This notebook was written in a 1932 Canadian Diary (published by Brown Brothers stationers in Toronto), which had one lined page for each day of the year. According to the distinctions used in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, the material, though written in a daybook or diary—and referred to several times by Frye as a diary—is similar in both form and content to the reflections and speculations in Frye’s other notebooks.
It is difficult to date the notebook with certainty, although it is clear that many of the notebook entries, perhaps even a majority, were written after 1932. In the entry of 13 March Frye refers to his experience on the mission field in Saskatchewan, which occurred in 1934. On 17 March he mentions Eliot’s After Strange Gods, which was published in 1934. A reference to the “current depression” in the entry of 23 May could suggest a date as late as 1939: it was only then, with the advent of World War II, that the Canadian economy began to recover. In a marginal notation to the entry for 13 July Frye identifies the entry as an early form of his anatomy theory. He began to develop this theory in 1932 and his first published version of it was 1942. This suggests a date sometime after 1932 and perhaps as late as 1940 or 1941. In the final entry for 31 January Frye refers to “My B.D. Thesis.” Although the lines that follow are a light-hearted and joking couplet, they suggest a mid-1930s date for the notebook, as Frye began to lay plans for writing a B.D. thesis on Christianity and music during his first year at Emmanuel College, 1933–34. Frye also refers to his “tendency to novel-writing” (7 July), and if this refers to the one extant though unfinished novel he wrote, then the date of this notebook entry could be as late as the early 1940s. Still, the material here is earlier than in any of Frye’s other notebooks.
The difficulty in dating the notebook can be seen in the entry on rugby of 29 November, which is written in the present tense and so appears not to be a flashback. Given this assumption, the date would appear to be the year that the University of Toronto varsity rugby team (The Blues) was in the cellar and that the Victoria team, which included Don Amos and John Stinson, lost in its bid to win the final competition for the Mulock Cup, the trophy awarded to the champion of the University of Toronto intramural rugby league. But Jean O’Grady has uncovered the following facts: Victoria did play Trinity College for the championship in 1931, and Trinity won, but neither Amos nor Stinson played. The year before, Victoria beat Trinity once again, but Amos and Stinson were not on the team. In 1933 the Toronto Blues were not in the cellar because they defeated Queen’s University for the Senior Intercollegiate Championship. This rules out 1931 through 1933 for that particular entry.
Frye was an Emmanuel College student from 1933 to 1936. For the 1936–37 academic year he was studying at Oxford. There is nothing in the notebook that would point to its being written when he was at Merton College. The best guess seems to be that the notebook comes from Frye’s time at Emmanuel College, and it is quite possible that he wrote the entries over the course of several years. In his later, somewhat obsessive note-taking he would pick up a notebook at his home or office, write in it, and come back to it later, sometimes years later. It is clear from the orthography of this notebook that Frye did come back to some of the entries. The writing is in both pencil and pen, and when writing in ink Frye used pens with different nibs and with different colours of ink. When we have different styles of handwriting appearing on the same page, it seems unlikely that all of the writing on that page was done at a single sitting. The two paragraphs for 9 March, for example, were written with different pens, and the pen used in the second paragraph was also used to insert two sentences in the first paragraph. Frye has obviously edited what he first wrote.
The diary has two vertical columns on the right-hand side of each page, and in the first column Frye makes a notation for almost all of the separate entries. This is the only Frye notebook in which such annotations appear. It is as if he has gone back through the notebook at a later date and made notes about which entries to “leave,” which are “OK,” which need improvement (“possible if revised”), and the like, although some of the notations remain mysterious. (Is “S.G.” an abbreviation for “sehr gut”? “sola gratia”?) What the disposition of the notebook entries might have eventually been is uncertain. I have recorded the marginal notations in square brackets at the end of the entry where they stand opposite. Words that I have been unable to decipher are designated by a question mark in square brackets; sometimes these question marks follow what I think the word might be. Words that Frye underlined have been italicized. I have retained his punctuation and spelling. An exception, in the interest of clarity, is the addition of quotation marks in several places where Frye refers to words as words.
The 1932 Notebook is published with the permission of Victoria University.
January 9
Of all literary abortions there is nothing more damnable than the chattering of an armchair smiling egoist. The familiar essay, like the personal impression in criticism, succeeds insofar as it is systematic or presupposes a systematic outlook. Insofar as it fails in this, it wastes the time of those looking for something useful and nauseates those looking for something beautiful.
January 13
Parody must be an extraordinarily difficult art. If you parody a man, you are necessarily trying to pick out weak spots, and as that cannot be done so objectively with thought, you must concentrate on style. Style is expression; parody inverts both. Now once style is divorced from man, the effect is as forced and laboratoried as hydrogen taken from water. If the man is earnest and sincere, the parodist possibly feels like a cad—sincerity and difficulty of parody being commensurate in any case. Now if you parody a school—a small individual artist is too petty a mark—there is always a lunatic fringe which has already parodied it. One cannot parody Gertrude Stein any more than The Hunting of the Snark. Take that famous indiscretion of Crashaw:
Two walking baths; two weeping motions;
Portable, and compendious oceans.1 [Saint Mary Magdalene or The Weeper, stanza 19]
If a parodist could think that one up, he might collect a pension and retire, but Crashaw himself wrote it, and parody can only shrug its shoulders.
[margin: “not too bad”]
January 15
Poetry is any form of literary expression which the creator wishes to call poetry. It may not be any good but it is poetry all the same.
[margin: “OK”]
Obscenity is well-nigh essential to satire, but that does not mean that a writer should scrape material for his work off the walls of a public lavatory.
[margin: “OK”]
I think an underlying cause of the pervading imbecility of detective-story writers can be found in the fact that they think in terms of short stories and yet insist on producing novels. Books which at best have barely enough material for an effective three-thousand word tale become excruciating when padded—or rather swelled—to the larger dimension which often requires a deliberate obstruction of the story such as a love-interest.
[margin: “OK”]
To me, how a man with the mellow wisdom and rich humor of Oliver Wendell Holmes could have produced a monstrosity like “Elsie Venner” is a deep mystery, which only a thoroughly competent psychoanalyst can solve.2
[margin: “useless”]
I think there are few things more drearily and irritatingly commonplace than cleverness.
[margin: “trite”]
The creation of a work of art consists in the infusion of a rhythmic pattern into Nature. Art conquers space by time, science by space again.
[margin: “useless as is”]
January 16
Continuing with the last thought of yesterday, there are three compulsions in the world. First, the time-compulsion to action, or morals. Second, the space-compulsion to thought, or logic. Third, the interfusion of time in space, or aesthetics, and of action in thought, or feeling.3
[margin: “expand”]
Therefore art is the precipitate of history and the catalyzer of science, as well as the expressed form of religion.
[margin: “useless”]
January 21
The Faustian drive into the infinite can be symbolized by one figure only, the Cross. But the cross must have a long shaft to emphasize the upward urge. The Greek square cross, and still more the Maltese, is an inclusive, self-satisfied figure. The cross squares down with the Anglicans and the moribund Byzantines. To have the centre in the centre is the symbol of egotistic criticism. The Latin cross implies the ellipse—the double rapport centre, one being an indefinite and consequently infinite locus.
[margin: “OK”]
One occasionally feels that had Judge Jeffreys never lived, all the nineteenth-century historians would have died of apoplexy.4
[margin: “S.G.”]
Magical formulas in the Leyden Papyrus W [Dieterich, Abraxas 202, 15 ff]. “Enter, act with your eyes shut, bellow as much as you can, then take in your breath with a sigh, and let it out again with a whistle.”5
January 25
The racial make-up of this country is more Scotch than English. Due partly, I suppose, to the affinity of Northern nations. As a result Canada is more apt to work out an abstract skeleton framework for the Americans in theology, philosophy, and science than develop a distinctive culture, just as the Scotch have done for England. What culture we would produce would seem to be provincial craft-art. The United Church of Canada is our first move along the other line.
[margin: “OK”]
It should be remembered that Jesus cursed the fig-tree because it bore no fruit, not because it bore no fig-leaves.
[margin: “OK”]
Red is the color of sexuality; even animals know that. In the nineteenth century the tomato was called the “love-apple” and regarded as poisonous. That seems to sum up a good deal of the Victorian attitude to sexuality, and I think it a probable explanation of the origin of this grotesque superstition. I suppose the reason red is sexual in nature is that it is nearest the heat rays.
[margin: “OK”]
There was also the prejudice against red hair. There are three primary colors. Blue and yellow both represent spatial abstractions, the first Catholic, real, & mystical, the second Protestant, nominal & scientific. Red is the great [time?]-color underlying time.
[margin: “vague”]
My B.D. Thesis
An attempt to mutter a long surmise
That is blankly questioned among the wise.
[margin: “leave alone”]
February 4
“The way to understand living forms is by analogy,” says Spengler [Decline 1: 4]. It is also the only way to acquire perspective. A new thing dazzles, blinds, confounds as long as it is regarded as new. I have just read a vicious but trivial attack on Freud by Dr. Collins in which the psychologist calls the psychoanalyst by the psychological equivalents of heretic, blasphemer, innovator and iconoclast. This seems to me a waste of time.6 Collins would have no difficulty in considering Thomas Hobbes in his true light without prepossessions, and Sigmund Freud is Thomas Hobbes. Similarly a relationship exists between the two sentimental reactionaries Bertrand Russell and Rousseau. Spengler’s “morphological equivalents” are only a special case of analogies. All analogies deserve investigation in order to arrive at an underlying similarity. Thus the parallel between Plato and Bernard Shaw should be noticed as well as that between Plato and Goethe, though it has not the same implication or significance. The superficial resemblance has its importance as well as the underlying one, though it may only be a coincidence or of merely individual preference. Special notice, too, should be taken of cases of morphological equivalents, where the younger is more or less aware of his relationship to the older, as Milton to Euripides, as distinguished from conscious attempts at such a relationship, as Blake to Milton. The direct path that often leads from one figure to a later similar one, as from Crabbe to E.A. Robinson, should be traced if it exists. The present tendency is merely to make an epigram out of a resemblance and let it go at that without further investigation.
[margin: “leave alone”]
It is extremely unlikely that Tennyson was ever aware of the damp soul of a housemaid,7 but at least he was more so than most of his successors.
[margin: “leave alone”]
February 12
Mencken calls Shaw an Ulster Polonius [140]. Somewhere in his prefaces Shaw speaks of Ophelia as having gone mad because she loved Hamlet but couldn’t get him [Shaw, A Selection 56], which is of course the complement of Polonius’ theory about the madness of Hamlet.
February 14
One of the most insidiously unfair dialectic weapons in existence is the illegitimate use of the connotations of words. For instance, a Communist, mentioning Spengler, in that sort of abusive special pleading which they call the inevitable logic of dialectical materialism, says “his thesis is founded on an irrational mysticism.” Now the ordinary, careless, slipshod reader, too lazy to realize that “mystic” is a definite technical word with a definite technical meaning, or too stupid to find out what words mean at all, feels his way through the darkness of an exacting language with antennae of emotional associations. He has a sloppy sort of paronomasia at the surface of his vocabulary which draws “mystic” into “misty” and “mysterious” and makes it a vague term of abuse for vagueness. This is here deliberately exploited by the writer, if the writer is not himself on the level of the readers he convinces, or reassures. Of course, I suppose that saying “mystical” when all one means is “misty” is the result of snobbishness, pretending to be better acquainted with culture in its various aspects than one actually is, to have “seen through” mysticism when one is merely ignorant of it.
[margin: “S.G.”]
February 15
Conceit is not an exaggeration of self-respect, as is so often thought, because it is unthinkable apart from a social background of applauding auditors; it is not easy to think of a conceited lighthouse keeper. Self-respect means intelligent self-appraisal, and intelligence implies an external compulsion to judgment. The exaggeration of self-respect is the self-abnegation of mysticism.
February 22
I succeeded today in repressing an impulse to strangle a friend of mine who claimed that he wanted to write, but could not do so except under ideal conditions. I said as gently as I could that anyone who had an essential urge to write would hardly be deterred by a lack of artistic surroundings, as long as it was quiet, and Cervantes, Bunyan, Defoe and others had found gaol as good a place as any. He protested that what he was trying to write was much more fragile and delicate than that of the men named, to which I agreed. As I read the child, he is afraid of himself, and subconsciously is trying to get out of or postpone the actual ordeal of writing something likely to prove inferior to the masterpiece he dreams about. I think, too, that his impulse to write springs from a feverish neurotic urge to cover every sheet of blank paper he sees with writing. The wholesale way he buys scribblers, writing pads, notebooks, etc. without filling them suggests this.
[margin: “not bad if revised”]
It must be easy to write a Grande Valse Brillante.8 The rhythmic kick of the waltz is arresting enough to guarantee life without any help from the composer. This is true of most dance forms, so that many dances might be regarded as springs for a mattress of padding for the weary listener to pound his ears upon.
[margin: “better leave”]
March 1
It is a pity that the stereotype of the polite skeptic, always armed with a smirk and a snuff box, like the man who annoyed Hotspur,9 and like him loftily superior to battles, has gained such currency. The skeptic is a female mind, interested in balance and consummation of personality. He is fundamentally a parasite: if he happens, accidentally, to be an artist or a social reformer, we can tolerate him, but when changes occur in society, we have to have dogmatists to establish a cultural structure to fit it. That no dogmatic system is final says nothing about its truth (finality, of course, relates only to historical events, and so only a system based on a historical event, like Christianity, can be final) and of course its lack of finality is what makes it true. Now the apparent invulnerability of the skeptic is really given him by the dogmatic superstructure of his time, religious or political. Rousseau is the lowest grade of skeptic: Voltaire, supported by a political system, is a bit higher: Montaigne, working inside both a religious and political consciousness, still higher: and Erasmus, not only fully integrated but fully conscious of it, highest of all. The poet is always more or less female to the thinker: explicitly as with Dante and Lucretius, or implicitly, as with Shakespeare or Cervantes; but then the poet is not essentially either skeptic or believer, but maker. So is the dogmatist, but masculine. With an essentially skeptical age like the nineteenth century, the skeptic’s politeness begins to wear a bit thin. Schopenhauer’s skepticism is far more [corrosive?] than Voltaire’s, but Schopenhauer himself was as factious and irascible a [snorting?] dogmatist as Luther or Calvin.
