connection with
the morality play. We notice this in the allegorical names that Dickens
often gives some of his minor characters, like the "Pyke" and "Pluck"
who are the satellites of Sir Mulberry Hawk in Nicholas Nickleby, or the
"Bar," "Bishop," and "Physician" who turn up at Merdle's dinners in
Little Dorrit. We notice it also in Dickens's tendency to arrange his hu-
mours in moral pairs, whether both are in the same novel or not. As just
indicated, we have a "good" major in Bleak House and a "bad" one with a
very similar name in Dombey and Son; we have a villainous Jew in Oliver
Twist and a saintly Jew in Our Mutual Friend, and so on. Within Dombey
and Son itself the "bad" major is paired against a "good" navy man,
Captain Cuttle. If characters change sides, there may be a metamorpho-
sis of character, which is not difficult in the humour technique, because it
simply means putting on a different mask. Thus the generous Boffin
pretends to be a miser for a while; Scrooge goes through the reverse
process; Mercy Pecksniff changes roles from the feather-head to the
faithful ill-used wife, and so on. Many humours are really chorus charac-
ters, who cannot do anything in the plot unless they step out of their
roles: an example is Lord Frederick Verisopht in Nicholas Nickleby, who
has to harden up a good deal to make his tragic end appropriate. The
commonest form of this metamorphosis, and the most traditional one, is
the release of the humour from his obsession at the end of the story:
through the experience gained in the story, he is able to break through his
besetting fault. At the end of Martin Chuzzlewit there is a whole series of
these changes: the hero escapes from his selfishness, Mark Tapley from
his compulsion to search for difficult situations in order to "come out
strong/'11 and Tom Pinch from an innocence that Dickens recognizes to
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 295

be more obsessive than genuine innocence, and which we should now

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

gest a puppet or mechanical doll, whose response is invariable whatever

the stimulus. We may feel with some of these characters that the me-
chanical quality is simply the result of Dickens's not having worked hard
enough on them, but occasionally we realize that Dickens himself is
encouraging us to see them as inanimate objects. Wemmick the postbox
in Great Expectations, Pancks the "tug" in Little Dorrit, and several charac-
ters who are figuratively and to some extent literally wooden, like Silas
Wegg, are examples. The Captain Cuttle of Dombey and Son, in particular,
impresses us as an animated version of the Wooden Midshipman over
the shop he so often inhabits. In The Old Curiosity Shop, after we have
been introduced to Quilp, Little Nell and her grandfather set out on their
travels and see a Punch and Judy show. It occurs to us that Quilp, who is
described as a grotesque puppet, who lies, cheats, beats his wife, gets
into fistfights, drinks like a salamander, and comes to a sticky end in a
bog, is Punch, brought to life as a character. Wyndham Lewis, in an essay
on Joyce (another admirer of Ben Jonson), notes the Dickensian ancestry
of Bloom's interior monologue in the speech of Jingle.15 He might have
noted a similar connection between Flora Pinching's unpunctuated ha-
rangues in Little Dorrit and the reverie of Molly Bloom. Lewis in his turn
developed, mainly out of Bergson, a theory of satire as a vision of human
behaviour in mechanical terms/6 where his main predecessor, if not one
he recognized, was Dickens. We notice also the reappearance of the
Punch figure in the centre of The Human Age.
We noted that, while there are humours on both sides of the social
conflict in Dickens, it is only the obstructing society which is humorous
as a society. This takes us back to the feature I mentioned at the begin-
ning which distinguishes Dickens from his major contemporaries in
fiction. In most of the best Victorian novels, apart from Dickens, the
society described is organized by its institutions: the church, the govern-
ment, the professions, the rural squirearchy, business, and the trade
unions. It is a highly structured society, and the characters function from
within those structures. But in Dickens we get a much more freewheeling
and anarchistic social outlook. For him the structures of society, as struc-
tures, belong almost entirely to the absurd, obsessed, sinister aspect of it,
the aspect that is overcome or evaded by the comic action. The comic
action itself moves toward the regrouping of society around the only
social unit that Dickens really regards as genuine, the family. In other
Victorian novelists characters are regrouped within their social struc-
tures; in Dickens the comic action leads to a sense of having broken down
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 297

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

obstructing society, a society which is shown to be a self-imprisoning

society, locking itself in to the invariable responses of its own compul-
sions. At the beginning we are introduced to various types of prison: the
Marseilles prison with Blandois, the quarantine prison with the discon-
tented Tattycoram and her Lesbian familiar Miss Wade, the prison-
house of the paralysed Mrs. Clennam, and finally the Marshalsea. As the
story goes on these external prisons give place to internal ones. With the
Circumlocution Office the prison image modulates to a maze or laby-
rinth, a very frequent sinister image in Dickens, and gradually a unified
vision of the obstructing society takes shape. This society is symbolized
by the Barnacles, who, as their name indicates, represent a social parasit-
ism inherent in the aristocracy, and operating through the political and
legal establishment. They are a family, but not a genuine family: their
loyalties are class or tribal loyalties cutting across the real structure of
society. One of their members, Mrs. Gowan, even goes so far as to speak
of marriage as "accidental,"17 and stresses the primary necessity of de-
fending the position of her class, or rather of her private myth about her
class. The fact that her son becomes the husband of the only child of the
Meagles family gives a most ambiguous twist to the happy ending of the
novel. We may compare the disaster wrought by Steerforth in David
Copperfield, whose mother is similarly obsessed with making her son into
a symbol of class arrogance. We begin to understand how consistent the
pitiful pretence of aristocracy that old Dorrit tries to maintain, first in the
prison, then in prosperity, is with the general scheme of the story. Miss
Wade's autobiography, headed "The History of a Self-Tormentor,"18
however arbitrarily introduced into the story, has a genuine symbolic
relevance to it, and one of the most sharply observed passages in the
novel is the moment of self-awareness when Fanny Dorrit realizes that
her own selfishness is implacably driving her into an endless, pointless,
pleasureless game of one-upmanship with Mrs. Merdle. Similarly in
Great Expectations the "gentleman's" world which entraps Pip is symbol-
ized by the decaying prison-house where all the clocks have been stopped
at the moment of Miss Havisham's humiliation, the rest of her life con-
sisting only of brooding on that moment.
The obstructing society in Dickens has two main characteristics: it is
parasitic and it is pedantic. It is parasitic in the sense of setting up false
values and loyalties which destroy the freedom of all those who accept
them, as well as tyrannizing over many of those who do not. Dickens's
implicit social vision is also radical, to an extent he hardly realized
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours. 299

himself, in dividing society between workers and idlers, and in seeing in

much of the leisure class a social sanctioning of parasitism. As for its
pedantry, it is traditional in New Comedy to set up a pragmatic stand-
ard, based on experience, as a norm, and contrast it with the theoretical
approaches to life typical of humours who cannot escape from their
reflex responses. Like Blake, like every writer with any genuine radical-
ism in him, Dickens finds the really dangerous social evils in those which
have achieved some acceptance by being rationalized. Already in Oliver
Twist the word "experience" stands as a contrast to the words "experi-
mental" and "philosophical," which are invariably pejorative. This con-
trast comes into Bumble's famous "the law is a ass" speech.19 In Hard
Times the pedantry of the obstructing society is associated with a utilitar-
ian philosophy and an infantile trust in facts, statistics, and all imper-
sonal and generalized forms of knowledge. We may wonder why Dickens
denounces this philosophy so earnestly and caricatures it so crudely,
instead of letting its absurdities speak for themselves. But it is clear that
Hard Times, of all Dickens's stories, comes nearest to being what in our
day is sometimes called the dystopia, the book which, like Brave New
World or 1984, shows us the nightmare world that results from certain
perverse tendencies inherent in society getting free play. The most effec-
tive dystopias are likely to be those in which the author isolates certain
features in his society that most directly threaten his own social function
as a writer. Dickens sees in the cult of facts and statistics a threat, not to
the realistic novelist, and not only to a life based on concrete and per-
sonal relations, but to the unfettered imagination, the mind that can
respond to fairy tales and fantasy and understand their relevance to
reality. The insistence on the importance of fairy tales, nursery rhymes,
and similar genres in education often meets us in Dickens, and implies
that Dickens's fairy-tale plots are regarded by Dickens himself as an
essential part of his novels.
The action of a comedy moves toward an identity which is usually a
social identity. In Dickens the family, or a group analogous to a family, is
the key to social identity. Hence his recognition scenes are usually genea-
logical, concerned with discovering unknown fathers and mothers or
articulating the correct family relationships. There are often three sets of
parental figures attached to a central character, with several doubles of
each. First are the actual parents. These are often dead before the story
begins, like the fathers of Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield, or
stagger on weakly for a few pages, like David Copperfield's mother, or
3OO On the Nineteenth Century

are mysterious and emerge at the end, sometimes as bare names unre-
lated to the story, like Oliver Twist's father or the parents of Little Nell.
The father of Sissy Jupe in Hard Times deserts her without ever appearing
in the novel; the first things we see in Great Expectations are the tomb-
stones of Pip's parents. Pip himself is brought up by a sister who is
twenty years older and (as we learn on practically the last page of the
book) has the same name as his mother. Next come the parental figures
of the obstructing society, generally cruel or foolish, and often descended
from the harsh step-parents of folk tale. Murdstone and his sister, Pip's
sister, the pseudo-mothers of Esther Summerson and Clennam, belong to
this group. One very frequent device which combines these two types of
relationship is that of the preternaturally loving and hard-working daugh-
ter who is the sole support of a weak or foolish father. We have, among
others, Little Dorrit, Little Nell, whose grandfather is a compulsive gam-
bler, Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend with her drunken "child," Madeline
Bray in Nicholas Nickleby, and, in a different way, Florence Dombey.
Naturally the marriage of such a heroine, following on the death of the
parent, transfers her to the more congenial society. Finally we have the
parental or avuncular figures of the congenial society itself, those who
take on a protective relation to the central characters as the story ap-
proaches its conclusion. Brownlow in Oliver Twist, who adopts the hero,
Jarndyce in Bleak House, Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations, the Cheeryble
brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, the Boffins in Our Mutual Friend, are exam-
ples. Abel Magwitch, besides being the ultimate father of Pip, is also the
actual father of Estella, which makes Estella in a sense Pip's sister: this
was doubtless one reason why Dickens so resisted the conventional
ending of marriage for these two. The more realistic developments of
New Comedy tend to eliminate this genealogical apparatus. When one
of the girls in Les Precieuses ridicules announces that being so interesting a
girl she is quite sure that her real parents are much more interesting
people than the ones she appears to have [sc. 5], we do not take her very
seriously. But Dickens is always ready to cooperate with the lonely
child's fantasies about lost congenial parents, and this marks his affinity
with the romantic side of the tradition, the side related to Classical
romance.
I have used the word "anarchistic" in connection with Dickens's view
of society, but it is clear that, so far as his comic structure leads to any sort
of vision of a social ideal, that ideal would have to be an intensely
paternalistic society, an expanded family. We get a somewhat naive
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 301

glimpse of this with the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, giving a

party where the faithful servitors are brought in at the end for a drink of
champagne, expressing undying loyalty and enthusiasm for the patron-
izing social arrangements. The reader gets the uneasy feeling that he is
listening to the commercial. When in Little Dorrit Tattycoram runs away
from the suffocating geniality of the Meagles family she has to be brought
back repentant, though she may well have had much more of the read-
er's sympathy than Dickens intended her to have. Even the Dedlock
menage in Bleak House, hopeless social anachronism as Dickens clearly
recognizes it to be, is still close enough to a family to gather a fair amount
of the society of the novel around it at the end. In contrast, social para-
sites often assume the role of a false father. Examples include the Mar-
quis in A Tale of Two Cities whose assassin is technically guilty of parricide,
Sir Joseph Bowley, the Urizenic friend and father of the poor in The
Chimes, and the elder Chester in Barnaby Rudge.
In New Comedy the obstructing humours absorb most of the character
interest: the heroes and heroines are seldom individualized. Such charac-
ters as Bonario in Volpone or Valere in Tartuffe are only pleasant young
men. In Dickens, too, the heroes and heroines resemble humours only in
the fact that their responses are predictable, but they are predictable in
terms of a norm, and they seldom if ever appear in the ridiculous or self-
binding role of the humour. Such characters, who encourage the reader
to identify with them, and who might be called norm-figures, could not
exist in serious twentieth-century fiction, which belongs to the ironic
mode, and sees all its characters as affected in some degree by hamper-
ing social forces. But they have some validity in nineteenth-century low
mimetic conventions, which present only what is conventionally pre-
sentable, and whose heroes and heroines may therefore logically be
models of presentability.
Comedy usually depicts the triumph of the young over the old, but
Dickens is unusual among comic writers in that so many of his heroes
and heroines are children, or are described in ways that associate them
with childhood. Nobody has- described more vividly than Dickens the
reactions of a sensitive child in a Brobdingnagian world dominated by
noisome and blundering adults. And because nearly all these children
are predestined to belong to the congenial society, they can only be hurt,
not corrupted, by the obstructing society. The one striking exception is
Pip, whose detachment from the false standards of the obstructing group
forms the main theme of Great Expectations. But David Copperfield is
3O2 On the Nineteenth Century

only superficially affected by his environment, and Oliver Twist escapes

from the activities of the Fagin gang as miraculously as Marina does
from the brothel in Shakespeare's Pericles. Usually this predestined child-
figure is a girl. Many of the heroines, even when grown women, are
described as "little" or are compared to fairies. A frequent central theme
in Dickens is the theme of Alice in Wonderland: the descent of the invul-
nerable girl-child into a grotesque world. In the preface to The Old
Curiosity Shop Dickens speaks of his interest in the beauty-and-beast
archetype, of the girl-child surrounded by monsters, some of them ami-
able like Kit, others sinister like Quilp. Little Nell descends to this gro-
tesque world and then rejoins the angels; the other heroines marry into
the congenial society. The girl-child among grotesques recurs in Florence
Dombey's protection by Captain Cuttle, in Little Dorrit's mothering of
Maggie, and in many similar scenes. Sometimes an amiable grotesque,
Toots or Kit or Smike or Chivery, will attach himself to such a girl-figure,
not good enough to marry her but protesting eternal devotion nonethe-
less, a kind of late farcical vestige of the Courtly Love convention. No-
body turns up in The Old Curiosity Shop good enough to marry Little Nell,
which is doubtless one reason why she dies. We may also notice the role
of the old curiosity shop itself: it plays little part in the story, but is a kind
of threshold symbol of the entrance into the grotesque world, like the
rabbithole and mirror in the Alice books. Its counterparts appear in the
Wooden Midshipman shop in Dombey and Son, the Peggotty cottage in
David Copperfield, the bone-shop of Venus in Our Mutual Friend, and
elsewhere.
Many of the traditional features of romantic New Comedy reached
their highest point of development in nineteenth-century Britain, making
it the obvious time and place for a great genius in that form to emerge.
One of these, already glanced at, is the domination of narrative genres,
along with a moribund drama. Dickens had many dramatic interests, but
his genius was for serial romance and not for the stage. Another is the
Victorian assumption of moral standards shared between author and
reader. This feature makes for melodrama, where the reader emotionally
participates in the moral conflict of hero and villain, or of virtue and
temptation. The rigidity, or assumed rigidity, of Victorian sexual mores
is a great help to a nineteenth-century plot, as it enables an author, not
only to make a Wagnerian noise about a woman's extramarital escapade,
but to make the most frenzied activity on her part plausible as an effort to
conceal the results of it. But the relation of melodrama to the foreground
action is far more important than this.
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 303

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

told by the picture and its enigmatic title, or of all the poems of Browning
that appeal to us to deduce the reality hidden behind what is presented.
In following the main action of a Dickens novel we are frequently
aware of a second form of experience being held up to it like a mirror.
Sometimes this is explicitly the world of the stage. The kind of entertain-
ment afforded by the Vincent Crummies troop in Nicholas Nickleby paral-
lels the uninhibited melodrama of the main story: the dance of the savage
and the Infant Phenomenon, in particular, mirrors the Dickensian theme
of the girl-child in the monster-world. In Hard Times, where the relation
is one of contrast, a circus company symbolizes an approach to experi-
ence that Gradgrind has missed out on. The Punch and Judy show in The
Old Curiosity Shop, one of several popular dramatic entertainments in
that book, has been mentioned, and in Great Expectations Pip, haunted by
the ghost of a father, goes to see Mr. Wopsle in Hamlet. Then again,
Dickens makes considerable use of the curious convention in New Com-
edy of the doubled character, who is often literally a twin. In The Comedy
of Errors the foreground Ephesus and the background Syracuse, in Twelfth
Night the melancholy courts of Orsino and Olivia, are brought into
alignment by twins. Similarly, the foreground action of Little Dorrit is
related to the background action partly through the concealed twin
brother of Flintwinch. In A Tale of Two Cities, where the twin theme is at
its most complicated, the resemblance of Darnay and Carton brings the
two cities themselves into alignment. In Dombey and Son the purse-proud
world of Dombey and the other social world that it tries to ignore are
aligned by the parallel, explicitly alluded to, between Edith Dombey and
Alice Brown. There are many other forms of doubling, both of characters
and of action, that I have no space here to examine. The role of Orlick in
Great Expectations, as a kind of demonic double of Pip, is an example.
The basis for such a dividing of the action might be generalized as
follows. There is a hidden and private world of dream and death, out of
which all the energy of human life comes. The primary manifestation of
this world, in experience, is in acts of destructive violence and passion. It
is the source of war, cruelty, arrogance, lust, and grinding the faces of the
poor. It produces the haughty lady with her guilty secret, like Lady
Dedlock or Edith Dombey or Mrs. Clennam, the lynching mobs that hunt
Bill Sikes to death or proclaim the charity of the Protestant religion in
Barnaby Rudge, the flogging schoolmasters and the hanging judges. It
also produces the courage to fight against these things, and the instinc-
tive virtue that repudiates them. In short, the hidden world expresses
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 305

itself most directly in melodramatic action and rhetoric. It is not so much

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

and statistics too literally, and did happen to prerevolutionary France, as

described in A Tale of Two Cities, dying of what Dickens calls "the leprosy
of unreality,"22 and awaiting the melodramatic deluge of the Revolution.
The obstructing humours cannot escape from the ritual habits that
they have set up to deal with this disconcerting energy that has turned
them into mechanical puppets. The heroes and heroines, however, along
with some of the more amiable humours, have the power to plunge into
the hidden world of dreams and death, and, though narrowly escaping
death in the process, gain from it a renewed life and energy. Sometimes
this plunge into the hidden world is symbolized by a distant voyage. The
incredible Australia that makes a magistrate out of Wilkins Micawber
also enables the hunted convict Magwitch to become an ambiguous but
ultimately genuine fairy godfather. Walter Gay in Dombey and Son re-
turns from the West Indies, remarkably silent, long after he has been
given up for dead, and the reader follows Martin Chuzzlewit into a
place, ironically called Eden, where he is confidently expected to die and
nearly does die, but where he goes through a metamorphosis of charac-
ter that fits him for the comic conclusion. Other characters, including
Dick Swiveller, Pip, and Esther Summerson, go into a delirious illness
with the same result. Our Mutual Friend has a complex pattern of resur-
rection imagery connected with dredging the Thames, reviving from
drowning, finding treasure buried in dust heaps, and the like; a similar
pattern of digging up the dead in A Tale of Two Cities extends from the
stately Dr. Manette to the grotesque Jerry Cruncher. We notice, too, that
the sinister society is often introduced in a kind of wavering light be-
tween sleep and waking: the appearance of the faces of Fagin and Monks
at Oliver Twist's window and the alleged dreams of Affery Flintwinch in
Little Dorrit are examples. The most uninhibited treatment of this plunge
into the world of death and dreams occurs, as we should expect, in the
Christmas Books, where Scrooge and Trotty Veck see in vision a tragic
version of their own lives, and one which includes their own deaths, then
wake up to renewed festivity. It seems clear that the hidden world,
though most of its more direct expressions are destructive and terrible,
contains within itself an irresistible power of renewing life.
The hidden world is thus, once again in literature, the world of an
invincible Eros, the power strong enough to force a happy ending on the
story in defiance of all probability, pushing all the obstructing humours
out of the way, or killing them if they will not get out of the way, getting
the attractive young people disentangled from their brothers and sisters
Dickens and the Comedy of Humours 307

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

the forming and shaping power, that is absurd. Real life does not start or
stop; it never ties up loose ends; it never manifests meaning or purpose
except by blind accident; it is never comic or tragic, ironic or romantic, or
anything else that has a shape. Whatever gives form and pattern to
fiction, whatever technical skill keeps us turning the pages to get to the
end, is absurd, and contradicts our sense of reality. The great Victorian
realists subordinate their story-telling skill to their representational skill.
Theirs is a dignified, leisurely vehicle that gives us time to look at the
scenery. They have formed our stock responses to fiction, so that even
when travelling at the much higher speed of drama, romance, or epic we
still keep trying to focus our eyes on the incidental and transient. Most of
us feel that there is something else in Dickens, something elemental, yet
unconnected with either realistic clarity or philosophical profundity.
What it is connected with is a kind of story that fully gratifies the hope
expressed, according to Lewis Carroll, by the original of Alice, that
"there will be nonsense in it."23 The silliest character in Nicholas Nickleby
is the hero's mother, a romancer who keeps dreaming of impossible
happy endings for her children. But the story itself follows her specifica-
tions and not those of the sensible people. The obstructing humours in
Dickens are absurd because they have overdesigned their lives. But the
kind of design that they parody is produced by another kind of energy,
and one which insists, absurdly and yet irresistibly, that what is must
never take final precedence over what ought to be.
 26
The Meeting of Past and Future
in William Morris
1982

From Studies in Romanticism, 21, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 303-18. Reprinted in

MM, 322-39. Three typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 48, file 4, and NFF,
1991, box 39, file 3.

There is no one in English literature who raises more fascinating and

complex questions connected with the relation of art to society than
William Morris. Part of the complexity, of course, comes from his bewil-
dering versatility. In the intervals of running a business, designing furni-
ture and wallpaper patterns, studying medieval recipes for dyeing textiles,
setting up a press for printing fine editions, and agitating both for social-
ism and for stopping the "restoring" of medieval buildings, he produced
a great mass of poetry and fiction, enough in its sheer range and bulk to
have made half a dozen quite respectable reputations. Many people
would not consider him a major poet or story-teller or translator, but
even they would have to admit that he was a major figure, in literature as
in many other areas.
The difficulties in understanding Morris are not in his writing as such
but in his motives for writing what and as he did. His total work may be
divided into five main divisions, which overlap a good deal but are still
in a roughly chronological order. First, the early poetry, including The
Defence of Guinevere, and the early stories, appearing mainly in the Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine, where he attained an intensity and vividness of
emotion not often equalled in his later work. Second, the period of verse
romance, including Jason, the collection of tales in The Earthly Paradise,
310 On the Nineteenth Century

and the remarkable masque Love is Enough. Third, his epic and romance
translations, which include the Volsunga Saga, the Aeneid, the Odyssey,
Beowulf, and various Northern and Old French romances, an activity that
spread over all his later life. Fourth, essays and lectures on socialism,
more particularly on its relation to the place of the so-called "lesser arts"
in society. Fifth, a period of long prose romance and fantasy: The Wood
beyond the World, The Well at the World's End, The Story of the Glittering
Plain, The Sundering Flood, and others. There is also a genre in this period
which combines romance with his political vision: News from Nowhere,
probably his best-known book, The Dream of John Ball, The King's Lesson,
and the narrative poem Pilgrims of Hope.
All this work has had a very mixed reception. In Mackail's biography
of Morris there is, for all his imagination and sympathy, a tendency to
dismiss the whole socialist side of Morris as a perversion of his talents, a
typical example of a creative person becoming ensnared in the siren's
toils of a political movement he never understood. For the final romances
Mackail has a very limited admiration: one would have expected, for
example, some mention of The Sundering Flood, if only because it was
Morris's last work. Those of Morris's contemporaries who better under-
stood and shared his political sympathies had even less use for the prose
romances. Bernard Shaw spoke of them as the resuscitation of Don
Quixote's library.1 A hasty reader of some criticism on Morris might
easily get an impression of a dithering kook, too overcome by his own
restless versatility to focus his mind properly in any one direction.
With the hindsight of another century, we may perhaps still say that
Morris's political sympathies were naive, but we can hardly say that they
were peripheral, or showed any unawareness of where history was
going in his time. History has vindicated his interest in Marxism, not by
showing that any of it was right—certainly anything in it connected with
predicting the future has turned out to be rather grotesquely wrong—but
by showing that it was profoundly relevant to the concerns of England in
the i88os. And yet, what of these dreamy romances, with their archaic
language, hazy characterization, and meandering plots? Are they at least
not a retreat from Morris's extroverted world of business and design and
political activity into some kind of childhood fixation: the eight-year-old
dressed in a toy suit of armour whom Mackail speaks of,2 and whom so
many of Morris's critics invoke?
Here again the cycles of history have qualified our certainties. Marx-
ism was a minority movement in England in Morris's day, but it has
expanded now to the point where Morris's interest in it shows a good
The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 311

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

and labour.3 Doubtless it was, but before archetypal criticism many

pseudo-issues clustered around the word "allegory," and the fact that an
allegorical reading of a story may be forced and unconvincing does not
mean that it has no external relations at all. Certainly the twentieth-
century romances mentioned above are not intended simply as "escape"
reading, but have connections, however oblique, with other twentieth-
century preoccupations. Similarly there are political overtones in the
struggle of a free state against a slave state in the early story Gertha's
Lovers, and these recur in the late romance The Roots of the Mountains.
Another early 'story, Svend and his Brethren, tells of the hero Svend, who
leads an exodus out of a war-crazed community to more peaceful sur-
roundings along with his six brothers, who represent the arts and crafts
of a civilized society. A similar theme recurs in the very late Sundering
Flood, where there is a battle in which the hero is supported by the
apprentices of the "lesser crafts."
Morris abandoned his one attempt at a novel with a contemporary
setting, remarking that he would never try such a thing again "unless the
world turns topsides under some day."4 Yet he also remarked of
Swinburne's Tristram ofLyonesse that it was founded on literature, not on
nature, which is not good enough in these days when "the issue between
art, that is, the godlike part of man, and mere bestiality, is so momen-
tous."5 The reflection that a poet ought not to turn to past literature for
inspiration when culture is locked in a St. George-and-dragon social
struggle is precisely the one that might be—and was—applied to Morris
himself. We are forced to conclude that there was a quite clear connec-
tion in Morris's mind between romance and the state of society, and that
that connection was the reverse of the usual one.
As for the verse romances, we can understand their comparative eclipse
if we approach them negatively and by contrast with another Victorian
poet who is Morris's direct antithesis in almost every respect, Gerard
Manley Hopkins. In one of his sketches for a unified critical theory,
Hopkins says that the mind has two kinds of energy, a transitional kind,
where one thought or sensation follows another, and an "abiding" kind,
which he says may be called contemplation.6 There seems to me at least
an analogy, and perhaps a real connection, between this distinction and
several others that Hopkins makes. There is the distinction between
"overthought," the superficial meaning conveyed by the syntax, and
"underthought," the deeper meaning conveyed by the imagery and meta-
phors, which in some Shakespeare plays, for example, may be telling us
The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 313

