The following entries come from a transcription of Frye’s Notebook 13, a holograph notebook in the Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library, 1991 accession, box 24. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University. Some of the material on Shakespeare from this notebook was included in Michael Dolzani’s edition of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 2004.
[1] Laforgue’s influence marked in: a) the lunar imagery b) the Laforgue personality as recorded in Symons, which has affinities with Prufrock and Eliot c) the Hamlet conception. Prufrock is not Hamlet; Hamlet itself is a failure. Prufrock’s the modern ironic Hamlet; Gerontion the modern ironic Satan or lost soul.1
[2] I imagine that Bradley was partly for Eliot the genuine Arnold, the stylist who didn’t have the genteel litterateur’s disease of reducing all technical language to the jargon of elegance. His main philosophical interest, like Eliot’s, was ethical, and he provided Eliot with a natural theology. He attacked William James & I think Bertrand Russell, with both of whom Eliot was out of sympathy.
[3] As I understand it, natural theology is this: the world of appearance is split between subject & object: it’s the world where the shadow falls in time. Above (the relation is potentially sacramental) is the world of immediate experience where subject & object are one, the reality we can’t bear much of.2 Objectivity of poetry, the primacy of experience, the dissociation of sensibility,3 all spread out from here. But Bradley’s shape is one with analogies in oriental philosophy. May Sinclair.4
[4] Two spiritual quests take shape: the way up from Dante, with the focus on Purgatorio 26, and the ascent of Mt. Carmel, symbolically a desert, from St. John of the Cross—plentitude & vacancy.
[5] Laforgue contributed the lunar symbolism of the early poems & the Hamlet theme which Prufrock isn’t. If Yeats had known as much French!
[6] Eliot seems almost to have resented the lack of original sin in Shakespeare, hence his emphasis on the aesthetic element in Othello & in heroism generally. Prufrock is something of an ironic Hamlet, just as Albert in The Waste Land is an ironic Ulysses. Possible link here with the anti-Stoic attitude (acceptance vs. renunciation; pride vs. humility; pessimism vs. waiting).
[7] Pseudo-nature of a lot of the polemical views (Milton’s Satan & Byronism). Coarse conformity: Kipling, Dryden, the illiterate audience for drama. But did he ever incorporate a philosophy as he says Dante does? He owes less to Dryden than Keats does.
[8] Because experience is essentially discontinuous human institutions are necessary, as they’re continuous. Hence too a poetry of epiphanic moments depends on continuous tradition.
[9] Steady opposition to (?) logolatry (?) lexicolatry in Eliot: his “eyewash” comment on Valery5 & his reservations about Mallarmé. Words are part of the bloody flux. It’s a part of the deification of fact he resists.
[10] Influence of Anabase on The Rock.
[11] Arnold link: the deliberate vulgarity of the gashouse imagery vs. Arnold’s creeping Saxon & Wragg is in custody.6 Arnold fell back on the Celts; Joyce on the heroes: Eliot’s genuine contrasts are not heroic but spiritual aspirations, like the Byzantine mosaic at Ravenna.
[12] Bibliography: Axel’s Castle, Leavis’ Mod. Poetry & the Tradition7 & I.A. Richards are all quite early pioneering studies. I have Matthiessen (good), one of Williamson’s two books (I guess they’re different men), Helen Gardner’s book (shit, apparently), & must get Unger & Kenner. W. Lewis’ goddamn Men Without Art. Philip Wheelwright links him to his symbolic theory, & the Quartet chapter in MacCallum’s book. Two new books, one on the plays, one by an R.C. Herbert Howarth on the Criterion & maybe Milton, Roy Daniells on Hulme & Blissett on Pater, the PMLA on the empty men, Anne Bolgan’s thesis. Elizabeth Drew.8
[13] Eliot’s dramas always turn on the isolation of the central figure, usually because he’s seen demons—this is true even of Sweeney in SA [Sweeney Agonistes].
[14] Echo lines—cross & cross across the brain [Rhapsody on a Windy Night, l. 61], words after speech reach [Burnt Norton, pt. 5, l. 3], the Ash Wednesday passage.9 Eliot has a lot to tell me about high style in my sense (or what’s getting to be my sense) of something that slides into the mind with the air of having always been there.
[15] Wonder if this isolation theme, which I originally thought was a reversed-Hamlet one, is the reason why Coriolanus is so damn important? The furies Coriolanus sees are the vulgarities of the present. The Coriolan poems are (at least Triumphal March) about the spiritual heroism, the AC dial kind,10 at the least of the wrong kind. Similarly with that Prelude. Triumphal March isn’t a Fascist poem, but it would be interpreted as one if things had worked out that way: Eliot never came closer to making the fool of himself that Pound did. The same theme in a purely ironic context, in the world of appearance only, is at the end of “Le Directeur.” But as it stands, the hero of that poem has more to do with Arjuna,11 or even Christ riding into Jerusalem, than any political mountebank.