March 5
My minister recently preached a fiery sermon against the liquor traffic. I should like to support him in his contentions, but I cannot go all the way with him, as his attitude is neither sufficiently critical nor comprehensive. I have worked in public libraries too long not to know that it is high time the word “narcotic” was given a much wider significance than it has at present.
[margin: “leave” / “trite”]
I have visited upon the devoted head of the family radio enough curses to make Ernulphus10 howl with horror and rage, but I have just heard something really exquisite. In the middle of a particularly atrocious jazz programme the announcer said: “Not only do modern composers write jazz but even the old masters are arranged and made to do a bit of syncopation.” If jazz is syncopated, so is its lineal ancestor, the water torture of the Middle Ages. The old master, incidentally, was Offenbach.
[margin: “leave”]
March 8
A mystic is a fool who is always right.
[margin: “leave”]
Pity the poor lovers who suffer in an agony of protectiveness.
[margin: “leave”]
As regards love, three kinds of women—invertebrates, crustaceans, and carnivores.
[margin: “better leave”]
Women are natural-born grand-daughters.
[margin: “possible”]
Consistency, thou art a fool.
[margin: “OK”]
March 9
The three caskets story in the Merchant of Venice is a good example of the allegorical nature of the drama. No novelist could possibly use anything of this. Apart from the obvious platitudes, a barbarian will always choose gold; an aristocrat, silver.11 But in practical life Portia’s father would of course be a jackass, the most drivelling kind of an old fool, owing to the accidents of reality. It would not do for a novel. Anyone not actually subnormal would open the leaden casket at once, if obeying only an obscure interest that there was a catch in it somewhere.
[margin: “OK”]
Portia’s suitors would be divided into the direct, who would open the leaden casket at once because they would know there was a catch in it, and the over subtle who would suspect that there might be a catch in the catch and open another. But this has no real relation to Portia.
March 10
The omniscient method will not work in a detective story, for if the author knows the minds and characters of several he presumably knows who the murderer is as well and is merely holding out on his readers. And if the author once enters into the mind of one of his characters, the latter is automatically disqualified as a suspect.
[margin: “OK”]
March 11
How about a spectral analysis of history? Take Western cultures, for instance. In the Romanesque violet, color of passion and terror, of fury and cruelty, splendour and intuition, gorgeous as a child, fierce as a birth. In the great Catholic period indigo, deep mystical power, childlike ecstasy of clean color. In the Scholastic period blue, color of cold, metaphysical subtlety, unearthly and remote from life. Then the Renaissance, green, a swing out to nature (hence its association with the Protestant brown), a desire for naturalness, for sanity, for empiricism, for attempting to make art organic and living—hence the Classical–Hebrew search for origins. Then the Baroque yellow, the color of splendid and intense pomp, of illuminating blinding intensity, lightening all painting like the sun which gives it off, striving after a search for light. Then the Industrial Revolution and orange, the color of gold, the showy, artificial color. Lastly red, the color of blood and fire, symbolic of Communist brutality and capitalistic ruthlessness, the color of sex, irritation, and restlessness. It is truly a long way from Augustine’s ultra-violet perspicacity to our swelterings in the intolerably sapping infra-red, but we are constantly plunging into deeper and deeper black and may rest our eyes in peace sometime. Jesus is still white, and a few religious spirits may not go blind.
[margin: “OK”]
Red is symbolic of Catholicism, but that is the wine-red from violet. The red formed from orange,—scarlet—was regarded as the color of a whore.
[margin: “leave”]
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battalion.12
[margin: [?] ]
March 12
England takes the lead in the final stages of the spectrum; that is why she has been associated with red, “painting the map red.” In the terrific struggle over whether modern England was to be symbolized by a red rose or a white one, the former absorbed the latter. The Jews also are heralds of civilization; that was why England expelled them at the beginning of her cultural development, allowing them to return after the final victory of money and city over land. Karl Marx is a splash of red. Spinoza, another Jew, is pure orange (hence his romantic rehabilitation), the yellow Baroque reason and the red materialism of today being caught up and statically blended as two aspects of the same thing. Orange is the color that most nearly represents gold, which is not a color (orange = aurum). Magian art has a gold background. It is for a deeper reason than merely a bad pun that Irish Protestants are orange men. Yeah.
[margin: “leave”]
And I think that if there were a prime symbol of the twentieth century it would be phallic. That is why Freud is so deep an incarnation. Sexual intercourse is now the consummation of life. With the Industrial Revolution life settled down to the distaff side, and the supreme moment in a bourgeois’ life is his wedding night. This era was heralded by a number of sons of Priapus—Goethe, Byron, Burns—and late post-romantic standing for a certain rugged masculinity went insane—Schumann, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, MacDowell, and, for practical purposes, Strindberg. After a nervous era of prudishness, women finally bared their bodies in triumph, and the male costume, no longer a sign of vitality and creativeness, dropped into a uniform. The whole organization of life today is feminine and erotic.
[margin: “possible but trite”]
March 13
It is one of the most pernicious tendencies of slipshod criticism to praise one art by referring to it in terms of another. It is no more a compliment to a Shakespeare drama to say it is “like a symphony” or to a Chopin Prelude to say it is “like an exquisite cameo” than for a gormandizer to say of a painting that it is like a potato salad.
[margin: “S.G.”]
All qualitative distinctions of kind are organic and concrete; all quantitative distinctions of degree are inorganic and abstract. I am different in kind from you because I am a different living organism and therefore am unique: any attempt to establish superiority and inferiority has to be referred back to an abstract standard. Thus the distinction between red and yellow is inorganically quantitative (number of vibrations per second) and organically qualitative. It begs the question to say that one can be “reduced” to the other: neither gives the least hint of the other, and they are parallel from the start. Moreover, differences of degree can always be defined: differences in kind cannot be defined, but have to be pointed out in experience. No sense experience can give any idea of the vibration of color, and no definition will work for the color [?] than bringing up a tomato and a buttercup and saying, “Here, this is red; this is yellow.”
[margin: “Blake?”]
On my mission field a parishioner said: “Moses wrote the Book of Genesis, didn’t he?” “O, no.” “But it says right here, ‘First Book of Moses.’ ” “Well, that means a book about Moses: ‘The Book of Kings’ means about the kings, not that all the kings took turns writing it.” “But there’s nothing about Moses in the Book of Genesis.” “No, no: it just means they associated it with Moses. When you say ‘Wars of the Roses,’ you don’t mean that the Roses did the fighting, but just that they were associated with it.”
March 14
I hate Henry James. I hate him. I hate his sniggering smirking puppets and his discreet nervous cough and his supercilious butler air and his Olympian snobbery and Buddhist lack of social conscience and his eternal bows and scrapes and posturing and afternoon teas and lah-de-dah and his endless ingratiating rhythm. And yet he seems to have a faculty for making things come all right, clearing cobwebs out of your brain, straightening up your ideas and putting you straight generally. He’s an ugly, prudish old nurse, but I have to have him when I’m sick, as I often am.
[margin: “S.G.”]
March 15
I suppose the reason why Johnson (I mean the character of Boswell’s novels, not the critic and poet) is lovable and appealing is that he makes essentially the same appeal as Don Quixote, on the plane of a bourgeois Tory. Quixote’s ideal world is mystic and chivalric; Johnson’s is consolidated and assured, but not the less unreal, with its obsolete dogmas in morality and politics. It is because Johnson is impatiently and pathetically wrong about everything—about Berkeley, about Tristram Shandy, about the Established Church—that I love him. Without a ferocious wall-butting (or rather stone-licking) epigram, he is stupid, as in the Gray essay. The Chesterfield episode13 even has an undercurrent of quixotism of the frustrated idealist, though in this case so much a loser to Quixote.
March 17
Jane Harrison’s Themis: God, but I wish she weren’t so definitely one of those gasping fluttering females who want to be Dionysians.14 Life is energy incorporated in form, and women always try to shirk the form.
[margin: “S.G.”]
I am sorry that Lady Chatterley is banned. I don’t mind Ulysses because that’s so much the greatest work of the century that to have it alone banned would be so complete an epitome of the 20th c as to be worth preserving indefinitely, even at extra expense and trouble in procuring that book. But Lady Chatterley’s being bracketed with Ulysses gives it thereby a lustre it does not deserve, and spoils the object lesson.15
Judging from “After Strange Gods,” Eliot has got to where the souls of the devout burn invisible and dim.16 I don’t object to his spiritual world being invisible, but I do object to its being dim.
March 18
A. The close of Othello is completely spoiled for me by the threat to torture Iago. It is impossible for a human being to commit a crime punishable morally with death by torture. It may be vengeance, but it is hypocrisy to call it justice. Moreover, a tragedy should harmonize at the close. If the villain is to die, let him die before the tragedy is over, so as to sustain a note of resolution: not this leering and vicious suspension of action which postpones the torture until after the end of the play, and which, notice, does not simply dismiss Iago but insists gloatingly on the expectation of his agonies. This is not squeamishness: even Nashe’s atrocious wallowings in torture are preferable because the narrative comes to a full close after them and not before them.
[margin: “S.G.”]
B. True, and yet there may be an artistic reason for it after all. Othello is a domestic tragedy: one might associate it with All’s Well or Measure for Measure, but it is a complete digression from the magnificently symbolic tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and the Roman plays. Now in domestic tragedy a heavier emphasis is thrown on the moral implications of the catastrophe. This implies a greater insistence on retribution, and, besides, the moralist’s point about tragedy is not religious but temporal: he sees sin going on forever, spreading and begetting evil. That is hell: the evil side of existence isolated. The fall of Antony is a ritual sacrifice: the fall of Othello a treacherous murder. Hence the additional horror of introducing the sinister note of continued vendetta cruelty at the close.
C. Very true. Where Lear and Macbeth are active intelligent agents, Othello is passive and a dupe: where they are tragic, Othello is primarily a figure of pathos. And as pathos makes a much more direct and obvious appeal to our emotions than tragedy, which is cold and impersonal, like all the greatest art. Othello is almost unbearably horrible: being moral, the tragedy is an unnecessary waste, not inevitable like Macbeth’s. The unbearable, emotional threat to torture Iago, also the result of baffled and frustrated activity, is the complement of this.
March 19
A young artist’s model named Rose
Refused to take off all her clothes.
The artist said, “Model,
Get this in your noodle,
I simply won’t draw you in those.”
[margin: “possible”]
Chorus of American public to Sinclair Lewis on the publication of “Elmer Gantry.” “We asked you for something worthy of Molière, but all you have given us is a Paine!”
[margin: “possible”]
One of the more frequent literary superstitions is the unlettered (dating from primitivism) yet profoundly wise apophthegmatic (?)17 philosopher to be found whittling. I have never believed in his existence.
[margin: “trite”]
I have finally understood why Chesterton’s antiphonal chant irritates me: it’s basically Oscar Wilde’s sniggering epigram, incarnated into a fleshly guffaw.
[margin: “S.G.”]
In Macbeth the element of pathos disappears: in Lear it survives in the “foolish fond old man” [4.7.60]; in Hamlet in the “sweet prince” [5.2.370]. It is this that accounts for the baffling elusiveness and subtlety of Lear & Hamlet as compared with the other two. We can understand Macbeth: we can even more clearly understand Othello, but Lear and Hamlet are like the nicer mysteries of religion: they cannot be understood: they have to be lived and experienced. Thus the interpretation of Hamlet is merely a reflection of the critic’s attitude to life, just as is his interpretation of Christianity—
March 20
So I always tend to think of Hamlet as the person qualitatively superior to the herd, respecting his superiority and yet admiring the herd’s strength and assurance. A terrible clarity of intellectual perception in Hamlet conflicts with an overmastering desire to do something in the social rhythm of overt activity. The tragedy arises through the spiteful malice & Philistinism of the herd directed at Hamlet, and the poisoning, corroding influence Hamlet exerts on them. Just as I respect the quality of my thinking and yet would get far more pleasure out of rescuing people from a burning building—if I could. The thinker is bound to be influenced by the social feeling that he isn’t doing anything and can’t do anything: that he is a social parasite and a sissy. This is inadequate Hamlet criticism, of course: but it is one factor—my factor.
[margin: “S.G.”]
Ophelia, of course, is the complete tragedy of virginity, Oedipus complex and terrific sex inhibitions included. The dialogue with Hamlet at the Mouse-Trap is not an attempt on the part of Hamlet to insult Ophelia, but to hammer away at her congenital virginity and not [let] her grow up. Hence the remarks about the nunnery [3.1.122, 131–2, 157] and warnings that walking in the sun [2.2.184–5] might break her icy reserve. Hence the reference to Jephthah’s daughter as a sacrifice of a girl who “bewailed her virginity” [Judges 11:38] by a fool of a father [2.2.422–31].
It’s hard to get over the idea that Hamlet is a melodrama, with hero, villain, heroine, and clown all complete. It is basically that, but the supreme irony lies in the treatment of these stock figures. I had to read Wilson Knight to realize the intensely evil side of Hamlet and the Ghost. Incidentally, it is hardly possible that the senior Hamlet was Hyperion to a satyr [1.2.142], compared to Claudius. His long speech in I, v, is as garrulous and pompous and conceited and circumlocutory as anything of Polonius, who, I think, is related to him in somewhat the same way that Gloucester is related to Lear. Cf. “My custom always in the afternoon” [1.5.60]—pure Polonius. Cf. the long priggish speech of Hamlet to his friends, which parodies Laertes’ remarks to Ophelia. Polonius is Shakespeare’s subtlest treatment of the clown.
What about the repetition of “form and pressure” by Hamlet, I, v, and III, ii [1.5.96; 3.2.26].
