29 March 1974
From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 5, file e. This was an address to a conference given by the graduate program in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto on “Romanticism and Historicism.” Frye’s panel dealt specifically with the role of time in Romantic poetry. A preliminary typescript with holograph corrections is in 1988, box 5, file c. First published in MM, 157–67.
I am not a scholar in the Romantic period, except by fits and starts, so it seems to me that what I can most usefully do is to provide some sort of context for the theme of “Time and the Poetic Self.” The great difficulty about time, of course, has always been that it is the primary category of experience, the most important and fundamental aspect of life, and yet apparently it does not exist. Its centre seems to be in the present moment, the now, but when we try to grasp this “now,” we find ourselves pursuing an elusive never quite that keeps vanishing between the no longer and the not yet. As Dylan Thomas says,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.1
We try to cope with time facing the past, with our backs to the future, and in relation to time human life seems to be a kind of untied Andromeda, constantly stepping back from a devouring monster whose mouth is the mouth of hell, in the sense that each moment passes from the possible into the eternally unchangeable being of the past. At death we back into a solid wall, and the monster then devours us too.
The time-honoured way of dealing with problems we don’t understand is to project them on God, who presumably does understand them. In the traditional view, as incorporated into medieval and later Christianity, the human experience of time has always been contrasted with what must be the experience of God, whose mind can be only in a pure present comprehending both past and future. Our ordinary experience of time, we have been assured ever since St. Augustine at least, results from the fall, when we acquired a consciousness that can attend to only one thing “at a time,” from which this slippery linear perspective on time has been derived. As the Elizabethan poet Sir John Davies says, in his philosophical poem Nosce Teipsum:
But we that measure times by first and last,
The sight of things successively do take,
When God on all at once His view doth cast,
And of all times, doth but one instant make.2
On the human level there are, according to this traditional Christian view, three kinds of temporal experience. At the furthest pole from the mind of God, where time is an eternal now, is demonic time, time experienced as simply one clock-tick after another, an unending duration without direction or purpose, of which we know nothing except that it annihilates everything, including us. Hell is usually conceived as this experience of time with death removed, and Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech [5.5.19] is the best-known literary evocation of it. Above this is our ordinary sense of time as a mixture of linear and cyclical movement. We see time as the universal devourer, with a unique capacity for wiping things out of existence; but we also experience a rotary movement in which spring follows winter, dawn the darkness, and new life death. In these brief instants of renewal there is some sense of hope and confidence, some feeling that a benevolent power may after all be concealed in the machinery. But this view of time is founded on the alienation myth of the fall of man, so two other questions about time arise. One is, What was time like in the garden of Eden, in the world God originally made for Adam before his fall? The other is, To what extent can this unfallen sense of time be attained in our present life?
A higher awareness of time must be connected somehow with the one reassuring aspect of time in our ordinary experience, the sense of renewal in the cycles of nature. This aspect is seen in its complete form in the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, where there is cycle without decline or decay, a continuous renewal. The heavenly bodies represent, for us, not mechanical obedience to divine law, but the release of freedom that such obedience makes possible. Their rotation is something to be associated with music and the dance, a movement which brings the highest kind of pleasure with it, and which is symbolized by the myth of the “music of the spheres.” We turn to Sir John Davies’ other long poem, Orchestra, where we have the finest and best-known treatment in English poetry of the creation of nature as a dance, a “harmony” of joyous and integrated rhythm which was the characteristic of the world as God originally made it. The experience of time in the unfallen state, then, would be the kind of experience represented by the dancer, whose world is not timeless but where time is the effect of exuberance, its cycles taking place, as Milton says, “for change delectable, not need.”3 As Davies says,
How justly then is dancing termed new
Which with the world in point of time began?
Yea, Time itself, whose birth Jove never knew,
And which is far more ancient than the sun,
Had not one moment of his age outrun
When out leaped Dancing from the heap of things
And lightly rode upon his nimble wings.
Reason hath both their pictures in her treasure,
Where Time the measure of all moving is
And Dancing is a moving all in measure.