[16] First chapter: Eliot at Harvard & the sense of New England as having had it. Gospel of individualism had become one of hustle, & the hustler had hustled elsewhere. Emerson & his “self-reliance,” & the institution as the lengthened shadow of a man. (Misquoted as “history” by a poet who defines history as a pattern of timeless moments). (The quatrain in question is not a glib sneer at either Emerson or apeneck Sweeney: the poet means just what he says).12 Sense of contrast between discontinuous experience & continuity of institution.
[17] Oh, the hell with it: it’s a mistake to try to incorporate the biography with the Man of Letters chapter. Make it a separate prelude, as in the Matthiessen book, & the bibliography of course a separate epilogue. That sets you free.
[18] Man of Letters, then. First, dynastic family & raised estate of New England. Cult of individualism & self-reliance in Emerson leading to a perverted view of institutions. For Eliot these complement experience, which is discontinuous. Hence the point he has Baudelaire endorse: it’s not necessarily a conservative or authoritarian view, though it tends to become one. Reinforced by Hulme & the shock to Teutonic & liberal-Protestant-Romantic complexes. Then the Great Western Butterslide & its “Waste Land” popularization. Eliot’s version of this as the reunited Anglo-American community before the Milton-New England Puritan schism, Catholic & so attracted to the European one. The enemy as Romantic (Shelley), as liberal (various), as Stoic (Russell & the humility business). The Fascist lean in the thirties: recovery of balance in Quartets. Perhaps a postlude. Poets’ social views are very important, not just because they also write poetry, but because they’re prophetic & apocalyptic, though utterly screwy in application. The tendency to write such treatises is Romantic & Arnoldian, just as a lot of Eliot’s poetry is spilt religion.13 Wisdom is an illusion: the partial insights of a craft are the best we can do (East Coker).
[19] “Chicago Semite Viennese” [Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, l. 16]: everybody resents the slur on Semite; nobody resents the slur on Chicago.
[20] *There is much that is pitiful & wretched in Eliot’s poetry, & much of the pathetic muddle of the human ego, but nothing really evil, except whatever it is that is going on in Sweeney Among the Nightingales.
[21] *Ezra Pound, who was accustomed to editing the work of other poets with the greatest confidence, is said to have cut The Waste Land in about half. Probably most readers would prefer to have the original version & make up their own minds, but there it is. It is possible that the cutting has improved the poem, & highly probable that it has made it more enigmatic.
[22] *Heavy-handed irony about not going to church: the Cyril bit from T.M. [Triumphal March]
[23] *I can still remember the sense of outrage & betrayal when, as a young student facing the world of the depression & of Hitler & the great Stalin [neuroses?] & looking to the writers I most admired for guidance, I picked up After Strange Gods. I had to learn the hard way that all leaders are lost leaders, like Moses in the wilderness. Even the guide who undertakes to take the reader to his leader may be suspect, like Sam Wauchope14 whom the Americans boast to be a “real live Britisher” to show them around London, but who is nothing but a lousy Canadian.15
[24] *Re this last & Eliot’s sense of mongrelism (“Chicago Semite Viennese,” the cosmopolite “Mélange Adultère de Tout,” the Lithuanian German in the WL [Waste Land]. Said in NDC [Notes towards a Definition of Culture], or ICS [The Idea of a Christian Society], that most people shouldn’t go away from home.16
[25] *The dramas, at least MC, FR, and CP [Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party], begin with a central character who creates a dialectic by seeing demons where others just see ordinary life.
[Here Frye draws a circle, like the face of a clock, the twelve sections being an early version of his representation of the total action of Paradise Lost in The Return of Eden, 18–21. The twelve points are designated here as follows:]17
12 Presence of God
1 Begetting of Son
2 Revolt of Satan
3 Creation of World
4 Creation of Eden, Adam, Eve
5 Plot of Satan
6 Fall of Man
7 Fall of World
9 Giving of Law (Promised Land)
10 Incarnation–Temptation
11 Second Coming
[1] Spenser’s conception of “Phantastes” illustrates the Renaissance sense of the pathology of the imagination. It’s the judgement that creates poetry as well as philosophy. Cf. Hobbes & his movement from memory through judgement & fancy.18
[2] Now when we turn to Fletcher’s Purple Island we find that, although he appears to be following Spenser closely, he’s actually made a very significant change. Phantastes in him is the originator of the creative power, hence George Macdonald’s Phantastes comes from him & not from Spenser. Cf. Dryden on wit & madness.
[3] The general literary view is that the imagination is the basis of mental health, not the reason. The emphasis is thus on work rather than enlightenment-creation.
[4] My Dickens-Kipps point—Dickens is bigger than Wells because he would write badly & see the character from the character’s own point of view, which is not necessarily unreal.19 Wells, like a modern, is afraid not to be objective. But the real artists’ criterion being the created & not the moral, he’s involved in a creation-hallucination dialectic which is sharper & subtler than a “reality” (e.g. creation handed to you as a datum)-neurosis one. You need the theory of humors in comedy for this too.