March 23
All the great epochs of English literature have had violent ends. The first great period ended with the beheading of Surrey, the second, with the jailing of Bunyan, the third, with the killing of Byron, the fourth, with the trial of Wilde. There is a caesura in each period marked when More, Donne, Defoe, and Leigh Hunt went to jail. Whenever anyone goes to jail because of his beliefs in literature, another full close has been reached. That is true of Bertrand Russell. But Wilde’s is the most profoundly significant event, marking as it does the final collapse of eccentricity in the grand manner. I do not approve of buggers, but that really had little to do with the matter. It is almost a pity that no romanticist went to jail for revolutionary sympathies. Blake came the nearest, and Blake certainly felt all the significance there was, and a good deal more, in the Scofield affair.18 The Whistler-Ruskin libel suit was the obverse of the trial of Wilde, almost a protest against it.19
March 28
My one theory about Shakespeare the man is that his wife was unfaithful to him around 1600. Hamlet, Troilus & Cressida & Othello were all written at once and all have an air of despondent horror and nausea about them no other plays have. Wilson Knight calls them plays of hell. In Lear & Macbeth the suffering is purgatorial; and while both Troilus & Timon are satires, there is no real horror in Timon, because Shakespeare does not enlist our sympathies in favour of Timon or anyone else. We get the horror of Macbeth through stage effects: murder, sleep-walking [and] so on: we appreciate the horror of Hamlet’s situation cumulatively, by a process of reflection which abstracts itself from the performance. Now each play is a subtle variation (or is it a sublimation?) of its untouchable theme of cuckolding. In Hamlet the twist is diabolically clever: the mother, not the wife. Othello has a melodramatic variation—the wife, but the wife innocent. Troilus, worst of all, has the pathetic variation—the [?] [?] youngsters separated. The cuckold wasn’t funny to Shakespeare. Unto his contemporaries: the obscene mockery of the opening of The White Devil isn’t there because Webster thought it was funny, but because he thought it was horrible. Kitely20 is funny only because he is jealous, while A Woman Killed with Kindness brings out the simple, honest action of the situation in its natural dramatic setting. In the Restoration drama something else was funny—set down two points marked cuckold and whore, draw an ellipse around them, and this is your play-formula. Yet even Wycherley and contemporaries realized something of the ghastly skull-grin artfully revealed under The Country Wife. Even Sir John Brute21 has a pathetic side to him. But there is a difference. In the first place, thrusting of the women into theatre on stage brought a nervous giggling atmosphere—an attempt to shock the ladies; besides, their increased patronage made it advisable to make a cuckold funny rather than pathetic, a whore a gay lady rather than a sinner. And, of course, the society it pandered to was breaking up.
April 1
A man’s search for friendship with women, conditioned as it is by love, is intensive; he looks for his feminine counterparts and antitheses, supplements and complements, and tries to find them in as few women as possible. But his friendship for other men is extensive; here variety is above all desirable, and even the casual acquaintance has a place. The starving of the latter element in me until so late has led to a mushroom growth in recent years, making me almost a spiritual homosexual. Hence a long succession of hopeless, lost struggles between me and the women who want my friends. Such women realize the influence I exert and develop a deep respect for my intelligence, thus placing me as an abstract, cold, selfish entity without warmth of affection. They tell me in front of their men that they stand in awe of me, an attitude that never fails to develop the masculine protectiveness of the latter. Last night a woman was working on one of my few remaining friends in my presence. Four times—he is a particularly devoted friend—I saw her sullen, unconscious hatred flash out against me, smiling perforce and encouraging even. Yet she would have taken me instead of him with sufficient opportunity. Life is like that, of course, and it seems natural and right that it should be like that. But what is natural and right is also often insensate and repulsive.
[margin: “leave”]
I have often wondered whether Sullivan set the “Lost Chord” to music in order to make money or to commemorate a similar experience of his own. If the latter, it was probably a diminished seventh.
[margin: “OK”]
—And all the dew22
From God’s green dishes disarrayed.
[margin: “bad”]
The Old Testament belongs to a creative period. The Law, The Poems, The Prophets, The Histories are all organic. But the New belongs to criticism. The Gospels, The Letters, the Apocalypses, are personal messages. Blake—Apocrypha.
[margin: “leave”]
April 2
An Ur-Hamlet would be interesting, ending up with “Who’s there?” Hamlet senior, a vicious parody of Polonius, bullying his wife interminably as his son does later. Gertrude, trying to be dutiful but finding no sexual satisfaction in him, turns to Claudius, to the insane jealousy of Hamlet junior, which neither Claudius nor Gertrude suspect. Claudius in desperation is driven to murder Hamlet senior.
[margin: “S.G.”]
No one is more ready than I to recognize the immense and potent influence for good that intoxicating drink has had upon Europe, yet I do not regard myself as inconsistent because I am an ardent Prohibitionist over here. Every nation makes what use it can of alcohol, and drinks the drink inevitable to it. Without English ale, French wine, German beer, European culture would have been hopelessly emasculated and impotent; therefore they drank those biguns in stupendous quantities. But drinking in America is a swinish and sodden business because the whole psychological attitude is different. Living as we do in a sex age, the idea of drinking is inseparably bound up with the idea of sex, and the swilling of whisky and gin over here is fundamentally an aphrodisiac pursuit. Youngsters in this country and in the U.S.A. talk about drinking with exactly the same air of lascivious grinning secrecy that they talk about the sex act itself. The whole idea of drinking is focussed directly on intoxication rather than relaxation. Drinking is done not for stimulation but as pure suicide. The common sense of America saw that in its soberest and sanest moment—after the war—and their shuddering recoil was expressed in Prohibition. There are those who continue the old European tradition, of course, but they are in a hopeless minority and are in any case mainly European exotics. The revolt against the Puritans was, as usual, a romantic one, based on a belief that a sympathy with liquor might re-incarnate the creator of Falstaff. American culture, however, has nothing of the natural and essential association with alcohol. Their great names—Whitman, Emerson, Dickinson—are essentially water-figures, and the exception—Poe—is more striking than an instance of the rule. I have no doubt that a collateral movement is going on in Europe, of course. The dead tissues of our civilization are held together far too shakily and parlously to permit of disruption by a powerful organic force like alcohol. China expressed the death of its culture in opium, which is suicidal. Whisky is homicidal, and a fomenter of endless unmeaning annihilating destruction.
[margin: “better leave”]
April 13
The Etude Music Magazine23 is one of the silliest periodicals I have ever seen. I have read four or five times the gravely repeated story that when Lizst was a ten-year old prodigy he played before Beethoven, who, though he very properly disliked prodigies, wept over Lizst, telling him that someday he would interpret Beethoven to the world. Franz Liszt was born in 1811. At ten it would be 1821, and of course Beethoven was deaf as a tree long before that time.
[margin: “leave”]
An Irishman’s heart is like one of those medieval coins with a cross on it—it breaks according to the value of the thing its owner is after.24
[margin: “OK”]
April 17
Scattered notes and observations like Logan Pearsall-Smith’s “Trivia” leave me cold. They may be good as leading points of reflection, but then they are perilous. They may be striking at odd moments, but to be of any permanent value they should be worked into a systematic outlook impressed in a definite form. The Trivia are brilliant thoughts (sometimes) abstracted from a context which cries out to be there. They are valuable in so far as the unity of author’s attitude is revealed as that context. What should we think of a painter’s claim to fame who contented himself with isolated color-combinations or arrangements of lines, or a musician’s who published a notebook full of harmonic progressions, rhythmic patterns, and snatches of melodies? Art is communication in form. The publication, say, of this diary would be a lazy man’s job.
[margin: “leave”]
A great deal of contemporary literature is trash because of a bad form. The statement of an idea is an epigram, the statement of its contexts and implications, an essay. But to write a “book” about anything, “book” here meaning that form of literature which is to the essay as the novel to the short story, is different; there a texture of ideas is essential. There are too many “books” written around one idea. Everything permitting of embodiment in writing (there ought to be one word for it) carries with it its inevitable form; failure to grasp this form carries with it therefore failure really to grasp the idea itself. A book of aphorisms or jokes is an abomination, but a book about an aphorism is little better.
[margin: “OK”]
All thinking is the expression of prejudices, which are essential to clarity. The “original bias of mind,” from which all thinkers start, is incarnated in them.
[margin: “leave”]
April 18
I heard a minister (T.R. Glover)25 a little while ago tell a story in which a camel was obviously intended to be the symbol of a highbrow intellectual. Now it is quite true that camels bite and kick savagely even without provocation, that they have a perpetual hump and sneer, that they are frowzy, dirty, sullen beasts, that they shuffle along in slow processions tied to each other’s necks. What he did not say was that if you want to get across a vast desert space with a very heavy load you have to use camels: the ponies he preferred, with all their cheerfulness and frisking, won’t go very far.
[margin: “S.G.]
Stained glass windows with panes in them that can be tipped sideways strike me as a bit of an anachronism. In ventilating the church one might incidentally ventilate Jesus.
April 20
Simile: as complete a sinecure as the double bass in a jazz orchestra.
[margin: “possible”]
Imperialism is a kind of Socialism that has succeeded in defining its form.
[margin: “leave”]
April 22
English poetry—the best of it—falls naturally into pentameters, trends into Alexandrines. That is why our verse is so strongly accented compared to the Gallic. The mental strain of remembering to hit one’s thumb an extra crack on the table at every line must be enormous, and, besides, it leads to callouses. So the French wisely decided to forget about the beat entirely and count syllables instead.
[margin: “OK”]
If a man does not own an automobile and is in the least dependent on others who do for his transportation, he would do well to go in debt and buy one for himself. If there is any petty tyranny or arrogance in a nature, the possession of a car will bring it out as nothing else will. This has been noticed in questions of speeding, road-hogging and so forth, but the mere passive fact of ownership sets the same psychological trend in evidence. No poet ever waited on a patron, no flunkey on a master, no poor relation on a rich one, more than a pedestrian on a friend who is “going to call on him in his car.”
[margin: “OK”]
April 26
The local library is getting pressed for room. To gain space it might be advisable to take all the junk off the shelves and put it in a separate place. Thus those sets of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Eliot, and so on could go in a case by themselves labelled: “Danger. Classics. Hands Off.”
[margin: “OK”]
I have found that a romantic attitude, a devotion to Shelley and Keats and a hatred of Tennyson, or an admiration for Beethoven and Schumann and a contempt for Tschaikovsky, goes hand in hand with the liberalism which is liberal from timidity, and under pressure would swing right.
[margin: “possible”]
“So you are trying to be a liberal?”
“You imply that it is a helpless or hopeless attitude. Well, if forced into a self-consistent attitude, I should take the right wing.”
“Unfortunately that’s the wrong one.”
“Well, of course, there are two opinions.”
“My only argument, curiously enough, is that of dogmatic conservation. It always has been the wrong one.”
[margin: “better leave”]
The twentieth-century liberal will be a stock figure of twenty-first century comedy.
[margin: “OK”]
May 2
Is there any possibility of a new development in music through jazz? Those who think not have been regarding it too exclusively, I think, as a cheap urban commercial product. There is that element at its base, certainly (insofar as it has a bass [sic]), but there are other and more promising ones. There seems to be in jazz a sick, nostalgic longing of an uprooted soul; the back to nature romanticism crushed by the reckless forced gaiety of the town. Who does not hear in jazz the intense yearning to exchange the life of a clerk for that of a peasant? Is it a coincidence that the two most popular jazz instruments—saxophone and tuba—reproduce the sounds of the horse and the pig respectively? Who’s so deaf not to hear the ineffable pathos of the poor lost calf or the sick little lamb in the crooner? Nay, even the humble ass is worthily represented by the contralto colorations of the chorus girls. Surely there is room here for a folk song revival more basic and far-reaching than any yet attempted. We talk too of “classical economy,” but what form of art is more economical than jazz? With one sweeping gesture it discards melody, harmony, counterpoint, syncopation, form, and the relevancy of the libretto, retaining only the two fundamental beats on which the rhythmic basis of our music lies with the sixteen-measure period which forms its testa. Here is none of the rococo decorativeness of the gavotte or minuet beat, but a quiet steady insistence on the vital principle of music—and this just when modern composers are drifting into a nebulous and languorous haze. In the same way the rigorously rhymed lyrics may revitalize poetry by their return to the pristine concordances of the language. “Poetry is played out,” sigh our ultra-sophisticated ears—artists, I mean of course. “Yes, but ‘you’ still rhymes with ‘blue,’ ” say the jazz lyricists doggedly. On that simple fact rests their whole case. This is not atavism but a control of evolution.
[margin: “better leave,” and below that, “outgrown”]
May 4
(From a harangue). Use your radio intelligently. The one principle is never to let a radio make a noise you are not listening intently to. Tripe only survives through being unheeded. If you fall in love with a cleverly painted whore, you may think her attractive in the dark, at a distance—anywhere you are not really looking at her. Take her ears in your hands and stare at her. It will not be long before her indignant protests subside to whimpering, when tears will run down and start gouging out channels, melting down mountains of red, washing away powder and cream and carrying down a heavy sediment to her foreground chin. The same thing happens to radios. If you like dishwater, drink it till you gag. If you like bad radio programmes—there is nothing anywhere worse,—listen with all your might, and get it out of your system. It will take an effort to excrete decaying matter that has been rotting in your brain for perhaps years, but it is worth it. There is more than one method of getting your katharsis.
[margin: “better leave”]
May 6
“The Revolt against Puritanism” is a catchword that affects me with a deep-seated pain. Some writers—such as Michaud26—seem to think that the entire literary activity of the United States can be expressed in terms of this formula, positively or negatively. Only a sentimental Frenchman could have such an idea, one who could say, “Great art is always pessimistic.” Romance is pessimistic, I suppose, and diatribe optimistic, but great art is not conditioned by a theory—it is an essential expression and a law unto itself. It is a pretty elastic theory anyway that ascribes to the whole of the United States the Puritanism of New England, even without taking account of the immigrants. The average American suffers from about as much of a Puritan neurosis as an Afghan mountaineer—less so, in fact, as he can always get a drink if he wants one, while the Afghan, if he is a good Mohammedan, has to deny himself. The revolt against Puritanism is really a romantic idealist’s revolt against Philistinism. Besides, in the interest of historical accuracy, I think the proper distinction between Puritan and Presbyterian should be kept. A Puritan is an individualist and a Protestant armed with Calvinism and logic in full revolt against Catholicism. A Presbyterian is a sectarian armed with a solidified Calvinist creed which transforms the Protestant spirit which gave it birth into a Catholic one. The latter is thoroughly democratic and the community forms the criterion of heresy. Then when the religion proper is replaced by morality and devotion by orthodoxy, the responses to the catechism are metamorphosed into emotional and instructive attitudes toward ethical questions. A congealed sect like Methodism, the Baptists and so on thus possesses the vices of both Catholic and Protestant and the virtues of neither. What has Comstock’s prurience to do with the invective of Knox or Milton?27
[margin: “leave” / “outgrown”]
May 10
I think the vital part of contemporary literature chiefly satiric and humorous. One thing is that humor consists largely as “pat allusions to a known story,”28 and we have so immense a tradition of literature behind us which we are too advanced to treat with awestruck and superstitious reverence.