Now if you do resemble that to this,
And think both one, I think you think amiss;
But if you judge them twins, together got,
And Time first born, your judgment erreth not.4
That is, time and dancing, the measure of movement and the movement in measure, are not the same thing, but time is the mode of the dancing existence, the ultimate context within which it operates, just as the ordinary kind of time is for life on this level.
Davies’ poem is said to be sung to Penelope by the chief of her suitors, Antinous, during the absence of Odysseus. The reason is that Penelope’s web was often taken to be an allegory of nature, its weaving and unweaving the process of change and mutation that goes on around us. What Antinous’s song does is to bring out the inner secret of nature, the form that time assumes in its originally created state. The poet says,
So subtile and curious was the measure,
With such unlooked-for change in every strain,
As that Penelope, rapt with sweet pleasure,
Ween’d she beheld the true proportion plain
Of her own web, weaved and unweaved again:
But that her art was somewhat less, she thought,
And on a mere ignoble subject wrought. [st. 134, ll. 1–7]
Somewhat less, because the world we live in, which her web symbolizes, is not equal to the great orchestra celebrated by her suitor. The poet uses an ingenious image to express this: while Penelope weaves, her hands are moving in the great dance, but if she were in a completely liberated world, her feet and whole body would be moving too.
The prevailing assumption, down to Milton’s time at least, was that everything that is genuinely good for man, that is in the largest sense of the term educational, tends to raise him from ordinary experience a little nearer to the unfallen level that he was originally created to live on. In this educational activity the cycles of the heavenly bodies symbolize a creative form of repetition, like the repetitions of practice. If we want to learn to play a musical instrument or to read the Latin language, we set ourselves free for these activities through practice, which builds up a habit ending in an extension of freedom. This kind of creative repetition was represented by the sacraments of the church in particular. A great deal of the measuring of time in this period was a by-product of religion, with clocks and bells marking the hours of worship or devotion. The two aspects of cyclical movement, the ordinary and the cultivated, are distinguished in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos: in fact the distinguishing of them is the whole point of the poem. Mutability dominates our world, and nobody disputes her claim to it. But she also claims the starry heavens above, on the ground that they too move in cyclical rotation, and hence are phenomena of becoming and change. The evidence she brings forth is the evidence of the natural cycle: the four seasons, day and night, the twelve months with their Zodiacal signs, life and death. But Nature decides against her claim to the upper world on the ground that there are two aspects to cyclical movement. The stars being made, not of the dissoluble four elements, but of immortal quintessence, their cycle is unchanging and not subject to decay:
I well consider all that ye have said,
And find that all things steadfastness do hate
And changed be: yet being rightly weighed
They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being do dilate:
And turning to themselves at length again,
Do work their own perfection so by fate:
Then over them Change doth not rule and reign;
But they reign over Change, and do their states maintain.5
The line “Do work their own perfection so by fate” indicates the element of what we have called habit or creative repetition in the upper cycle: the rotation of heavenly bodies symbolizes not simply an unending cycle but a telos, a purposive movement back to their Creator. As elsewhere in The Faerie Queene, the top and bottom of the four levels of time are only hinted at. The top level is referred to explicitly only in the very last stanza of the poem, as the “rest” or “Sabbath’s sight” which the poet prays to have at the end of his life.6 The demonic level is indicated in Nature’s comment to Mutability, “For thy decay thou seek’st by thy desire”7—that is, the ultimate thrust of the force of change and decay in time as we know it is into perpetual annihilation, the chaos of fluctuating chance that Milton says is “the womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave.”8
So far we have been following the poets in their purely religious themes. But outside the Christian mythology was Eros, the power of love that has a sexual basis, however sublimated it may later become. For the poets Eros was another force that could raise man to a higher awareness of time. Davies makes it abundantly clear, not only that his poem is a love song, but that his conception of the cosmological dance is also a manifestation of Eros. Similarly, it is Dante’s love for Beatrice that impels him up the purgatorial mountain to reach the unfallen form of his own existence, which is in the garden of Eden on the top of the mountain. Even unhappy, frustrated, or rejected love may have the same result. In Shakespeare’s sonnets we hear a great deal about time as the devourer and annihilator of all being. But in the beautiful-youth sequence there are certain intervals—three in all—where there is a sense of renewed energy and power, obviously connected with the imagery of spring. At the beginning of the sequence the poet urges the youth to marry and beget a son, a futile effort to prolong his beauty in time; then the poet drops this theme and falls in love with the youth himself. After a great deal of suffering and misery, along with a few gleams of ecstasy, the total experience of love on the poet’s part lifts him clear of the dissolution and decay in time. The beautiful youth is left to nature’s “audit,” in other words to age and death, but the poet’s love is in a ver perpetuum like the garden of Eden in Dante, “That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.”9