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

II

If we look at News from Nowhere, the most accessible of Morris's books,

we can see at once how completely Morris has recreated the future of his
country in his own personal image. Himself a tireless producer of so
much practical and manual work, without a lazy bone in his body, he
shows us an England where everyone, from earliest childhood on, is
314 On the Nineteenth Century

incessantly working, and where the most serious social problem is a

shortage of things to do. The nineteenth-century visitor inquires about
the system of educating children, and is told that there isn't any: children
quickly pick up the skills of carpentering and cooking and thatching and
shopkeeping. Asked about the cultivating of the mind, his informant
says, "we don't encourage early bookishness,"9 but that children also
pick up languages easily enough, and some of them even read books.
Disregarding the deliberately polemical tone, we can see that what Mor-
ris is talking about is what he calls, in his lecture on "The Lesser Arts"
(1877: the earliest of his important lectures on art and society), "the art of
unconscious intelligence."10 He wants to build on such an art, in the
future, a new art of conscious intelligence; but the practical education of
young children in his Utopia is the foundation of an activity on which all
Morris's social values depend.
Morris was strongly influenced, as he says, by Carlyle and Ruskin, and
was converted to socialism by reading Mill's hostile discussion of it. His
reading of Marx and other socialists came much later. Naturally Morris
had no use for the reactionary drift of Carlyle's thought or his hero cult,
but one feature of that thought strongly attracted him. Carlyle generally
talks about work in the abstract rather than the condition of the worker,
and sometimes gives the impression that any sort of work is good for the
moral fibre. But in Sartor Resartus he makes it fairly clear that drudgery,
that is, servile, exploited, and alienated work, is not what he means by
work. Drudgery in this sense is an aspect of a society of which the other
aspect is "Dandyism," where some people do nothing at all, and where
other people are consequently forced into excessive work in order to
support them.11
Ruskin carried this principle much further in Morris's direction in
Stones of Venice. Here, especially in the section called "The Nature of
Gothic," he found that the ugliness of much of Victorian civilization was
an aesthetic fact pointing to a moral principle. Mass production means
machine production, which in Ruskin's day meant turning human be-
ings into machines, and obliterating everything creative or pleasurable
from their work. He gives as an example men who sit in a factory all day
chopping glass rods into beads, "their hands vibrating with a perpetual
and exquisitely timed palsy."12 Such pseudo-work illustrates two inter-
related social facts: that the process of mechanizing human labour is a
form of penal servitude, and that its product is therefore bound to be
both ugly and unnecessary. Ruskin, like Carlyle, did not follow up the
The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 315

revolutionary implications of this principle, but he comes close to sup-

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

The real context of social planning, then, is a society in which work has
been defined as creative act, and thereby becomes the energy by which
an intelligent being expresses his intelligence. Work in this sense cannot
be separated from leisure, and can exist only in a society in which there is
no longer a "leisure class" with another class of exploited workers sup-
porting them, but in which the working class is the leisure class, and vice
versa. Such a society would reconstitute the word "manufacture" by
bringing it back to its original meaning of something made by a brain-
directed hand. The natural emotional response to producing anything
attractive by one's own hands is pleasure, and what Morris emphasizes
more than anything else is the continuous happiness of the people in his
Utopia.
If we say of News from Nowhere, "but this system would never work,"
we are expressing the kind of panic that Morris was attempting to
counteract. A society is not a "system": human beings have no business
trying to identify their community with a machine of any kind. And of
course "it" would never work: it is only people who work. Morris often
says that he is not opposed to machinery as such (though the inhabitants
of his future England seem to get along with astonishingly little of it), but
that the purpose of machinery is to absorb slavery. When exploitation
and alienation are removed from people their natural energies are set
free. The real question Morris is asking is rather, "I have given you a
picture of a happy and healthy community: do you like the picture? If
not, what's wrong with it, as a picture?" On that basis, objections to it
would soon start taking the form of expressions of distrust in human
freedom itself.
Morris's examples of unconscious intelligence, in "The Lesser Arts,"
are the Palaeolithic artefacts that were beginning to be discovered in his
day. Such an unconscious intelligence, as he clearly recognized, is very
close to consciousness. Similarly, we admire, for example, Shaker furni-
ture, but if the Shakers themselves had applied the kind of self-conscious
aesthetic canons to their work that we do, they could probably not have
produced it at all. It would be a surprising inference that the people who
produced such work were less intelligent than the people who collect it:
the Shaker craftsmen merely possessed a kind of intelligence that did not
get in the way of their "unconscious" skill. Morris's poetry, in particular,
is similarly an attempt to let an acquired skill flow through the con-
sciousness without being disturbed by that consciousness. Morris says
that anyone should be able to compose poetry while his mind is partly on
The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 317

something else, such as weaving or dyeing. It is clear that there is an

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

Ill

Morris's original associates in his socialist activities were Anarchists, and

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

Morris was all his life a pure anarchist, with a lowercase "a." His News
from Nowhere was written partly as a protest against Bellamy's socialist
Utopia Looking Backward, a vision of Boston in the year 2000 where
everyone is drafted to serve in an "industrial army," and where recrea-
tion consists largely of listening to government propaganda over the
"telephone," or what we now call the radio.15 Communist movements
since Morris's time have followed Bellamy and not Morris, and have also
followed the course that Morris most hated: economic centralization,
concentrating on mass production and distribution, setting up a rigid
chain of command throughout the whole of society. Even the curious
Janus-faced attitude to violence that gives anarchism both a terrorist side
and a peaceful side recurs in Morris: he says he has a religious hatred of
war and violence, yet News from Nowhere predicts the rise of the counter-
ideology of fascism much more clearly than most socialist writing of his
day did.
What the later Morris was, perhaps, was that very rare bird, a Marxist
uncorrupted by Leninism. Marx thought of Communism as a natural
evolution out of capitalism: when capitalism had reached a certain stage
of deadlock through its inherent contradictions, a guided revolutionary
movement could shift the control of production from a few exploiters to
the workers. This evolutionary development did not occur: Communism
was established in an essentially pre-industrial country, and became
simply the adversary of capitalism, not its successor. What attracted
Morris to Marx were such things as the comments on the impoverishing
of the rural by the urban parts of society in the Manifesto, the vision of
capitalism as a dehumanizing relationship, in contrast to earlier social
connections which, though still based on exploitation, were at least per-
sonal ones, and, above all, the anarchist ultimate goal that Marx envi-
sioned, when all states have withered away and imposed controls are no
longer needed.
And so, the informant of the narrator in News from Nowhere says, "we
discourage centralisation all we can."16 Not only has the British empire
vanished in Morris's ideal world, but England itself has broken down
into small local units and local councils. The House of Parliament has
been turned from a verbal dungheap into a literal one, and in its place
has come a decentralizing of control that the most extreme Jeffersonian
might consider chimerical. It was later than his remark about the impos-
sibility of Anarchism that Morris said, "it will be necessary for the unit of
administration to be small enough for every citizen to feel himself re-
The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 319

sponsible for its details."17 He also says that the goal of state socialism is
one that sickens him. When he goes on to say that "variety of life is as
much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition/'18 we realize
that Morris is talking about something quite different from what left-wing
movements of his time—and since—have been primarily concerned with.
That concern has been, of course, with political control and economic
development, both of which are normally centralizing movements. Most
of the effective social entities today are the huge continental powers
which, whether capitalist or socialist in organization, keep expanding
from that basis through various forms of political and economic imperi-
alism. Morris is interested in cultural development, and cultural tenden-
cies seem to go in the reverse direction. The more mature a culture is, the
more it tends to circumscribe itself in smaller units. If we wish to study
"American literature," for example, and discover what the creative liter-
ary imagination tells us about America, we find that "American litera-
ture" is mainly an aggregate of Mississippi authors, New England authors,
middle-Western authors, California authors, expatriate authors, and so
on over the whole area. Canadian literature has followed the same ten-
dency more recently, and even the much smaller area of Great Britain
shows us a Hardy confined to "Wessex," a Lawrence from the Midland
region, a Dylan Thomas from south Wales, and the like.
When the reading population of Great Britain was so much smaller,
before Wordsworth's time, English literature was essentially a London
literature, but with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the great
Midland cities the picture quickly changed. We have Shelley remarking,
in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, that a great cultural advance
would result from breaking England up into many smaller units like
those of Renaissance Italy.19 It was abundantly clear in Morris's day that
cultural developments had to be distinguished from political and eco-
nomic ones if the total social picture were to be a healthy one. To attach
culture to the centralizing movements of politics and economics pro-
duces a cultural totalitarianism, an empty, pompous, officially certified
pseudo-art. To attach a political or economic movement to a decentraliz-
ing cultural one produces a kind of neo-fascist separatism. Nothing
could be more remote from anything Morris wanted than totalitarianism
or fascism, and it is understandable that so many political and economic
questions are simply waved away in News from Nowhere. The book in fact
often reads as though it were being deliberately confined to the cultural
aspect of social vision.
32O On the Nineteenth Century

To the laissez-faire capitalism that emphasized liberty to the point of

forgetting about equality, and the state socialism that emphasized equal-
ity to the point of forgetting about liberty, Morris opposed the third and
very neglected revolutionary element of fraternity. If Matthew Arnold is
right, liberty is the specifically middle-class contribution to the classless
society of genuine culture that Arnold envisaged, and equality the spe-
cifically working-class one. It should follow that it is the aristocracy that
dramatizes for society as a whole the conception of fraternity, and per-
haps this is one reason why there are so many stories about heroic
warriors linked in some kind of chivalric brotherhood in Morris's ro-
mances. The curiously childlike quality of the people in News from No-
where, who sometimes seem to be living in a gigantic kindergarten, is not
inconsistent with this, because the genuine aristocracy or privileged class
of every society are the children. But in Victorian times the aristocracy is
too unfunctional to be invoked. With his usual insouciance in such mat-
ters, Morris dismisses the whole "class-conscious" compulsiveness of
revolution with the remark, "what we of the middle classes have to do, if
we can, is to show by our lives what is the proper type of a useful citizen,
the type into which all classes should melt at last."20 Not many left-
wingers in Morris's day would have foreseen that the bourgeoisie would
eventually become the standard of maturity for Communist societies.
Even fraternity, of course, can become socially oppressive, and in the
background of News from Nowhere there looms the spectre of intermina-
ble picnics and similar forms of extroverted cheer, in a society where the
more contemplative aspects of leisure are so disregarded. As in so many
Utopias, the inhabitants are so preoccupied with reciting the litany of
benefits that their system gives them as to have, quite simply, no time to
think. Towards the end of the story, however, Morris shows his aware-
ness of this, and shows too that this society of young people who have
torn themselves loose from the fetters of history have still to face the
question of historical continuity. The heroine remarks to the narrator that
she wonders whether they are really right in paying so little attention to
their past history: an old fallacy might seem to the uninstructed a glitter-
ing novelty. She goes on to say that while she would not force anything
on her children, she would hope to impress on them an essential part of
herself, "that part which was not mere moods, created by the matters
and events round about me."21 One gets a strong impression that the
next generation of this exuberant society might see the children back in
school.
The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 321

IV

The negative side of Morris's attitude appears in occasional melancholy

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

age and the age of primitive Christianity. The Renaissance movement in

particular consolidated a view of history that is perhaps at its clearest in
Gibbon. The Augustan age was the highest cultural pinnacle of Euro-
pean civilization, and was the golden age of Latin. It was succeeded by
the silver age of Nero, and then, as monkishness and barbarism in-
creased, it reached a nadir during the "dark" ages until the Renaissance
rediscovered the essential facts about human civilization. Gibbon presents
us with a typically humanist vision of history, a U-shaped movement
going through the decline and fall of Rome and the subsequent rise of
rational values to his own time. Obviously a good deal of confidence
about his own time was incorporated into this view.
The nineteenth century produced many people who did not like most
of its culture, and Gibbon's view of history is exactly reversed by Ruskin,
who in Stones of Venice plotted a chart of history that rises from the
"servile" art of the pre-Gothic to its culmination in the decorated phase
of Gothic, then declines into overelaboration until we reach the Renais-
sance, which Ruskin explicitly calls a "fall."22 After that everything gets
worse until Ruskin's own time, when the painting of Turner and the pre-
Raphaelites suggest some upturn. Ruskin provides an almost math-
ematical proof of the superiority of the middle phase of Gothic architecture
to every other form of human building. This thesis was taken up by
various Catholic apologists, such as Belloc and Chesterton, who applied
it to other aspects of medieval life. Morris, however, like Ezra Pound
later, was a disciple of Ruskin who adopted the view that medieval
culture preserved an integrity steadily corrupted later by what Pound
calls "usura"23 and sloppy workmanship produced by illegitimate social
demands, but ignored the religious dimension of the argument.
What we notice about all these conflicting phases of taste is that in
cultural movements there seems to be a strong tendency to move back-
wards in time, to seek out a congenial period in the past, very frequently
the distant past. Thus while political and economic movements go for-
ward into the future, which in the twentieth century means carrying an
increasing amount of technological baggage with them, cultural move-
ments tend to rediscover neglected or forgotten earlier times in our
tradition.
The admiration for medieval culture which Morris shares with many
others of his time and later seems to have some unconscious connection
with the view of Western civilization developed by Vico in the eight-
eenth century and expanded by Spengler in the twentieth. For Spengler,
The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 323

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

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

They {the fairies of the Irish countryside} live out their passionate lives not
far off, as I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep
The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris 325

our natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall unite
us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among blue
hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but

Foreshadowings mingled with the images

Of man's misdeeds in greater days than these,

as the old men thought in The Earthly Paradise when they were in good
spirits?25

The quotation is from the epilogue to the story of Acrisius, the Classical
tale told for the month of April.26 Morris does not think in categories like
living after death in fairyland, and the total scheme set up in The Earthly
Paradise, though a deeply haunting one, has a different reference. The
"Wanderers" of the Prologue are old men, half from the Mediterranean
and the other half from the North, who after their wanderings, in the
course of which they have been welcomed as kings and worshipped as
gods, have met together on a lonely island to interchange their tradi-
tional stories. Nothing happens except that they tell them.
Yet these impotent old men are clearly being identified with the stories
they tell; and the stories themselves, it seems to me, are conceived as
latent powers, imaginative projections of life that humanity at present
can see no use for, and yet are the sources of all the styles of living, past,
present, and future, that it has set up. They are myths that form a
mythology, and a mythology is the world man builds as distinct from the
world that surrounds him, so far as the former world can be presented in
words. In his curious mania, as it sometimes seems, for telling and
translating all the world's great stories he can get his hands on, Morris
seems to be collecting the swords and spears of traditional heroism, of
chivalry and romance and warfare and magic and mystery, so that they
can be beaten into the plowshares and pruning-hooks of a new world
where man has made his peace with himself and with nature.
 27
The World as Music and Idea
in Wagner's Parsifal
27 October 1982

Address to the Toronto Wagner Society. From Carleton Germanic Papers, 12

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

On the subject of Wagner I have to speak as a pure outsider. I am

interested in Wagner as a creative figure with an immense cultural
influence, but I have never been to Bayreuth: I have seen very few
Wagner operas, and the whole spectacular side of Wagner, the spears
that freeze over the heads of the virtuous, the swans and doves and
The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifali 327327

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

complete freedom, he adds that, like William Tell, if his arrow fails he
has no other to send after it.3 A touch of genuine pathos here is given by
the fact that "Parsifal" was Wagner's private name for King Ludwig,
and that Wagner was dead within a few months of Parsifal's first
performance.
The story of Parsifal comes from one of the Grail romances. There are
so many Grail romances, and they interlock in such curious ways, that
one feels at first that there must have been some archetypal poem which
contained all the essential Grail themes, of which the poet we happen to
be reading has picked up only bits and pieces. But we soon realize that
criticism needs another conception when dealing with legends like this,
something closer to "total tradition" than to "lost first poem." A great
myth like that of the Grail means everything essential that it has ever
been made to mean in the history of its development, and the complete
story is the one that emerges gradually in the course of time, which in
English literature takes us down through Malory to Tennyson, Swinburne,
Charles Williams, and many others still to come.
Wagner will always be slightly peripheral to the total Grail story, I
think, because in Parsifal, as in Tristan, he obliterates the Arthurian con-
text of the cycle. To adapt a phrase of Vinaver about Malory, he has no
Camelot to balance his Corbenic (Malory's name for the Grail castle), and
so we have no contrasting base of social operations and no roots in a
specific body of legend. The Ring is solidly entrenched in the Siegfried
story, but a Grail story without an Arthurian court is as disembodied as
an Odyssey without Ithaca. A work of art derives its identity from its
context within the art, including the context of its tradition, and anything
that has to be called a Buhneniveihfestspiel clearly has problems with
identity.4 I am not speaking of anything that Wagner should have done
and did not do: I am trying to indicate the context of what he did. Parsifal
belongs to a genre of drama that I have elsewhere called the auto (taking
the word from Calderon):5 a musical and spectacular drama that is
neither tragic nor comic, but presents an audience with a central myth in
its cultural tradition, like the Biblical plays of the Middle Ages. The latter
were associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi, and the symbol of
communion so prominent in Parsifal is appropriate to its tradition.
For most of us the Holy Grail is a part of a Christian legend. It was,
according to tradition, the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, when he
identified the wine in it with his own blood. It was later used to catch the
actual blood and water that flowed from his side when it was pierced, on
The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's ParsifalI 329

the cross, with a lance of a Roman soldier, traditionally named Longinus.

Bleeding lance, or spear, and chalice of divine blood thus form together
an unauthorized but very haunting pair of Christian symbols. When
Wagner read Wolfram, he was, according to his letters to Mathilde
Wesendonk, disappointed in him,6 and seems to have got more, at least
at first, from Wolfram's main source Chretien de Troyes and from the
poets who continued Chretien's unfinished story.7 One reason, it seems
clear, was that Wolfram has no notion of a Christian context for his
imagery. Wolfram's Parzival comes to the castle of the Grail, and sees
borne in procession there a number of mysterious objects. They include a
bleeding lance, but it is not said to be the lance of Longinus; they include
a Grail, but the Grail in Wolfram is not a chalice: it is apparently a stone,
though a stone with miraculous healing powers, able to raise the phoenix
from its ashes. The manuscripts, which clearly reflect confusion in the
minds of their scribes, usually call it lapsit exillis. If lapsit is a scribal error
for lapis, then it could be lapis exilis, slender stone, whatever that means,
or lapis elixir, the philosopher's stone of alchemy, or lapis exilii or exsulis,
stone of exile, which suggests a meteorite fallen from the sky.
The conception of the Grail as the chalice of the passion of Christ is
associated with another cycle of stories connected with Joseph of
Arimathea, who is said to have brought the Grail to Glastonbury in
England. As we push further into the stories, there seem to be hints of
Celtic and pre-Christian sources, where lance and grail were sexual and
fertility symbols, emblematical of love and war, as Yeats would say.
Sometimes the Grail is not a cup but a flat dish, a platter or salver, which
seems to be the original meaning of the word "grail." Sometimes a sword
replaces the spear or lance, and in the Welsh version of the Percival story,
Peredur, there is a procession bearing a bleeding lance and a severed
head. As lance and grail became more fixed in the Christian legend, the
alternative images, the sword, the dish, the severed head, began to
cluster around the passion of John the Baptist, whose birth is tradition-
ally at the summer solstice, at the opposite end of the calendar from the
birth of Christ. The John the Baptist parallels, whatever their actual
importance, were emphasized by the Grail scholar Karl Simrock, who
was one of Wagner's sources. Nineteenth-century poets tended to be
more interested in the John the Baptist passion than in that of Christ,
because the women connected with it, traditionally named Salome and
Herodias, could be so easily assimilated to their cherished theme of the
femme fatale. We notice that "Herodias" is one of the names that Klinesor
33O On the Nineteenth Century

applies to Kundry. Herodias also appears in nineteenth-century fiction

as the name of a female counterpart of the Wandering Jew: this is clearly
one of the roles associated with Kundry, who says that she laughed at the
passion of Christ, and has been looking for the release of death ever
since. Other commentators have connected the four main images of the
two legends, lance, chalice, sword, dish, with the four suits of the Tarot
pack of cards, but Wagner does not follow them, though a number of
other writers did so, notably Yeats.
In any case the Christian associations of the imagery seem to go back to
fertility images, cauldrons of plenty and the like, which are older than
Christianity. We may compare the growth of the story best known to us
as that of St. George and the dragon, which also evolved from a pre-
Christian into a Christian legend. Here a young knight comes over the
sea to a waste land ruled by an aged and impotent king, whose land is
laid waste by a dragon. He kills the dragon, rescues and marries the
king's daughter (who has just been chosen by lot to be fed to the dragon),
and becomes the new king. The overtones of a nature myth where
winter, sterility, age, and death give place to their opposites is clear
enough. But the same story becomes absorbed into Christian symbolism,
where Christ, the new or second Adam, kills the dragon of death and
hell, rescues his bride the church, and redeems the old and impotent king
who is the first Adam. The close relationship of this myth to that of the
Grail story needs no labouring.
An enthusiastic Wagnerian, Jessie Weston, who also translated Wolf-
ram's Parzival into English verse, was an Arthurian scholar whose book,
From Ritual to Romance, attempted, on a basis of Frazer and similar
writers of his generation, to trace the Grail stories back to a pre-Christian
mythology. Her book was a definite and acknowledged influence on
Eliot's Waste Land, but The Waste Land, while it uses a good deal of
Frazerian and pre-Christian imagery, is again a Christian poem, in which
an aged and impotent king seems to be identified both with Wolfram's
"Fisher King" and with the first Adam. There are several Wagnerian
echoes in Eliot's poem, though the only one linked to Parsifal [1. 202] is a
quotation of the last line of Verlaine's sonnet on Parsifal, which refers to
the boys' choir singing in the dome ("coupole") at the end of act i, and
prophesying the coming of a compassionate fool. Eliot puts this, as we
should expect, in a grimly ironic context.
Verlaine treats Parsifal as simply Christian in its imagery, but Wagner
also gives us a powerful sense, especially in the Good Friday music of the
The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's ParsifalI 331

third act, of an immemorial revival of nature pushing its way through

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

innocence, and enables Parsifal to destroy the illusions of Klingsor, as

innocence and illusion cannot ultimately inhabit the same world.
In Wolfram Parzival comes, by accident, to the castle of the Grail,
meets the keeper of the Grail there, called also the Fisher King, who is
impotent and suffering, and sees the great procession with the bleeding
lance and the holy stone. The latter, it appears, can cure everything
except what ails the Fisher King. Parzival, whose father had died in his
infancy, has been taught by his mother and by an old knight named
Gornemans to behave respectfully when with strangers, and above all
not to ask too many questions. So he watches the mysterious procession
without comment or inquiry, or expressing the curiosity he feels. The
next day he discovers that his silence was not only a grave discourtesy
but something like a mortal sin. If he had asked the question the king's
agony would have ended, and the waste land been transformed into a
garden. As he did not, he is reviled and cursed as the geatest disaster that
ever came to the land.
At first this sounds like one of those irrational situations that occur in
romance simply because they occur, included by Wolfram because it was
in his source. The question of why it was in his source, even if we could
answer it, would take us too far from Wagner. Almost always, in ro-
mance as elsewhere, the hero succeeds by doing what his elders have
told him to do, minding his manners, and keeping his mouth shut. A
male-centred literature has tended to associate curiosity with the disas-
ters caused by the inherent weakness of females. Yet Parzival's situation
is a most eerily suggestive one nonetheless. Perhaps this is partly because
we have all had dreams in which we accepted mysterious and porten-
tous imagery without question, and may have felt on waking that if we
had only been sufficiently conscious to ask ourselves about the meaning
of what we saw, we might have made a major breakthrough to another
dimension of experience altogether. We have mentioned Eliot, and we
may remember how as early as Prufrock Eliot is haunted by the theme of
"some overwhelming question" [1. 10], which he associates with the
return of Lazarus from the dead.
In Wolfram, Parzival eventually gets back to the Grail castle near the
end of the story and asks the healing question, which appears to be
something like, "Dear uncle, why do you have this terrible pain in the
testicles?" Even Wagner quailed before the prospect of putting this into
recitativo, although he had, as we saw, already moved the area of pain to
a more respectable address. In Chretien de Troyes the question is rather
The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's ParsifalI 333

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

We have been speaking of Christian redemption in Parsifal, but Wagner

had also been developing an interest in Buddhism, running parallel to
his interest in Christianity though not, as he saw it, inconsistent with it.
This had come largely from his reading of Schopenhauer, and before he
wrote Parsifal Wagner had meditated dramas on both Jesus and Buddha.
In Buddhism the great enemy is illusion, and illusion is caused by the
ego-centred nature of our perception. Here again we have two levels of
nature, though metaphorically the better one is usually thought of as
deeper rather than higher. In this context Parsifal's confrontation with
the memory of his mother represents the deepest hold that the habit-
energy of his ego still has on him, and the only way to break from it is
through compassion, the sudden sense of identity with Amfortas that
cuts him loose from Kundry. Buddhism also puts a high valuation on the
stillness and the calmness of mind that comes from emptying it of self-
conscious thoughts, and the "pure fool" aspect of Parsifal, which some-
times leaves him unable to articulate the simplest sentence, is connected
with that.
In the Ring cycle the disturbances set in motion by Alberich's theft of
the gold cause a crisis among the gods. The gods, or at least Wo tan, find
that they have become an establishment, and get caught up in all the
casuistry and false decisions of an establishment mentality. At the end of
Gotterdammerung the gods have had it, and the new reign of man is
prophesied. There were contemporary and later German writers, some
of them insane, who were or tried to be polytheists with a genuine belief
in the old gods, Classical or Nordic. But Wagner was not one of them,
and no other conclusion for the Ring was conceivable except a humanis-
tic one. What kind of man would genuinely deserve to succeed the gods?
This, I think, is the question that Parsifal is mainly concerned with.
Parsifal assumes that the coming of Christ, symbolized by the Grail, has
been essential to the answer, so the question takes the form of what the
model of human action is that Christianity provides. The answer is still
complex, but its principle is that true human action is antiheroic, not in
the sense of lacking courage, but in regarding patience and endurance as
still greater virtues. In the Ring all the heroic quests are essentially ways
of feeding the gods, keeping them supplied with the youth and energy
essential to their supremacy. The Valkyries, the choosers of those slain in
battle, symbolize this conception of the heroic life as a continuous sacri-
fice by man to nourish the gods. In Parsifal the Grail does the feeding,
because the essential sacrifice, of God for man, which is what keeps man
The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's ParsifalI 335

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

does not acquire the Grail by a dragon-killing quest: he merely gets his
head clear of the kind of illusion that such dragons represent, and the
Grail thereby acquires him.
Going by the text alone, the characters of Parsifal do seem to be a life-
denying lot, crippled or half dead, and resembling characters in a play of
Beckett more closely than they do those in any earlier work of Wagner's.
Amfortas is in mortal agony, longing for death, until almost the last
moment of the drama; Titurel speaks from a tomb in the first act and is
buried in the third; Kundry, who practically has to be dug out of the
ground at the beginning of the third act, also longs for the death she
finally gets; Gurnemanz seems old and tired even at the beginning, and
proportionately more so at the end. Parsifal himself makes his entrance
as a stupid oaf shooting a swan, an oafs idea of fun, and then proves to
be unable even to answer any questions, much less ask them. He finally,
as we saw, becomes such an encumbrance to what action there is that
Gurnemanz pushes him irritably off the stage. Whatever one thinks of
the phrase "music of the future" applied to Wagner, Parsifal at least is the
drama of the future, pointing the way to the kind of dramatic struggle
with, and within, stagnation that we have later in Strindberg, Chekhov,
Beckett, and Sartre.
All through Wagner's work runs the theme of the comitatus, the broth-
erhood united by some form of distinctive heroism or skill—even the
Meistersinger make up such a group. But the knights of the Grail move
toward exhaustion in the third act, where much of the dominant music is
very like a funeral march. In the course of the action Gurnemanz remarks
that in the world of the Grail castle time has given place to space. I don't
know what this means altogether, but certainly the atmosphere is one of
suspended time, like the life-in-death of the Ancient Mariner, or the
world between incarnations in a Japanese Noh play. Another parallel
would be Ezekiel's vision of a valley of dry bones, transformed into "an
exceeding great army" [Ezekiel 37:10] by a power that Christian readers
of Ezekiel would identify with the Resurrection, the ultimate transform-
ing power that immediately follows Good Friday.
It seems to me significant, however, that Wagner kept the traditional
Good Friday as the setting for his third act, instead of changing it to
Easter Sunday. For the main action of the opera is less a resurrection than
a harrowing of hell. There are, as always, two levels of hell. The deeper
level, the world of the self-castrated Klingsor in which Kundry is unable
to die, is the real hell: it will always be there as long as man insists on
The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifall• 337

living in egocentric illusion, but it is still illusion, and is unredeemable.