[margin: “useless”]
In Suckling’s most famous poem we have:
Will, when looking well won’t move her,
Looking ill prevail? [Why so Pale and Wan, Fond Lover? ll. 3–4]
An excellent example of the typically poetic thought. It is synthetic, ambiguous, connotes rather than denotes, co-ordinates, brings two relative unconnected (logically, that is) standards and makes an absolute standard out of them. All speculative thought works in precisely the opposite way, and to establish such an absolute standard in philosophy or theology would be a pernicious fallacy, getting a certain plausibility as a poetic conceit masquerading as an induction from experience. I suppose however that this conceit of Suckling’s, which is only a confusion or term-juggling in philosophy, has wrought irreparable damage. Medieval thinking—the kind we call typically scholastic—must be a tissue of such allegorical connections.
Notice, incidentally, the position of “will” in the quotation; it looks like a sort of synthesis of “well” and “ill.”
[margin: “S.G.”]
May 11
Osbert Sitwell’s “Man Who Lost Himself” is good in parts but too much the fretful, nagging, whining, complaining, irritable, peevish, petulant, sulky, whimpering, hypochondriacal highbrow.
[margin: “S.G.”]
I see where yet another female has defecated all over Lawrence. These books about Lawrence by his bitches are the most grimly pitiless epitaphs on Lawrence himself. Compare a paragraph from a short story, “Glad Ghosts,” one of the Women Who Rode Away series: “If I were dead, would I be honoured if a great, steamy wet crowd came after me with soppy chrysanthemums and prickly laurustinus? Ugh! I’d run to the nethermost ends of Hades. Lord, how I’d run from them!”
Of course, the reason why Lawrence had to pound his gut and roar about his testicles was that he spent too much time with women and so developed an abnormal sense of sex. He was a Cock who never escaped from the hens. Hence his propensity to darkness and dirt—he had to scramble upon a dung-hill to express himself. Women aren’t as important as Lawrence thought they were.
May 13
Good music is apt to be ethereal rather than atmospheric.
[margin: “not bad”]
I have heard that when Queen Victoria read “Alice in Wonderland” she wrote to the author asking for a copy of his next book and received an elementary treatise on determinants. I find it difficult to believe that Lewis Carroll could have been such an ass, but the story seems well authenticated. Carroll was a master of humor. One has only to compare his “Three Voices” with “Princess Ida”29 to realize the difference between an artist and an artisan of parody, and such a piece of stupid literalism seems out of his reach.
[margin: “possible”]
May 14
At a symphony concert Ravel’s Bolero followed by Mozart’s concerto for harp and flute. Rather brutal, a distinctly pessimistic programme.
As I have set forth in my essay on Browning the pre-romantic drama may be symbolized by the sphere, post-romantic by the ring.30 Now the late nineteenth century saw a rise of eclecticism, which was the cause–effect of a distrust in the optimism of the earlier period. Hence strict criticism reverted to critical productions of creative forms, and in every country there came a great revival of music and the drama. Now the experimentally produced sphere has no fixed or inevitable size, like a soap-bubble or a toy balloon, and it would give a terrific cataclysmic effect to blow it up till it burst—it would be the whole expression of pessimism in the age. The most awful short-story I know in modern times is Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, and here that technique is used. Preserving all the unities, never increasing in speed, it increases its horror and terror to an unbearable extent, and then—breaks. Precisely the same thing is found in the most soul-shaking music of the age—the Bolero. No change in rhythm, melody, or harmony, no idea of relief; it merely increases in dynamic to an incredible pitch, and then,—vanishes. Now in art what is there, which almost by a formal design, can hold the gazer riveted by the sheer glare of its color and then vanish when it becomes overpowering? I don’t know, but it is the concept underlying the advertisement. Now the advertisement is in turn a symbol of our whole civilization—in a period of prosperity advertisement is piled on advertisement until it becomes past endurance, and then—nothingness. Marx has shown how the whole capitalistic system is one bursting soap-bubble after another—in fact, the bubble is frequently used as a popular symbol. The Bolero has been justifiably called an orgasm, too,—sex is red, and we live in a red age.
[margin: “OK”]
May 15
And so the symbolism becomes more deeply ingrained. The town is masculine, the country feminine. The constant copulation of agriculture with industry makes for fertility. But masculinity is cut off by the root upon the advent of the metropolis, and the fertilizing male disappears. Hence our contemporary economic system. It consists of hysterical and uncontrolled energy, saving time without saving it for anything, saving money like a miser and spending it like a nabob, of wild Utopian dreams about eternal prosperity, and, arriving at the breaking point, comes collapse, a point of exhaustion and disillusionment. In other words, it is the purest masturbation. Our wars are conducted on exactly the same organic principle, and are hence very difficult to shake off. Pacifists, like the better nature of an auto-eroticist, are listened to with respect in peace times and silenced furiously in war. This sex suicide manifests itself in many other fields as well, and this phallic vision of modern war is probably the reason for its rhythmic fifty-year recurrence.
[margin: “OK”]
May 16
Most critics, and all bad critics, are preoccupied with biography. It doesn’t matter a damn what kind of man an author is: why that kind of man should have appeared in such an age and connected with such an art is what matters. It is the purest waste of time, in discussing the ferocity of Gulliver’s Travels, the shuddering ecstasy of delight in the grotesque and repellent, to talk about Swift’s liver or his disappointment at missing a bishopric. It is the purest waste of time, in discussing the snobbish, tired, prudish, super-subtlety of James, to talk about his nostalgic deracination. The point is that the satiric anatomy demands a terrific speed, concentration and vigor: hence it produced Swift as its greatest exponent. A bilious or sulky Swift could hardly have been capable of setting his teeth and going places. Similarly, the novel demands endless careful analysis, sifting of motives, rigorous selection of detail—hence James. Primarily Swift and James were serious artists trying to live up to the respective demands of the very different and almost opposed art-forms they chose. Ferocity & subtlety, etc. are only inferences from that. We do not read these things, we only infer them: we read the book, and the book is an art-form.
[margin: “S.G.”]
May 18
The Hammerclavier Sonata is a romantic’s view of culture—first the immense primeval energy, second, the childlike bliss of early civilization, third, the profound head-aching and perplexities of a more mature one, fourth, the birth, in sorrow and darkness, of a scientific, atomistic, determined and synthetic conquest.
[margin: “leave”]
May 19
Re the Puritan opposition to drama: cf. Preface to Samson Agonistes—drama for reading, not performance. Masque a step in conventionalizing drama. By the time of Puff’s “I’ll print it every word,”31 the romantic drama to be read comes into prominence. Survival of romantic theory in Middleton Murry type of assumption that drama is impure form because of intermediate agents (anti-musical theory). Pure forms those completely controlled by artist. Miserly & commercial 18th c.’s hatred of music—Barry, the bestiality of the Buggered Opera, feeling that music, with no tangible results, was a waste of time—Chesterfield & the fiddle.32 Age of Pewter or Varnish—gilt is unfair. 18th c.: Age of Varnish. 19th c.: Age of Gilt. 20th c.: Age of Patina.
May 20
Every fad of its time probably has a symbolic significance, thus only a tissue of great eclecticism, superficial interest in everything, attempt to gain an ordered semblance of knowledge and unbounded self-satisfaction and optimism could have produced the cross-word puzzle, while those busied with the problem of building up a synthetic unity out of chaos become hypnotized by jig-saw puzzles. But to call these things symbolic in the high sense is a vile prostitution of a noble word. They represent the negative side of the Zeitgeist; the refusal to co-operate, the refusal to live. There is thus an element of pure suicide in them. People absorbed in them do not waste time; they kill time. But time is life,—as the Mad Hatter said, it is not wasting it, but him.33 This nervous and feverish energy in pursuit of something dead is part of race suicide. The amount of skill, ingenuity, wisdom and sheer genius sapped and sucked up by bridge would have brought about a Utopia, properly used, long ago. Oh, well, why be an efficiency expert? Now, let’s see, this piece ought to fit in here .… Incidentally, the connection between the cross-word puzzles and the great number of “Outlines” which became popular in the ’twenties and then vanished, should not be overlooked.
[margin: “possible”]
The sentimental prudish, scented stationery, heart’s outpourings female as a homosensualist?
[margin: “SS”]
The carpe diem of the [?] in his agony.
[margin: “√”]
The inductive approach aphoristic—Bacon & Pareto. Spinoza!
May 23
The morals of fools, like the fashions of women, are very transient affairs, and, again like them, are dictated by unseen, mysterious forces their supporters (this is not a pun) know nothing of.
[margin: “possible”]
This play of “Sunshine Susie” (a movie which has attained unprecedented popularity here)34 seems to me dimly to point the way to sound and healthy popular art. I went to see it prejudiced by the title, and said to myself: “Pollyanna, arranged for depression audiences as a prolonged solo on an English horn.” (The picture was an Elstree product.)35 I found it a rather pretty comedy, with just enough music in it to give the whole thing a sort of rhythmic lilt. The farce was (or looked like) spontaneous fooling, not dreary variations on the general theme of a rhinoceros charging a tree. Now the current depression has unmistakably dragged public intelligence up to the point where entertainment has to be bright and stimulating to cheer it, not sloppy and syrupy in order to stupefy it. As a result the cinema has advanced from its unspeakable fatuousness of ’29 and back, to a point of pseudo-sophistication. These are relapses, but the gain is there. Now why not consolidate this on a basis of technical facility and work through the comedy to a point where melodrama would perish, “religion” (as exemplified in the “Ten Commandments”) disappear, and the waxen marionettes and lantern-jawed Pierrots be replaced by actors and actresses? We have reached an attitude now of being able to laugh at ourselves—that is, intelligent laughter. We need music to help us—light, clever, rhythmic, tuneful, harmonized by competent musicians. Wanted, a twentieth-century Gilbert and Sullivan—Gilbert without his Procrustean “plots”—or plot—his misdirected attacks on “aesthetes,” or the bestial caddishness of his Katishes and Lady Janes,36 and Sullivan without a Mendelssohn complex. Somebody will fill the bill. Possibly I might.
[margin: “leave”]
May 24
I think most critics of literature would do well to remember that it is always the second-rate man who sums up his age. The first-rate man struggles with or transcends it. There is little advantage in treating Shakespeare as primarily an Elizabethan product, or a Renaissance figure. If Shakespeare were merely the inevitable result of the Armada, the Burbage Theatre, the Six Articles and the slave trade of Hawkins, there would be little more to him than to the minor dramatists who were. And nothing more would be left of him than of Lewis Carroll’s horseman. Three drops of blood, two teeth, and a stirrup.37 There is no causal connection running from history to literature.
[margin: “bad”]
June 1
César Franck: An Epigram
At an organ in St. Clothilde
Sits a genial and mild-mannered man,
Talking quietly to half-a-dozen students
Absorbing him like sunshine.
Alone, he picks out phrases, drums a bit
Then he takes something to the public,
And the public yawns and looks at the critics,
The critics looking the other way.
So he goes back to St. Clothilde
And smiles through his beard at the organ.38
[margin: “phoney”]
We float down through corridors of time
And find a student cramming history.
“Well, not much more to cover. Thank the Lord!”
“Nineteenth century .… M—m! .… Not much here.”
“This is César Frank’s time, isn’t it? .… ”
“ … Yeah. Well, I got him cold, of course.”
“Chap called Napollyon or something .… ”
“Oh, yes, here. ‘Napoleon legend.’ To hell with that.”
“Twentieth century … …”
[margin: “possible”]
Remark of professor recently, “Give me the history of drums and trumpets, not the history of bums and strumpets.”
[margin: “√”]
June 4
Carl Sandburg might add another definition of poetry to his collection for his own private use: Poetry is the synthesis of a commonplace book.
[margin: “leave”]
I was reading a book the other day in which the author informed me that if he were marooned on the proverbial island with the proverbial half-dozen masterpieces he would hesitate a long time between Plato and Emerson. But what is there to hesitate about? After all, most of the things Emerson said were Plato–tudes.
[margin: “OK”]
June 9
The change signified by the French Revolution occurred far earlier in England. That is why in the nineteenth century we still find survivals of eighteenth-century thought, such as Macaulay and John Stuart Mill.
[margin: useless”]
The critical approach to creation is that of understatement and suggestion.
[margin: “possible”]
June 11
The greatest North-West Passage fallacy in literature is the attempt to get at Shakespeare’s mind. Hamlet’s address to the players. Classical theory of tragedy, argument in favour of restraint, highbrow: point in a play’s favour that it is “caviar to the general” [2.2.457], despising of groundlings. Hamlet the university wit who likes the university, classical Senecan play. Theory of imitation, moral persuasion, reflection of age, all Renaissance classicism. Everything consistent with Hamlet’s character, but not Shakespeare’s—not necessarily Shakespeare’s.39 Passage about clown (deleted) may have been ordered by company—we don’t know—was certainly relaxation of dramatic integrity, but not necessarily or even obviously Shakespeare’s. In Ivy Day Joyce writes a patriotic poem—not his but his character’s. Reconstructs with incredible skill the kind of poem such a man would write—doggerel redeemed by sincerity. Shakespeare’s play inside Hamlet a previously similar feat. One of the supreme virtuoso triumphs of dramatic art. Shakespeare never drops the mask the Bavarians say is over his face in the Droeshout engraving.40
I have just been reading Crosland’s “Unspeakable Scot.” Enlightened and tolerant though I try to be, I have never been able entirely to rid myself of a prejudice against that race, and so I perused his book with a good deal of applause, especially at the roasting he gave Burns. But he left out a very important chapter: “The Scot as Theologian.” I do not think it desirable for a Protestant minister to pose as a necessary intercessor to salvation, but I do think his education and strength of character should be sufficiently above that of his parishioners for him to be a liberalizing and cultural influence in the community, and that he should know enough of the traditions of the church to maintain its dignity. In questions of ethics, philosophy, and theology he should be an expert. But the Scotchman loves to lay down his theological laws, and so wherever he penetrates, which is all over the place, he originates a solid body of befogged worshippers who insist on putting themselves on the level of the minister in every way. Anyone who agrees with them on all points holds the keys to Paradise. Therefore an intellectually honest minister cannot work with them, and so the Nonconformist minister—the Anglican, of course, is ipso facto hopeless—is usually a mediocrity or a moral coward, and socially a parasite. I do not see why one who refuses to examine his beliefs should not derive them from one who knows what he is talking about. But the organization of the Scottish Kirk, which is a product of the fatal democratizing tendency of the Scotchman, has to answer in large measure for the degradation of ecclesiastical Christianity today. The Scotchman started the custom of making an instinctive response to any religious proposition and on arguing with the minister on terms of easy familiarity. The effect is pernicious.