[5] The state of mind that we call belief is neither ancient nor universal. It’s one of those unconscious assumptions we seldom examine that everyone believes. The attitude of the ancient Greek was, obviously, not: “I believe in Zeus the father Almighty … and in Dionysos his Son our Lord.” It was rather: “Some say that Dionysos was born from the thigh of Zeus; others that he was nursed by Amalthea,” etc. And today Christianity would go bankrupt overnight if it were supported only by the people who believe. People accept it, realize it’s there, respect it, even turn to it for help, but don’t necessarily believe or disbelieve it.
[6] I suppose the slow conviction that the just shall live by faith took shape in Judaism, with its conception, very rare in any religions except those that have derived from it, of “false gods.” As soon as you begin thinking of truth & falsehood in relation to gods you’ve gone about halfway to monotheism: I don’t quite know why at the moment: it just seems obvious that if you believe in a god he starts to become the god.
[7] I don’t know either why the revolution in self-consciousness was also a revolution from the Mother-Goddess to the Father-God. But, again, that seems the inevitable symbol of the revolution itself: the mind emerging from nature & turning around to look at what it had emerged from. In the Mother-Goddess period man had a unity with nature he’s since lost, but it was a unity providing insufficient consciousness for the next step he had to take.
[8] One blurs the issue by talking about social attitudes here. It’s natural to assume that when the Mother is worshipped society is matriarchal (which may or may not be true) and that women are highly respected, which doesn’t seem to me to follow at all. Faceless creatures like the Venus of Willendorf, all bum-belly-teats & gaping vulva, are just sexual machines, not human beings. In such a society women might be shut up in the dark during menstruation, & harassed & bedevilled & tormented in every way that superstitious ingenuity could devise, but not necessarily respected. Nor could such a society ever evolve to the point of producing a Joan of Arc or a Queen Elizabeth or an Emily Dickinson.20 All it has is a Queen Bee.
[9] We tend to think in threes, & have always felt that there was a Third-Age just on the way. If there is, it would be an Age in which faith was subordinate, not to action as in the age of the Mother Goddess, but to vision. Vision is love, of course; not love as emotion but charity. Christianity has always really talked of faith in these terms, but we keep missing it.
[10] The condemnation of idolatry in the Bible seems so unreasonable: surely everybody knew that idols were human artefacts. It becomes intelligible only when we think of it as part of an imaginative revolution. Lived with, the idol represents a power; looked at, it’s dead.
[11] The “totalitarian” attitude is the last stage of justification by faith, and its inner spiritual death realized. It would also be the first & lowest stage of justification by vision.
[12] Something of this will have to get into the Romanticism paper, & not only because it’s central in Blake. The whole Frankenstein myth, which arises then, has to do with the antagonism of self-consciousness & nature.21 It’s our “Druidism,” as the frenzy of the Aztecs was the “Druidism” of the Mother Goddess.
[13] One of the functions of culture, including mythology, is to act as a kind of reservoir for belief. Any belief not reflected in behavior is mere acceptance, like acceptance of something taught in a science one trusts but doesn’t know. An intense conservatism in religion ensures that expressions of belief take the same verbal form even when they’ve gone back into the reservoir & returned with a completely new content.
[14] Romanticism itself is a kind of retreat into the reservoir. In speaking of Arnold’s culture recently I connected his argument with Shelley’s. His culture is the invisible community of love manifested in the arts—the community of which poets are the hidden (“unacknowledged”) legislators.22
[15] Polytheism, as I’ve said, develops science because it’s forced into the acceptance of natural law. It also develops the imaginative reservoir. The “false gods” direction develops the dialectic in the Word, and, eventually, the social telos of science.
[16] The difference between criticism & direct experience is that the former is an incessant practice repetition directed toward possession. The latter avoids repetition: as an experience, one doesn’t want two performances of King Lear in the same day: granted a superlative performance, hardly two in the same year. Criticism purges experience of associative elements—here’s where my “golden rain” story goes.23 The “toneless tone” represents the frisson of experience in a semi-purified state: [recreating?] experience in the sense of life (poetry as a criticism of life) rather than strictly the rest of literature. I never did get the final twist on my third Virginia lecture,24 nor the sublime-Arnold-continuous and intensifying-Poe-discontinuous antithesis. Preface to 1853 Poems speaks of structure with implicit texture; the fragmented Waste Land technique has texture with implicit structure.
[17] Glance back: what’s unique in Judaism isn’t monotheism or moral fervor or anything positive: what’s unique is its insistence that all gods except Yahweh are false—in other words it contributed to mankind through its least amiable characteristic. Human nature is a bit like that, I’m afraid.
I’m attracted to this subject because Poe sets down the elements of the imagination, in its introverted or projected dream form, so nakedly. This, as I explain in AC [Anatomy of Criticism],25 is why he has so immediate an influence on our own time as compared with a more displaced writer like Hawthorne. As for the Germans (except Novalis and possibly Jean Paul), the less said about them the better. Most of them don’t know what the hell they’re doing—I’m not saying Poe did either, but something in him did.