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

tached arias like Senta's ballad in The Flying Dutchman or Wolfram's song
to the evening star in Tannhauser. Some Wagner criticism gives the im-
pression that Wagner wrote a libretto, then composed a number of
leitmotifs, each one with an allegorical relationship to some character or
image in the story, then mixed these up in a musical pastiche where they
appear at appropriate moments. How anything resembling a structure
could emerge from such a procedure is an unanswered question. The
opposite extreme is represented by Lorenz's four-volume study attempt-
ing to demonstrate, not simply that the music has a structure, but that the
musical structure in fact is the structure of the opera.12 This tends to
suggest that Wagner's music dramas are simply overgrown symphonies
with vocal obbligato. But even the longest symphony has to have some
basis in symphonic form, and the structural principles of Wagner's mu-
sic seem to be quite different from those of symphonic form.
This statement, however, is less true of Parsifal than of any other
Wagner opera. Parsifal begins and ends in the same key (A-flat major),
and the second act also begins and ends in the same key (B minor). We
may call this pure accident, but accidents in Wagner are seldom if ever
pure. It looks as though tonality has a function for this opera which is
unusual for operas in general, even for Wagner's. All through the work,
again, there is a contrast of diatonic and chromatic textures. The diatonic
ones are associated with the Grail and the ideals and virtues it inspires.
The chromatic passages predominate in the world of Klingsor in the
second act, and are also associated with the agony of Amfortas and with
the more screaming and scampering aspects of Kundry.
The overture presents the three main Grail themes: we may follow
tradition, for the most part, and associate them respectively with the
Christian virtues of love, hope, and faith. We begin with what is called
the "Love Feast" motif, an eerie, plaintive, isolated melody followed by
arpeggios on the chord of A-flat. We are not, of course, in the world of
preconscious innocence represented by the open E-flat chords at the
beginning of Rheingold: the function of these arpeggios is to establish the
underlying rhythm of the very syncopated first theme. The second theme
is a well-known liturgical cadence called the "Dresden Amen," which
would have been familiar to many in Wagner's audience. A third theme,
with four descending notes prominent in it, follows and provides a
rhythmical contrast to the gentle and wavering opening. A quite sudden
modulation of this theme from A-flat to D major was associated by
Wagner, apparently, with the spreading of the Grail faith throughout the
The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's ParsifalI 339

world. The opening theme recurs, wistful and elusive as ever, and the
overture ends on a dominant seventh of almost intolerable insistence,
lingering even in the first recitatives after the curtain rises.
All three themes are strongly diatonic, and seem to set the pattern for
three modes of feeling. The "Love Feast" theme, in spite of its gentle
subsidence at its close, is mainly a rising melody with a dotted rhythm in
its rise that recurs, in different forms, through various moods of aspira-
tion and yearning, including even the central theme of the Good Friday
music. All three acts of Parsifal begin with a summons to wake up, the
second and third being both addressed, for different reasons, to the
harassed Kundry, and Klingsor has a demonic parody of rising rhythm
associated with him as the curtain goes up on the second act.
The "Dresden Amen" is one of a group of themes that seem to express
a mood of waiting, with calmness and patience, for some kind of deliver-
ance from the prison paradise of the Grail world. The most important of
these themes of hope, as we might call them, is the hymn that prophesies
the coming of the compassionate fool. The more vigorous theme called
"Faith" reminds us that the Grail knighthood is still a band of heroes,
even though their heroism has outgrown the fighting stage, and it is
linked with the marching rhythm of the procession in the first act, which
moves with a somewhat plodding stateliness towards the unveiling of
the Grail. The march in the third act, where the burial of Titurel is
involved, has a slightly different rhythm, closer, as said, to a funeral
march, in contrast to the more spirited martial theme that accompanies
the entrances of Parsifal. In the chromatic tumult of Klingsor's world in
the second act we hear two themes in particular associated with tempta-
tion and illusion. One is the waltzing rhythm of the flower maidens'
chatter, the other the pastoral six-eight (later nine-eight) rhythm of
Kundry's account to Parsifal of his childhood with his mother. Both have
curious recalls of the formulas of popular nineteenth-century music: they
are equal in attractiveness and technical skill to anything else in the
opera, but manage to suggest something a bit bogus, or at least common-
place, at the same time.
The opening of the third act, depicting the exhaustion and low morale
of the Grail knights and Parsifal's inability to find them, wanders uncer-
tainly around the key of B-flat minor: so uncertainly that one critic has
suggested that the real tonic chord is a diminished seventh rather than
the chord of B-flat minor. Wagner is never atonal, and when he seems to
move away from tonality it generally means that chaos is coming again.
34O On the Nineteenth Century

The third act then alternates between hope and fear, rising to a dissonant
climax when the knights insist that the suffering Amf ortas, who is at the
end of his endurance, uncover the Grail once more, and we wonder if a
demonic parody of the sacrifice of Christ is about to be enacted on this
Good Friday. However, Parsifal is present this time with his healing
spear, and the opera ends with the motif of "Faith" having it all its own
way, in a limpidly diatonic conclusion.
Even an amateur with no training in musical analysis, like myself,
could follow the evolving, intertwining, metamorphosing play of the
various themes throughout the opera for a long time; but we do not have
a long time (changed to space, like the Grail world, in the context of an
essay), and I wish to make one point only about the music. The verbal
framework of Parsifal, we suggested, was derived from Schopenhauer's
construct of the world as will and as idea, or representation of the world
in a conscious mind. This construct, though it has a popular reputation
for pessimism, is nevertheless one within which the redemptive efforts
of Christianity and Buddhism become at least intelligible. But the music
expands from here into a much larger vision of humanity led by its own
inner nature to rise toward some infinite power which is both itself and
the opposite of itself, an effort neither quixotic nor hopeless because the
infinite power has already descended to meet it. I hear this perhaps most
clearly at the moment of Parsifal's prayer before the spear, but its over-
tones and resonances are on every page of the opera, and make me
wonder whether music, which defines nothing and expresses every-
thing, may not be the primary language of the spirit, and not merely, as
Schopenhauer said, of the suffering and enduring will.
 28
Some Reflections on Life and Habit
17 February 1988

From Some Reflections on Life and Habit (Lethbridge: University ofLethbridge

Press, 1988). Originally the F.E.L. Priestly lecture, 17 February 1988. Re-
printed in Northrop Frye Newsletter, i, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 1-9, and in
MM, 141-54. Two typescripts are in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 8.

It is a great privilege to be giving a lecture in honour of my old friend and

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

pages or so are a brilliant and witty piece of writing, and if the entire
book were on that level it would be one of my favourite books. Two,
those hundred pages are essentially a theory of education, which natu-
rally concerns me as a teacher. Butler's theory was not new, but the
formulation and context of it were new in his day. The context was
Butler's intense interest in Darwinian evolution: he was a contemporary
of Darwin, and realized that the issue raised in the Origin of Species in
1859 was the central scientific issue of his time. Darwin's account of the
evolutionary process, in which variations are thrown out by a species at
random until one proves to have better survival value for its environ-
ment and becomes the channel for a new development, fascinated Butler
but dissatisfied him too. He felt that the degree of precision and skill
shown by even the simplest organisms, along with their immense vari-
ety, pointed to a directing will within them. The title of another book of
his, Luck or Cunning? indicates his attitude. Here he was reverting to an
earlier view, proposed by the botanist Lamarck in France and by Dar-
win's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, in England.
Biologists oppose this view on the ground that it appears to depend on
the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and that there is no evidence,
or not enough evidence, for this. As Butler went on, he became increas-
ingly hostile to Darwin, and more and more insistent on introducing
elements of will, design, and purpose into evolution. The consensus of
biologists was that the Darwinian explanation described the process, the
how of evolution, and that that was the whole business of biological
science. The other elements, they said, belonged to speculative philoso-
phy or theology, and could not be experimentally studied.
So Butler fell out of fashion, and became known as an amateur who
blundered into a scientific controversy on the wrong side without really
knowing what he was talking about. His reputation was further affected
by the fact that his chief disciple was Bernard Shaw, whose doctrine of
"creative evolution" in my opinion rather vulgarizes Butler's views. This
is particularly true of his interminably gabby play, or series of plays,
called Back to Methusaleh, in which the human race evolves from Adam
and Eve to a whirlpool of pure thought in something like twenty hours.
More recently, there was the attempt of the pseudoscientific politician
Lysenko, in Stalin's Russia, to set up Russian biology on a Lamarckian
basis, which proved an abysmal failure.
Well, as it happens, I am rather interested in people who are out of
fashion, because they often indicate the limitations of the age that consid-
ers them so. If I knew more biology, or more accurately, if I knew some
Some Reflections on Life and Habit 343

biology, I should not be surprised if many of Butler's speculations, such

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

within it, a whole Parliament of ancestral voices where some dominate

and others are repressed. Long before Freud, Butler realized that the
unconscious could speak, and that when it spoke it defined the speaker
much more clearly than his conscious speech did. He quoted a famous
evangelical preacher named Spurgeon as praying publicly that God
would change England's rulers "as soon as possible," and pointed out
that those last four words showed that while Spurgeon's consciousness
may have been evangelical, his unconscious was clearly atheistic.2
But such anomalies are a feature of conscious uncertainties. The learn-
ing skill is perfect when we have reached the stabilization, the habitus or
hexis, where no such conflicts remain. On this principle the best-educated
would be those who do not even know that they are educated. To Butler,
as a nineteenth-century middle-class Englishman, the principle that un-
conscious knowledge is perfected knowledge meant that the best-edu-
cated people in England in his day were the aristocracy. They had been
accustomed to rank and privilege from birth, not counting centuries of
heredity before that, and could live a privileged life with a spontaneity
and ease that was the despairing envy of any jumped-up businessman or
politician who tried to imitate them by voluntary effort. If the noble lord
happened to be as stupid as the pheasants he shot, that showed that he
was even better educated: he had nothing of the uncertainty and hesita-
tion that goes with the investigating of new things.
It is clear that in this argument there are two levels of education
involved. One is the education we acquire through our evolutionary
heredity: we display most of this within a few hours of birth, but its
afterglow remains all through our lives in our social and personal rela-
tions. The other is the specifically human education we develop from the
fact that we are conscious beings. A little girl with a skipping rope would
be a model of the first stage of education; a wise man telling us to take no
thought for the morrow and to consider the lilies as an example of living
would represent the fulfilment of the second stage.
One of Butler's most celebrated remarks is that a hen is simply an egg's
way of making another egg.3 Why should this statement seem so para-
doxical to us, when the reverse statement, that an egg is what a hen
makes, seems so self-evident? Butler explains that the development of an
egg into a hen is a matter of growth through repetition of previous
growths. Every detail of this development can be, and has been, studied
by embryologists. But when a hen makes an egg she cackles, and we are
very impressed by noise, which we always associate with some kind of
Some Reflections on Life and Habit 345

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

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

II

We sometimes say of a student when he has got whatever degree he is

pursuing that he has "completed his education." But of course we know
that this is only a way of talking, and a rather loose way at that: no
human being can ever finish an education as long as he has any sort of
brain to process his experience with. It is only such organisms as the
lichen on the rocks and the medusa jellyfish who have finished their
education, and even they might be caught short by a change in the
environment. Humanity, alone of all organisms, has elected to transform
its environment instead of simply adapting to it, and so only human
beings have a lifelong commitment to experiment, trial and error, uncer-
tainty, and all the other burdens of continuing knowledge.
Does this mean that we are still evolving, and if so, toward what? In
my view this question is not simply unanswerable but can be profoundly
misleading. In the first place, the fact that we are adapting the environ-
ment to ourselves instead of ourselves to the environment has totally
changed the rules of the game, so perhaps the word "evolution," in its
traditional sense, no longer means anything as far as our own future is
concerned. This does not prevent us from using a lot of conceptions of
change and development that we call evolution, even though the word is
Some Reflections on Life and Habit 347

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

Our present mood in regard to education, however, is past-centred

rather than future-centred, and is more inclined to ask, Are we doing as
well as we used to do? This is mainly a reaction to elementary and high
school educators who do not understand why we should transform our
environment by reading Shakespeare when we can so easily adapt to it
by reading Stephen King. I was recently looking through a book that has
been on the bestseller list for a long time, and which propounds the thesis
that students have been cheated out of their education, socially and
morally as well as intellectually.7 I thought, in reading it: somebody
writes this book every ten years; I have lived through four or five cycles
of similar protests, and have in fact contributed to some of them. (On this
last point I think I am speaking for Professor Priestley also.) Such books
are often, like this book, warmly received and are accompanied by a
feeling that something should be done. Nothing ever is done, so there
must be something that the protest has failed to reach.
Two points occur to me in this connection. One is that there is seldom
any recommendation for action in this field except to prod the educa-
tional bureaucracy. And a bureaucracy, as Mr. Gorbachev is undoubt-
edly discovering, cannot be improved by prodding: it can only be left
alone and when possible bypassed. The other is that what the public
picks up from such books is what literary critics call a pastoral myth.
There was a simpler time, the myth runs, when things were a lot better,
so let's get back to them. But just as the future does not yet exist, so the
past has ceased to exist, and an idealized past never did exist. I distrust
all "back to basics" slogans because I distrust all movements that begin
with "back to." It is more profitable, perhaps, to inquire into the reasons
for the dissatisfaction with what our education has achieved, and this
takes us "back to" Butler. Here the phrase "back to" is in its right context,
as it refers to something in the past that can still be brought into the
present.
The author of the book I refer to was clearly still smouldering from the
anti-intellectual movement among students twenty years ago in the late
19603. I remember this period very well: it was a time when, although
practically all students merely wanted to keep on doing what they should
have been doing, there was a small group caught up in an adversarial
trend that I think was almost entirely created by the news media. I notice
that the news media are sniffing around this period again, perhaps in
some hope of reviving it in a new generation. The minority I speak of
were students who felt that they were revolting against middle-class
Some Reflections on Life and Habit 349

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

before I realized that the emphasis on routine was only the flip side of
something very different.
Notice that we speak of "playing" the piano, just as we speak about
playing tennis or chess, and just as we call dramas, even the most terrible
tragedies, "plays." In ordinary speech we distinguish work and play,
work being energy expended for a further end in view, play being energy
expended for its own sake. Doing any kind of playing well, whether on
the stage or at a piano or chessboard, takes an immense amount of work,
but when the work has its end in play we can see the point in it much
more clearly. Nothing gives greater pleasure than spontaneous activity,
but the spontaneous comes at the end of a long discipline of practice. It
never comes early except when it is something we have inherited as part
of our previous evolutionary development—something our ancestors
have practised before us.
Education, then, is a movement toward the spontaneous, not a move-
ment away from it. We speak of liberal education, which means essen-
tially that something in us is getting liberated or set free. When we
practise the piano, we are setting ourselves free to play the piano. The
half-educated may follow rules or dodge around rules; it is only the
thoroughly educated who can take liberties with rules. If we want to
write, it is nothing very wonderful if we can produce acceptable or even
remarkable poetry in early years: poetry at that age ought to be a natural
secretion, like a pearl in an oyster. It is the writers that keep on writing
who matter in the history of literature; and what their incessant practice
aims at is a steadily purer and more direct simplicity. The simple, which
is the opposite of the commonplace, is normally one of the last secrets of
art to be mastered.
We often feel, ploughing through the gobbledygook and bumble of
political speeches and the like, Why can't they say what they mean?
Often, of course, they have excellent reasons for concealing what they
mean, but the real answer is usually that lucidity is difficult. We may
even be impressed by the kind of polysyllabic blather that merely throws
words at the ideas instead of expressing them; we may feel that anything
so hard to read must have been even harder to think out. But eventually
we realize that it is very easy to write this way: in fact it is the normal
way to write when we are not thinking about what we are doing. It is the
same with a kind of scholarly writing that we in the academic world are
reluctantly familiar with, and which infallibly indicates a lack of under-
standing of one's material.
Some Reflections on Life and Habit 351

III

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

we do not know anything until we have recognized it, that is, placed it in
a context of what we already know, rearranging the familiar until the
unfamiliar is fitted into it. It follows that we cannot know the unique as
such. When we come to the phrase "to everything there is a season" and
its corollary, "there is a time for all things," we are in the realm of
experience, where everything is new and unique. The function of knowl-
edge is to set free the capacity to experience. The repetition and constant
practice that underlies the acquiring of a skill, then, is, or certainly ought
to be, a process of continuous discovery: the knowledge is not new, but
the experience of getting it is. Knowledge that tries to do without experi-
ence becomes paranoid; experience that tries to do without knowledge
becomes schizophrenic.
The anti-intellectual trend which is so deeply rooted in American life is
linked to a tendency in American education to emphasize experience at
the expense of knowledge. I say American because the same tendencies
have extended to Canada, perhaps as much here in the West as further
east. The tendency is often associated with the name of John Dewey,
although it seems hardly fair to blame him for all the imbecilities of his
disciples. But certainly such slogans as "learning by doing" can do a
great deal of damage when they ignore the fact that thinking is also a
doing, and one as totally dependent on habit and practice as any other
skill. There is a semantic difficulty here: we often speak, with Thurber's
Walter Mitty, of daydreaming or woolgathering as thinking, and when
we repeat prejudices acquired from our friends or the morning paper we
often imagine that we are thinking for ourselves. But thinking, again, is
like piano-playing: how well we do it depends primarily on how much of
it we have progressively and systematically done already, and at all
times the content of thinking is knowledge. The age of hysteria in the '6os
I spoke of developed the emphasis on experience over knowledge to
great lengths. Drug cults, for example, were pursued as novel modes of
experience, although they totally failed to link up with any genuine
knowledge or creativity. Today the pendulum has swung the other way,
and political leaders at least are required to have as narrow and conven-
tional a background of experience as possible. Unfortunately, a lack of
knowledge seems to be as highly prized as ever.
Samuel Butler was a humanist trying to relate, as a humanist should,
what he observed in his reading to the quality of human life, actual or
potential. His satire Ereivhon depicts a society that has destroyed all its
machinery. They had been persuaded to do this by a writer who told
Some Reflections on Life and Habit 353

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

Introduction

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

10 See Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University

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

i. The Young Boswell

1 The Ghost, in The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 97 (bk. 2,1. 653).
2 E.g., in his A Vision, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1937), 73.
Notes to pages 5-11 357

3 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 309.
4 Nicomachean Ethics, 4.7.14-15.
5 See "Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson," in The Works of Lord
Macaulay, ed. Lady Trevelyan (London: Longmans, 1866), 5:498-538.

2. Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility

1 See "On Writing the History of English Criticism, 1650-1800," University of

Toronto Quarterly, 22 (July 1953): 376-91. [NF]
2 In "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924), Woolf discusses the way that
"Edwardian" writers like Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells would treat the
character of Mrs. Brown (an old woman seen in a railway carriage) and
contrasts this with writers such as herself, Joyce, and Lawrence. See The
Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 94-119.
3 "Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience
would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read
him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the
sentiment." James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2 vols. in i (London: Dent, 1976),
1:427.
4 An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot, \. 182.
5 The Dunciad, bk. i, 1. 32.
6 Thomas Chatterton, Mynstrelles Song, in Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton,
ed. Donald S. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1:210.
7 William Collins, Ode to Evening, 11. 7-8, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William
Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longmans, 1969), 463.
8 Robert Fergusson, The Farmer's Ingle, in The Works of Robert Fergusson, ed.
Alexander Grosart (New York: AMS Press, 1973), 61.
9 William Blake, The Clod and the Pebble, in Blake: Complete Writings, ed.
Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 211; The Complete
Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982), 19. Future references to Blake are
given in the form K2ii/Ei9 for convenience of reference to these two
standard sources.
10 "In Pope, I cannot read a line, / But with a sigh, I wish it mine: / When he
can in one couplet fix / More sense than I can do in six": see Verses on the
Death of Dr. Swift, in Selected Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Kyle
Cathie, 1992), 161 (11. 47-50).
11 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2:443.
12 See Norman Maclean, "From Action to Image," in Critics and Criticism
[: Essays in Method], ed. R.S. Crane ([Chicago: University of Chicago
Press,] 1952), 408-60. [NF]
358 Notes to pages 11-24

13 See Edgar Allan Foe's essay "The Poetic Principle."

14 From Arthur Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant to Paul Demery: "Le Poete se fait
voyant par un long, immense et raisonne dereglement de tons les sens" ["The
poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense, and reasoned
derangement of all the senses"], Oeuvres Completes, ed. Rolland de Reneville
(Paris: Galimard, 1954), 270; cf. also p. 268.
15 Jubilate Agno, in Christopher Smart: Selected Poems, ed. Karina Williamson et
al. (London: Penguin, 1990), 53.
16 Johnson says that Gray "seems in his rapture to confound the images of
'spreading sound' and 'running water.'" However, Johnson is talking about
The Progress of Poesy, not The Bard. See "Gray," in Lives of the English Poets,
ed. George Birbeck Hill (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), 3:436.
17 Rimbaud, Letter to Georges Izambard, Oeuvres Completes, 268.

3. Nature Methodized

1 "The Readie and Easy Way to Establish a Commonwealth," in The Works of

John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-32), 1:149.
2 "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy," in Selected Prose of John Dry den, ed. Earl
Miner (New York: Random House, 1969), 81.
3 John Wilson Croker (1780-1857) was a Tory politician who wrote a fa-
mously savage review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review in 1818.
4 Dobree accurately quotes Charles Gildon (1665-1734), from his Complete Art
of Poetry (1718); Gildon's idea of rules in poetry is expressed by John Dennis
(1657-1734) in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701).
5 The Spectator, no. 29 (3 April 1711).
6 Isaac Newton, Opticks, 2nd ed., Queries 28 and 31.
7 Marjorie Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the
Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). The
poet who spoke of Newton and the Muse was Richard Glover (1712-85) in
his On Sir Isaac Newton (1728), in The Poetical Works of Richard Glover, ed.
Thomas Park (London: John Sharpe, 1806), 2:137-51.
8 This is a quotation from The Creation (1712) by Sir Richard Blackmore (ca.
1650-1729), a writer of copious epics, satires, and religious poems.
9 George Borrow, Lavengro, ed. W.I. Knapp (London: John Murray, 1907), 195
(chap. 31).
10 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (New York: New American Library, 1960),
300 (pt. 4, chap. 10).

4. Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility

i The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore Howard Banks (New
Haven: Archon Books, 1969), 77 (11.191-2).
Notes to pages 25-30 359

2 In canto 63 of bk. 2, Beattie refers to "Those forms of bright perfection,

which the bard . . . consecrates to never-dying fame." A footnote explains
these as "General ideas of excellence, the immediate archetypes of sublime
imitation, both in painting and in poetry." See The Poetical Works of James
Beattie (London: Bell & Daldy, 1870), 59.
3 See Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux, The Art of Poetry (1680-83), 11. 373-428.
4 The Poems and Fables of John Dry den, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford
University Press, 1962), 839 (11. 87-9).
5 The phrase occurs in An Ode ("Shall I begin with Ah, or Oh?"). Originally
attributed to William Cowper, it is now known to be by his friend Robert
Lloyd.
6 Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West, in Poems of Gray, Collins and Cold-
smith, 67.
7 The reference is to Oliver Goldsmith's essay "Account of the Augustan Age
in England," published in The Bee in 1759, which defined the era of Con-
greve, Addison, and their contemporaries as "Augustan."
8 See "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," essay no. 2 in the present
volume.
9 This line begins its public career, already as an example of scientific pseudo-
poetry, in chap. 18 of Biographia Literaria, which is undoubtedly NF's source.
See Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. Donald A. Stauffer (New York:
Random House, 1951), 311. The line is from a poem called Beneficial Effects of
Inoculation, by William Lipscomb (1754-1842).
10 Stephen Duck, On Mites, in Poems on Several Occasions, 1736 (Menston:
Scolar Press, 1973), 160.
11 Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick, at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane,
174.7, in The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith et al. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1974), 109 (11. 53-4).
12 Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989), 63 (11. 485-7).
13 See "Dryden," in Lives of the English Poets, 1:469. See also Horace, Epistles, 1.4.9.
14 Essay on Criticism, 11. 370-1.
15 Joseph Warton's chief work was his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope
(2 vols., 1756 and 1782). Though an admirer of Pope he criticized the Classi-
cal tendencies of eighteenth-century poetry and longed for a revival of
imagination and passion.
16 Although the immediate association here is with F.R. Leavis's book The
Great Tradition (1948), Leavis did not invent the phrase; hence the reference
applies to all evaluative critics.
17 The Spectator, no. 413 (24 June 1712).
18 The reference is to the fundamental tenet of Bishop Berkeley's subjective
idealism: "Esse est percipi or percipere" (The Works of George Berkeley, ed.
A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop [London: Thomas Nelson, 1953], 1:53).
360 Notes to pages 30-45

19 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902). The book argued,
against the social Darwinists, that those who support each other are more
likely to survive than the competitive.
20 The full title of the 1714 edition of Mandeville's work was The Fable of the
Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits.
21 Robert Browning's Parleying with Bernard de Mandeville, in Parleyings with
Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887).
22 Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton (London: Oxford University Press, 1973),
199.
23 Borrow, Lavengro, 195 (chap. 31).
24 Borrow, Lavengro, 423 (chap. 77).
25 Robert Bage, The Fair Syrian (New York: Garland, 1979), 2:81.
26 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 169. Marx
says: "Of [Crusoe's] prayers and the like, we take no account here, since our
friend takes pleasure in them and sees them as recreation."
27 See Swift, Gulliver's Travels, pt. 4, chaps. 4-10.
28 "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," in The Writings and Speeches of
the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Toronto: George N. Morang, 1901), 4:176.
29 See Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932).
30 Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 180 (vol. 3, chap. 36).
31 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 308.