[margin: “outgrown”]
June 14
My chief objection to materialists is that their point of view is inductive, which makes their books too long. Darwin’s Origin of Species is an enormous and wearisome enumeration of instances. So is Marx’ Das Kapital. I think this outlook of the Communist is also responsible for the enormous length of Dreiser. A communist is in any case exasperatingly voluble.
[margin: “trite”]
English philosophy is inductive, of course, though not necessarily materialistic. Marx lived in England during his most productive years. Bacon, even Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, all formulate an inductive school ending in skepticism. Mill follows to give us the [course?] of induction, and ethics, the inductive side of philosophy, settles in England. Even Bertrand Russell falls in line. And Wy-clif, Bartholomew, Roger Bacon are anticipations. A language in which adjectives precede the noun is inductive. French reverses this. Hence our literature depends on contrast and variety. Shakespeare’s plays are inductive: they make unity by a contrasted group of characters. Dickens get his unity in a different but essentially similar way. The French, being deductive, need absolute unity of tone—hence Racine & Molière.
[margin: “OK but trite”]
“Arc” makes an excellent verb, e.g., “His instincts arc from the fine arts to the language, through philosophy and literature.”
[margin: “√”]
June 15
But James was not going back to his home town to live any longer than he could help.
“It’s like this,” he explained to his cold, gray-eyed, poised fiancée, “You’re an artist, and will understand. You’ve had to make all kinds of sketches, daubs, blots, every kind of drawing to get out of your system and throw away. You have enough of those scribbles to paper your room with. But would you want to?”
“Want to paper my room with them, do you mean?” inquired the girl. “Of course not.”
“Well, I got my schooling in Middleton, and my life there was just as tentative, experimental, blundering and ridiculous as your sketches. I suppose one who amounts to anything, as I hope I am, goes through an ugly duckling stage in which he makes a far bigger fool of himself than the ordinary bumpkin whose development stops at thirteen. Anyway, I did. And going back there would mean all my adolescent struggles brought back to grin at me. That’s why people need a change of environment.
[margin: “OK”]
June 17
If there is any passage in history where the economic misinterpretation of history might plausibly be applied it is surely the American Revolution, yet in spite of this fact—or more probably because of it—the issue has been so befogged by the clouds of sulphurous rant (or cant) which passed for Ciceronian oratory in the eighteenth century that the English themselves quailed before the task of ploughing through the wilderness of jingoistic sepia and took the liberty-or-death attitude at its face value. This fustian was inevitable at the time because it was part of the Romantic movement, the whole tendency of which was to make a cult of youth and rebirth of the menopause which preceded our civilization, or, to use the orthodox Spengler metaphor, to make a new spring out of the Indian summer preceding our winter. It was, of course, greatly prolonged by their defeat of 1812 and in the fin de siècle era of blackguardism found an admirable expression in Roosevelt. The necessity for this has gone, but the long cultural subordination to England, as shown by the English criticism of all the best American literature from Washington Irving to Henry James, the contempt, silenced and expressed, or at most condescending patronage, of English men of letters such as Carlyle and Dickens and the casual English way of indicating Whitman, Poe, Melville and Mark Twain to the American critics who acclaimed Longfellow and Bryant, has provoked a precisely similar revolt beginning about 1912. This may, indeed, be taken as the date of the Second American Revolution. As before, they promptly sought French help; they have their traitors (Pound), their martyred heroes who have gone to perdition and whose putrescent carcasses lie rotting on the plains (Cabell and Anderson) and their apologists (Lindsay and Mencken).
[margin: “outgrown”]
June 21
I am not one of those who hold with the familiar essay. Give me a Biblical text and I will expatiate, give me a great theme, and I will rise as high to it as my level will permit, give me something to attack, and I will grow indignant, give me a great poet to write about, and I am off in the clouds. But when it comes to spring cleaning, detective stories, collar studs, bathroom accessories and similar trifles out of which an occasional contemporary makes his living, I grow impatient and uncomfortable. I am not one of those arm-chair egoists who consider that any subject is enough if they are pleasantly entertaining about it. I have not that kind of a Midas touch. Nor have I the Chestertonian flair for exacting the cosmic from the comic.
[margin: “outgrown”]
Protestant prose is rhythmic. Typically Catholic prose is sub-rhythmic, like Catholic music. Atheistic and agnostic prose is rhythmless. If written by a stupid person, it is planed off to one level of dullness; if by a more clever egoist, it merely gabbles. Pater is mechanical, like an atheist, Wilde stagnant, like an agnostic. The long swing of Shaw is Protestant; the inward vitality of Malory Catholic. The antiphonal chant noted before41 in Chesterton is romantic Catholic.
[margin: “outgrown”]
June 24
The Egoist: A Cinquain Rhymed
You go
Surely too slow
Death, with the tomb below.
Are you afraid without me? No?
I’ll go.42
[margin: “leave”]
As long as the language of poetry is natural and essential it is sacrosanct. When creativeness is exhausted, it breaks down into prose. That is what vers libre signifies, but the technical informalization of Whitman is far less significant than the spiritual informalization of Browning. Poetry is understanding formalized and orchestrated; prose is subservient to the concept: it is propagandic. The great religious mystics, like Blake and Bunyan, write in a vers libre form because art is subordinate to religion with them. Vers libre means equating the line with the idea; modern prose equates the sentence with the idea and the two forms approach. The best vers libre written today is the “prose” of Bernard Shaw, whose long sentences are rhetorical, to be spoken in a breath, like a line of Whitman’s. Similarly the antiphonal chant of Chesterton’s prose is vers libre. The attempts of Wilde and Pater to pull prose over into poetry are a romantic back-looking perversion of this tendency. The two movements are seldom carefully distinguished. Opponents of vers libre say it means the degradation of poetry into prose. In both prose and poetry, however, a steadily increasing colloquialism is obvious with which will merge the two provinces into the diatribe.
[margin: “leave” / “outgrown”]
Every man of my acquaintance who has a particular “girlfriend” has been attracted to the woman that looks more like his sister, if he possesses one, than anyone else. Not the mother, the sister. I do not enunciate this as a general principle; I merely record what I have seen.
[margin: “√”]
A friend of mine, speaking of a French impressionistic tone-poem, said: “She fiddled around with the chromatic scale a bit, which sort of gave you the general idea that there was water present.”
[margin: “√”]
June 27
A cup of cold water, as understood by a charity organization, is a cup of lukewarm water with a clump of ice in it—chilled water, like that of an American hotel.
[margin: “√”]
The word “exotic” seems to be changing its meaning. “An exotic plant” forms the most usual context for it. And as most exotic plants come from a warm climate, they are usually ranker and lusher than the indigenous. Hence “exotic” is used—improperly, of course, as yet—in a unique and almost indefinable sense which will be valuable later on—a sort of recondite, romantic glowing splendour seems to be the general idea. I do not disapprove of this in the least. Movie producers and perfume advertisers are the worst offenders. In this sense it seems to be a sort of telescoping of “erotic” and “exquisite.” “Foreign” or “extraneous” would do as well for its present meaning. Another word which is changing is “hectic” and I am glad of this change, as it brings a euphoniously affective word from technical compartments to ordinary use, albeit with a radically different significance. But although Anglo-Saxon monosyllables are every one onomatopoeic poems, there is one exception, a flat and dismal failure, the word “smell.” I don’t blame the nineteenth century spinsters for saying “scent”—that is, as a verb.
[margin: “S.G.” / “OK”]
One thing a universal language ought to do is give us a separate personal pronoun of common gender to use for words like student, author, member, person, etc. where we now have to say “he or she,” or, insultingly, “he.”
[margin: “OK”]
Some are born fools, others become fools, others have fools thrust upon them.
[margin: “OK”]
July 4
The paper says that as a result of the fourth of July celebrations in the United States about two hundred and fifty lost their lives—an unusually low figure. To think that out of a population of a hundred and twenty millions only two hundred or so could be found that were willing to give their lives for their country!
[margin: “possible”]
July 5
I feel sometimes rather dishonest about Marxism. I find their dialectic thesis extremely useful, yet I don’t accept Marxism. Still, I have that right. But it is interesting how completely all capitalistic thought is dominated by indefinite expansion, onward and upward progress, endless exploitation of the potential, endless improvement, through competition. Not definitely consolidated until after Darwin’s work, but Rousseau to Herbert Spencer is a perfectly consistent wave of belief in human perfectibility, in liberty for its own sake, in self-assertion, etc. This is true romanticism: in politics it tries to identify racial & national units, and then expand from there. Goethe & Blake are pre-romantic: their traditions are continued by the hyperbolic thinkers like Bergson & Spengler. The capitalist philosophers thought of three stages in history: Comte, Hegel, Frazer, Fichte, Kant revolving around (in various forms of course) savagery, pre-capitalist civilization, & civilization.
[margin: “S.G.”]
July 7
I think that I have acted as father confessor to more young people of both sexes,—most of them a few years older than I—than any other adolescent that I know. This is peculiar, even ridiculous perhaps, but I’ll be damned if I’ll think it proves me a prig. The reasons advanced for this situation by the confessors themselves are that I am sympathetic and understanding. Now to understand people is to know them, and I think I have an instinctive knowledge of people, hence my tendency to novel-writing. Sympathy, with me, is merely interest, but with a confessor it represents a willingness to mold my conception of him as closely as possible to his conception of himself. The confession is an organized attempt to do this for me. Thus, it does not open the heart, but closes it, deflecting the searching, analytic understanding mind into channels that will awaken a romantic interest, pity, or even increased respect in the confidant. It does not arise from affection except as an answer to the sympathy, but from an inferiority complex striving to protect its own weaknesses or disarm criticism by admitting them. My pose of caustic cynicism has forced many (mostly women) to long laments over their own inherent stupidity. Their motto is: “woodman, spare this tree.”
It may be objected here that while the mere presence of this quality does not prove me a prig, my explanation of it certainly does. But this is a self-confession, and confessions are, as implied above, essentially priggish.
[margin: “outgrown”]
A detective story whose solution is not fairly obvious by page 100 is not worth reading.
[margin: “trite”]
We live in a hideous and terrible world, with the Dark Ages very close at hand.
[margin: “trite”]
July 10
Triolet
My lady makes me think of blue,
No other color seems to suit her,
She never wears it: still, it’s true.
My lady makes me think of blue,
That cool and clear and mystic hue
Beloved by poets male and neuter
My lady makes me think of blue,
No other color seems to suit her.
[margin: “better leave”]
It is easier to believe that Bacon originally wrote Shakespeare when one sees how the latter was re-written, revised by so many hams.
[margin: “√”]
I wish Shakespeare had written the tragedy of Abelard & Heloise. It’s the world’s greatest example of the intellectual love tragedy, and Antony & Cleopatra is that of the sensual love tragedy.
July 13
The novel should have developed historically as an organization of the discursive essay. By discursive essay I mean the ordering survey of a consciousness. (The novel is essentially an epic form rather than a dramatic one, I think.) It was developing logically toward this in the 17th c. The Anatomy of Melancholy is the clearest example of the sort of writing I mean; Pepys Diary is another; Burnet’s History another; Fuller’s Works another. Rabelais, Cervantes, Erasmus, Montaigne all support the tradition; so did Browne: even the character studies, like Earle’s Microcosmography had this epic or discursive basis. The bourgeois deflected this into a study of character & made it objective. Even novelists who knew enough to be discursive: Fielding, Thackeray, etc. [took a] crack at it. Sterne, and Swift to a lesser extent, kept clear of the stultifying tendencies of Richardson, but Jane Austen finished the derailing that Defoe began (though Robinson Crusoe is at least alone). When Tom Jones crossed the picaresque tradition with the comedy of intrigue, a mixed but not synthesized art arose. Jane Austen is one exquisite artist, but in the second rank. Congreve is in the first rank: Sterne also. Jane tried to sit on both stools, to avoid the extreme of sense in The Way of the World and the extreme of sensibility in Tristram Shandy. [margin: “This is important / Early form of the anatomy theory / What about Browne?]
July 17
The more I read Hardy the more I didn’t like him. I remember when I thought Tess was a well-constructed tragedy instead of a series of preposterous accidents and unconvincing coincidences. I can remember when Tess’ being captured on the stone of sacrifice seemed to me thrillingly symbolic instead of a snuffy and sentimental piece of faked melodrama. But that time is over.
[margin: “S.G.”]
It is no use making Keats’ confusion: beauty is beauty and truth is truth: one is subjective and emotional, the other impersonal and intellectual. The fact that it cost me a dollar and fifteen cents to get my laundry out this morning is true, but it is not beautiful; the politician’s statement that he will wipe out poverty and unemployment in three months if elected is beautiful, but not true. Symbolism is the field of interpenetration, working a beautiful conceit into an intellectual conception and infusing philosophy with the connection of beauty. (Bad sentences, of course, but the idea’s there.)
July 18
I suppose a diary should be a self-confession. It is good, of course, to know oneself, and to realize the expression of your personality in one’s views of others. But I can’t bring myself entirely to confess in ink. There is something morbid about excessive introspection but also something caddish about congealing and transmitting the result. One’s own soul is as sacred or as dirty as one’s body, and while I would not mind exposing my body in an athletic contest or my mind in a work of art, I would not record my daily condition of bowels, eyes, feet or lungs. It is the same in literature. Rousseau of the Social Contract, the New Heloise, the Emile is a serious artist, the Rousseau of the Confessions is a humbug and a liar. I can never forgive Burns for [reminding?] [?] about his whores and bastards when he left us only one Tam o’ Shanter and one Jolly Beggars. Nor Sterne for letting his cheap sentiment override his wonderful but objective humor. John Donne and John Bunyan command my highest respect as artists, but their soul-sufferings make me feel distressed and nervous. The diaries we prize—Pepys and Evelyn—are not the confessing kind. Letters are equally revealing, but a letter is a message to someone else and submerges the conscious personality in an ultimate unconscious revelation. I would give my ears for some of Shakespeare’s letters, as I think I know what letters he would write for his epilogues to Henry IV and As You Like It, but I should have only a perfunctory interest for his autobiography—though if he could have written one he would not have been Shakespeare. It is only the second-rate artist who is deliberately self-revelatory. Of course, I am not exactly a first-rate artist, but I find it more interesting to let my thoughts cohere on a definite subject rather than set down events and emotions arising therefrom in a wilderness of italics and exclamation points, like a schoolgirl.
[margin: “outgrown”]
For if Pan had his pipes distended and brought into our churches, what connection is there?