As nearly all the poets in this period, apart from the dramatists, represented themselves as lovers, they were able, even without a doctrine of creative imagination as such, to suggest that poetry itself was also a means of acquiring a higher awareness of time, and coming closer to the exuberant pulsation of the dance which is its real form. The word “grace,” with its double set of associations in love and religion, was of great importance here. At the end of The Faerie Queene Spenser introduces himself, under his earlier pseudonym of Colin Clout, the lover of Rosalind, as evoking a vision centred on four “Graces,” Rosalind being the addition to the conventional three, and in her turn being placed “under the feet” of Queen Elizabeth, who usually took this role of fourth Grace.10 The implication is that Spenser, as lover, is able to create the entire world of “faerie,” and enable his reader to enter it.
In modern poetry the Eliot Quartets give us once again this traditional view of time on four levels of experience. In Burnt Norton, which owes a good deal to Davies’ Orchestra, we begin again with the sense of overwhelming unreality in the ordinary experience of time, where nothing but the most rigid kind of fatalism can unite its three dimensions. Perhaps nothing can happen except what must happen, which means that the future has, in a sense, already occurred, and so is indistinguishable from the past. In this kind of fatalism there could be no redemption, for “all time is unredeemable” [sec. 1, ll. 1–5]: such a world would be hell if there were no death. Redemption requires a God, but a God within time is no better off than we are, and a God wholly free of time is of no use to us. Fortunately we have the Incarnation, the descent of something outside time into time, and this creates in time the possibility of a genuine present moment. The recurrence of this moment, suggesting that it is continuously latent, is represented by the church’s daily repetition of the Incarnation in the Mass, and its possible emergence in life is the basis of the arts, hence the sense of a moment in which “past and future are gathered” [sec. 2, l. 18], when “all is always now” [sec. 5, ll. 11–13], is one of the things that poetry is about. In Little Gidding the conception of Eros is added, for the sake of completeness and tradition, but Eliot is not much of a votary of Eros, and the theological subordination of Eros to Agape, or God’s love for man, takes over and organizes the argument.
So the traditional view of time is still poetically viable, as Eliot shows. But its traditional symbol, the sky with its heavenly bodies, has lost most of its prestige. We no longer believe that the heavenly bodies are made of immortal quintessence, or that they move in intelligently guided perfect circles around the earth. In fact the heavenly bodies now, with their colossal distances from the earth and their obvious indifference to human concerns, are more likely to be a symbol of human alienation than of divine providence. Eliot does give us the traditional cosmological dance, at the beginning of the second section of Burnt Norton, with all the rhythms of nature pulsating around “the bedded axle-tree” [sec. 2, l. 2]. But the old spatial metaphors of sky and mountain have largely vanished, the Incarnation-moment being a kind of vortex or shadow-mountain.
By a century after Newton’s time, at least, the heavenly bodies were becoming increasingly an image of mechanism rather than of divine providence and the original condition of creation. Hence the number of evil or stupid sky-gods in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, along with the use of the older construct for parody, as in Byron’s Vision of Judgment and the Prologue to Goethe’s Faust.11 When the movements in the sky become thought of as mechanical, we are left with the organism as the highest symbol of being, with man, the conscious organism, at the centre. In the older construct man turns away from his natural environment and attaches himself, through love or religion, to an ideal form of human community. But now man is thought of as immersed in, first, his social, and then his physical, environment. His time-consciousness, first of all, expands into the more leisurely temporal rhythms of social continuity. The “short time” that so haunted Spenser is still short for the individual, but the individual’s life is interpenetrated by instants when he becomes aware of the slow growth or decline of ideas, religions, institutions, and, of course, empires. A very obvious symbol of this enlarged view of time is the Wandering Jew who appears in Shelley’s Hellas. It follows that both a specifically historical consciousness and a speculative consciousness of the future become elements of the Romantic awareness of time.