5. CBC Goethe Salute

i In act 2, Egmont says: "As if whipped on by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds

of time sweep the light chariots of our destiny along, and the most we can
do is to maintain courage and calm, hold the reins tight, and steer the
wheels to right or left, here avoiding a stone and there avoiding a plunging
crash." See Goethe's Plays, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1980), 323.

6. Long Sequacious Notes

1 G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (London: Bodley Head, 1909), 1-2.
2 The exact phrase has not been found, but cf. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice,
ed. Erich Heller and Jiirgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth
Duckworth (New York: Schocken, 1973), 389.
3 In "Bentham" (1938), J.S. Mill refers to Bentham and Coleridge as "the two
great seminal minds of England in their age." Essays on Ethics, Religion and
Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 77.
Notes to pages 45-57 361

4 The aphorism reads simply, "A Word a Focal Point" (Inquiring Spirit, 101).
5 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London: Penguin, 1966),
302 (chap. 33).
6 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 1:174.
7 Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, 168-70.
8 "Psilanthropy" means "the doctrine that Jesus Christ was a mere man"; on
p. 381 Coburn quotes Coleridge's Table Talk (1835), which applies this term
to Unitarians.
9 "Captured one time by sharp desire, Apollo / Made him gifts of skills that
were the god's—/ Augury and the lyre and speeding arrows. / lapyx,
however, to postpone the death / Of a father desperately ill, preferred / To
learn the powers of herbs, a healer's ways, / And practise without glory
silent arts." Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (London: Penguin,
1985), 382 (bk. 12,11. 537-43)-
10 Arnold's quotation is from an article on Marx by John Macdonell: "Karl
Marx and German Socialism," The Fortnightly Review, i March 1875, 391.
11 "If there be joy in the world, truly the man of pure heart possesses it."
Thomas a Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, trans. Abbot Justin McCann
(New York: New American Library, 1957), 56 (chap. 4).

7. Lord Byron

1 Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: J. Murray,

1973-82), 7:229 (18 November 1820).
2 Byron's Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1814) was set to music by Arnold
Schoenberg as his Op. 41 (1942), with Napoleon's tyranny suggesting
Hitler's. The piece was for string quartet, piano, and soloist, who declaimed
in recitative (Sprechgesang).
3 Lady Jane Oxford (1774-1824) was married by her father to Edward Harley,
the fifth Earl of Oxford, on 3 March 1794. It was a bad marriage and her
husband was only in law the father of her children, who were called the
Harleian Miscellany, after the literary collection brought together by the
second Earl of Oxford. The affair with Byron started in 1812 and lasted for
a couple of months, ending when she left for the Continent.
4 "'In the very grand and tremendous drama of Cain,' says Scott, 'Lord Byron
has certainly matched Milton on his own ground.' And Lord Byron has
done all this, Scott adds, 'while managing his pen with the careless and
negligent ease of a man of quality.'... Alas,... one has only to repeat to
oneself a line from Paradise Lost in order to feel the difference .... Byron is
so negligent in his poetical style, he is often, to say the truth, so slovenly,
slipshod, and infelicitous, he is so little haunted by the true use and con-
362 Notes to pages 57-70

summate management of words, that he may be described as having for

this artistic gift the insensibility of a barbarian; — which is perhaps only
another and less flattering way of saying, with Scott, that he 'manages his
pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality.'" See "Byron,"
in Essays in Criticism, 2nd ser., vol. 4 of The Works of Matthew Arnold, 15 vols.
(London: Macmillan, 1903), 128-9.
5 See no. 2, n. 13
6 See Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (London: Chatto & Windus,
1897), 19° (chap. 21). Although Byron's poem is recited on examination day
at Tom Sawyer's school, it is not recited by Tom, who instead butchers
Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.
7 The quoted lines comprise the middle stanza of Byron's famous lyric, She
Walks in Beauty. While it is one of many poems that Byron composed to
music, it is not among those he titled Stanzas for Music.
8 Byron's Letters and Journals, 6:211 (20 August 1819).
9 See, for example, the edition of Hobhouse's Swiss Diary for the period from
26 August to 11 October 1816, published on line at http://www.hobby-
o. com / s witzerland .php.
10 Byron's Letters and Journals, 2:194 (*3 September 1812).
11 Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (London: Henry Colburn,
1824), 1:12.
12 See Byron's Preface, in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (London:
Oxford University Press, 1970), 179-80.
13 William Beckford, Vathek, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E.F. Bleiler (New York:
Dover, 1966), 109.
14 Byron's Letters and Journals, 2:193 (1O September 1812).
15 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, in Three Gothic Novels, 48.
16 The phrase is from Byron's long letter to John Murray on William Lisle
Bowles's edition of Pope, which Murray published as a pamphlet. See
Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Peter Gunn (London: Penguin, 1984),
312.
17 Byron's Letters and Journals, 6:231 (26 October 1819).
18 Ibid., 8:148 (6 July 1821).
19 George Paston and Peter Quennell, "To Lord Byron" (London: John Murray,
1939), 159-
20 In his satire Apocolocyntosis, or the apotheosis of a pumpkin.
21 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: J.M. Dent, 1908), 145 (bk. 2,
chap. 9).
22 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: J.M. Dent, 1912), 279-80 (bk. 4,
chap. 7).
23 Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (London: Penguin, 1946), 12.
24 W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1970), 246. Yeats made the
remark about George William Russell (AE).
Notes to pages 72-80 363

8. Foreword to Romanticism Reconsidered

1 For Hulme's attack on Romanticism, see "Romanticism and Classicism"

(probably dating from 1911-12, posthumously published 1924), in The
Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994), 59~73- In his own article NF alludes to Eliot's preference for
poetry predating a "dissociation of sensibility" in his "The Metaphysical
Poets," Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951). For some of
Pound's anti-Romantic remarks, which included calling Wordsworth "a
silly old sheep" and Blake "dippy William," see Literary Essays of Ezra
Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), 277, 72.
2 See NF's n. 3 to no. 9, below.
3 The Coleridge quotation is from the prose "Argument" to the poem Reli-
gious Musings, in Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, 91.
4 William Wordsworth, "Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads," in
Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1965), 455-

9. The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism

1 Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, ed. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1967), 253 (7 August 1799).
2 T.E. Hulme, "Romanticism and Classicism," in Collected Writings, 66.
3 See the article "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms," [in Arthur O.
Lovejoy] Essays in the History of Ideas ([Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,]
1948) [228-53]. [NF]
4 Of Education, in The Works of John Milton, 4:286.
5 Sarah Binks, by Paul G. Hiebert ([Toronto: Geoffrey Cumberlege,] 1947) [6].
The joke, however, like so many jokes, is anticipated in Finnegans Wake
[London: Faber & Faber, 1939], 203. [NF] Joyce writes: "Was it yst with wyst
or Lucan Yokan or where the hand of man has never set foot?"
6 Marjorie H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (1946). [NF]
7 Shelley's Jupiter is the supreme deity of Prometheus Unbound, referred to by
Shelley in his preface as "the Oppressor of mankind." Byron's Arimanes is
the Lord of Nemesis in Manfred, whose "shadow is the Pestilence" (2.4.9-
13). The Lord in the prologue to Goethe's Faust invites Mephistopheles to
try and do his worst to Faust. For the Baudelaire reference, see Even When
She Walks in Les Fleurs du Mai, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R.
Godine, 1982), 33. Hardy's Immanent Will appears, for instance, in The
Unborn in Time's Laughingstocks and Other Poems.
8 A Vision, 8.
9 Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers ([New
Haven: Yale University Press,] 1951). [NF]
364 Notes to pages 81-9

10 Religio Medici, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes
(London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 1:26 (pt. i, sec. 16).
11 I am not assuming that man was not responsible for his civilization in pre-
Romantic times, but it makes a good deal of psychological difference
whether man is regarded as the continuous creator of his civilization or
merely as the trustee of an original form given him by God. [NF]
12 Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2:2546.
13 Sonnet ("When I have fears that I may cease to be"), 1. 6.
14 As did T.S. Eliot in "The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 288.
15 The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1958), 1:232 (19 February 1818).
16 Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, 237 (chap. 12).
17 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldberg,
Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1993), 207 (Lecture 6).
18 See "The Correspondent Breeze," reprinted in M.H. Abrams, ed., English
Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism ([New York: Oxford University
Press,] 1960) [37-54]. [NF]
19 Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1:921.
20 Blake uses "Giant Forms" in the Preface to Jerusalem, "To the Public" (pi. 3);
then again in pi. 53,1. 8 (K62O, 684/Ei45, 202). For Wordsworth's "huge and
mighty forms" see The Prelude, bk. i, 1. 398 (1850) or 1. 425 (1805).
21 [Edward Bostetter,] The Romantic Ventriloquists ([Seattle: University of
Washington Press,] 1963). [NF]
22 Letters of John Keats, 2:67 (19 February 1819).
23 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Speculations on Metaphysics, in Complete Works, ed
Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 6:64.
24 The allusions to Blake are to the Introduction to the Songs of Experience, the
"And did those feet" lyric from Milton, and the poem from the Rossetti MS
beginning "The Caverns of the Grave I've seen." [NF]
25 Milton, pi. 15,1. 39 (K497/Eno).
26 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writ-
ings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 158.
27 D.H. Lawrence, Selected Poems, ed. Mara Kalnins (London: J.M. Dent, 1992),
75-
28 Of particular interest is the Yeatsian identification of chance and choice in
the passage quoted. [NF] In StS, NF then refers the reader to his discussion
of Yeats's Thirteenth Cone, where chance and choice are one, in the essay
"The Top of the Tower" (StS, 259).
29 Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, pt. 56: "Nature, red in tooth and
claw / With ravine, shriek'd against his creed."
30 As NF's next remark indicates, he has in mind here W.H. Auden's Atlantis
(1941), which describes a trip to Atlantis in a "ship of fools."
Notes to pages 90-9 365

31 See no. 2, n. 14.

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

10 A Study of English Romanticism

1 In Shaw's one-act play of 1913, The Music Cure, the following exchange
occurs:
REGINALD [exhausted but calm]: Why does valerian soothe me when it excites
cats? There's a question to reflect on! You know, they ought to have made
me a philosopher.
THE DOCTOR: Philosophers are born, not made.
REGINALD: Fine old chestnut, that. Everybody's born, not made.
THE DOCTOR: You're getting almost clever.
From The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (London: Oldham Press, 1931),
1126. The original remark is not from Horace but is a proverbial tag.
2 The Garden of Cyrus, in Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 1:226 (chap. 5).
3 See Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe ([Oxford: Clarendon
Press,] 1921). [NF]
4 Besides Blackmore's The Creation, quoted at p. 20, above, NF is thinking of
such poems as the Hymn to Science by Mark Akenside (1721-70), An Essay on
the Universe in Four Books by Moses Browne (1704-87), and the Ode to the
Memory of Sir Isaac Newton: Inscribed to the Royal Society by Allan Ramsay
(1686-1758).
5 Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama (London: Macmillan, 1925), 522.
366 Notes to pages 99-106

6 See "On Poesy or Art/' in Biographia Literaria, ed. [J.] Shawcross [London:
Oxford University Press, 1954], 2:257-8. [NF] The terms natura naturata and
natura naturans have medieval roots, but their modern usage in Schelling,
Coleridge, and others descends from Spinoza.
7 Parenthetical references to Death's Jest-Book and Beddoes's other plays are to
The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. H.W. Donner (London: Oxford
University Press, 1935).
8 Blake, Europe, pi. 15,1. 2 (K245/E66).
9 The title of the pamphlet for which Shelley was expelled from Oxford.
10 Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University
Press, 1971), 801.
11 Ibid., 812.
12 This term in this book means the whole period from the beginning of the
Christian era down to the latter part of the eighteenth century. [NF]
13 Cf. Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris
([London: Faber & Gwyer,] 1928), chap. i. [NF]
14 For De Quincey's enthusiasm for Ricardo, see "Dialogues of Three
Templars on Political Economy, Chiefly in Relation to the Principles of Mr.
Ricardo" (1824), in The Works of Thomas De Quincey (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1859), 10:195-287. See also "The Services of Mr. Ricardo to the
Science of Political Economy, Briefly and Plainly Stated" (1824), in Thomas
De Quincey: The Uncollected Writings (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1890),
1:154-9. The most convenient English source for Goethe's scientific writing
is probably Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (New York:
Surkhamp, 1988). This volume includes the first part of Goethe's Theory of
Colour (German, 1810) as well as excerpts from his scientific journal On
Morphology, which contains an "Outline for a General Introduction to
Comparative Anatomy, Commencing With Osteology" (1820).
15 See his Hymne de I'Univers (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961).
16 T.S. Eliot's "unreal city" is in The Waste Land, 1. 60; Charles Baudelaire's
"fourmillante cite" is from the preface to Les Fleurs du Mai; Belgian poet
EmileVerhaeren (1855-1916) wrote Les Villes Tentaculaires in 1895.
17 The Prelude, bk. i, 1. 398 (1850) or 1. 425 (1805).
18 The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816-1879, £d. H.E. Rollins (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1965), 2:144.
19 Religio Medici, in Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 1:26 (pt. i, sec. 16).
20 The concept of a "speaking picture" derives from Horace's Ut pictura poesis,
or "As is painting, so is poetry" (Ars Poetica, \. 361). The idea that painting
and poetry, as mimetic arts, are similar was widely repeated in Renaissance
and later criticism, but began to be attacked in the eighteenth century by
G.E. Lessing in his essay Laokoon (1766).
21 I take this term from Robert Schumann's piano music; cf. the
Notes to pages 106-25 367

Davidsbundlertanze, op. 6, and the conclusion of the Carnival, op. 9 ("Marche

des Davidsbiindler contre les Philistins"). [NF] In 1831 Schumann had
invented a "League of David" composed of music lovers—dead, alive, and
imaginary—to battle against Philistine musical tastes.
22 John Milton, Sonnet 16 (On His Blindness), 1. 3.
23 See the "Annotations to Reynolds," K465/E652.
24 This concept recurs throughout Hazlitt's work. See, for example, the lecture
"On Shakespeare and Milton," reprinted in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed.
Walter Jackson Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 307-12.
25 The Higher Pantheism, in The Poetry of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks
(London: Longmans, 1969), 1204-5.
26 For a violent and roughly contemporary reaction to this, see George Bor-
row's The Romany Rye ([London: John Murray,] 1857), chap. 7 of the Appen-
dix. [NF]
27 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 183.
28 The influence of these has, paradoxically, popularized the notion that
Romanticism has no consistent imaginative structure, but is only a chaotic
period of subjectivity and relativism, at most a number of contradictory
tendencies, following the dissolution of the great chain of being. It is hoped
that the present book, along with some of those listed in the bibliography,
will help the reader to put Humpty Dumpty together again by himself. [NF]
29 The whole of Pound's Canto 45 is a complaint about "usura" (usury).
"Usura slayeth the child in her womb / It stayeth the young man's courting
/ It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth / between the young bride and her
bridegroom / CONTRA NATURA" and so on.
30 See "The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 288.
31 Wordsworth, The Recluse, 1. 821.
32 Rimbaud, Lettre du voyant. See also no. 2, n. 14.
33 Endymion, bk. 2,1.14.
34 The Vision of Judgment, 11. 688-9.
35 See Friedrich Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans.
Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966).
36 Despondency Corrected is the title of bk. 4 of Wordsworth's The Excursion.
37 This is, of course, Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony ([London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press,] 1933). [NF]
38 The poem, whose first line is "O why was I born with a different face,"
occurs in a letter to Butts, 16 August 1803, K828-9/E733.
39 No. 206 of his Pensees (1670), normally translated as "The eternal silence of
these infinite spaces terrifies me."
40 The scheme of the present book perhaps owes something to that of D.G.
James, The Romantic Comedy ([London: Oxford University Press,] 1948),
though the differences in attitude are obvious. [NF]
368 Notes to pages 126-39

41 I am not suggesting that it was Beddoes's fault that his play was not pub-
lished earlier, only that it is always unfortunate for literature not to have
important works published in their primary chronological place. I think this
principle applies also to the poetry of Hopkins. [NF]
42 Life and Habit, vol. 4 of The Works of Samuel Butler (New York: AMS Press,
1968), 109.
43 These lines are spoken by Orlando.
44 Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 614-15.
45 Bosola is a main character in John Webster's The Duchess ofMalfi (written
1612/13, published 1623); Vendice is the misguided revenger of The Reveng-
er's Tragedy (1607) by Thomas Middleton.
46 Edward E. Bostetter's The Romantic Ventriloquists[: Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Keats, Shelley, Byron (Seattle: University of Washington Press,] 1963) deals
with this feature of Romantic poetry, though it is not concerned with
Beddoes. [NF]
47 Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 595.
48 T.S. Eliot, "Christopher Marlowe," in Selected Essays, 123.
49 Death Sweet, in Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 243.
50 "Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque
Art in English Poetry" (1864). [NF] See The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot
(London: The Economist, 1965), 2:321-66.
51 "The Works of Edgar Allan Poe," Essays and Reviews. [NF] See The Works of
Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), 24:107-17.
52 Yeats does not refer specifically to the bardo in his poems or letters, but
"The Gates of Pluto" (the final section of A Vision, 1926) includes some
discussion of reincarnation. Yeats describes the "coming to self-knowledge"
of the spirit after death, and the various states that the soul undergoes
before its "return."
53 The Phases of the Moon, 1.118.
54 I owe this view of Goethe to Barker Fairley, Goethe's Faust: Six Essays ([Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press,] 1953). [NF]
55 In a letter to Thomas Forbes Kelsall (i April 1826), Beddoes wrote: "Thank
you for the box to day—because it has come. You're right, the Cenci is best,
because truest. [...] Why did you send me the Cenci? I open my own page,
& see at once what damned trash it all is. No truth or feeling" (Works of
Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 619).
56 Cf. Eliot's comment on the "tomorrow" speech in "The Three Voices of
Poetry," in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 100.
57 "The plot then is the first principle and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy:
character comes second" (Poetics, 6.14).
58 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pi. 7,1.18 (Ki5i/E36).
59 From Gosse: the Donner Variorum edition has another and much more
verbose reading. [NF] See Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 328-9.
Notes to pages 140-55 369

60 This remark, on reflection, seems pointless, except that it is true that

Beddoes's world of the dead tends to become, like Shelley's world of
immortality, an explicitly mythological world. [NF]
61 The eponymous character of "Hop-Frog" is a crippled, dwarf jester who
takes revenge on his captor-king by tricking him and his seven ministers
into attending a masque as chained Ourang-Outangs, then setting the room
on fire with the masquers trapped inside.
62 J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (London: Methuen, 1961), 108
(act 3).
63 The allusion is to the comic retelling of medieval legends by R.H Barham
(1788-1845). The poems first appeared in Bentley's Miscellany and The New
Monthly Magazine starting in 1837, and were first collected in 1840.
64 Martin Heidegger is the main philosopher to make use of this concept.
Heidegger uses Augenblick to mean a "moment of vision." A key usage is
found in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(London: SCM Press, 1962), 387-8.
65 Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 252-3.
66 Ibid., 240.
67 Fragment, Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 496.
68 Fragment, Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 492.
69 In i Samuel 28:7-20, Saul in disguise consults the Witch of Endor, who
summons the recently-dead prophet Samuel to advise him.
70 Written in an Album at Clifton, in Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 103.
71 Draft version of lines by Sibylla: see Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 399.
72 There seems in fact to be a definite influence from Kant on Beddoes: see
H.W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes ([Oxford: Basil Blackwell,] 1935), 213.
[NF] For "Kant's riddle," see p. 167, below.
73 The theme of his Being and Nothingness (1943; trans. 1957).
74 Shelley refers to Nature's, and Necessity's, "unvarying harmony" in the
sixth section of Queen Mab, 1. 203.
75 For Prometheus, see Shelley: Poetical Works, 826. In Blake's Jerusalem, Los
complains to Jerusalem that "thou hast bound me down upon the Stems of
Vegetation" (pi. 60,1.11, E2io/K692).
76 According to Graves, The Greek Myths, the name means "Disposer" (index).
"Tethys' and Thetis' are names of the goddess as Creatrix (formed, like
'Themis' and Theseus,' from tithenai, 'to dispose' or 'to order'), and as Sea-
goddess, since life began in the sea" (11.2).
77 In the essay On Life (1815). For Godwin as a possible intermediate influence
here see the edition of Godwin's Political Justice by F.E.L. Priestley ([To-
ronto: University of Toronto Press,] 1946), 3:109. [NF]
78 Introduction to Songs of Experience, K2io/Ei8.
79 A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 503.
370 Notes to pages 155-64

80 Coleridge's essay "On the Principles of Genial Criticism" was originally

conceived as a means of promoting an exhibition of the paintings of his
friend Washington Allston (1779-1843), though in its final form it alluded
only briefly to him (Biographia Literaria, 2:223,237)- NF may have in mind
rather the long description of Allston's Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase
(1806), in which Coleridge virtually wanders through the landscape. See The
Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2, pt. i, entry 2831. For natura
naturans, see n. 6, above.
81 Shelley: Poetical Works, 811.
82 Ibid., 827.
83 Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 505-6.
84 Prometheus Unbound, 3.4.39; Endymion, bk. i, 1.16; The Bride's Tragedy, 3.5.8.
[NF]
85 See A Defence of Poetry and The Four Ages of Poetry, ed. John E. Jordan
(Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1965), 42n. 52.
86 E.M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany ([Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,] 1935). [NF]
87 Yeats's The Phases of the Moon brings together "Milton's Platonist" and
"Shelley's visionary prince" (11. 15-16). The alternation of civilizations that
are "primary" (objective, "comic," and democratic, as in Christianity) and
those that are "antithetical" (subjective, "tragic," and aristocratic, as in
Classical times), is a major theme in A Vision.
88 If this book had been a study of German Romanticism, the three poets
chosen would (probably) have been Kleist, Heine, and Holderlin. The
substitution of Heine for Shelley would have made this part of the argu-
ment easier to follow, as Heine adopts the old Joachim of Floris conception
of the dawn of a third age of the Spirit following after the ages of Father
and Son. See the ballad "Tannenbaum, mit griinen Fingern" in Die Harzreise
(1826). Similarly in Blake, the martyred Son-figure, Ore or Luvah, is the son,
not of the Father-figure Urizen, but of the Spirit-figure Los. [NF]
89 Shelley: Poetical Works, 812.
90 Fragments of an Unfinished Drama, in Shelley: Poetical Works, 483 (11.15-19).
91 Shelley: Poetical Works, 206.
92 Ibid., 277.
93 In particular, Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson
([London: SPCK,] 1953), and The Mind and Heart of Love, by M.C. D'Arcy, S.J.
([London: Faber,] 1945). [NF]
94 Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 505.
95 In his Defence of Poetry, p. 506, Shelley says that "It [poetry] justifies that
bold and true word of Tasso—Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il
Poeta" (None deserve the name of creator except God and the Poet). The
quotation is from Pierantonio Serassi's Italian Life ofTorquato Tasso (1785).
Notes to pages 166-81 371

For the universal human mind in On Life, see Shelley's Poetry and Prose,
478.
96 NF is here equating creation and fall in Blakean manner. What Augustine
actually says is that time came into existence with the creation. See Saint
Augstine, Confessions, trans, with introduction and notes Henry Chad wick
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 229 ff. (bk. 11, sec. 13 ff.).
97 Milton, pi. 15,11.39, 46 (K497/Eno).
98 Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1964), 154 (16 November 1819).
99 Prometheus Unbound, 3.4.1.
100 T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 174 (act 3,11.
423-31)-
101 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1. 317.
102 "There may be heaven; there must be hell; / Meantime, there is our earth
here—well!" Time's Revenges (1845), 11. 65-6.
103 Shelley: Poetical Works, 448.
104 "Note on Prometheus Unbound," in Shelley: Poetical Works, 271.
105 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934), 35.
106 "The Four Ages of Poetry," rpt. in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard
Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 509-14.
107 Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 482, 493.
108 Ibid., 505.
109 Ibid., 506.
no T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, 1. 89 (end of pt. 2).
111 Letters of John Keats, 2:102 (21 April 1819).
112 Ibid., 1:243 ( X 3 March 1818).
113 The Fall of Hyperion, canto i, 1.199.
114 Letters of John Keats, 1:185 (22 November 1817).
115 Ibid., 1:139 (10 May 1817).
116 Ibid., 1:170 (8 October 1817).
117 Ibid., 1:281 (3 May 1818).
118 Ode on Indolence, \. 54.
119 Parenthetic references are to canto and line of Endymion.
120 See Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography ([London: Murray,] 1957), 2:886.
[NF] Marchand points out that in a letter to John Murray (4 November
1820), Byron wote: "The Edinburgh praises Jack Keats or Ketch, or whatever
his names are: why his is the Onanism of Poetry." In a later letter to Murray
(9 November 1820), Byron added, "such writing is a sort of mental mastur-
bation—he is always f—gg—g his Imagination. I don't mean he is indecent,
but viciously soliciting his own ideas into such a state, which is neither
poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and
opium."
372 Notes to pages 181-202

121 Point Counter Point (Penguin: London, 1955), 124 (chap. 10). Rampion calls
Shelley "a mixture between a fairy and a white slug."
122 Edmund Spenser, Mutabilitie, in The Fairie Queen, ed. Thomas P. Roche
(London: Penguin, 1978), 1055 (canto 8, st. 2).
123 Letter to Ellen Delp, 27 October 1925. [NF]
124 The Crystal Cabinet, 1. 21 [K429/E488].
125 Sonnet 5, Those hours that with gentle work did frame, 1.10.
126 Ode to a Nightingale, 1. 24 (st. 3).
127 Keats: Poetical Works, 351.
128 In a letter to Richard Woodhouse of 27 October 1818 Keats remarks that the
poet has no identity; in a letter to George and Thomas Keats of 21 Decem-
ber 1817 he comments on the poet's "negative capability" of remaining in
uncertainties. See Letters of John Keats, 1:387,193.
129 Letters of John Keats, 1:387 (27 October 1818).
130 Ibid., 1:207 (23 January 1818).
131 In Edgar Allan Poe's story "Ligeia," the narrator's second wife comes back
from the dead and appears to take possession of him in the persona of his
loved first wife Ligeia.
132 Letters of John Keats, 1:277 (3 May 1818).
133 Martin Heidegger, Erlaiiterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung (1951). Two of
Heidegger's Holderlin essays are translated in Existence and Being, ed.
Werner Brock ([London: Vision,] 1949). [NF]
134 Letters of John Keats, 1:185 (22 November 1817).
135 See T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 287-8.
136 Cf. Andrew Marvell, Thoughts in a Garden, 11. 47-8: "Annihilating all that's
made, / To a green thought in a green shade."
137 Letters of John Keats, 2:323 (16 August 1820).
138 Ibid., 1:186 (22 November 1817).
139 Ibid., 1:143 (n May 1817).
140 Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, 1.100.
141 Letters of John Keats, 1:231 (19 February 1818).
142 So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch, in Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 296 (11. 23-4).
143 Letters of John Keats, 1:243 (^3 March 1818).
144 Ibid., 2:208 (21 September 1819).
145 Ibid., 1:232 (19 February 1818).
146 Ode on a Grecian Urn, st. 2,1. 4.
147 Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk. 6,1. 639.
148 Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 11.1-2 (K431/E49O).
149 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 504.
150 Letters of John Keats, 2:146 (24 August 1819).
151 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 12,1. 587.
Notes to pages 202-14 373

152 The reference is to the optimistic tutor in Voltaire's Candide (1759), who
taught that this was the best of all possible worlds.
153 Letters of John Keats, 2:101 (21 April 1819).
154 Ibid., 1:185 (22 November 1817).
155 Ibid., 2:102 (21 April 1819).
156 Ibid., 2:5 (16 December 1818).
157 Ibid., 1:218 (30 January 1818).
158 T.S. Eliot, "Poetry and Drama," in On Poetry and Poets (1957), 87. [NF]
159 "The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of
all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in the infinite I AM." Biographia Literaria, 1:202 (chap. 13).
160 See no. 6, n. 7.