[margin: “√”]
July 22
In a magazine recently I saw an advertisement the chief feature of which was a woman’s face. Her mouth was open to a preposterous extent—she seemed bent on displaying every tooth in her upper jaw—in what was evidently intended to be a disarming smile. Each feature was unnaturally regular and the general effect was that of a cleverly painted skull. Underneath was the caption that she was a famous actress, of whom I had not heard before. The important thing was, however, that though she was a mature woman of well over thirty, she flattered herself that she had succeeded, thanks to the diligent use of the product advertised—I think it was soap—in making herself look as much like a half-grown girl of eighteen or so as possible. I could not repress a shudder of disgust when I saw that, and I thought that if I belonged to her sex I should be ashamed of the ubiquitous prostitution which compels so many women to paint out the light of intelligence from their faces and substitute a reassuringly stupid death-mask prettiness.
[margin: “OK”]
How seldom does a man of small talent give a square deal to a man of genius!
[margin: “trite”]
The true Irish patriot is he who works hard for Ireland and thoroughly despises the Irish.
[margin: “trite”]
A materialist is apt to pride himself on seizing substance while others are quarrelling about shadows, but what he does is simply to grasp the cloak while the body makes a clean getaway.
[margin: “trite”]
While the very early works of Beethoven are intensely Mozartian in character, opus 1343 sounds like a return to the standards of Haydn.
[margin: “leave”]
July 23
I read in a book on the limerick the other day by some supercilious ass who talked about Edward Lear as a pioneer but a childish and inane primitive because his first and last lines ended with the same word, venturing to “improve” some by rewriting their final lines. This latter method is all right for sillycleverness or obscenity,—or anything which makes the limerick do slave-labor for some non-literary purpose,—but the gentle echolalic of Lear, the last line as a reflective comment, establishes the limerick as art, modern smartness ruining its delicacy by rushing the meter and clinching and compressing the theme. Lear is the unchallenged and supreme master of the limerick, and almost the only one who brought it definitely within the pale of literature. This person is an ass, as I said before.
[margin: “OK”]
Incident embarrassing A related by B. A denies it and turns table by circumstantial evidence on B. B, smarting, persuades himself that A is very wicked to lie, and taxes him, full of horror. A asks him why he told the story in the first place, & then says: “It isn’t a case of my being a liar: it’s a case of you being a fool.”
[margin: “OK”]
“And then there was no more sea” [Revelation 21:1] seems a strange desideratum for heaven, but hardly for a man stranded on an island with nothing but sea to look at.
[margin: “OK”]
Chaotic explosive emptive nature of Jewish culture—Isaiah to the Bloch quartet.44 Prophecy the central art form. No plastic ideal. Result of no security or balance in Jewish development.
[margin: “OK”]
July 25
I went into a restaurant recently with a friend who addressed a casual remark to a waitress with whom he had established a slight acquaintance. The girl, thoroughly tired out and obviously half-sick, broke out into a long recital of long hours, low wages, unjust treatment, inconsiderate customers, misunderstandings, and, of course, hinted dark things of suicide. My friend, sympathetic but extremely gratified by her confidence, grew quite paternal and when she had left said to me: “I always thought she was superior to the common run of waitresses.”
[margin: “OK”]
In this University the Christian lies naked, basking in the sun. Along come little elves and gnomes, tickling him with feathers labelled “Social Problems,” “Communism,” “Unemployment,” “Russia,” and so on. He scratches his titillations placidly, murmuring, “We must do something,” and smiling, basks in the sun.
[margin: “possible”]
August 2
Winter’s Tale:
(a) Colin Still has proved The Tempest a symbolic mystery,45 and I propose to prove that A Winter’s Tale is symbolic of the fertility myths of Adonis, Balder and the rest.
(b) Adonis is the most famous fertility god. Shakespeare had written a long poem on Adonis. Hermione is close to Mt. Hermon in Syria. Leontes is a river in Syria.
(c) Shakespeare’s favourite images are garden ones, & his dominant image is the comparison of human life to plant life, culminating in the allegorical passages in Richard II.46 See Spengler.47
(d) Throughout Shakespeare’s plays one can trace a growing element of folklore. MV [The Merchant of Venice], the problem comedies (Lawrence),48 the mother-kin conflict in Hamlet, etc.
August 7
I have made another attempt at “A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur”49 and have found it more mystifying than ever. One would expect, from the title, a parody of the “Idylls of the King” or something similar that might promise fun. But hardly has the author started when he is simultaneously gripped by two powerful and overmastering emotions; one the pious reforming goal of the thrifty Yankee beholding the wasteful and gloomy pageant of history, the other the nervous resentment of the thorough Philistine against an age of culture and faith. The book is mainly a satire on knight-errantry and the romances of chivalry. Parts of it are effective enough, but why a man who had been a Mississippi river pilot and a Nevada miner should want to produce a twenty-fifth-rate imitation of Don Quixote is beyond me. Interlarded with this is some spinsterish squeamishness about the morality of the Canterbury Tales and some pathetic bleating about the plausibility of those of Malory. There is a vicious attack on an economic system which appears to be that of pre-Revolutionary France. The Yankee meets Canterbury Pilgrims travelling six hundred years before the murder of Becket and a long procession of slaves—color not given. He constructs a telephone system, organizes a printing press, makes revolvers, does a thousand similar things, yet is expressly stated to be an ordinary representative of nineteenth-century America. I should not mind such a hodge-podge if it were deliberately nonsensical. But nonsense that survives is usually a perfectly logical structure on an impossible foundation, rather than vice versa, and in any case must be funny enough to disarm criticism. And this book is not intentionally humorous except in spots, and there the humor is very intentional, very intentional. There are a few flashes of real brilliance, but a writer who attempts to lavish satire and propaganda on something that is dead and gone is as much at a disadvantage as an artist who selects a hunting scene for his picture or a composer who arranges “The Battle of Prague” for string trio. I simply cannot see why anyone who could write “Huckleberry Finn” would write such a mess of pot-boiling buffooneries as the travelogues and romance. Huck Finn’s opinions are so far superior to those of Mark Twain that it ought to have been obvious to the latter that it was an advantage to talk about things he understood and not vent his reaction to Titian’s “Venus” and “Lohengrin”50 upon a rabble of fools and prurients.
[margin: “OK”]
My regard for the New Yorker is conditioned by the same reaction that makes me love Sterne. The gentle, whimsical humor of the bulk of the writing, touched up by a broad caricature here and there, is interspersed by realistic little vignettes, sometimes farcical, sometimes sentimental and pathetic.
[margin: “S.G.”]
If Lenin succeeded in Russia, it was not because he was a Communist, but because he was a genius; and if the Communists folded up in Germany it was not because their Marxism was not orthodox, but because they were fools. Lenin was not essentially a revolutionist any more than Julius Caesar, whom he resembles in many respects. He was an exceptionally penetrating and realistic political genius who could handle society in larger units than most leaders. The leader who, like Hitler, is a product of social activity, is passive: he deals with conditions, and has to simplify his nation into a pattern. The leader like Lenin who is a source of social activity, is dynamic: he deals with movements, and has to organize his nation into a rhythmic unit.
Has some vast Imbecility,
Mighty to build and blend,
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?
[Thomas Hardy, Nature’s Questioning, ll. 13–16]
I don’t know why I find these lines so uproariously funny—I greatly prefer them to Gilbert’s tune to the Terrestrial Globe—but I do. I suppose it’s the absurdity of defying the Supreme Architect with those wallpaper-and-thumbtack rhymes.
August 12
Apparently even Wyndham Lewis subscribes in some measure to the race silliness, talking about the cold blood of the Nordics. I suppose the longer tradition in Italy made them consolidate in Dantes and Giottos when the Germans were fizzing away with their sagas and eddas. Now the Germans have got old & sluggish, & the Italians [are] trying to react against their “premature beatitude.” Our vague theories about wild-eyed dagoes and grumpy scandalous [fians?] is a stereotype two or three centuries old, perhaps. We point to D’Annunzio as the wild wop and more or less associate him with Vesuvius. A great belch and a foul smell, and D’Annunzio produces another book. By contrast Ibsen, sluggish Northerner, winding & sticky & turgid, like spilled molasses, or congealed lava. But Iceland has its geysers too, and its Eddas; Italy its Mantegnas.
Sometimes I think that if I had to select what in my opinion was the most audacious poem in English it would be the “Bridge of Sighs.” Our poetry kicks like a steer when it is ridden by dactyls and when that metre is combined with a short line it is well-nigh impossible to do anything with it in serious poetry—it travels too fast for decorum. The only other attempt of this nature I recall is Drayton’s “Ballad of Agincourt” and there it fared better because the galloping rhythm was subjoined to a thrilling flight carrying an intense patriotic appeal. But here the theme is so sentimentally and pathetically sweet that if it is to come off at all it requires beyond everything else a subdued hush. Hood uses, besides, double and even triple rhymes—another feature which is notoriously the property of light verse. It would be a colossal technical feat should such a work be entirely successful, which it is regrettably not. While Blake and Whitman were ignoring the conventions of poetry, Hood and Browning were wilfully trying to reduce them to absurdities. It seems like that, at any rate.
[margin: “leave”]
A friend of mine remarked recently, “Judging from the ballyhoo [shot?] by so many writers about the Fathers of Confederation it would appear that that event was the only instance of an Immaculate Conception carried out on a national scale. Closer investigation, however, particularly in connection with New Brunswick and the Macdonald–Tilley correspondence,51 would seem to indicate an extensive use of financial forceps.”
[margin: “leave”]
August 20
If a writer concerned to deny the existence of Homer or Shakespeare or Jesus or Buddha is also inclined to deny that of any of the other three, the possibility, for a reader, of his being convinced by truth is lessened by an obvious habit or bias of mind, a will to disbelieve, which one is inclined to discount accordingly.
August 21
Heard at church “Lascia ch’io Piange”52—if that’s it—cramped into the corset of a penitential psalm. This and the extraordinary distortion of the soft and slow waltz lullaby of the largo into a bellowing funeral March. Poor Handel!—the English love of Puritanic edification and sententiousness ruined him.
[margin: “leave”]
I wish that when critics speak of “musical verse” they would define their terms. There are two literary and totally wrong theories about music in verse. The cruder states that a vowel is musical and a consonant is not. Thus Italian is “musical” because it is full of vowels, German harsh because it is full of consonants,53 though the Germans have produced greater word artists than the Italians, and more of them. A more intelligent consideration recognizes the value of the consonants, and the musical poet then becomes the one who arranges a superb pattern of sound, like Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge or Keats. But that is not music—that is more like painting. The feeling given is that of a static art, to be viewed as a whole—the question of speed does not enter. Burns and Browning are our poets who think as musicians. It is significant that Shakespeare has been called the “Swan of Avon.” The swan is a beautiful and exquisite bird, but sing it cannot, and Shakespeare, sympathetic musical amateur as he was, did not conceive his plays musically, except in one instance—Macbeth—though Coriolanus, in diction perhaps the harshest of all, is a close approach—and as Macbeth was unfortunately not his last play, the swan analogy does not altogether hold good. The interlocking plots are not musical, or contrapuntal, they are dramatic, or repetitive blocks of contrast. This is, it is true, a very shadowy region of metaphors, but it is well to avoid the facile but irrelevant coincidence that poetry and music are addressed to the same sense.
[margin: “outgrown” / [very?] [end?] [a form?] of music theory” / “phoney”]
Every contemporary thinker with a catholic outlook will eventually find himself, if he treads the right path, to the opposition of God and the Devil, just as any previous one, but the incarnations for us are Oswald Spengler and Karl Marx.
[margin: “bad”]
August 28
Open letter to David Dubinsky
On his having given a recital at Hart House
Sir: In a recent issue of the Varsity the critical review of your performance stated that you played the “Moonlight Sonata” with great expression and excellent technique which was especially evident in the “Andante” movement. If the worthy critic means the Adagio, I can only say that I do not agree with him. Had your execution of this movement been marked by a total lack of imagination merely, I might perhaps have borne it, but when thereto was added an exhibition of broken legato and thumped accompaniment such as has seldom disgraced a public performance even of this hackneyed work, I thought it time to register a protest. Your wavering crustedness of rhythm and total disregard of dynamic indications, might have passed off under the guise of poetic feeling, but the number of notes you missed or ignored was inexcusable in a technically straightforward thing of this kind. The percentage you got right might be accurately described as a batting average, inasmuch as your natural touch appears to be a kind of barking staccato which in the Chopin Nocturne and Scherzo was metamorphosed into a production of a glutinous mass of notes failing to yield a single coherent phrase. The rest of the programme, not being music of very high calibre, passed off fairly well, however. Sir, Rubenstein once remarked after a recital that he might have given another with the notes he omitted, and, as you left out practically all of the rest of the factors which are considered essential to a good performance as well, I think you might have given several such recitals—but I should not have attended them. Yours, etc.
[margin: “mostly outgrown”]
September 2
It is curious how wars are immortalized by the women they bring into prominence. I suppose that men who fight in wars cannot help being a little ashamed of them, and they seize eagerly at whatever has seemed pure and holy by way of justification. The Hundred Years’ War is as extinct as the dodo to all but a few pedants, but Joan of Arc lives on. The Crimean War, in spite of the Charge of the Light Brigade, has disappeared from contemporary consciousness, but Florence Nightingale has not. The War of 1812, brought on by a howling mob of savages on the western frontier of the United States through a time-serving politician who wanted their votes, has been forgotten by Canadians except for the legend of Laura Secord. So it seems fairly reasonable to infer that in the world of tomorrow Edith Cavell will be the only coherent memory of the “Great” war.
[margin: “better leave”]
That naked white cenotaph to dead soldiers in front of the City Hall can only be described as an incandescent flame of ugliness.54
[margin: “√”]
The specialist with his facts produces encyclopaedic reverberations in my ear, and that is all. I know he is there, but I wish he weren’t.
[margin: “bad”]
September 6
I think a case could be made out on purely theoretical grounds to prove the atonal tendency in music anachronistic. Our music is based on one interval,—the octave—arbitrarily and compromisingly divided into twelve semitones. Therefore the harmonic basis of the art is the harmonic scale. Now a work of art being the incarnation of an idea, is a form, and one essential characteristic of a form is the possession of a beginning and an end. In the case of a dynamic art the latter means a point of repose. Out of the chromatic scale music has found two and only two such points satisfactory: the major and the minor concords. Besides, the question of key relationship is as much a part of form as anything else—form in depth as a sonata or rondo is form laterally. To alter this we should have to alter our whole concept of harmony and scrap the piano-forte on which it is based and which is based on it. In my opinion such a change could not be made without an infusion of melodic material which only a young culture,—Russia, for example—will be able to supply. These are tentative ideas; I may have cause to regret them later.