11. John Keats

1 Letters of John Keats, 1:185 (22 November 1817).

2 The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1960), 2:173-6.
3 Letters of John Keats, 1:387 (27 October 1818).
4 The Keats Circle, 2:144.
5 Predictably, the efforts of Keats and Shelley were entitled Sonnet-—To the
Nile, Hunt's being Sonnet—The Nile.
6 Letters of John Keats, 1:264 (8 April 1818).
7 For these three reviews, see Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G.M. Matthews
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 97-110,110-14, and 91-6.
8 Letters of John Keats, 2:293 (10 June 1818).
9 "Keats seems to me also a great poet.... The Odes—especially perhaps the
Ode to Psyche—are enough for his reputation." T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry
and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), 100.
10 Burton relates the story of one Menippus Lycius, who was seduced by a
serpent or "Lamia," from the fourth book of Philostratus's De vita Apollonii.
See The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K.
Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3:45-6 (3rd
partition, sec. 2, member i, subsec. i).
11 Letters of John Keats, 2:167 (21 September 1819).
12 The Keats Circle, 2:73-4.
13 Letters of John Keats, 2:323 (16 August 1820).
14 Ibid., 2:359 (3° November 1820).
15 Ibid., 2:360 (30 November 1820).
16 The Keats Circle, 2:152.
17 In a letter dated 15 November 1888 to Buxton Forman (editor of Letters to
Fanny Brawne, 1878), Patmore wrote, "I find nothing in these letters that
374 Notes to pages 214-31

deserves a much better name than lust/ which, when compared with the
integrity of heat in true passion, is toad-cold." Memoirs and Correspondence of
Coventry Patmore, ed. Basil Champneys (London: George Bell, 1900), 2:271.
Matthew Arnold, after quoting one of Keats's letters to Fanny, says that "It
is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice which one might hear
read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. The sensuous
man speaks in it, and the sensuous man of a badly-bred and badly trained
sort." "John Keats," in Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism, ist and 2nd ser.
(London: Everyman, 1964), 283.
18 The Keats Circle, 1:69.

12. Kathleen Hazel Coburn

1 When NF showed Coburn a draft of Fearful Symmetry, she was horrified at

the complete lack of footnotes (Ayre, 187-8).
2 For the attitude of NF's Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden, see NFHK, 2:864.
3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ed. David Erdman (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978), 2:78

14. In the Earth, or In the Air?

1 Selected Writings of Hans Denck, ed. and trans. Edward J. Furcha (Pittsburgh:
Pickwick Press, 1975), 135.
2 Gouffre du neant may be translated "abyss of nothingness." The two poems
by Baudelaire are Le Gouffre (1862) and Le Gout du neant (1859).
3 "Your Sailing to Byzantium, magnificent as the first three stanzas are, lets me
down in the fourth, as such a goldsmith's bird is as much nature as man's
body, especially if it only sings like Homer and Shakespeare of what is past
or passing or to come to Lords and Ladies." Letter of Moore to Yeats, 16
April 1930, in W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-
1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 162.
4 W.B. Yeats, Blood and the Moon, pt. 2,1.14, and The Circus Animals' Desertion,
final line.
5 Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 88.

15. Review of Patience and The Silver Box

1 It was this production of The Gondoliers that cemented the relationship

between NF and Helen Kemp, he operating the arc light while she held the
prompt book (see NFHK, 1:390,2:602).
2 Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), who was awarded honorary doctorates in
Notes to pages 231-42 375

music from Durham University (1910), Oxford (1926), and Manchester (1930),
and an LL.D. from St. Andrews in 1928, is most admired for her Mass in D
(1891) and for her opera The Wreckers (1902-4). American composer, conduc-
tor, and critic Reginald de Koven (1859-1920) helped to establish the style of
American light opera with musicals such as Robin Hood (1900) and The
Highwayman (1897).
3 In NF's second year, "the drama group, Vic Dramatics, fell apart organiza-
tionally and Frye helped to pick up the pieces and organize the year" (Ayre,
66).

16. Review of H.M.S. Pinafore

i Gate House, where NF had a single room from his second year on, was the
"house" that linked the newer to the older section of the men's residence,
Burwash Hall.

20. James, Le Farm, and Morris

i Possibly Sir Oswald Mosley (1896-1980), The Alternative (Mosley Publica-

tions, 1947), which deals with the crisis of the European democracies in the
face of Communism.

22. Joan Evans's John Ruskin

1 Peter Quennell, John Ruskin: The Portrait of a Prophet (1949); Derrick Leon,
Ruskin, the Great Victorian (1949); Reginald Howard Wilenski, John Ruskin:
An Introduction to Further Study of His Life and Work (1933).
2 Ruskin married Euphemia ("Effie") Gray in 1848. The marriage was an-
nulled in 1854 for non-consummation, and in 1855 Gray married the painter
John Everett Millais. In Evans's words, Ruskin "set his heart upon the child
Rosa La Touche" (251) when they first met in 1859; she was ten years old, he
was forty. On her seventeenth birthday he asked her to marry him, but her
increasing mental instability and her parents' opposition precluded this.
She died "wholly mad" (353) in 1875. Also in 1859, Ruskin met Margaret
Alexis Bell, the headmistress of a private girls' school at Winnington,
Cheshire. He paid frequent extended visits to the school until he quarrelled
with Bell in 1865, enjoying chiefly, Evans suggests, the presence of the
young female students "who fluttered everywhere and smiled at him as he
passed" (256). The St. George's Company or Guild had its origin in the May
1871 number of Fors Clavigera, when Ruskin began soliciting funds for a
scheme to buy land which was to be cultivated without the benefits of
steam power, ready-made goods, and individual freedom (341). The Guild's
376 Notes to pages 243-66

essentially vague and unworkable conception made failure inevitable, and

Ruskin abandoned the scheme in 1886. The Whistler libel suit of 1878 arose
when the painter sued Ruskin for writing of his Nocturne in Black and Gold
that he had "never expected a coxcomb to ask two hundred guineas for
flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" (372). Whistler won his case, but
was awarded only a farthing in damages, both sides being ordered to pay
their own legal costs.
3 Evans at 285n. 2 refers the reader to J.A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of
His Life in London, 1834-81 (1844), 2:298.

23. Emily Dickinson

1 References in square brackets preceded by "L" are to the numbered letters

in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1958).
2 References in square brackets not preceded by an "L" are to the numbered
poems in Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson
(London: Faber & Faber, 1970).
3 Towards the end of chap. 2 of Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What
Alice Found There (1871), the Red Queen says to Alice: "Now here, you see, it
takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to
get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" The Com-
plete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: The Modern Library, 1900), 166.
4 Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1960), 99.
5 Millicent Todd Bingham, Ancestors' Brocades (New York: Harper, 1945), 16.
6 Bingham, Ancestors' Brocades, 127.
7 "Walt Whitman," in Robert Louis Stevenson: Essays and Poems (London: J.M.
Dent, 1992), 149.
8 The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings, ed. Thomas H.
Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 3:840.
9 The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3:1002.
10 The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 2:480.
11 See Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood, 1. 52. [NF]
12 From Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr.
Yorick, ed Gardner D. Stout, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1967), 262 ("Maria").
13 See "The Gospel of the Hebrews," in The Complete Gospels: Annotated Schol-
ars' Version, ed. Robert J. Miller (San Fransciso: HarperCollins, 1994), 432
(4b).
14 Unnumbered fragment, Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3:920.
Notes to pages 269-81 377

15 The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3:825.

16 Unnumbered fragment, Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3:925.

24. The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century

1 All three of Milton's antiprelatical tracts, "Of Reformation" (1641), "Of

Prelatical Episcopacy" (1641), and "The Reason of Church Government"
(1642) express the view that the Gospels do not sanction the existence of
bishops. See The Works of John Milton, 3:514-617, 618-52, 736-861. For an
example of a bishop who is really an overseer, see Milton's description of
Timothy as Bishop of Ephesus, 3:630-1.
2 Areopagitica, in The Works of John Milton, 4:319. Aristotle's proairesis is gener-
ally translated "choice" with the sense of "deliberate choice" (e.g., Ethics, 17)
or "purposive choice."
3 The Reason of Church-government urg'd against Prelaty, in Works of John Milton,
3:225.
4 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Works of John Milton, 5:19.
5 Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in The Writings and
Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989), 4:169-70.
6 Ibid., 4:162.
7 Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund
Burke, 8:84.
8 Ibid., 8:72.
9 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund
Burke, 4:174.
10 Ibid., 4:175.
11 Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund
Burke, 8:129-30.
12 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 168.
13 Butler, Life and Habit, 18.
14 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (London: Pan Books, 1976), 340 (chap.
78).
15 Samuel Butler, Erewhon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 145 (chap. 17).
16 William Morris, News from Nowhere, ed. Krishan Kumar (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995), 100 (chap. 15).
17 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund
Burke, 4:177.
18 J.S. Mill, "Bentham," 108.
19 "Utilitarianism," in Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, ed. J.M. Robson
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 207.
20 The reference is to John Stuart Mill's wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, a strong-
378 Notes to pages 281-95

minded feminist and socialist. In his Autobiography Mill praised her extrava-
gantly as his intellectual superior and the inspirer, reviser, and virtual co-
author of many of his works.
21 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Frank M. Turner (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 78 (discourse 5, sec. 2).
22 Ibid., 78 (discourse 5, sec. 2).
23 Ibid., 85 (discourse 5, sec. 6).
24 Ibid., 135 (discourse 7, sec. 6).
25 Culture and Anarchy, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed.
R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 5:190-1
(chap. 5).
26 Ibid., 147 (chap. 3).
27 Ibid., 113 (chap. i).
28 Theses on Feuerbach, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New
York: International Publishers, 1975), 5:3.
29 Culture and Anarchy, 184 (chap. 5).
30 T.H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London: Pilot Press,
1947), loin. 20.

25. Dickens and the Comedy of Humours

1 In chap. 15 of The Warden Trollope describes how Mr. Popular Sentiment

produces a novel, The Almshouse, exposing with melodramatic exaggeration
the supposed abuses of the clergy.
2 T.S. Eliot, "Wilkie Collins and Dickens," in Selected Essays, 468.
3 AC, 166. [NF]
4 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 13.
5 Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Margaret Card well (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 217 (chap. 23).
6 Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (1900), passim.
7 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 908 (chap. 66).
8 [E.M. Forster] Aspects of the Novel ([Harmondsworth: Penguin,] 1927) 80
(chap.3, "People")]. [NF]
9 See, for example, Bleak House, 223 (chap. 15) and 341 (chap. 23).
10 Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984), 54 (bk. 2, chap. 6).
11 Ibid., 625 (bk. 18, chap. 48).
12 See, for example, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 468 (chap. 39).
13 Bouvard et Pecuchet is an unfinished novel by Flaubert, published posthu-
mously in 1881. The original edition contained, as an appendix, Flaubert's
Notes to pages 295-315 379

"Dictionnaire des Idees Recus," which was published as a separate volume

in 1913.
14 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 209 (chap. 27).
15 Wyndham Lewis, "An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce," in Time and
Western Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 1O5-
16 See Wyndham Lewis, "The Greatest Satire is Non-Moral," in Men without
Art (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 92-3.
17 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. John Holloway (London: Penguin, 1973),
579 (bk. 2, chap. 8).
18 Ibid., 725 (bk. 2, chap. 21).
19 Dickens, Oliver Twist, 422 (chap. 51).
20 See NF's "The Argument of Comedy," in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed.
D.A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58-73.
21 Dickens, Little Dorrit, 39 (bk. i, chap. i).
22 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. George Woodcock (London:
Penguin, 1970), 137 (bk. 2, chap. 7).
23 Lewis Carrroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in The Annotated Alice, ed.
Martin Gardner (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 7.

26. The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris

1 "Morris as I Knew Him," in Bernard Shaw: The Complete Prefaces, ed. Dan H.
Laurence and Daniel J. Leary (London: Penguin, 1993-97), 3:2&4-
2 J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (London: Oxford University Press,
1950), 1:10.
3 Mackail, Life of William Morris, 332.
4 The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987), 1:162 (22 June 1872).
5 Collected Letters of William Morris, 2:807 (9 August 1882).
6 The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 96.
7 "Author's Preface," in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W.H.
Gardner and N.H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 45.
8 Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 29.
9 William Morris, News from Nowhere, 33 (chap. 5).
10 "The Lesser Arts," in The Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A.L. Merton
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 40.
11 Carryle, Sartor Resartus, 210.
12 "The Nature of Gothic," in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook
and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), 10:197.
13 Life of William Morris, 2:210.
380 Notes to pages 317-31

14 Political Writings of William Morris, 241.

15 See Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (New York: Modern
Library, 1951), chaps. 6 and 11.
16 Morris, News from Nowhere, 70 (chap. 10).
17 William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1936), 2:506.
18 Ibid., 2:507.
19 Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 134.
20 Collected Letters of William Morris, 2:203 (i July 1883).
21 Morris, News from Nowhere, 202 (chap. 29).
22 "The Nature of Gothic," in Complete Works of John Ruskin, 10:188.
23 See no. 10, n. 29.
24 William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, ed. Florence S. Boos (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 1:52.
25 W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (Gerrard's Cross: Colin Smythe, 1981), 86.
26 Morris, The Earthly Paradise, 1:342.

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

1 Nietzsche said of Wagner and Schopenhauer that "they negate life, they
slander it." Of Parsifal he remarked, "For Parsifal is a work of perfidy, of
vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life—a
bad work." Nietzsche Contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 670, 675.
2 NF's Notebook 143 has a lengthy book-by-book analysis of Wolfram's
poem: see Michael Dolzani's edition of Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance,
CW, 15 (NR, 167-81).
3 Wagner wrote to Ludwig: "Yes! I must have complete freedom with this
final work; for, like Tell, I am bound to say that if this too slips weakly from
my hands, I have no other work to send out into the world." See Selected
Letters of Richard Wagner, trans, and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry
Millington (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1987), 896 (25 August 1879).
4 Buhnenweihfestspiel (a stage-consecrating festival drama) was Wagner's
subtitle for Parsifal.
5 AC, 282.
6 See esp. Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, 458-9.
7 Chretien de Troyes left his Perceval; ou le Roman graal unfinished at his death
ca. 1185; there were at least three early medieval continuations. Chretien de
Troyes's Arthurian Romances, trans. W.W. Comfort (Dent, 1967), is an anno-
tated volume in NF's library in Victoria University Library.
8 "To have Chr. sung by a tenor—what a disgusting idea!" Cosima Wagner's
Notes to pages 335-53 381

Diaries, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton
(London: Collins, 1978-80), 2:935.
9 W.H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward
Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 404.
10 See sec. 52, bk. 3, of The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover,
1966), 1:255-67.
11 For the abuse, see n. i above. Nietzsche praised the overture as, among
other things, "a sublime and extraordinary feeling, experience, happen-
ing of the soul at the basis of the music, which does Wagner the highest
credit.... Has any painter ever painted such a melancholy gaze of love as
Wagner did with the last accents of his prelude?" Selected Letters ofFriedrich
Nietzsche, ed. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969), 259-60 (21 January 1887).
12 Alfred Lorenz, Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner (The Secret of Form
in Richard Wagner), 4 vols. (Berlin: Hesses Verlag, 1924-33), an analysis of
the later operas.

28. Some Reflections on Life and Habit

1 Butler, Life and Habit, 137.

2 Ibid., 22. Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92) was a fiery English Baptist
who preached to large crowds at his Metropolitan Temple in London.
3 Ibid., 109.
4 Ibid., 67.
5 Ibid., 44.
6 Ibid., 203.
7 NF is no doubt referring to Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
8 Butler, Erewhon, 202-5 (chap. 24).
This page intentionally left blank
 Emendations

page/line
2
5/6-7 story or plot for study or plot (as in TSS)
26/35 religion for relation (as in TSS)
27/39 limitation or for limitation of
28/11 For we that live to please for And they that live to please
31/20 Blessed Mary Flanders for the Blessed Mary of Flanders
32/5 "I prefer death a thousand times" for "I had rather death a thousand
times"
32/6 "And I prefer a thousand times - to death" for "I had rather a
thousand times than death"
36/7 the cultural the fairly new for the cultural to the fairly new
49/9 Arnold's reading for Arnold reading
66/4 as popular for at popular
67/19 Lake Poets for Lake poets (as earlier in the essay)
70/20 "vagabond libertine" for "libertine vagabond"
72/15 are all the more significant for is all the more significant
76/21 "I object even to the best of the Romantics" for "I object to even the
best of the Romantics"
89/2 hedgehog in for hedgehog. In (as in Romanticism Reconsidered)
99/7 Monsters for Mountains
106/17 Davidsbund for Davidsbundler
134/33-4 "Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents" for "Hunch-
back and Saint and Fool are the final crescents"
143/22 this world for the world
157/8 A Defence for The Defence (and elsewhere)
169/27 lone remarks for Panthea remarks
206/8 livery stable for livery stables
221/37 new kind of relationship for new relation
225/20-1 others on the redemptive for others the redemptive
384 Emendations

230/36 works of German composers for works of German

232/4 those who were present on both nights for those who were on both
nights
279/7 We have now found out for We know
280/22-3 essay On Liberty for Essay on Liberty
296/13 grotesque puppet for "grotesque puppet" (the phrase itself does not
appear in the novel)
323/17 House of the Wolf ings for House of Wolf ings
325/13 in The Earthly for the The Earthly
332/14 been transformed for transformed
335/10 Parsifal is much more for The Parsifal is much more (corrected in
NF's offprint)
336/27 what this means altogether for what this meant altogether (corrected
in NF's offprint)
344/2 Butler realized for Butler realizes (as in preliminary TS)
344/4 He quoted for He quotes
353/9 never dreamed of for ever dreamed of (as in MM)
 Index
Abrams, M(eyer) H(oward) (Mike)
(b. 1912): "English Romanticism:
The Spirit of the Age" (1963), 72,
73, 74; The Mirror and the Lamp
(1953), 11, 84; Natural Super-
naturalism (1971), 222
Absurd, the, 156; in Beddoes, 150; in
Dickens, 289, 307-8; knowledge as,
133-4
Achilles, 160
Acta Victoriana: NF writes for, 234
Actaeon, 183
Action: in Beddoes, 139-40,143; and
consciousness, 166; heroic, 165,
334-5; in Milton, 164,166
Adam, 80,163; Christ as new, 330;
dream of, 180; knowledge of, 87-8;
in Milton, 63, 83,104; traditional
and Romantic, 103
Addison, Joseph (1672-1719): aphor-
isms of, 19; on taste, 28; The Vision
ofMirza (1711), 60
Adonis, Gardens of, 85,184,186
Aesthetics: and ideology, 220-1; of
Morris, 315
Agape, 162; and eros, 163; redemption
via, 105. See also Caritas; Love
Alchemy, 98. See also Magic
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (1836-1907),
253
Alienation, 124, 316; myth, 177; from
nature, 103
Allegory: life as, 85; in Morris, 312
Allston, Washington (1779-1843):
Coleridge on, 155
America: discovery of, 35; geometry
of, 153-4
American Civil War, 248, 251, 270
Amory, Thomas (1691-1788): The Life
of John Bunde (1756), 25
Amphion, 190,193
Anabasis: and rebirth, 190. See also
Ascent
Analogy, 20, 97; as language of God,
107; "like" as sign of, 162
Anarchy, 125; in Dickens, 296, 300; in
Morris, 317-18
Anatomy form: in the eighteenth
century, 25
Anaximander (ca. 610-546 B.C.), 144
Andromeda, 305
Animals: in Dickens, 305; in poetry,
13
Annals of the Fine Arts, 210
Anthropomorphism, 222
Anti-intellectualism, 352
Aphorisms: of Coleridge, 43-5, 48.
See also Fragmentation
Apocalypse, 222-3,282; in Keats, 201;
and liberty, 273; thinking of, 173
386
Apollo: in Keats, 193; oracle of, 115
Apuleius, Lucius (b. ca. A.D. 125),
186
Aquinas, St. Thomas (ca. 1225-74):
Summa Theologica, 94
Arbuthnot, John (1667-1735): The
History of John Bull (1712), 20
Archetype(s), 73; from Beattie, 24-5;
Beddoes's characters as, 138
Architecture: Gothic, 322; Morris on,
315
Ariel, 158,159
Aristocracy, 344; authority of, 276-9
passim; barbarians as, 283; in
Dickens, 298; fraternity of, 320;
Romantic view of, 109-10. See also
Leisure class
Aristophanes (ca. 448-ca. 388 B.C.):
The Frogs, 134
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), 6, 8,115; on
catharsis, 12; on plot, 137; proairesis
in, 273
Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), 9, 271; as
anti-Romantic, 90; on Byron, 57; on
culture, 282-4; on liberty, 320; on
Keats, 214; on the university, 285-
6; Culture and Anarchy (1869), 283;
Empedodes on Etna (1852), 118;
Notebooks of Matthew Arnold, ed.
Lowry et al. (1950), 48-9
Arthur, legend of, 328. See also Grail
Artist: responsibility of, 105-6
Art(s), 81; counter-environment of,
106; democratization of, 317;
identity of, 328; moral force of,
176-7; and nature, 8,19; origin of,
69; as play, 25; reality via, 286;
Romanticism in, 75-6; and society,
309
Ascent: of Christ, 114; failure of, 193;
in Keats, 190-1. See also Anabasis;
Quest
Index
Asimov, Isaac (1920-92): Foundation
trilogy (1951-53), 311
Astrology, 98
Astronomy, 98,100; in Chaucer,
107-8
Atlantic Monthly, 248
Atlantis, 89,190; in Romantic myth,
86; in Shelley, 167
Attis, 331
Auchinleck, Lord (1706-82), 6
Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907-73),
69, 90; For the Time Being (1944),
89; The Sea and the Mirror (1944),
335
Augustan Age, 7, 321-2; art in, 11;
characteristics of, 27; interpenetra-
tion in, 29-30; metaphor in, 14
Augustine, St. (A.D. 354-430), 58; on
the fall, 166
Aurelius, Marcus (A.D. 121-80), 49
Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 32,76;
comedies of, 123; Love and Freind-
ship (pub. 1922), 82,111; Northanger
Abbey (1818), 59, 82; Pride and
Prejudice (1813), 54; Sense and
Sensibility (1811), 82
Authority: of genius, 106; spiritual,
271-86 passim; temporal, 274-7
passim
Autohypnosis, 90
Babe, Murray W., 234
Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750),
18
Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans
and Baron Verulam (1561-1626),
25,45,48, no
Bage, Robert (1720-1801): The Fair
Syrian (1787), 32; Hermsprong
(1796), 32, 35
Bagehot, Walter (1826-77): on the
grotesque, 133
Index
Bailey, Benjamin (1791-1853): Keats
writes to, 208
Ball, John (d. 1381), 279, 315
Ballad, 10, 257. See also Lyric
Balzac, Honore de (1799-1856), 68
Bar do, 134
Barrie, Sir J(ames) M(atthew) (1860-
1937), 231
Bates, John, 234
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-67),
66,122,133: froide majestein, 79;
Correspondances (1857), 88,111,222,
223; Les Fleurs du mal (Prelude in,
1857), 104; Obsession (1857),222
Bauhaus movement, 315
Beattie, James (1735-1803): The
Minstrel (1771-74), 25
Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616), and
John Fletcher (1579-1625), 17,127;
Philaster (1622), 213
Beauty: poetry of, 194; and truth, 178,
183,191,197
Becker, Carl (1873-1945): The Heav-
enly City of the Eighteenth-Century
Philosophers (1932), 37,80
Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906-89),
22,134, 336
Beckford, William (1760-1844):
Vathek (1786), 60, 61
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803-49),
115; the dead in, 157; noumenal
and phenomenal world in, 149-50;
the occult in, 171; water: of life in,
145-6; The Bride's Tragedy (1822),
125-9 passim, 158; Dirge and
Hymeneal, 126; The Last Man, 136,
144; The Second Brother, 128-9, X43;
The Two Archers, 126
- Death's Jest-Book (1850): 92,114,
125-50 passim, 172-3; characters
in, 138-42; the grotesque in, 132-4;
history in, 135; plot of, 138; two
387
brothers theme in, 130; unfinished,
131
Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827),
84,169; Egmont Overture (op. 84)
(1830), 41
Being, 205; in Beddoes, 143
Belief: images and, 77, 78; and imagi-
nation, 177; Romanticism as new,
102. See also Faith
Bellamy, Edward (1850-98): Looking
Backward (1888), 318
Belloc, (Joseph) Hilaire Pierre (1879-
1953), 322
Benda, Julien (1867-1956): La Trahison
des clercs (1927), 119, 323
Bennett, (Enoch) Arnold (1867-1931),
8
Beowulf, 116
Bergson, Henri (1859-1941), 90; on
laughter, 291; on satire, 296
Berkeley, George (1685-1753), 19,23;
esse est percipi, 30; Siris: A Chain of
Philosophical Reflections and Enquir-
ies concerning the Virtues of Tar-
water (1744), 36
Berlioz, Hector (1803-69), 68
Beulah, 169
Bhagavadgita, 204
Bianchi, Martha Gilbert Dickinson
(1866-1943), 253
Bible: Dickinson reads, 259; myth of,
94,103; the primitive in, 36;
rhythm of, 12. See also Scripture;
Gospel
Bingham, Millicent Todd (1880-
1968), 253
Binswanger, Ludwig (1881-1966), 225
Biography, 3
Birth: death balances, 144; mystery
of, 290-1
Blackwood's Magazine, 207; Endymion
reviewed in, 209
388
Blake, William (1757-1827), 10,15,
153,196, 218; Atlantis in, 167; on
cloven fiction, 202; Dickinson
compared to, 266; emanations in,
169; the female will in, 187; on the
fool, 138; on genius, 106; on his-
tory, 116; innocence and experi-
ence in, 108; Jerusalem in, 86; in
London, 27; Luvah and Albion in,
164; the mechanical in, 154; myth
of Urizen, 79; on natural religion,
153; Nobodaddy in, 260; NF's early
reading of, 24; Ore in, 85,114; his
Prophecies, 84; sky-gods in, 100;
spectres in, 192; vehicular form of,
84-5
- works: America (1793), 103,190;
Auguries of Innocence (1803), 13, 48,
201; The Book of Thel (1789), 181,
182,185; Europe (1794), 78-9,100;
The Four Zoas (17967-1807?), 12,14,
131; I saw a chapel all of gold, 12;
Island in the Moon (1784), 25;
Jerusalem (hymn), 37; Jerusalem
(Prophecy, 1804-20), 117; The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793),
37,90; Milton (1804-8), 117; O why
was I born with a different face, 122;
Songs of Experience (1794), 13,114,
198
Blanchot, Maurice (1907-2003), 225
Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313-75):
Decameron, 208
Body: mechanical, 153-4; spiritual
authority in, 285; universe as, 97
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus
(ca. A.D. 480-524), 77
Boileau (-Despreaux), Nicolas (1636-
1711), 26
Bolingbroke, Viscount (Henry St.
John) (1678-1751), 22,274
Bolivar, Simon (1783-1830), 68
Index
Borrow, George Henry (1803-81):
Lavengro (1851), 21, 31
Bosch, Hieronymus (ca. 1460-1516),
132
Bostetter, Edward E.: The Romantic
Ventriloquists (1963), 85
Boswell, James (1740-95): as artist, 3-
6; his London Journal, 3, 9
Bowles, Samuel (1797-1851), 248,258
Bradbrook, M.C.: Ibsen the Norwegian
(1966), 239
Brawne, Fanny (1800-65), 3-88,210,
212; Keats's letters to, 213
Brett, George Sidney (1879-1944), 215
Briareus, 289
Bride: in the lower world, 193; sister
as, 103
British Critic: Endymion reviewed in,
210
British Empire, 32, 318; Byron and
the, 70
Bronte, Charlotte (1816-55), 246
Bronte, Emily (1818-48), 246;
Wuthering Heights (1837), 11:3
Brooke, Frances (1724-89): The
History of Emily Montague (1769), 36
Brooke, Henry (1703-83): A Fool of
Quality (1766), 25
Brothers, theme of, 112
Brown, Charles Armitage, 209, 210,
211
Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-82): on
nature, 81,105; The Garden of Cyrus
(1658), 96
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-
62), 246
Browning, Robert (1812-89), !33/ !72/
246, 304; Andrea del Sarto (1855), 29;
The Bishop Orders His Tomb (1845),
136; Parleyings with Certain People of
Importance in Their Day (1887), 30
Buddha: as hero, 335
Index
Buddhism: Wagner's interest in, 334,
340
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, ist
Baron Lytton (1803-73), 287; A
Strange Story (1862), 111
Bunyan, John (1628-88): The Holy War
(1682), 112; The Pilgrim's Progress
(1678-84), 87,118
Burke, Edmund (1729-97), 284; as
conservative, no; doctrine in, 282;
identity in, 204; law in, 283; tempo-
ral authority in, 275; Appeal from the
New to the Old Whigs (1792), 34,
279; Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790), 27
Burns, Robert (1759-96): 10,209,258;
To a Mouse (1786), 13
Burton, Robert (1577-1640): Anatomy
of Melancholy (1621), 211
Butler, Samuel (1612-80): Hudibras
(1663), 65
Butler, Samuel (1835-1902), 25,282,
284; Erewhon (1872), 182,278, 341,
352; Life and Habit (1877), 126,277,
341-53 passim; Luck or Cunning?
(1886), 342; The Way of All Flesh
(1903), 277
Byron, Allegra (1817-22), 54
Byron, Annabella, Lady (1792-1860),
54
Byron, Augusta Ada (1815-52), 54
Byron, George Gordon, Baron Byron
of Rochdale (1788-1824), 76, 88,
125,126,198; brothers theme in,
113; burlesque in, 65; the exile in,
157; on history, 116; in Italy, 55; on
Keats, 181; life of, 50-6; lyrics of,
56-8; new sensibility of, 69; plays
of, 62-4; rhyme in, 132; satires of,
64-8; sister, 103; tales of, 59-62;
temperament of, 188; youth of, 70-
i; in the Victorian Age, 69
389
- works: Beppo (1818), 52, 55, 64; The
Bride ofAbydos (1813), 52; Cain
(1821), 55,63-4,87,109,113,115;
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-17),
52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58-9, 60, 61, 64,
66,85,113,120,131,142; The
Corsair (1814), 52, 53, 59, 66, 70,142;
The Curse of Minerva (1811), 52;
Darkness (1816), 54, 87; The Destruc-
tion of Sennacherib (1815), 57; Don
Juan (1819-24), 55, 58, 61, 64-6
passim, 69,70,85,122,131,142; The
Dream (1816), 54; English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers (1809), 51, 64; The
Giaour (1813), 52; Heaven and Earth,
63-4,67-8; Hebrew Melodies (1815),
57; Hours of Idleness (1807), 51; Lara
(1814), 52, 53, 59, 60, 87-8,113;
Lines to Mr. Hodgson (1830), 62;
Manfred (1816), 54, 59, 63, 67, 69,79;
Marino Faliero (1821), 55, 62; Ode to
Napoleon Buonaparte (1814), 53; Ode
to Venice (1819), 55; The Prisoner of
Chilian (1816), 54; Sardanapalus
(1821), 55,64,70; She Walks in
Beauty (1815), 57; Stanzas for Music,
57; The Two Foscari (1821), 55;
The Vision of Judgment (1822), 55,
64, 67-8, loo, 113; Werner (1822),
62
Byronic hero, 119,142; as natural
man, 112
Cain, 80; and Abel, 112
Calderon de la Barca, Pedro (1600-
81), 328
Camus, Albert (1913-60): L'Etranger
(1941), 122
Canada: literature of, 319
Canada Council, 93
Cannibal feast, 132
Capitalism: and Communism, 318;
390
eighteenth-century, 30; laissez-
faire, 320
Caricature, characters as, 291
Caritas, 162. See also Agape; Charity;
Love
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 125,
149-50, 243, 271, 281; on the aris-
tocracy, 277; on Byron, 70; as
conservative, no; the hero in, 118-
19; the intrinsic symbol in, 283; on
Napoleon, 84; Past and Present
(1843), 285; Sartor Resartus (1833-
34), 46,70, 88,118,277, 314
Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson) (1832-98), 250; Alice
books, 181; Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland (1865), 302, 308
Cartesianism. See Descartes
Castiglione, Baldassarre, Conte di
Novilava (1478-1529): sprezzatura
in, 279; The Courtier (1528), 4,221
Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Vis-
count (1769-1822), 53
Catharsis, 196; as product and proc-
ess, 12-13
Catullus, Gaius Valerius (ca. 84-ca.
54 B.C.): his ode to Attis, 95
Cave(s): of the imagination, 162; in
Keats, 191; in Shelley, 167,169
CBC, 41
Cervantes, Miguel de (1547-1616):
Don Quixote (1605-15), 121
Chain of Being, 99,107,193
Champion, The, 208
Chapman, George (1578-1644), 17
Character(s): in Beddoes, 134-5; in
Dickens, 287-8; mechanical, 296,
306; in modern fiction, 303: ob-
sessed, 291, 294-5; realistic and
romantic, 82
Chardin, Teilhard de (1881-1955),
101-2
Index
Charity, 272. See also Caritas
Charles II of England (1630-85), 16
Chastity, 181. See also Sex
Chatterton, Thomas (1752-70), 13;
and Keats, 197; and Rowley, 14;
Mynstrelles Song, 10
Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345-1400),
96; The Man of Law's Tale, 107; The
Pardoner's Tale, 140; Troilus and
Criseyde (ca. 1385), 107
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860-
1904), 135, 336
Chemistry, 98
Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) (1874-
1936), 322; on Shaw, 45
Children: as aristocracy, 279, 320; in
Dickens, 301-2
Chretien de Troyes: Perceval, 329, 332
Christ, 96,103,160,161,172; ascen-
sion of, 114; as dragon-killer, 330;
epiphanies of, 200; harrows hell,
190; as hero, 164; as Logos, 284;
poetry as, 163; Prometheus as, 163;
quest of, 165. See also lesus
Christianity, 176, 340; and action,
334-5; antithesis to, 160; Blake on,
78; creation myth of, 95;
Dickinson's relation to, 260-5
passim; Grail symbolism of, 328-9;
the imagination in, 153; myth
of, 96-8,102; persecuting, 324;
primitive, 322; recovery of myth
in, 194
Christie, Margot, 42
Chronos, 166
Church, the, 194; and the aristocracy,
276; as bride, 165, 330; and culture,
283-4; university a function of, 282.
See also Belief; Roman Catholic
Church; Christianity
Churchill, Charles (1731-64), 64; on
Boswell, 3
Index
Cimarosa, Domenico (1749-1801), 18
City, 100; of the dead, 147; destruc-
tive, 104; of God, 97,104,108
Civilization: the arts in, 81; as body,
153-4; man creates, 100-1,106;
traditional and Romantic views of,
109-10
Clairmont, Claire (1798-1879), 54
Clark, Sir James (1800-62), 213
Clarke, Charles Cowden (1787-1877),
206
Class conflict, 283. See also Working
class
Classicism: and Romanticism, 7,
77-8
Cleland, John (1709-89): Fanny Hill
(1749), 31
Coburn, Kathleen (Kay) (1905-91),
215-17; on Coleridge's notebooks,
44; The Inquiring Spirit (1951), 44-8
passim; The Grandmothers (1949),
217; In Pursuit of Coleridge (1977),
215
Code, Muriel, 232
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-
1834): 38, 51, 64, 67, 99; aphoristic
thought of, 43-5, 48; on the clerisy,
285; Coburn on, 44, 216-17; and
continuous prose, 45; as conserva-
tive, no; on freedom, 83; on the
French Revolution, 73; on identifi-
cation, 84; imagination in, n, 105;
inner world of, 81; nature in, 155;
religion in, 203-4; Aids to Reflection
(1825), 44; Biographia Literaria
(1817), 44, 46, 47,79; The Friend
(1812), 44; Kubla Khan (1816), 85,
114,146; The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner (1798) 84,102,103,120,
134, 336
Collins, Wilkie (1824-89), 29; The
Moonstone (1868), 289
391
Collins, William (1721-59), 13; Ode on
the Poetical Character (1747), 14; Ode
to Evening (1748), 10
Comedy, 301; in Dickens, 290; iden-
tity in, 299; in romance, 118; in
Shakespeare, 158-9; transformation
of, 115,122-3. See also New Comedy
Commonweal, 317
Communication, 204; Romantic, 194
Communion, 204; Christian and
Romantic, 194-6; poetry of, 201
Communism: and the bourgeoisie,
320; and Morris, 318. See also
Leninism; Marxism
Community: the dead and, 147;
Morris on, 316; of response, 204-5;
Romantic, 194; and spiritual
authority, 278, 282, 284-6
Comte, Auguste (1798-1857), 281
Concern: language of, 168; myth of,
102; poetry of, 198
Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), 69
Conscience: Coleridge on, 47
Consciousness, 168,186; and action,
166; in Beddoes, 133,144; as
"drunken boat," 89; expanded, 120;
and identity, 188-9; integrated,
118; and learning, 343, 349; as
mechanical, 79; and memory, 351;
mystical, 105; in poetry, n; reason
as part of, 99; as separation, 103; in
Shelley, 156
Constant, Benjamin (1767-1830):
Adolphe (1816), 121
Context, art in, 328, historical, 18
Continuity: in the nineteenth cen-
tury, 25; in Romantic poetry, 85
Convention: exhaustion of, 29;
mythology contains, 94
Copernicus, Nicolas (1473-1543), 98
Copp, John (Johnny), 234
Corelli, Marie (1855-1924), 287
392
Corinthians, First Epistle to, 259
Correspondence, 98
Cosmology, 101; literary, 94; Roman-
tic, 192,193
Counter-environment: literature as,
28
Courtly love: convention of, 121,180,
187,191; in Dickens, 302; poetry,
57. See also Mistress, cruel
Cowley, Abraham (1618-67), 29
Cowper, William (1731-1800), 14,26;
The Castaway (1803), 12; The Snail
(1731X13
Crabbe, George (1754-1832), 13,76,
117; The Village (1783), 82
Craftsmanship: age of, 29
Crane, R(onald) S(almon) (1886-
1967)/ 7
Crawford, Thomas James (Tommy)
(1877-1955), 230,237,238
Creation, 162; artificial, 95; autonomy
of, 106-7; and dream, 189; and
evolution, 351; four levels of, 69,
77,78,82-3,99,107-9,123,179,
184; human and divine, 151,162-3,
199,200; innocence of, 324; to
Keats, 178; from love, 105; man's
power of, 81-5 passim; myth, 103;
in the pastoral, 180; reality of,
176-7; sexual, 94-5; and suffering,
170
Creator, man as, 162
Criticism, 220; anti-Romantic move-
ment in, 72, 90-1,101; of Coleridge,
46; contemporary, 313; eighteenth-
century, 28; genius and, 106;
posterity as lazy, 17
Croker, John Wilson (1780-1857),
209; on Keats, 18
Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658), 119
Culture: authority of, 282-5; and
economics, 319, 321
Index
Curse, original, 165,166
Dance: of life, 166
Danse macabre: in Beddoes, 130,135
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), 69,80,
174,182; Matilda in, 172; nature in,
170; Virgil in, 225; world picture
of, 77; Convivio, 100; The Divine
Comedy, 94,179; Inferno, 183; Para-
diso, 78,96,107; Purgatorio, 171,
179-80,202; Vita Nuova, 162,176
Darkness: in Romanticism, 114,120
Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-82), 22,
89,101,284, 353; The Origin of
Species (1859), 342
Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802), 342
Darwinism, Social, 347
David, Evelyn, 238
Davies, Margaret, 238
Death: anxiety over, 133; cities of, 147;
as the death of, 143-4;m Dickens,
303, 306; in Dickinson, 269; and
dream, 171; in the grotesque, 132-
4; identification with, 87; the
leveller, 135,141; and life, 132-4,
142,188,205; and love, 126-9
passim; mystery of, 291; nature as,
115,125; noumenal, 150; and sex,
185; signature speech of, 136; and
time, 147. See also Thanatos
Deconstruction: and myth, 226
Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731), 22; good
and evil in, 30; Captain Singleton
(1720), 30; Moll Flanders (1722), 21,
31; Robinson Crusoe (1719), 16, 21,
32, 33, 37; Roxana (1724), 31; The
Shortest Way with the Dissenters
(1702), 16, 30
Deism, 23
Dekker, Thomas (ca. 1570-1632), 17
DeKoven, Reginald (1861-1920), 230
Delacroix, (Ferdinand Victor) Eugene
(1798-1863), 68,84
Index
Deluge, 190; and fall, 167. See also
Flood
De Man, Paul (1919-83): Allegories of
Reading (1979), 219, 225-6; Blindness
and Insight (1971), 219,220,225-6;
The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984),
219-26
Democracy, 124-5; death represents,
141; and Keats, 205
Demonic: in Keats, 195; interpenetra-
tion, 204; lovers, 126; world, 108,
114-15
Denck, Hans (ca. 1495-1527), 219
Denham, Sir John (1615-69), 28;
Cooper's Hill (1642), 24
Dennis, John (1657-1734), 19
Depression, the, 347
De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859),
84-5,101; introversion in, 120;
"The English Mail-Coach" (1849),
154; Savannah-la-Mar (1845), 86
De Regnier, Henri (1864-1936), 241
Derrida, Jacques (1930-2004): on
Rousseau, 225
Descartes, Rene (1596-1650), 48,79
Descent, 190; in Dickens, 302; of
identity, 114-15; in Keats, 183. See
also Ascent; Quest
Design: as absurd, 308; Morris on, 317
Desire, 156
Detective fiction, 36
Devil, the, 96
Dewey, John (1859-1952), 352
Dialectic: Coleridge detests, 45
Diana: as diva triformis, 183-4, *85; in
Keats, 183
Dickens, Charles (1812-70): the
absurd in, 289, 307-8; braggart
soldier in, 292; Christmas in, 291;
description in, 305; the double in,
304; dystopia in, 299; as fairy tale,
287,299, 302; family in, 296,299,
393
300-1; festivity in, 291; humours in,
287-308 passim; industry in, 297;
institutions in, 296-8; marriage in,
291, 300; mystery and murder in,
291; probability in, 288-9; radical
vision of, 289; recognition scenes
in, 293; resurrection in, 306; stock
devices in, 290; twin theme in, 304;
violence in, 304-5
- works: Barnaby Rudge (1841), 301,
304; Bleak House (1852-53), 55,289,
291,292,293,294,295,297, 300,
301, 304, 307; The Chimes (1845),
301, 303, 306; A Christmas Carol
(1843), 3°6, 307; David Copperfield
(1850), 293,295,298,299, 301-2,
305, 306, 307; Dombey and Son
(1846-48), 290,292,293,294,296,
297, 300, 302, 304, 305, 306, 307;
Edwin Drood (1870), 289,290, 303,
305; Great Expectations (1860-61),
204,290,296,297,298, 300, 301;
Hard Times (1852-56), 292,297,299,
300, 304, 305; Little Dorrit (1855-57),
288,294,295,296,297-8, 301, 302,
304, 305, 306, 307; Martin
Chuzzlewit (1844), 291,294,297,
305; Nicholas Nickleby (1839), 290,
294, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304,
305, 307; The Old Curiosity Shop
(1840-41), 133,290,291,296, 302,
303, 304, 305; Oliver Twist (1837),
290, 294, 295, 297, 299, 300, 302,
304, 306; Our Mutual Friend (1864-
65), 288,291,294,295,297, 300, 303,
305, 307; The Pickwick Papers (1836-
37), 292-3,295, 297; A Tale of Two
Cities (1859), 290, 301, 303, 304, 306
Dickinson, Edward (1803-74), 245
Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth (1830-
86): awe in, 262-3,269; body and
soul in, 265-6; circumference in,
394
251, 261-2, 264, 269; on death, 264-
5,268-70; diction of, 256; on her
father, 246; first published, 249;
friendships of, 246-9; and God,
259-65 passim; genius of, 270;
grammar in, 255; on the Holy
Spirit, 263-4; hymn form of, 246,
257; innocence and experience in,
266; life of, 245-70 passim; as
Moses, 270; Paradise in, 264,267,
268, 270; perceptions of, 250;
popularity of, 254; prose in, 258;
riddles in, 255, 259; style of, 254-8
- works: Doubt Me! My Dim Compan-
ion! 268; I like to see it lap the miles,
255; I never told the buried gold, 269;
It sifts from leaden sieves, 255; Love
selects its own society, 168; Poem 48,
263; Poem 49,260; Poem 59,261;
Poem 109, 252; Poem 123, 251; Poem
193,260-1; Poem 214,265; Poem 248,
268; Poem 256,268; Poem 354,256;
Poem 357,260; Poem 400,266; Poem
419,266; Poem 441,251; Poem 4.4.2,
267; Poem 516, 255; Poem 623, 258;
Poem 641, 256; Poem 677, 250; Poem
679,265; Poem 709,255; Poem 711,
255; Poem 721,269; Poem 722,249;
Poem 733,263; Poem 745,254; Poem
756, 267; Poem 764, 254; Poem 810,
259; Poem 822,265; Poem 949,259;
Poem 1037,256; Poem 1052,256;
Poem 1068,267; Poem 1129,255;
Poem 1182,269; Poem 1205,260;
Poem 1207,257; Poem 1260,263;
Poem 1283,268; Poem 1319, 262;
Poem 1395,254; Poem 1421,270;
Poem 1434,268; Poem 1439,263;
Poem 1445,257; Poem 1454,257;
Poem 1462,264; Poem 1463,254,255;
Poem 1569,264; Poem 1576,266;
Poem 1599,260; Poem 1601,266;
Index
Poem 1615,256; Poem 1620,262;
Poem 1658,255-6; Poem 1679,266;
Poem 1701,262; Poem 1732,266;
Poem 1733,262; Poems by Emily
Dickinson (1890), 253; Struck, was I,
nor yet by Lightning, 268; Success is
counted sweetest, 249; Wild Nights!
251
Dickinson, Lavinia (1833-99), 246;
publishes sister Emily, 252-3
Diderot, Denis (1713-84), 37
Dionysus, 96, 97,102,104; green
world of, 159
Disraeli, Benjamin (1804-81), 287
Divinity: and poetry, 199
DNA, 343
Dobree, Bonamy (1891-1974): English
Literature in the Early Eighteenth
Century (1959), 16-23 passim
Doctrine: and scripture, 282
Dolphin: as salvation, 190
Donne, John (1572-1631), 136
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich
(1821-81), 68,239; Notes from
Underground (1864), 74
Dragon: of death, 165; guards iden-
tity, 144; as illusion, 336; symbol-
ism of, 330, 331
Drama: Jacobean, 311
Drayton, Michael (1563-1631):
Endimion and Phoebe (1595), 186
Dream: and creation, 146-7,189; and
death, 171; in Dickens, 303, 306; in
Keats, 178; and poetry, 11, 204
Drugs, 352
"Drunken boat" construct, 284:
consciousness as, 89; in Beddoes,
145; in Freud, 89,113-14. See also
Rimbaud
Dryden, John (1631-1700): prose of,
28; on Shakespeare, 17; Of Dramatic
Poesy (1668), 29; Fables Ancient and
Index
Modern (1706), 76; Religio Laid
(1682), 26; Secular Masque (1700),
26,27
Duck, Stephen (1705-56): On Mites
(1736), 27
Earth-mother goddess, 88, 95, 96,115