[margin: “possible”]
September 8
Applause after a concert seems to me to be a purely Neolithic impulse which has disregarded all evolution. Whenever I hear it (I seldom join in) I (think of and) see before me the picture of a squatting ring of Stone Age savages circling a group of dancers, beating out the rhythms with their hands. The difference is that in the cruder entertainment the audience takes a part, while in the later they are precluded from anything except passive recipience. Consequently the rhythm beating is support, applause is revenge.
[margin: “possible”]
September 13
There is really no such thing as a wrong critical attitude. Take any of the big names at random, say, Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley. Critic A, for instance, is an individualist and hero-worshipper who admires the strength and independence of Milton and Shelley, and resents the lack of a strong personality in Shakespeare. Critic B is a tricky sprite who soars off into the blue with Shakespeare and Shelley and talks about the leaden feet and crabbed Puritanism of Milton. Critic C is a classicist and a bit of a pedant with a strong sense of form who feels safe with Shakespeare and Milton and regards Shelley as a precariously balanced epiphyle. Critic D says the English have no feeling for poetry and have never produced any poet, except, by some miracle, Shakespeare. (Usually a German commentator who has never read anything in English literature except Hamlet and King Lear in translation.) Critic E considers Shakespeare and Shelley as pagans, not to be mentioned with the lofty and austere Milton. Critic F has a linear theory of poetry which makes Shakespeare and Milton hopelessly antiquated, no poetry written before the development of modern ideas of which Shelley may be taken as the starting point being readable. Critic G views the contemporary field with alarm and advises a return to the standards of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley. Critic H is sure that only by breaking completely away from the traditions which can only hinder and cripple us, can we do anything new or original in poetry—we must forget about Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley and trust the pleasant future. These, you say, all cancel out and give nothing. By no means. They give you the definite impression that there must be something very extraordinary about Shakespeare, Milton and Shelley. And not being a critic, but a lover of poetry, you investigate and find that your suspicions are correct.55
[margin: “possible”]
Unfortunately, it also leaves you with the impression that it would have been better to have read Shakespeare, Milton & Shelley in the first place. But it is possible for an eloquent critic to arouse more pleasure & enthusiasm for culture than the great critics he is dealing with would in the original, if the reader is inexperienced and has no perspective of culture.
[margin: “OK”]
September 14 and 15
I have never read a more preposterous piece of bad arguing than the paragraph on “Americanisms” in the book on the King’s English by the Fowler twins [Fowler and Fowler]: if they are twins, as their desire to have the English language castrated and pole-axed would seem to indicate. This sort of Oxford snuffle is bad enough even in England. For no language is self-sufficient. English has been rescued from extinction time and again by French, Latin, Italian and German. So why not another rhythm of English, particularly when English is as dried-up as pea-seeds, all the 20th c. poetry of any importance apart from Lawrence or perhaps Hardy having been written by Irishmen and Americans. Even minor writers like Kipling and Mansfield have been strongly influenced by American tendencies. How imbecile this insularity is even there! but there is some excuse for it in countries who feel they have to live up to an antithesis. The strained self-conscious muscularity of Whitman, Sandburg & Lindsay, or the exaggerated refinement of the Squirearchy bleaters56 are regrettable but historically inevitable. It is the fortune of Canada to be critical of each. We cannot very well issue declarations of independence like Sinclair Lewis, nor should writers give way to the petty snobbery of educationalists and the “King’s” Highway people. The result might be a split man like Ezra Pound with his constipationist poetry and his barbarous Yankee prose. But really this silly antagonism of American English tradition is as strained and unreal as the couchant animals rampant in heraldry. Incidentally, it is too bad that we use “rampant” as connoting motion or life. But it is what our Tweedledum and Tweedledee would call Slipshod Extension with sarcastically stressed capitals57 according to the best traditions of Worn-Out Humor. It comes from a technical art, and, in spite of the number of technical words the language has derived from astrology, alchemy, & primitive medicine, the Gold Dust theories object to taking in any more. Medicine stole “venereal” & degraded it, the whole process being a silly piece of euphemism. No one wants the degradation of “mad” to angry, leaving us with the colorless “insane,” nor “awful” to a vulgarism, nor the implications of the German dumm, which leaves a person really dumb indescribable, nor the spluttering female use of such words as “devastating” or “intriguing.” But a language makes mistakes in its development. “Antagonize,” which we are getting, is all right; “mob” may be all wrong, but we have got it, just the same. American? So are “potatoes” & “tobacco,” and one would hardly object to those unless he despised the Americans and everything that conveyed an impression of them to his mind. But as no one but a pathological crank could feel that way, there seems nothing in the way of “placate” or “antagonize” except an automatic hostile reaction to a stimulus counting form and action, such as would be more consistent with the attitude of a mule rather than an educated human being. (Frightfully bad writing but it’s only a diary.) Besides, in an earlier period of a language it was easier to take in words and Anglicize them, but with the rise of cosmopolitan snobbery it has become very difficult to naturalize a word. “Rendezvous” and “naïveté” are spoken evidences of our Stratford-at-Bow affectation. Hence it becomes all the more essential to take in living, organic words from colonial English, and we have at least as much right to take “antagonize” from the Americans as “tea” from the Chinese or “checkmate” from the Persians. The Fowler fools want to keep the Yankee out because they know their damned language is moribund and they’d sooner see it die than cross-fertilize. Fortunately, common sense will ignore them. The 21st c. will no doubt wonder what all the fuss was about over “caveman,” etc.
[margin: “S.G.” / “better leave” / “some will do”]
Perhaps English depends on continuous fucking of French & German rhythms. The American one is Germanic.
September 23
I have been reading at Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. It makes me lose my temper, not because it was difficult, but because it prided itself on its difficulty. John Lily in the sixteenth century, John Cleveland in the seventeenth, Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth, Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth, and Virginia Woolf in the twentieth. Oh, you elegant writers! Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Cécile Chaminade, Rosa Bonheur, Marie Corelli, and now Virginia Woolf. Oh, you elegant females.
[margin: “bad”]
The above remarks are of an unqualified asininity, but I am out of temper tonight. I have just been to see a movie where an actress with a face as flawless and as devoid of expression as the surface of the Great Pyramid wept tears of pure glycerine all the time, for no reason that I could see. Oh, the deep symbolic significance of that glycerine!
[margin: “possible”]
September 24
It annoys me to hear people talking of critics as though a poet were something solitary and magnificent, with an unconditional reputation. The poet in some important respects does not exist apart from his critics—approaching him is and must be a process of imitation. All intelligent reading is of course criticism: and intelligence depends on truth, and truth, in literature, on a tradition. The critic, in bringing out the poet’s implications, does not simply appreciate him, but reconstructs him: makes him religious and communal.
September 25
I shall watch Spain with interest. And yet I am not sure—Italy’s rise is economic and political and Spain’s may be similar. Besides, Spain may be like Japan—no soul of her own—Barcelona in particular is said to be thoroughly American. And yet there seems to be something African and anti-European about Spain.58 They seem to have expelled the Moriscos59 when they had no further use for them. There is something tropical about the Falla and Spanish rhythms generally. If Spengler is right, that Mohammedanism is the Puritanism of Magian civilization, then Spain in its Puritan period seems to have taken on a fatalistic, stagnant, iron-bound Mohammedanism for its Puritan period. The work which is so thoroughly sane and popular, Don Quixote, is called by its author a translation from an Arabian romance, and it certainly played havoc with those typical products of Christianity, the errant romances.
[margin: “possible”]
There is something so negatively Puritanic about the country that produced the duenna and the grille, such a powerful repressing force on sex, such hysterical finesse of sex etiquette clashing with a notorious potency immortalized in Don Juan, that the slaughtering of bulls becomes as inevitable as profound a symbol of the nation’s inward feeling.
[margin: “possible”]
October 1
Carnivorous lovers.
Metaphoric strata of society.
[margin: “√”]
Anti-evolutionists, book censors, and continuing Presbyterians.
Nagging around with a mop.
[margin: “√”]
The groundswells of the theatre.
—With her kisses still ringing in his ears.
[margin: “√”]
Rectilineal obedience of Jesus.
Saints with downthrust curves.
Dishwater realism
October 3
It is a common and amateurish error to classify humanity as (a) superstitious (b) enlightened. All people, no matter how enlightened, cherish a pet superstition somewhere! Some may cheerfully smash up mirrors, or commence a thesis on Friday and yet shiver at a black cat. And even those who no longer believe humanity [is] in the clutches of a steel-clad and electrically generated monster called progress may be found cherishing a secret leaning toward Anglo-Israelitism or surreptitiously searching for Francis Bacon acrostics in the pages of Coriolanus and Cymbeline. Your scoffer who laughs at Jonah and ridicules the [friggling?] of Biblical enthusiasts with Apocalyptic prophecies was likely as not to consult a crystal gazer or an astrologist with regard to his business investments.
[margin: “leave” / “outgrown”]
October 7
The word “and,” commonest in the language, has two diametrically opposed meanings. In “bread and butter” it is additive, “one and one make two” being a typical example. It makes a quantitative synthesis. In “red and white” it discriminates or analyzes. In the first case, it means bread plus butter; & in the second red minus white “and” white minus red. Or does it simply depend on whether the mind interpreting the phrase is synthetic or analytic?
[margin: “S.G.”]
October 9
I suppose the reason for the popularity of [Rachmaninoff’s] the Prelude in C# minor is that its first three notes make such a hell of a noise that the listener is startled into attention, and, hearing those repeated, listens all the way through. He has not done this before, and he finds the sensation agreeable. But in truth, it is infernal music; a cheap exploitation of romantic music’s most gorgeous key, a complete defeat of counterpoint, subtlety and vitality. It moves by mechanical propulsion, and its clanging open harmonies trample on the unresistant body of living music with a fiendish collocation of howls and bellows. It is music of the machine age, strident, vulgar, powerful and dead. To call it the “Bells of Moscow” is the same grotesque error, resulting in identifying the cheap proletarian agitations of our big city slums, living off the Jewish-ghetto philosophy elaborated by Marx and Engels, with the awakening soul of Russia.
[margin: “OK”]
Communism, as we know it, being so obviously a sublimation of the hatred of Jew for Christian.
[margin: “trite”]
The Communistic attack on gentility being therefore directed, not against gentlemen, but against Gentiles.
[margin: “possible”]
Déraciné. The only Aryan Communist I know was brought up in an orphanage.
[margin “√”]
Did anyone ever see a six-foot Communist?
[margin: “possible”]
October 11
I shall not attempt to solve the difficult problem of classical education in the public schools. But why not give Latin and Greek a fair trial, if willing to grant that they are magnificent languages. “All the Latin I construe is amo, I love,” says Lippo Lippi [Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi, ll. 111–12]. Well, I too started with amo, a very good verb, I thought obviously only a decoy. The next one I learned was neco, I kill, and all the time I spent on Latin grammar from that time forth was spent in laboriously acquiring a language which talked about nothing else in the world but fighting. Every sentence I wrote in Latin or translated, concerned war, and every word I learned had some military context. It does not take a very fanatical pacifist to see that this method deliberately aims at encouraging the idea that Latin is a very dead language, there being few things deader about a language than those words which deal with violent death. If Latin really was a dead language, therefore, it would be of no use.60 The excuse is, of course, that we read Caesar first in Latin, Xenophon in Greek, but the excuse is a pitifully inadequate one. The method is obviously that of a crabbed pedant bent on killing the language and stamping on the corpse. Catullus and Horace are eternal. Caesar is not only dead but always was, falling stillborn upon publication like any other journal. The next step is Livy, Cicero, Thucydides. Like learning English by starting with the Duke of Marlborough’s memoirs, if he wrote any, and proceeding through Pater or Burke or Gibbon. We do not make such an approach to any modern language. We do not start German by learning all about their weapons, their armies, the histories of their wars, even if we still think of them as a race of barbarian Huns, intent on conquering the world by force of arms. If I could read German fluently,61 which I regret to say I cannot, I should regard it as one of my primary accomplishments, but I should see the entire Teutonic race in hell before, etc. I would wade through a barrage of military terminology in order to read the war correspondence of Blücher, Moltke, Gneisenau, or von Kluck. There is a good deal of truth in the famous remark that Caesar was a very inferior writer who wrote for the public schools.
[margin: “OK”]
October 12
In Bernard Shaw’s essay on Bunyan he sets a passage from the Pilgrim’s Progress beside one from Macbeth and shows how Shakespeare rants and rhymes and swears and Bunyan is calm and perfectly poised [“Better” 140–5]. Christian, it may be observed, says nothing. Bunyan’s courage is always quiet: there are no gamecocks in his book, no crowing or clucking or making defiant gestures to muster up courage. I can never see that the courage of a Hotspur is anything more than Dutch courage, though he swallows atmosphere rather than alcohol. I cannot see that Bunyan’s heroes with their sighs and groans are anything but perfect examples of immense strength, tenderness and courtesy. Apollyon roars and howls in the best Shakespearean tradition, but Christian notices it so little that Bunyan almost apologizes for recording the fact in a footnote. Bravery in one physically strong and secure is merely meeting a situation to which one is well adapted: it is not a virtue, it is only self-expression. But the fight of weak men in Bunyan is inspiring: it has the thrill and ecstasy of Blake’s “mental fight.” Because the physical battle is the most adequate metaphor, people confuse the mental ecstasy of conflict with the mere visual titillation of trumpets and uniforms, just as we think God a solemn old man because “father” is the best metaphor to express his relationship to us. Take the magnificent passage where Christian puts his fingers in his ears and rushes toward the light. Christian is a cringing coward, and Browning, for example, in his religious poems such as Prospice, is heroic and dignified and noble. But we see the self-conscious swagger in the banana peeling under Browning’s posture when we read such poems as Death in the Desert or The Epistle. Browning’s fingers are not in his ears. Anyone comparing his poetry to Bunyan’s will understand that his ears are less sensitive. But he dares not look at the light.
[margin: “S.G.” / “OK in spots”]
October 13
The artist is the only man who makes organic patterns, and the only man whose life shows an organic pattern superimposed on his life. Hence if Beethoven went deaf and Milton blind it was because they had to. “The things that happen to people are the things that are like them,” says Spandrell62—if it varies in truth directly as the man is an artist. No accident or digression was therefore possible to Jesus, and only a little to Shakespeare.