Earth spirit, 169; unity with, 162
Ecclesiasticus, Book of, 49
Eco, Umberto (b. 1932): The Name of
the Rose (1981), 36
Economics: and culture, 319, 321
Eddison, E(ric) R(ucker) (1882-1945):
Memison trilogy, 311
Eden, 77,80, 81, 97,103,104,108,113,
180,201-2; in Dante, 179-80;
Jerusalem as, 86. See also Garden;
Paradise
Edgar, Pelham (1871-1948), 215
Education: ascent via, 80,108; Butler
on, 277, 349; and culture, 283; in
Dickens, 297; endless, 346; future
of, 353; liberal, 350; Morris on, 314,
317; via nature, 104; past-centred,
348; via poetry, 105-6; and spir-
itual authority, 271, 272, 281; two
levels of, 344
Ego, 73-4, 86
Eighteenth century: Byron as poet of,
64; enlightenment of, 25-6; lan-
guage of, 38
Elgin, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of
Elgin (1766-1841), 52
Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans)
(1819-80), 31, 246, 287
Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888-1965),
72,101,218; and Beddoes, 136-7;
on Dante, 90; on death, 150; disso-
ciation of sensibility in, no, 313; on
farce, 132; on Keats, 210; medita-
tion in, 201; on Shakespeare, 137;
Ash-Wednesday (1930), 171; Burnt
395
Norton (1935), 176,182,184,191,
195; The Cocktail Party (1950), 171;
East Coker (1940), 132; Family
Reunion (1939), 289; Four Quartets
(1935-42), 195; Gerontion (1920),
136,137; Little Gidding (1942), 221;
The Love Song of]. Alfred Prufrock
(1917), 137, 332; Marina (1930), 171;
The Waste Land (1921), 49,104,134,
137,171,187,204, 330; "Wilkie
Collins and Dickens," 289
Elizabeth I (1533-1603), 116
Elizabeth II (b. 1926), 277
Elpis (hope), 163
Emancipation. See Liberty
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82),
246,261
Energy, 159,166,190; absurd, 308;
Byron releases, 69; and intelli-
gence, 316; metrical, 84
Engels, Friedrich (1820-95): and
Morris, 317
England: Eden as, 86
English Institute, 72
Ennui, 66
Enoch, Book of, 13
Entertainment, literature as, 28
Epiphany: historical, 18; types of,
200-1
Episode: and plot, 288-9
Equality: and liberty, 320
Eros, 96-7,102,104,126,185,191,
305; and agape, 163; in Dickens, 291,
306-7; redemption via, 105; in
Shelley, 162,168,176; in Yeats, 224.
See also Love
Esau, 157; as Byronic hero, 112
Eternity, 145,166; identity resides in,
143-4;as now, 264
Euripides (ca. 480-406 B.C.), 231
Evans, Joan (1893-1977): John Ruskin
(1954), 242-4
396
Everyman, 135
Evolution: and the Bible, 351; Butler
on, 342; and progress, 346-8
Examiner, The, 207
Experience, 167-8; in Dickinson, 266;
and innocence, 177-8,183,190; and
knowledge, 351-2; limitations of,
149; underworld of, 162; vision of,
198
Ezekiel, Book of, 336; the primitive
in, 35
Fairley, Barker (1887-1986), 41
Faith, 194,272; Romanticism revives,
no; in Shelley, 162-4,166; and
superstition, 351. See also Belief
Fall, the, 96, 97,108,194; and deluge,
167; Pre-Romantic, 201-2; in
Shelley, 169; traditional and
Romantic, 103; vision annihilates,
166
Falstaff, 3
Fancy: truth of, in; visual nature of,
90
Fantasy, 133. See also Science fiction
Farce, 132
Fascism, 83,125, 319; and Yeats, 160
Father-god, 95
Fear, 163,168
Femme fatale, 121, 329; in Shelley, 169
Fergusson, Robert (1750-74), 13; The
Farmer's Ingle (1773), 10
Fertility: the Grail as symbol of, 329-
30,311
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814),
74; as Romantic philosopher, 75
Fiction: Byron's impact on, 68-9;
formulaic, 36; plot and episode in,
288-9
Fielding, Henry (1707-54), 8, 36;
Journey from this World to the Next
(1743), 25; Tom Jones (1749), n, 25,26
Index
Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea
(1661-1720), 27
Fisher King, 332
Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), 122, 303;
Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881), 295
Flood, the, 145. See also Deluge
Folk tale, 94
Fool: death as, 129-30,133,136,138-
9,140-1; in Dickens, 307; in
Parsifal, 331-2, 333
Formalism, 225
Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (1879-
1970): on Dickens, 293
Foscolo, (Niccolo) Ugo (1778-1827):
Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1798),
121
Foucault, Michel (1926-84): The Order
of Things (1966), 38
Fragmentation, 90; in Beddoes, 136;
in lyric poetry, n; Romantic poets
resist, 85. See also Decentralization
Franklin, Benjamin (1706-90), 30
Fraternity: and the aristocracy, 320
Frederick II (the Great) (1712-86), 119
Freedom, 97,106,152,172; and
education, 350; Morris on, 316; and
necessity, 272. See also Liberty
French Revolution, 27, 73, 78, 93,100,
150,172,173, 204, 306, 307; tyranny
of, 276
Frere, lohn Hookham (1769-1846):
Prospectus and Specimen of an
intended National Work ... by
William and Robert Whistlecraft...
relating to King Arthur and His
Round Table (1817), 65
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), 37,102,
158,176, 307, 331, 344; Auden on,
89; the "drunken boat" construct
in,89,113-14
Frye, (Herman) Northrop (1912-91):
lectures at Western Reserve Uni-
Index
versity, 93; on value judgments,
218; Anatomy of Criticism (1957), 25,
38; "The Argument of Comedy"
(1949), 303; Romanticism Reconsid-
ered (1963), 92
Future, 173,203, 226, 348; is the past,
176; progress towards, 347
Galileo (Galileo Galilei) (1564-1642),
98
Galsworthy, John (1867-1933): The
Silver Box (1906), 231
Garden, the, 100,104. See also Eden;
Paradise
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn (1810-
65): Life of Charlotte Bronte (1856),
240
Gay, John (1685-1732): The Beggar's
Opera (1728), 32; Trivia (1716), 18
Genesis, Book of, 345
Genius, 317; authority of, 106; in
Byron, 142; demonic, 87-8;
Dickinson as, 270
George, St., 189; and the dragon, 165-
6,330
George III (1738-1820), 67, 68
Ghosts: in Beddoes, 126,128,132,
147,192; in Dickinson, 269; in
Keats, 192; in Shelley, 171
Gibbon, Edward (1737-94), 174;
Coleridge on, 46; Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire (1776-88), 297,
322
Gide, Andre Paul Guillaume (1869-
1951), 241
Gifford, William, 64
Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (1836-
1911), and Sir Arthur Seymour
Sullivan (1842-1900), 65; The
Gondoliers (1889), 229; H.M.S.
Pinafore (1878), 234-5, 255/ lolanthe
(1882), 236,237-8; Patience (1881),
397
229; Pirates ofPenzance (1880), 230;
Yeomen of the Guard (1888), 290
Gilbert, Susan (1830-1913), 246,247,
252,266
Gildon, Charles, 19
Gnosis: as imagination, 105,106-7; in
Shelley, 163,166
God: as artist, 8; Blake on, 79; is dead,
152; Dickinson's relation to, 259-65
passim; as male, 333; and nature,
81,156; and poetry, 193; projected,
100-1; in Romanticism, 80; will of,
272
Gods: in Homer, 272; man creates,
151
Godwin, William (1756-1836): Mary
Byron meets, 54; Enquiry concern-
ing the Principles of Political Justice
(1793), 25
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-
1832), 5,44, 49,101,116,136, 216;
and Byron, 70; Egmont (1787), 41-2;
Faust (1808-32), 63, 70,79,86,100,
119,161; The Sorrows of Young
Werther (1774), 60,121
Golden Age, 77,80,104,108
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-74), 26-7,
29
Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich (b.
1931), 348
Gordon, Catherine (1764-1811):
mother of Byron, 50
Gorky, Maxim (1868-1936), 324
Gospel: and law, 273; of nature, 152.
See also Bible; Scripture
Gothic literature, 59, 60,111; the
primitive in, 36
Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de
(1746-1828): Disasters of War
(series), 51
Grace, 105; descent of, 86; transfor-
mation of, 164; and will, 191
398
Grail legends: genesis of, 328-30; in
Parsifal, 334, 335-6, 337. See also
Arthur
Graupner, Christoph (1683-1760), 18
Gray, Thomas (1716-71), 29; The Bard
(1757), 14; The Fatal Sisters (1768),
10,36
Green, Matthew (1696-1737): The
Spleen (1737), 18
Green world, 158,169; in Dickens,
303, 307; in Shelley, 159
Grotesque: in Beddoes, 132-4,142,
147; in Dickens, 302
Habit, 165, 351; and humours, 293;
meaning of, 343, 344
Hades, 162,187,195. See also Hell
Handel, Georg Friedrich (1685-1759),
196
Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928), 89, 319;
Immanent Will in, 79; The Dynasts
(1903-8), 99,108-9
Harlot, forgiven, 333
Harmony, 158. See also Music
Hart House, 235; Dramatic Society,
231
Hartley, David (1705-57), 38; Obser-
vations on Man (1749), 35
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-64), 246
Haydon, Benjamin Robert (1786-
1846), 207, 208, 211, 213
Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 207;
Liber Amoris (1823), 121
Heaven, 77, 98,123,179,222; as city,
97; internal, 81; in Milton, 78; pre-
Romantic, 86
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
(1770-1831), 279; in Shelley, 168
Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976), 194
Hell, 77,108,123,179; in Dickinson,
269; harrowing of, 174,190; in
Parsifal, 336-7. See also Hades
Index
Hemingway, Ernest Millar (1899-
1961), 69
Herbert, Frank (b. 1920): Dune trilogy
(1956-69), 311
Hercules, 190
Herder, lohann Gottfried (1744-
1803), 37
Hero(es): Byronic, 59-62 passim, 68-
70; in Dickens, 291-2, 301; in
eighteenth-century fiction, 32; in
Milton, 164; romance, 332; Roman-
tic forms of the, 115-21 passim; as
symbol, 277
Herodias, 329
Herod the Great (74-4 B.C.), 89
Heroine(s): Byron's, 62-3; in Dickens,
300-2 passim; in eighteenth-
century fiction, 31-2; Gothic, 111,
181
Hesiod (8th c. B.C.), 163
Hexis, meaning of, 343, 344
Heywood, Thomas (ca. 1574-1641), 17
Hiebert, Paul Gerhardt (1892-1987):
Sarah Binks (1947), 77
Hierarchy. See Creation, four levels
of
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth
(1823-1911), 251,258,260; com-
pares Dickinson to Blake, 266;
Dickinson contacts, 248
History: context of, 18; hero of, 119;
humanist vision of, 322; of ideas,
76; liberation of, 174; Morris on,
321; redemption of, 176; Romantic
rejection of, 116-17
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 271
Hobhouse, lohn Cam, Baron
Broughton (1786-1869), 51, 58
Holderlin, lohann Christian
Friedrich (1770-1843), 131; on
Rousseau, 226; Bread and Wine
(1807); The Rhine (1808), 220
Index
Holy Spirit, 111; Dickinson's relation
to, 263-4
Homer: the gods in, 272; Achilles in,
116; Odyssey, 191, 328
Hooker, Richard (1553/4-1600), 101
Hope, 272; in Shelley, 162-4,166,172
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-89),
9; binaries of, 312
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)
(65-8 B.C.), 26, 34; epistles, 28; poeta
nascitur non fit, 95
Horror fiction, 32, 36
Housman, (A)lfred (E)dward (1859-
1936), 69; The Chestnut Casts His
Flambeaux (1922), 79
Hugo, Victor (1802-85), 94, 324;
Cromwell (1827), 13; La Legende des
siecles (1859), 193
Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest) (1883-
1917), 72,76,90
Humanism: as humanity, 353
Human nature: nature and, 83, 96-7,
99,104,108, no, 124
Hume, David (1711-76), 35
Humour: and death, 133; in Dickens,
287-308 passim; tagged, 293,294-5;
and truth, 331
Humours: good and bad, 294; melo-
dramatic, 305-6; obstructing, 301
Hunt, Leigh (1784-1859), 55, 207,208,
212
Hurd, Richard (1720-1808): Letters on
Chivalry and Romance (1762), 36
Hutchinson, Sara (1775-1835), 216
Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894-1963),
278,284; Brave New World (1932),
299; Evolution and Ethics (1893), 285;
Point Counter Point (1928), 181
Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906), 231;
Ghosts (1881), 239; When We Dead
Awaken (1899), 113
Icarus: and Bellerophon, 190
399
Ideal world, 82
Ideas: association of, 35; history of, 76
Identity, 87,124,190; and analogy,
162; of art, 328; "as" and "with,"
188-9; in comedy, 299; as commun-
ion, 194-6; death guards, 144; eter-
nity as world of, 143-4; fallen, 185;
in Keats, 188,198,202; ladder of,
193; of life and death, 127,148-50;
of man and nature, 97; metaphor
as, 14; with nature, 97, no, 177-8;
original, 103; primary and second-
ary, 162; of process, 99; quest of,
114-15; of realities, 192; recovery
of, 96-7; in Shelley, 168; social and
natural, 104; types of, 203-4; with
larger power, 84
Ideology: frozen, 351; and mythol-
ogy, 226; in Romanticism, 220, 225-
6
Idolatry: tradition as, 273
Illusion, 196; in Buddhism, 334; and
innocence, 332; in Romanticism,
223; in storytelling, 8; temptation
through, 335
Imagery: history of, 76-8; moralistic,
108; of order, 99; primacy of, 81;
revolution in, 74
Imagination, 156,161,166; awak-
ened, 193; and belief, 177; in
Coleridge, 48; in Dickens, 299;
divine, 106-7, 2°4; and epiphany,
200; eternal, 176; fancy over, 90;
gnosis as, 105; in Keats, 199, 208; as
love, 163; and poetry, 204;
Prometheus as, 151-2; prophetic,
174; revolution in, 73; secondary,
11,14
Imitation, 81; of nature, 83; in
Shelley, 172
Imperialism, 347; Morris on, 319
Impressionism, 155
4OO
Incarnation, 89; Coleridge on, 48; and
discarnation, 176; imagination as,
162; threat of, 100
Incest: in Byron, 60; Shelley on, 168-9
Indicator, The, 212
Individual, 124; as microcosm, 144;
and nature, 117; and the sublime,
no
Industrial Revolution, 319
Inertia: Jupiter as, 157
Innocence: and creation, 324; in
Dickinson, 266; and experience,
177-8,183,190; and illusion, 332;
in Keats, 198; vision of, 180,181,
202-3
Intelligence: conscious and uncon-
scious, 316, 343-6 passim; and
energy, 316
Interpenetration: in the Augustan
Age, 29-30; in Beddoes, 133,142;
and poetry, 203; types of, 201; in
Wordsworth, 80
lonesco, Eugene (1909-94), 22,134
Irony, 82, 303; in Eliot, 137; in Keats,
198; in Romance, 115,118,121-3
Isaac: and Ishmael, 112
Isaiah, Book of, 26
Ishmael, 157: as Byronic hero, 112
Israel, 103
Jackson, Helen Hunt (1830-85):
Ramona (1884), 249; Mercy
Philbrick's Choice (1876), 249
Jacob: Dickinson as, 261; and Esau,
112; his ladder, 35
Jacobean drama, 119; and Beddoes,
134-5,136
James, Henry (1843-1916): "The Jolly
Corner" (1908), 269; What Maisie
Knew (1897), 24°
James, Mary Frances (1903-88), 41
Index
James I of England (1566-1625), 116
Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826), 37
Jehovah, 159. See also God
Jesus, 100,159, 324; and the Grail,
328; as hero, 335. See also Christ
Johnson, Samuel (1709-84): 8, 27,46;
on being, 30; Boswell on, 3-4;
criticism of, 29; on Dryden, 28, 76;
as father-figure, 6; on Gray's Bard,
14; on the Ossian poems, n, 12;
Lives of the Most Eminent English
Poets (1779-81), 9,29; Prologue
Spoken by Mr. Garrick, at the Open-
ing of the Theatre in Drury-Lane,
1747, 28; Rasselas, Prince of Abys-
sinia (1759), 25, 60
Johnson, Thomas H. (1902-85): The
Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955),
253, 255; The Letters of Emily
Dickinson (1958), 253
John the Baptist, 329
Jolliffe, Charles D. (Charlie), 237
Jolliffe, Dick, 234,238
Jonah, Book of, 190
Jonson, Ben (1572-1637), 17, 296; The
Alchemist (1610), 291; Bartholomew
Fair (1614), 297; The New Inn (1629),
289; Epicene, or The Silent Woman
(1616), 291; Volpone (1605), 291, 301
Joseph of Arimathea (ist c. A.D.), 329
Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius
(1882-1941), 18,94,101, 303;
Dickens influences, 296; Finnegans
Wake (1939), 290; Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (1916), 13,
174; Stephen Hero (1944), 200
Judaism, 95
Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961), 25,
187
Kairos, 166
Kali, in
Index
Kalidasa (fl. 5th century), 75
Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), 216;
and Beddoes, 149; and Fichte, 75;
and Romantic imagery, 167
Kean, Edmund (1789-1833), 208,211
Keats, Fanny (1803-89), 206
Keats, George (1797-1841), 208,209
Keats, John (1795-1821), 58, 64,73,75,
84,125,126,160,170,177; as a
child, 198; on history, 116; ideal
style of, 197-8; life of, 206-14
passim; his moods, 196-7; odes of,
195,196,197,199, 200; plotless, 138;
on society, 83; symbol-essences in,
189,192,195; and temenos, 201
- works: To Autumn (1820), 88,211,
212; La Belle Dame Sans Merci
(1820), 88,187,195, 210, 212; Bright
Star (1838), 210; Calidore, 207; The
Cap and Bells, 198, 211; In a Drear-
Nighted December (1817), 208;
Endymion (1818), 18, 85, 86, 92,104,
108,123,125,158,178-205; 208-10
passim; Epistle to Reynolds, 202; The
Eve of St. Agnes (1820), 188,196,
201,210; The Eve of St. Mark (1816),
188,210; The Fall of Hyperion (1819;
pub. 1856), 197, 211; On First Look-
ing into Chapman's Homer (1817),
207; On a Grecian Urn (1820), 88,
178,199,203,205,210,212; To Homer
(1848), 184; Hymn to Pan (1817),
208; Hyperion (1820), 117,131,186,
188,193,197,199,210,211; Imitation
of Spenser (1812), 207; I stood tiptoe
upon a little hill, 207; On Indolence
(1848), 210; Isabella, or the Pot of
Basil (1820), 188,195,208; Lamia
(1820), 193,195,197, 211; Lamia,
Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and
Other Poems (1820), 212; On Melan-
401
choly (1820), 210,212; To a Nightin-
gale (1820), 87,88,203,205,210,212;
O Solitude (1815), 207; Otho the Great
(1819), 131, 210; Poems (1817), 207;
To Psyche (1820), 210,212; Sleep and
Poetry (1817), 85,196,198-9,208;
Staffa, 190; To —, 188; When I have
fears that I may cease to be (1848), 81,
208
Keats, Thomas (1799-1818), 206,208;
death of, 210
Kempis, Thomas a (1379-1471): The
Imitation of Christ (1427), 49
Kierkegaard, S0ren Aabye (1813-55),
47, 89,239; the "drunken boat"
construct in, 113-14
King, Stephen (1947), 348
Kinnaird, Douglas (1788-1830), 65
Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936), 258
Kleist, Heinrich von (1777-1811), 131;
"Uber das Marionettentheater"
(1801; pub. 1810), 221
Knowledge: of Adam, 87-8; and
consciousness, 343-6; of death, 133;
and experience, 351-2
Krishna: epiphany of, 205
Labyrinth, 184,190
Laforgue, Jules (1860-87), 109
Laissez-faire economy, 30
Lake Poets, 67
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de Monet,
chevalier de (1744-1829), 342
Lamb, Lady Caroline (1795-1828), 53,
60
Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 208
Lang, Andrew (1844-1912), 253
Language: decay of, 28-9; of love,
163; music as, 340; poetic and
discursive, 20
Latin: golden age of, 322; habit of, 343
4O2
Laughter, 147; obsession causes, 291
Law, 97; in Dickens, 297; man cre-
ates, 100-1; natural, 152-3
La Wallonie, 241
Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885-
1930), 69,101,102,104,181, 319;
Song of a Man Who Has Come
Through, 86-7
Lazarus, 332
Learning: and consciousness, 343,
349
Le Fanu, (Joseph) Sheridan (1814-73):
In a Glass Darkly (1872), 240
Legend, 94
LeGuin, Ursula K. (b. 1929): Earthsea
trilogy (1968-90), 311
Leigh, Augusta (nee Byron), 50, 54
Leisure, 320; and work, 316
Leisure class, 317. See also Aristocracy
Leninism, 318. See also Communism;
Marxism
Leon, Derrick Lewis (1908-44):
Ruskin the Great Victorian (1949),
242
Leviathan, 169,190
Lewis, Matthew (Monk) (1775-1818),
59
Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (1882-
1957): "An Analysis of the Mind of
James Joyce," 296; The Human Age
(1955), 296
Liberal, The, 55
Liberty, 101; Ancient Greek, 160;
and equality, 283, 320; and reason,
273-5; in Shelley, 159,168,170,173,
176
Life: and death, 145,148-50,171,188,
205
Lipscomb, William (1754-1842): The
Beneficial Effects of Inoculation
(1783), 27
Literature: and abstraction, 222;
Index
history of, 13,16-23 passim;
improvement of, 29; mythology
creates, 94; as product and as
process, 8-13; and reality, 308;
social function of, 105-6
Locke, John (1632-1704), 28, 35,174;
Essay concerning Human Under-
standing (1690), 27, 29; Treatises of
Government (1790), 27
Lockhart, John Gibson (1794-1854),
209
Lodge, Thomas (1556-1625): Glaucus
and Scilla (1589), 186
Logos, 273; Apollo as, 193; Christ as,
284; Coleridge on, 45, 48. See also
Word
London: in Dickens, 303; eighteenth-
century, 27
Longinus (the soldier who pierced
Christ), 329
Longinus (fl. ist c. A.D.), 8; On the
Sublime, 110-11
Lord's Prayer, 163
Love, 272; Byron on, 58; and death,
126-9 passim; dialectic of, 175; eros
and agape as, 105; in Keats, 196; in
Shelley, 162-4,166,168-9, *72;
vision of, 168,169. See also Caritas
Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken (1873-1963):
on Romanticism, 73, 74
Lower world, 146-7
Lowth, Robert (1710-87): On the
Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753),
36
Loyalty: and spiritual authority, 276;
and the university, 286
Lucifer, 161. See also Satan
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (ca.
94-55 B.C.), 95
Lukacs, Gyorgy Szegedy von (1885-
1971), 225
Lyric: audience of, 251-2; in Beddoes,
Index
136; of sensibility, 11. See also
Ballad; Fragmentation
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1st
Baron Macaulay (1800-59), 6
Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527): The
Prince (1532), 221
Mackail, John William (1859-1945):
Life of William Morris (1889), 310
Macpherson, James (1736-96): Ossian
poems, 10,12,13, 36,116
Maeterlinck, Count Maurice (1862-
1949)/136,241
Magic, 82,189,192-3; in Keats, 200;
in Shakespeare, 158. See also Al-
chemy
Magna Carta, 282
Mallarme, Stephane (1842-98), 38;
L'Azur (1866), 222; Le tombeau de
Verlaine (1897), 220
Mallett, Paul Henri (1730-1807):
Northern Antiquities (1790), 36
Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471), 328
Mandeville, Bernard (1670-1733), 23,
32, 35; The Fable of the Bees (1714),
18,20-1, 30
Maritain, Jacques (1882-1973), 75
Marlowe, Christopher (1564-93): The
Jew of Malta (pub. 1633), 132
Marvel, Ik (Donald G. Mitchell)
(1822-1908): Reveries of a Bachelor
(1850), 250
Marx, Karl (1818-83), 37, 49, 284, 307,
314; Communist Manifesto (1848),
318; Das Capital (1867-94), 32;
Theses on Feuerbach (1932), 284
Marxism, 125,221; Auden on, 89; the
"drunken boat" construct and,
113-14; and Morris, 310, 317-18.
See also Communism; Leninism
Mary, Virgin: as Queen of Heaven,
96
403
Mary Magdalen, 333
Massey, Walter Edward Hart (1864-
1901), 215
Masterpiece: imaginative vision of,
20; judgment of, 22
Mattheson, Johann (1681-1764), 18
Matthew, Gospel of, 264
Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805-72), 68
McKnight, Ray, 230
McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall (1911-
80), 341; The Gutenberg Galaxy
(1962), 90
Meaning, expression of, 29
Mechanism: of characters, 306; of
humanity, 314, 316, 352-3; nature
as, 79, 99,100,108,164-5; Romantic
attitude to, 154
Meditation: as evolutionary, 347
Medusa, 169
Melbourne, Lady (1751-1818), 53,62
Melodrama, 302; in Dickens, 305
Melville, Herman (1819-91): on
Greek architecture, 91; Moby Dick
(1851), 69
Memory: conscious and unconscious,
351; in Dickens, 303
Menander (342-291 B.C.), 290; plots
of, 289
Menippean satire, 25
Merrill, Stuart Fitzrandolph (1863-
1915), 241
Metamorphosis, 282; in Dickens, 294;
in Keats, 186,191; poetry of, 194
Metaphor, 97, 222; and emblems, 262;
in the age of sensibility, 14
Methodism: the primitive in, 35
Metonymy, 222
Metre, 10,11
Micawber, 3
Middle Ages: ascent in, 80; as ideal
society, 83; Morris on, 315; reac-
tions against, 321; romance in, 117
404
Middle class: and liberty, 320
Miles gloriosus: death as, 129
Mill, Harriet Taylor (1807-58), 281
Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 7&/ 271,
282, 314; on Coleridge, 45; educa-
tion in, 281; on spiritual authority,
279-81; On Liberty (1859), 280
Milne, A(lan) A(lexander) (1882-
1956), 231
Milnes, Richard Monckton, ist Baron
Houghton (1809-85): ed., Life,
Letters, and Literary Remains of John
Keats (1848), 213
Milton, John (1608-74), 29, 69, 76, 80,
83, 88,94,197,271, 324; Coleridge
on, 46; education in, 281; on gen-
ius, 106; on liberty, 101; his muse,
78; on poets, 106; on the Restora-
tion, 16-17; spiritual authority in,
273-4; on temporal power, 283;
universe of, 77-8,193; L'Allegro
(1645), 160,196-7; Arcades (1632),
186; Areopagitica (1644), 273,281;
Comus (1637), 83,85,162; Lycidas
(1638), 186,190; Nativity Ode (1645),
26, 78, 99,174; Paradise Lost (1667),
33/ 59/ 63, 78,115,122,160-1,164,
179,182; Paradise Regained (1671),
165, 335; II Penseroso (1631), 160,
196-7; Samson Agonistes (1671), 274;
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
(1649), 274
Minos, King, 190
Mirrors: in Beddoes, 145; in Dickens,
304
Mistress, cruel, 121. See also Courtly
love
Modern Library (Random House),
240
Modern mind: two poles of, 80-1
Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)
(1622-73), 289; Les Precieuses
Index
ridicules (1659), 300; Tartuffe (1664),
301
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de
(1533-92), 46; as Ydgrunite, 278;
"Of Cannibals" (1580), 35
Monteverdi, Claudio (1567-1643), 327
Moon, 109
Moore, John (1729-1802): Zeluco
(1789), 59
Moore, Thomas (1779-1852), 64
Moore, T(homas) Sturge (1870-1944),
223
Morality: in literature, 106
Morley, Christopher, 3
Morris, William (1834-96), 136, 279;
on the arts, 321-5; on centraliza-
tion, 318-19, 321; five phases of his
writing, 309-10; on fraternity, 320;
on manufacture, 316; medievalism
in, 116-17, 3!5/ 324; as Parnassian,
313; politics of, 310, 317-20; schizo-
phrenia in, 311; on social planning,
315-16; on work, 313-17
- works: trans. The Aeneid (1875),
310; trans. Beowulf (1898), 310, 313;
trans. The Odyssey (1887), 310;
trans. Volsunga Saga (1870), 310;
"Art and Socialism" (1884), 240;
The Defence of Guenevere (poem)
(1858), 309; A Dream of John Ball
(1888), 310; The Earthly Paradise
(1868/9-70), 309, 313, 324, 325;
Gertha's Lovers (1899), 312; House of
the Wolfings (1890), 323; "A King's
Lesson" (1886), 310; "The Lesser
Arts" (1878), 314, 316; The Life and
Death of Jason (1867), 309; Love Is
Enough (1873), 310; News from
Nowhere (1891), 278-9, 310, 313,
316, 317-20 passim, 323; The
Pilgrims of Hope (1885), 310; The
Roots of the Mountains (1889), 312;
Index
The Story of the Glittering Plain
(1891), 310; The Story of the Sunder-
ing Flood (1897), 310/ 312/ "Svend
and His Brethren" (1856), 312; The
Well at the World's End (1896), 310;
The Wood beyond the World (1894),
310, 311
Mosely, Sir Oswald (1896-1980), 240
Mother: in romantic tragedy, 120,121
Mountain, Elizabeth (Bessie), 230, 234
Mount Holyoke College, 246
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-
91), 18; Don Giovanni (1787), 66
Murray, John (1745-93)7 53/ 55
Music: in Parsifal, 337-40;
Schopenhauer on,337
Music of the spheres, 96,158,169,199
Mysticism, 264
Myth(s), 84, 93-4; characters as, 82; of
concern, 102; and deconstruction,
226; man creates, 100-1,150-1,177;
meaning of, 328; and mythology,
325; poetic origin of, 98
Mythology: decline of, 26; and
ideology, 226; matriarchal, 96; and
myth, 325; open, 177; Romanticism
as new, 102-3; two structures
descend from, 94
Mythopoeic poetry: plotless, 167;
Romantic poetry as, 84-5
Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte)
(1769-1821), 68,115,119; Byron
on, 53; Keats on, 189; as Romantic,
83-4.
Napoleonic wars, 93
Narcissus, 145; poetry of, 198
Narrative: plotless, 167
Nash, Ogden (1902-71), 65
Natural society, 34-7 passim, 103,
no, 122
Nature, 345-6; ambivalent, 88-9; and
405
art, 8,19; in Dickens, 307; in the
eighteenth century, 27; as female,
333; hero as, 119; identity with,
104,115,124,125,138,177-8;
innocence in, 202; as mechanical,
79; as mother, 95,126,169; natura
naturans, 99,138,155,221, 222;
poetry of renewed, 20; pre-Roman-
tic, 81; as process, 99,107; Roman-
tic view of, 102,103-4,111-12;
scientific and poetic visions of,
150-1; in Shelley, 166,170; spirit of,
161-2; spiritual authority from,
284; two levels of, 13, 22, 33, 34-5,
77,78,80, 95-7,104,108,109,123,
126,158-9, 222, 224, 331; unity
with, 103-4. $ee also Creation, four
levels of
Nazism, 83. See also Fascism
Necessity, 152-3; in Blake, 78-9; and
freedom, 272
Negative capability, 188,199
Nemesis, 335
Neptune, 190
Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar) (A.D.
37-68): silver age of, 322
Nerval, Gerard de (Gerard Labrunie)
(1808-55), 15
New Comedy, 299; Dickens as, 289-
94, 300, 301; festivity in, 291;
nineteenth-century, 302-3
New Criticism: and Byron, 56
Newman, Cardinal John Henry
(1801-90), 47, 271; doctrine in, 283;
on spiritual authority, 281-2; the
university in, 285
New society: in comedy, 122
New Testament: and tyranny, 160.
See also Bible; Gospel; Scripture
Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), 28,
98,100; in Blake, 79; excitement
over, 19; world picture of, 78;
406
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica (1687), 27
Nicolson, Marjorie (1894-1981):
Newton Demands the Muse (1946),
20,78
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-
1900), 37,68, 96,239; on Parsifal,
333, 337; on truth, 222; on Wagner,
327; Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-
92), 113
19603,120; on campus, 348-9; knowl-
edge and experience in, 352
Noah, 267; his ark, 89, 96
Noble savage, 34, 83,104
Noh plays, 336
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)
(1772-1801), 105
Novel: Gothic, 111; Romanticism
and, 82. See also Fiction
Obsession: in Dickens, 305; in hu-
mours, 294-5; in New Comedy, 291
Occult, 170. See also Tarot
Oedipus, 161
Old Testament: will of God in, 272
Ongley, Fred, 238
Oracles: random, 200
Oracular: autohypnosis as, 90; in
Beddoes, 146-7; cave, 115; compo-
sition, 13; metaphor as, 14; nature
as, 88,111; rhythm, 12
Oram, Betty, 234
Order: images of, 99; universe as, 96,
98
Organic: versus mechanical, 79
Orpheus: Dickinson champions, 261;
and Fury dice, 193
Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair)
(1903-50): Nineteen Eighty-Four
d949), 79,299
Osborne, Dorothy (1627-95), 28
Ossian. See Macpherson
Index
Ottava rima: in Byron, 64
Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramee)
(1839-1908), 287
Ouroboros, 143
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43
B.C.-A.D. 17), 26, 95; Metamorphoses,
186,191
Oxford: women at, 216
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine:
Morris appears in, 309
Oxford University Press, 22
Pain: in Keats, 182; Shelley on, 156
Pandora's box, 163
Paradise: Dickinson's vision of, 264-9
passim, 270; of Keats, 201; lost, 177,
203. See also Eden; Garden
Parataxis, 219
Past, the, 109,176,226, 348, 351. See
also Future; Present
Pastoral, 97,177, 348; in the
Augustan age, 34; creation in, 180;
in Keats, 182; and the prophetic,
324
Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton
(1823-96), 214
Paul, St., 116,166; on liberty, 273
Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866),
25; The Four Ages of Poetry (1820),
174
Peasants' Revolt, 279, 315
Peninsular War, 51
Pepys, Samuel (1633-1703), 5
Percy, Thomas (born Piercy) (1729-
1811): Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry (1765), 36
Peredur (Welsh Grail story), 329
Perfection, 29. See also Fantasy
Pericles (ca. 490-429 B.C.): Age of, 160
Peter, St., 190
Philips, John (1676-1709): The Splen-
did Shilling (1701), 18
Index
Philosophy, 94; Romantic, 75
Picturesque, the, 13
Plato (ca. 428-ca. 348 B.C.), 45, 337;
the cave in, 162; unity in, 163; The
Laws, 324; Phaedo, 172; The Sympo-
sium, 162,176
Plautus, Titus Maccius (ca. 250-184
B.C.), 289,290
Play: the anatomy and, 25; and work,
350
Pleasure: and pain, 121-2; in Roman-
ticism, 74
Plot: in Dickens, 287-9, 300-7 passim;
sequence within, 137-8
Poe, Edgar Allen (1809-49), 57,109;
on the continuous poem, 57,90;
Berenice (1835), 293; Hop-Frog; or,
the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs
(1850), 141; King Pest (1835), 133;
"The Poetic Principle" (ca. 1845), 11
Poetry, 171; of concern, 198; contem-
porary, 15; continuous, 11-12, 85;
and creation, 165; crusading, 204;
diction of, 256; and divinity, 199;
and eternity, 176; and experience,
149; healthy, 241; and identity, 162,
196; and imagination, 204; and
interpenetration, 203; Keats's view
of, 194; language of, 195; lyric, 251;
oracular, 13; organic wholeness in,
225; original, 201; the poet's role,
106-7,116-17; the primitive in, 36;
as product, 9; and prophecy, 174;
and reality, 168; and religion, 177;
of sensibility, 13; Shelley on, 157;
and sleep, 178,191; sound and
sense in, 11, 257; thought of, 176;
unites man and nature, 97; and the
Word, 163
Political science, 94
Politicians, 352
Polytheism: Romantic, 102
407
Pomona, 184
Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 7, 22,
28, 38, 75, 76; Byron and, 64,122;
couplets of, 9; The Dunciad (1728),
10,16; An Essay on Criticism (1711),
29; The Messiah (1712), 26; Moral
Essays (1731-35), 19; Peri Bathous:
Or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry
(1728), 29; The Rape of the Lock
(1712), 18
Poseidon, 272
Pottle, Frederick Albert (1897-1987),
5
Poulet, Georges (1902-91), 225
Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885-1972), 72,
no, 322; fragmentation in, 90
Power: creative, 81-5 passim, 106-7;
stories as, 325
Praz, Mario (1896-1982): The Roman-
tic Agony (1933), 121
Pre-Raphaelites, 322
Presence(s), 199, 200; in Dickinson,
266
Present, 173, 203, 226, 351; continu-
ous, 9-10; in Dickinson, 264;
eternal, 176; sacrifice of, 347
Priestly, F(rancis) E(thelbert) L(ouis)
(1905-88), 341
Primitive: the eighteenth-century,
33-6 passim; in Romanticism, 83
Primitive societies: the dead in, 147
Prior, Matthew (1664-1721), 23
Process: identity of, 99; literature as,
8-13 passim
Product: literature as, 8-n passim
Progress: and evolution, 346-8
Projection, recovery of, 100-1,150-1,
177,194
Prometheus, 160; as Christ, 163; in
Shelley, 164
Propertius, Sextus (ca. 5O-ca. 16 B.C.),
75
408
Prophecy: poetry as, 174; and the
pastoral, 324
Prose: aphorisms and, 44; continuous
and discontinuous, 258
Proserpine, 193
Proust, Marcel (1871-1922) 101;
Romantic tragedy of, 121
Pseudepigrapha, 13
Psyche, 184
Pulci, Luigi (1432-84): Morgante
maggiore (1481), 65
Puppet characters, 296
Purgatory: space as, 202-3
Pushkin, Alexander (1799-1837), 68
Pygmalion, 168
Quarterly Review: Endymion reviewed
in, 209
Quennell, Peter (1905-94): Ruskin:
The Portrait of a Prophet (1949), 242
Quest: imaginative, 200; mental, 118;
and question, 332-3; renunciation
of, 335; in Shelley, 165; of the soul,
114,118,178. See also Ascent;
Descent
Rabelais, Francois (1493-1553), 46
Radcliffe, Anne, nee Ward (1764-
1823), 59,111
Reading: authentic, 176
Realism, 155; and imagination, 299;
and romance, 118, 287; and Ro-
manticism, 82,116-17
Reality, 80,166,182; via the arts and
sciences, 286; in Beddoes, 143-4;
cemetery of, 134; death as, 149; to
Keats, 178; and literature, 308; new,
27; spatial projection of, 78-83
passim; two kinds of, 176-7;
underworld of, 162; verbal, 38
Reason, 105; Age of, 22; belief in, 25;
inferior to consciousness, 99; and
Index
liberty, 272-5; and tyranny, 276
Rebirth, 147. See also Resurrection
Recognition, 352
Redemption: myths of, 105; in
Parsifal, 331, 333, 335, 337; tradi-
tional and Romantic, 103
Red Sea, 145; habit as, 165
Reformation, no, 321-2
Refrain: in lyric, 10
Regeneration, 152,163,169
Reincarnation, 147
Religion: eighteenth-century, 26; and
poetry, 177,195
Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz
van Rijn) (1606-69): nature in, 155
Renaissance, 321-2; ascent in, 80
Repetition, 351; and education,
349; in literature as product and
process, 10-11;
Response, community of, 194,204-5.
See also Saving remnant; Spontane-
ity
Revelation, 194,222-3; Book of, 259;
mythopoeic, 107; and spiritual
authority, 273-4,282
Revolution, no, 147,165-6; as apoca-
lypse, 73; and culture, 283-4; m
Dickens, 307; and Eros, 176; and
fraternity, 320; hope of, 163; in-
ward, 83; and Morris, 317; in poetic
imagery, 74; and revelation, 282; of
Romanticism, 78-83 passim, 101,
102,108-10,114; and Shelley, 167,
172; and spiritual authority, 274-6;
technological, 323
Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), 36;
storytelling of, 9; Clarissa (1747-48),
11, 31; Pamela (1740-41), 9, 31
Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875-1926), 102;
on the poet, 183
Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur (1854-
91), 15; dereglement de tons les sens,
Index
13,115; on me pense, 14; as voyant,
90; Le Bateau ivre (1871), 89, 284; Les
Illuminations (1886), 90; line Saison
en enfer (1873), 12,115
Rodgers, Richard (1902-79), and
Hammerstein, Oscar (1895-1960):
The King and I (1951), 290
Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855), 64
Roman Catholic Church, problem of,
281; and Romanticism, 109-10
Romance: and Dickens, 303-4;
endless, 85,131; of Morris, 309-12
passim; novels as, 82; and realism,
287; Romanticism transforms, 115-
19
Romanticism, 7-8, 92; antitheses in,
219; apocalyptic vision of, 117; art
in, 11; and Classicism, 7; concern
of, 177; conflicts in, 225; cosmos of,
192,193; creative power within,
81-5 passim; definition of, 72-4,
75-6, 93; divinity in, 199, 200;
elitism of, 317; expanded con-
sciousness in, 120; genesis of, 203;
German, 159; inward nature of, 81-
3; journey to the centre of, 86-8;
metaphor in, 14; new mythology
of, 102-3,105; NF becomes inter-
ested in, 218; reconsideration of,
91; rejects social process, 135;
revolutionary cosmos of, 78-83
passim, 101,102,103,105,108-10,
114,123-4,150,153,192,193
Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78), 4,5,
22,37,69,104,221,280; on civiliza-
tion, 81, no; as Dante's Virgil, 225-
6; Holderlin on, 220; natural society
in, 274-5; the primitive in, 35; Con-
fessions (1782), 120; Reveries d'un
solitaire (1782), 226
Ruskin, John (1819-1900): influences
Morris, 314-15; life of, 242-4; The
409
Ethics of Dust (1866), 243; Praeterita
(1885-89), 242; The Stones of Venice
(1851-53), 314,322
Sacrifice: as quest, 334-5
Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-Frangois,
Marquis de (1740-1814): nature to,
88; Romantic irony of, 121
Salome, 329
Salvation, the dolphin as, 190
Samuel, Book of: Witch of Endor in,
146
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80), 75, 336;
Being and Nothingness (1943), 150
Satan: in Milton, 59, 73-4,164,187,
191; as sky-god, 100
Satire, 122; Byron's, 64-8; eighteenth-
century, 26; of mechanical charac-
ters, 296
Saving remnant, the, 284-5. $ee a^so
Response, community of
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
von (1775-1854), 75
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich
von (1759-1805), 116,221
Schoenberg, Arnold (1874-1951), 53
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860),
37, 47, 74,126, 284; the "drunken
boat" construct in, 89,113-14;
Nietzsche detests, 337; Wagner
reads, 334; The World as Will and
Idea (1819), 337
Science, 80, 93,150-1; and law, 152;
and mythology, 98; and Romanti-
cism, 101
Science fiction, 109; and Morris, 311.
See also Fantasy
Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 51,76,
82; aristocracy in, 109; heroines of,
111; Ivanhoe (1819), 116; Lay of the
Last Minstrel (1805), 1]L3; R°b ^°y
(1817), 36; Waverly (1814), 36
4io
Scripture: and doctrine, 282; and
truth, 281. See also Bible; Gospel;
New Testament
Self-awareness: tragedy of, 119-20
Self-consciousness: fall into, 109, no;
sin of, 103
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the
Younger (ca. 4 B.C.-A.D 65), 135;
Apocolocyntosis, 67; Thyestes, 132
Senex figure, 157,158
Sense, 80-1
Sensibility, Age of, 7-8, 9-10,11-12,
14,15, 27; Beddoes as change in,
133; Romanticism as new, 93
Severn, Joseph (1793-1879), 213;
befriends Keats, 212
Sex: and death, 185
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616),
69,197,240,250,271, 348; and his
contemporaries, 17; comedy in,
158-9; out of fashion, 29; the fool
in, 138; green world of, 307; imagi-
nation of, 107; magic in, 192-3;
romantic comedies of, 123; tem-
perament of, 188
- works: Antony and Cleopatra (1623),
159; As you Like It (ca. 1602-3), *23;
Comedy of Errors (1623), 304;
Cymbeline (1608), 136; Hamlet
(1604-5), 116,119,129,132,170;
Julius Caesar (1599), 42; King Lear
(1608), 116, 331; Macbeth (1623),
132,137; Merchant of Venice (1600),
123; A Midsummer Night's Dream
(1600), 116,118,123,158,184;
Othello (1622), 295; Pericles (1609),
302; Romeo and Juliet (1597), 159,
180; The Tempest (1623), 158,189,
214, 307, 333, 335; Titus Andronicus
(1607), 132; Twelfth Night (1600),
304; Venus and Adonis, 186; A
Winter's Tale (ca. 1610), 168,289
Index
Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950),
231, 311; on God, 260; on Morris,
310; Back to Methusaleh (1921), 342;
Candida (1933), 290; Man and
Superman (1901-3), 70; The Music
Cure (1913), 95
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-
1851), 173; Frankenstein (1818), 79,
122,164
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822),
60, 64,76,109,115,125,137,143,
193, 202,208,213; atheism in, 153;
Byron meets, 54; on the creative
process, 85; drowns, 55; and Eliot,
171-2; Eros in, 105; Greece in, 159-
60; and Keats, 178,198-9,207,212;
on liberty, 101; magic in, 192-3;
nature in, 155; plotless, 138; on
poets, 105; and science, 151; sister
in, 103; a slug, 181; wandering Jew
figure in, 120
- works: Adonais (1821), 183,213;
Alastor (1816), 88,120; Cenci (1819),
122,163; Cloud (1820), 155; A
Defence of Poetry (1821), 79,157,
159,164,174,176, 201;
Epipsychidion (1821), 162,168; Hellas
(1822), 160,173,175-6; Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty (1817), 162; Julian
and Maddalo (1824), 54,169; Letter to
Maria Gisborne, 154; Mont Blanc
(1817), 170; Necessity of Atheism
(1811), 100; Ode to Heaven (1819),
169; Ode to Liberty (1820), 168; Ode
to the West Wind (1820), 84,112; On
a Future State, 172; On Life, 164;
Prince Athanase (1824), 160;
Prometheus Unbound (see below);
Queen Mab (1813), 85,100,152-3,
156,160-1,163,167; The Revolt of
Islam (1817), 85,151,165-6,167,
171-2,173; The Sensitive Plant
Index
(1820), 172; Song to the Men of
England (1839), 173; Speculations on
Metaphysics (1840), 85; To a Skylark
(1820), 218; The Triumph of Life
(1824), 174,226; Witch of Atlas
(1824), 154
- Prometheus Unbound (1820), 85,86,
87,90,92,100,117,123,125,150-76
passim, 319; Jupiter in, 79,152,
156-7,159,161,163-4,167,172-3
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-
1816), 64; The School for Scandal
(1777), 26
Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86), 25
Siegfried: legend of, 328
Silence: poetry of, 201
Simile, 97
Simrock, Karl Joseph (1802-76), 329
Sinclair, Lister (b. 1921), 42
Sky-gods, romantic, 79
Smart, Christopher (1722-71): Jubilate
Agno (1758/9-63; pub. 1939), 12,13,
14; Song to David (1763), 10,12, 36
Smith, Adam (1723-90), 33
Smith, Aubrey C. (1863-1948), 234
Smith, Mrs. Spencer, 51-2
Smollett, Tobias George (1721-71):
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count
Fathom (1753), 32
Smyth, Dame Ethel (1858-1944), 230
Social contract: in Burke, 34; in the
eighteenth century, 33-4
Socialism, 320; Morris on, 319
Social science, 101
Society: and art, 309; and identity,
204; natural, 275, 276; obstructing
and congenial, 289,291, 292,294,
296,298-9, 300; original, 83; the
poet in, 116; transformation of, 282
Socrates (469-399 B.C.), 324
Soler, Antonio (1729-83), 18
Song of Songs: bride in, 95
411
Soul: Keats on, 202; quest of the, 114,
118,178
Sound patterns: in literature as
product and process, 10-11; of
poetry, 257
Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 11, 51,
70; Byron ridicules, 61; Vision of
Judgment (1820), 67, 68
Space: as purgatory, 202-3
Sparagmos, 190. See also Fragmenta-
tion
Spectator, The, 19, 29
Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936), 322
Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552-99), 195;
stanzaic form in, 11; The Faerie
Queene (1590-96), 80, 83,85,108,
112,179-80,182,186,201;
Mutabilitie Cantos (1599), 179,182;
The Shepheardes Calender (1579), 182
Spheres, music of. See Music of the
Spheres
Spirit: of God, 273; music as language
of, 340; of Nature, 161-2
Spirits: elemental, 158,192-3; in
Shelley,i58
Spontaneity: education towards, 350.
See also Response, community of
St. Michael's College, 341
Stars: as mechanical, 109; as original
creation, 96, 98
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783-
1842), 68
Sterne, Laurence (1713-68), 25;
animals in, 13; Tristram Shandy
(1759-65), 5, 8, 37, 65
Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955), 200
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-94):
on Poe, 133; on Whitman, 256
Stock response: humour of, 295
Storytelling: as power, 325. See also
Fiction; Narrative; Plot
Stream of consciousness, 8
412
Strindberg, August (1849-1912), 102,
135,136,231, 336; Dream Play
(1902), 138,288; Great Highway
(1909), 113
Structure: music as, 338; of Romantic
poetry, 85
Subject-object split, 95,99,103,153,
165,170,171; in Romanticism, 225
Sublime, 12,110-11,126
Sullivan, Sir Arthur (1842-1900), 235.
See also Gilbert
Superstition: and faith, 351
Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 22, 25,
28,197; on dogma, 26; on Pope, 11;
Drapier's Letters (1724), 16;
Gulliver's Travels (1726), 16,21-2,
34; Journal to Stella (1710-13), 5; A
Tale of a Tub (1704), 65
Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837-
1909), 57, 328; Tristram ofLyonesse
(1882), 312
Symbol, intrinsic, 277, 283
Symbolisme, 137; vision in, 90
Symbolist movement, 149, 241
Symmetry: eighteenth-century, 27
Sympathy, imaginative, 12-13
Synge, John Millington (1871-1909):
The Playboy of the Western World
(1907), 142
Tarot, 330. See also Occult
Tasso, Torquato (1544-95), 164, 327
Taste: eighteenth-century, 28
Tatler, The, 19
Taylor, John (1757-1832), 209, 214
Technology, 151,204; demonic, 154;
military, 347; and revolution, 353;
and uniformity, 323
Telemann, George Philipp (1681-
1767), 18
Tell, William, 328
Temperament: creative, 188
Index
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-92), 9,
109,126,246, 328; In Memoriam
(1833), 261; Lady ofShalott (1832;
rev. 1842), 87; Ulysses (1844), 136
Terence, Publius Terentius Afer (ca.
190-159 B.C.), 289
Thanatos, 126, 305. See also Death
Theatre of the Absurd, 133-4
Theism: in Coleridge, 48
Theology, 94; in the university, 285
Theory, educational, 271
Theseus, 190
Thetis, 160
Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914-53),
15, 319; Under Milk Wood (1954),
303
Thomson, James W. (1869-1941), 20
Thoreau, Henry David (1817-62),
246; Walden (1854), 270
Thought: poetic and aggressive,
174-5
Thurber, James Grover (1894-1961):
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
(1941), 352
Time: in Beddoes, 145; and death,
147; and the fall, 166; tyranny of,
176. See also Future; Past; Present
Todd, Mabel Loomis (1858-1932),
252, 253,254
Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel)
(1892-1973): The Lord of the Rings
(1954-55), 165, 3ii, 335
Totalitarianism, 204; cultural, 319. See
also Communism; Fascism; Naz-
ism; Tyranny
Tradition, 273-4; art in, 328; and
Morris, 325
Tragedy: in Keats, 197; revenge in,
147; in romance, 118; Romantic
transformation of, 115,119-21
Traherne, Thomas (ca. 1637-74), 113
Transfiguration, 190
Index
Transformation: vision as, 164
Trelawny, Edward (1792-1881), 55,
56
Trilling, Lionel (1905-75): "The Fate
of Pleasure: Wordsworth to
Dostoevsky" (1963), 72, 74
Trollope, Anthony (1815-82), 287; The
Warden (1855), 287
Truth, 222; and beauty, 178,183,191,
197; and humour, 331; and myth,
177-8; and scripture, 281; and
spiritual authority, 284
Turner, Gord, 238
Turner, Joseph Mallord William
(1775-1851), 322; nature in, 155
Twain, Mark (Samuel Longhorne
Clemens) (1835-1910): The Adven-
tures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 47;
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876), 57
Tyranny, 275-6; in Blake, 78-9,100;
of Greece, 160. See also Totalitarian-
ism
Ugliness: Morris on, 314-17 passim
Unconscious: Butler on, 343-4
Uniformity: and technology, 323
United States: aristocracy in, 277;
literature of, 319
Unity: through love, 162-3
University: and the Church, 282;
spiritual authority from, 285-6
University College (Toronto), 341
Urania: Milton's muse, 78
Utilitarianism: John Stuart Mill's,
281
Utopia, 316, 320; in romance fiction,
116
Valery, Paul (1871-1945), 241
Value judgments, 17, 46, 313; on
Romanticism, 76; on Wagner, 327
413
Vaughan, Henry (1622-95), 113
Venus, 190
Verhaeren, Emile (18.55-1916), 24; Les
Villes Tentaculaires (1895), 104
Verlaine, Paul (1844-96), 13; Parsifal
(sonnet) (1886), 330
Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 37,
100-1,322
Victoria College, 341; Gate House in,
232; honour course at, 215; Music
Club in, 229, 230,234, 235,236,238
Vinaver, Eugene: on Malory, 328
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Marro) (70-
19 B.C.), 34; Coleridge on, 46;
Aeneid, 49; Fourth Eclogue, 26,169-
70
Virtue(s), Christian, 162-4
Vision, 173; apocalyptic, 117, 223;
Dickens's radical, 298; Dickinson's
paradisal, 264-9 passim, 270;
human, 8; ideal, 176-7; of inno-
cence, 114,177,180,181,198,202-3;
of Jupiter, 157; liberated, 170; of
love, 168,169; in Shelley, 164-6;
two poles of, 153
Void, 166
Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de
(1694-1778), 4, 35,174; Candide
(1759), 202
Wadsworth, Charles (1814-82), 247-8
Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard (1813-
83): comitatus in, 336; as Nazi, 327;
Flying Dutchman (1843), 338;
Gotterdammerung (1876), 334;
Lohengrin (1850), 327; Die Meister-
singer (1868), 336; Parsifal (1882),
326-40 passim; Ring Cycle (1876),
165, 328, 334-5; Tannhauser (1845),
327,338; Tristan and Isolde (1857-59),
327, 328
Waller, Edmund (1606-87), 28
414
Walpole, Horace (1717-97): Castle of
Otranto (1764), 36, 60, 63
Walton, Evangeline Ensley (1907-96),
311
Wandering Jew, figure of, 149, 330; in
Shelley, 160
War, cult of, 335
Warton, Joseph (1722-1800), 13; Essay
on Pope (1757-82), 29,
Warton, Thomas the Younger (1728-
90), 13; History of English Poetry
(1774-81), 36
Wasserman, Earl Reeves (1913-73):
subtler language, 84
Waterloo, Battle of, 53
Watts, Isaac (1674-1748), 26
Webster, John (ca. 1580-1626): his
influence, 17; The Duchess ofMalft
(1623), 136
Welford, Jean Hardie, 234
Wellek, Rene (1903-95): "Romanti-
cism Re-Examined" (1963), 72,73
Wentworth, Lady Isabella (1653-
1733), 19
Wesendonk, Mathilde (1828-1902),
329
Wesley, John (1703-91), 10, 26
Westerns, 36
Weston, Jessie L. (1850-1928): From
Ritual to Romance (1920), 330
Whig Revolution of 1688, 27
White goddess, 88,111-12
Whitman, Walt (1819-92), 12,256;
There Was a Child Went Forth (1900),
198
Wilenski, John Ruskin (b. 1933), 242
Wilkes, John (1727-97), 68
Will: in evolution, 342; of God, 272;
and grace, 191; renunciation of, 173
Williams, Charles Walter Stansby
(1886-1945), 328
Wilson, Harriet (ca. 1807-70), 66
Index
Wisdom: folly as, 133,138,140
Wit: theory of, 25
Witches, 96
Wittgenstein, Ludwig Joseph Johann
(1889-1951), 47
Wolcot, John (1738-1819), 64
Wolfe, Thomas (1900-38), 69
Wolfram von Eschenbach (d. ca.
1230): Parzival, 327, 329, 330, 331,
332
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-97), 32
Women: in Byron, 62-3; in Parsifal,
333. See also Heroine(s)
Wood, Roy, 230
Woodhouse, Richard (1788-1834), 212
Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882-
1941): "Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown" (1924), 8
Word(s), 194,195; Coleridge on the,
48; creative, 163. See also Logos
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 7,
51,67, 72,76,81,99,121,198,199,
202,209,213,221,258,261, 319;
Byron on, 64; Coleridge on, 45;
correspondence in, 112; identity in,
203; Keats meets, 208; nature in, 88,
103-4,111,149,157,170; on the
Ossian poems, 10; poetic diction of,
26; revolution in, 73; the sublime,
126; temperament of, 188; The
Excursion (1814), 80,118; The Idiot
Boy (1798), 84,154; Lyrical Ballads
(1798), 14,27; Ode on Intimations of
Immortality (1807), 103,113; Peter
Bell (1819), 84,154; Preface to the
Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads
(1800), 37, 76; The Prelude (see
below); The Recluse, 86; Resolution
and Independence (1807), 82,118;
Simon Lee (1798), 200; To a Skylark
(1825), 270; The Waggoner (1805),
84,154
Index
- The Prelude (1805,1850), 104,105,
117,118,131,192, 200; mighty
forms of, 80, 84,104; mother-
goddess in, 88; the soldier in, 82
Work: and leisure, 316; Morris on,
314, 317; and play, 350
Working class, 317; and equality, 320;
Morris on, 316. See also Class
conflict
Writer: Boswell as, 5-6; in history, 20;
serious, 106
Writing: lucid, 350; process of, 8-13
passim
Yale University, 3, 220
Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), 70,
101,102,104,109,136, 220; Byzan-
tium in, 224; as conservative, no;
double gyre, 134; on the Grail, 329-
415
30; image and emblem in, 223-4;
on Shelley, 160; spirits in, 80; on
the writer's mask, 4; Among School
Children (1927), 223; Byzantium
(1932), 223,224; The Celtic Twilight
(1893), 324-5; Responsibilities (1914),
223; Sailing to Byzantium (1925),
223, 224; The Statues (1939), 224; The
Tower (1928), 171; Vacillation (1932),
224
Yoga, 347
Young, Edward (1683-1765): Night
Thoughts (1741), 28
Youth: Byron as, 70-1; education of,
317
Zelazny, Roger (Rodzher Zheliazny)
(b. 1937): Amber trilogy, 311
Zen Buddhism, 201, 347
Zeus, 160