[margin: “S.G.]
October 16
Epitaph on a Humorist
“Don’t you understand yet? The man is dead, and what you mistake for cheerfulness is the grinning of the skull.
[margin: “OK”]
October 22
One falls in love with a person, not with an assemblage of virtues. It is just the same in literature: in Elizabethan drama, for instance, all Massinger’s virtues will not persuade us to like him, nor all Marston’s faults succeed in making me dislike him.
The theory of tactile responses to painting comes from the 18th c. Burke—Sublime & Beautiful. Rococo decadent fussiness, when everyone went around in a vague state of priapism gazing at Boucher. The great painter of nudes was the painter who also made you want to lay that nude.
October 31
Realism in philosophy and theology means frozen music like the plain chant: it means allegory rather than symbolism: it means more obviously heraldry. Spenser’s animals are heraldic. Blake’s tiger is alive. Couchant and rampant; ideal forms, yet in some mysterious way more truly real than existence.
[margin: “S.G.”]
November 5
It is difficult to say anything about Ulysses: it is so universal a book, tackles so many problems, and is buttressed on so many sides that it is like a universal philosophy, like Christianity or communism, which we must either criticize exhaustively and sympathetically or make inane remarks and later flapping gestures. Certainly it restored a rhythm to the novel which had not been in it since Tristram Shandy: it summed up and finished the analysis of character & started prose fiction toward the interpretation of symbolism and cohering of consciousness. Prose should have developed through the Anatomy of Melancholy and the great 17th c. writers and not been deflected by Bunyan and Defoe as poetry was deflected by Milton. The Bible is the archetype of the kind of writing I mean. But Ulysses seems to me to be too self-conscious an attack. It is paralyzed by a self-conscious intellect, and I’m not sure that the entire book “comes off” rhythmically as a whole. It is this consistent linear rhythm that makes Rabelais immortal. Joyce’s medium I think is a shorter one: the separate units of Dubliners or the simpler linear scheme of the Portrait give a clearer effect; and while there is no finer writing in literature than the brothel scene or Marion Bloom’s monologue there seems no sense of integration into a larger unit. The Odyssey has a climax. Ulysses wanders interminably and the crisis comes when he comes home. This crisis is marked by a terrific impact: the slaughter of the suitors. But there is no such crisis in Joyce’s Ulysses as a whole: the brothel scene is a little off-centre and the monologue is a coda. Again, some of the symbols like the Hely’s walking sign and so on are arbitrarily chosen and I feel like that a symbol should respond to an inherent requirement in the whole design. The metamorphosis symbol is better chosen but doesn’t quite come off—I may be making a fool of myself of course.
[margin: “OK”]
November 10
I have occasionally wondered how much we would know of literature if English poetry were as completely in the hands of elocutionists as piano music is in that of recitalists. About like this:
For what we get of Bach, the soliloquies in Hamlet, the lyrics from the Tempest, and the Seven Ages of Man from As You Like It
For Mozart, a very infrequent Canterbury Tale.
For the Beethoven Sonata, a book from a Miltonic epic.
For the Romanticist group, about thirty stock pieces from Shelley, Keats and Tennyson.
For the odd Schubert piece, four or five songs of Burns.
For Brahms, half a dozen hackneyed Browning monologues, hackneyed [sic].
For the Liszt piece, Swinburne or Poe (who, like Liszt, would spring into undue prominence should such a situation arise).
The variations from the above would be negligible. Of modern poetry one poem we would know would be Vachel Lindsay’s Congo, which would correspond to the Prelude in C# minor. Who the literary analogue would be to the crocodile who twisted Dvorak’s little humoresque into a sentimental love-song, I cannot imagine, but he would crop up somewhere. And if the poetry of the Bible corresponds to Händel, as it probably would, one can imagine the snuffle that the counterparts of our Largo and Dead March players would put into the Penitential Psalms! Bach–Liszt and Bach–Taussig; Shakespeare–Dryden and Shakespeare–Cibber. As for Gounod’s Ave Maria—but this has gone far enough. About, my brain!63
[margin: “adapt”]
The Bible of the Pass Course64—Ripley’s Believe It or Not column.
[margin: “leave”]
Aw, it ain’t a man’s world.
November 15
An ensemble performance belongs to organic growth. The ballad and the Gothic cathedral alike are fundamentally communal art, as were the Elizabethan madrigals. When the solo performer who must have an audience comes into fashion, a more critical note is sounded. Romantic music brought with it the virtuoso and the popular approval. Modern dramas consist of characters fighting with each other, this antagonism being in fact what holds the drama together. But the real popular attitude is exemplified in the football game, where an ensemble performance is given for the sole purpose of destroying another. The audience watches and gloats on the suicide.
[margin: “possible”]
November 18
The Canadian National Railways is at last, I hope, definitely heading for bankruptcy. It is criminal to tie up so much capital in such a hopelessly antiquated affair as a steam railway. The Age of Steam is dead and gone—it flourished when Dickens wrote Hard Times and passed with the nineteenth century. Nobody wants to go back to the life depicted in that novel and it is a shameful humiliation to be compelled to ride on a vehicle which symbolizes, or rather incarnates, the whole Gradgrind–Bounderby65 spirit. The Middle Ages hated machines, except those of torture, and they invented the dragon to represent their hatred. The locomotive is the actualization of that dragon. Everything shows it—its ungainly form lurching and banging along, noisy and jangling, on a remorseless and unyielding steel track, its venomous outpouring of choking smoke and steam the residue of which fills its shabby upholstery with dust and spreads layer on layer of greasy filth over its passengers, its stuffy unendurable breath of incredibly stale tobacco and oranges, its exorbitant tributes levied on its victims, its habit of laying waste all the surrounding landscape in country or city. Everywhere it goes, if not actually on the spot, it invariably leaves a grim reminder of its existence in the long rotting rows of hideous and rickety red skeletons, which are even more of an eyesore, because more constant, than its puffing and clanking actuality. I can never believe in a hell that one gets by paying two pence for a ferry. If the luckless soul were instead to give a hundred dollars to a snippy station agent and go by train, the thing might be more convincing.
[margin: “possible if revised”]
November 19
The fate of Sir Thomas Browne, sandwiched between medieval fable and the revolutionary Royal Society, is that of all liberals. Like modern Christology. There is a theoretical conservative limit of literal truth in all four gospels and a scientific limit which reduces every word in them to myth and symbol. Between these are the liberals, trying to show that Mark is “more historical” than John, working on the will to believe historical truth, yet with a scientific or quasi-scientific attitude which, being dependent on that basis, is cautiously controlled. That is Browne’s relation to the Royal Society—really interested in science only for its literary or symbolic value; like the medieval bestiaries he adopts a quasi-scientific attitude of enquiry and adoption of reputable authority. It is not his attitude but his interest, or subject matter, that is unscientific. Thus while the medieval scholars were interested in crocodile tears because they were an allegory of hypocrisy, Browne reads much the same set of authorities to see whether a crocodile has ever been known to cough, his real interest being that coughing symbolizes some difference between human and animal natures. The attitude is quasi-scientific, the interest away from science.
November 21
I wonder if the civilization of ants and bees could plausibly be called two-dimensional as opposed to ours? Two-dimensional elements in our own, such as Russian communism and the general Slav denial of height66 seem to approximate the general insect scheme. In our own the approximation to the insect state goes along with the post-Romantic cutting off of height.
[margin: “leave”]
November 29
The Varsity rugby team is in the cellar, and I don’t give a damn. The Victoria rugby team has lost the final and I am broken-hearted. I am not of Toronto but of Victoria in my partisanships. I know the Vic men and would be glad to wipe their faces for them as they come off the field. When Don Amos67 goes charging through Trinity I have a personal interest in Don; I want to see him do well and later on in the shower he will tell me in detail what it was like and how he felt. And when a Trinity man comes through with only John Stinson68 to stop him, I have a personal interest in him too and pray that John will succeed in breaking his dirty damned Trinity neck. So Don and John go into battle with my heartfelt blessings breathed behind them. My attitude is that of the lady at the tournament of knights, as the specialization in sport has reduced me to the rôle, if not of a lady, at least of the be-witched and raucous-voiced but essentially effeminate, admiring, sissy spectator. Trinity, I know, feels the same way and I glow with contemptuous sympathy for Trinity. But an intercollegiate game I watch like a spectator at a horse race with no bets up. The only player I know is Jack Witzel69 and after observing with horror at the outset that he is not playing, I relapse into sullen silence. Seeing Varsity at length being thoroughly beaten and not knowing very clearly what I can or should do about it, I remark to my neighbour, who looks like an Engineer, that if Varsity would get wise to itself and put a couple of big guys like Witzel in the front line we might get somewhere. Then during the rest of the game, this not having registered, I howl at intervals that “We (that is, I) want Witzel!!” The team does not know I exist and does not care; how then can they (sic) represent my athletic development which must in this environment find a purely vicarious expression?
[margin: “outgrown”]
December 4
The average sketch of English literature is like a fat man running a race. Beginning with a careful and sympathetic account of the miracle plays, Chaucer, and Langland, it proceeds to a rapid review of the Elizabethans, glances over the seventeenth century and notices Milton, says a few platitudes about the age of reason, gets perceptibly broken-winded around the Romantic Revival, mumbles over the big names of the nineteenth century like a sulky monk at his rosary, gets with a desperate effort to Matthew Arnold, then gasps out “Kipling, Masefield, Hardy” and falls in a dead faint. Oh, they’re not all like that—one I glanced over recently was moderately good—though when there are so many better proportioned manuals on the market there is hardly sufficient justification for producing another one actually to produce it. But if one is going to talk about all English literature one should do it properly, that is, ponderously. One may chat gracefully and wittily only about a forgotten poet or a scandal in connection with a bigger name.
[margin: “leave”]
Perhaps I should mention that the specific book is Broadus’ History of English Literature.70 I don’t know why I talked about average sketches.
December 7
Under the pressure of cheap immigrant Latin, Celt, and Slav, the Nordics are retreating to their mountain fortresses. Hence the rise of Scandinavia, particularly in America. Sandburg, for instance, and in another sphere Lindbergh. The American ideal of beauty is Greta Garbo, strident, angular, and Swedish. All other actresses strive to make themselves look like her and become beautiful insofar as they succeed. I certainly think the welcome given Lindbergh was not altogether on account of his having flown across the Atlantic, which had been done before often enough. The point was that he was an idol as well as a hero; a statuesque figure.
[margin: “OK” / “adapt”]
December 15
Unfinished Triolet
She walks on frosty mornings clear
Ice-bright with the sun’s sharp ray.
Gazing over the white land drear
She walks on frosty mornings clear
(Now what the hell can I put here?
I’m stuck, for fair. Well, anyway)
She walks on frosty mornings clear
Ice-bright with the sun’s sharp ray!
[margin: “all my doggerel is bad”]
I was talking today to a girl about five years older than I. We got arguing, and she, being a very dogmatic and positive sort of female, but not knowing much about the subject, appealed from me to a future general council, telling me I was just going through a certain silly stage of adolescence, and later on I would change my views. I have often felt that way in talking to others, but I should regard my feelings as personal opinion merely and my pride would not allow me to resort to the miserable expedient of using it in place of an argument. As a matter of fact, I think she is wrong. As nearly as I can analyse myself, I have gone through my last “stage.” My conceptions of things are slowly beginning to take definite and permanent form, and in another year I think I shall be intellectually an adult and socially at least an imbecile, perhaps even a low-grade moron. We can only work hard and hope for the best.
[margin: “phoney”]
To imply that it is dulcet and decorous to die for one’s country is, I think, to translate Horace a bit too literally.71
[margin: “possible”]
December 16
The most pernicious example of censorship I know is the edition of Spenser that cuts out the penultimate stanza of the Epithalamion. The complete poem is so delicate, graceful, sensitively tactful: then remove that story and substitute a line of dots and it is suddenly transformed into a grotesquely leering obscenity.
Butler’s Erewhon contains a spirited satire on a religion which is apparently Orphism: cf. the world of the unborn, the rights of animals,72 etc. It is not Christianity.
December 17
Outline History of English Culture
[margin: “S.G.”]
December 19
I glanced through a female magazine article today on bringing up children. Don’t spank them, said the authoress—a child is all right at bottom, and it gives more lasting results to appeal to his better nature. This logic seems to me to be shaky. If a youngster is all right at bottom, why not make your appeal there?
[margin: “possible”]
December 23
Music is the epitome of life; accented continuity of movement in time. It never stops, never falters, never hesitates. Yet the movement is uniform but by no means unvarying; in history a great man gives accent, emphasis and consequently ordered formulation to an epoch. Similarly the great periods appear as sudden accentuations—the creative jumps in evolution and history alike have the characteristics of rhythmic emphasis. Hence there are three approaches to history as there are to music,—Catholic, Protestant and negative. The last one is of two kinds which merge into the same thing—the first kind say[s] that Nature never jumps, the second that nature never does anything else, the latter being the fortissimo formulation of the former, both denying accent. To say that an age produces a great man, or conversely, the man his age, is an identical error, the recognition of accent carrying with it the conception of action and reaction. Materialistic evolution of strict Darwinism belongs here, setting off a purely catastrophic theory on the other side. Catholic views of history, like Catholic views of music before Byrd, deny the push and drive of an immanent force—everything is subordinated to a static and harmonious whole, alike in Palestrina and in Thomas Aquinas. Protestant music is incarnated in the great evolutionary forms of the fugue and the sonata, and evolution with a creative factor is the most purely Protestant of conceptions.
[margin: “leave” / “outgrown”]
December 31
DRAMA: |
GROTESQUE COMEDY |
EARLY |
|
THE CHRIST |
MIDDLE |
NOVEL: |
LIBERAL |
EARLY-MIDDLE |
|
TRAGICOMEDY |
MIDDLE |
|
ANTICLIMAX |
MIDDLE |
|
RENCONTRE |
MIDDLE |
|
MIRAGE |
MIDDLE |
|
PARADOX |
MIDDLE-LATE |
|
IGNORAMUS |
LATE |
|
TWILIGHT |
LATE |
ESSAY: |
ENGLISH LITERATURE |
EARLY |
|
MUSIC |
EARLY |
|
SUMMA |
LATE |
[margin: “outgrown but the [tree?] of the novels still holds”]