In the background are the still slower rhythms of nature, a nature which is not itself human, and yet contains something that complements human experience, where life and death assume different patterns and suggest different proportions. To take an example practically at random from The Prelude, Wordsworth sees a ruined convent as
a roofless Pile
And not by reverential touch of Time
Dismantled, but by violence abrupt.12
This complementary sense of time in nature develops from the eighteenth-century vision of the sublime, as manifested later in, for instance, the Mont Blanc that confronts Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, and inspires them to different and yet curiously interrelated reactions.13 The sublime, by definition, is not the lovable, and although, in Shelley particularly, the association of love and the poetic imagination may still be very close, the basis of the poet’s enlarged time-consciousness is not his role as a lover, but his function as a poet. Hence that function is separable from the poet’s personality, real or projected. The barrage of Scriptural echoes in the Defence of Poetry shows how deliberately Shelley is replacing the older construct with a new one: “Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.”14 This deification of time is parallel to Blake’s conception of Los as both Time and the Holy Spirit.
To use a somewhat oversimplifying formula, the Romantic time-consciousness tends to be immanent rather than transcendent, and its emotional tone is not ecstatic so much as elegiac. The older ubi sunt theme, of time as the devourer, is of course still there, but it is qualified by occasional instants where our unconscious participation in larger rhythms of history and nature come to the surface and “We feel that we are greater than we know.”15 The Romantic poet, working as he normally does without the professional rhetorical training that Spenser and Milton had, is well aware of the large involuntary element in creative writing, the times when the will to write must be employed to relax the will, and let the slower autonomous rhythms welling up from lower strata of the mind take over. These rhythms are often identified with historical or natural processes, as in Prometheus Unbound, where the liberation of Prometheus is part of a huge cosmological culbute in which Demogorgon, whose name is “Eternity,” ascends from the depths of the earth on a car piloted by the “Spirit of the Hour” to pull Jupiter off his throne, in a kind of reversal of Eliot’s vision of the Incarnation. Shelley’s vision is in fact founded on the myth of resurrection, which is complementary to that of incarnation, though of course in Shelley it is not specifically the resurrection of Christ which is involved, as it is in Blake’s America, for example. Resurrection, where the power bringing the new sense of time comes from below, is most naturally a revolutionary myth, just as incarnation, which visualizes that power as descending from a higher world of greater order, is most naturally an authoritarian one.
Shelley’s visions of liberation are comic visions, and derive from the structure of comedy as we have it in The Winter’s Tale, where the tragic complications are metamorphosed into a comic conclusion by the discovery of Perdita’s identity at the appointed time. Time himself is a personified chorus in Shakespeare’s play, and the play’s main source, Greene’s Pandosto, is subtitled “The Triumph of Time.” The Incarnation, on the other hand, repeats, on a voluntary and conscious level, the earlier fall of Adam into a lower world, the archetype of tragedy, the theme of which is regularly the theme of the breaking of time, the disruption of the proper rhythms of the creation by something violent and hurried. But both the rhythms of descent from above and emergence from below break into the continuity of our ordinary experience of time with something discontinuous. Eliot’s Quartets make a good deal of the discontinuity that the real present, the still point of the turning world, makes in time. Eliot shows us that it is folly to try to unify our linear sense of time, to assume that we get wiser as we get older, to think that we build a continuous structure of achievement out of our past that will follow us into the future. In The Dry Salvages popular myths of evolution and progress, along with the practice of fortune-telling through various occult means, are condemned as illusions and vanity, as compared to the humility which sees in every moment a fresh beginning, discontinuous with its predecessor:
Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint … [sec. 5, ll. 16–19]
Auden’s For the Time Being uses the Romantic mythological framework, and sees the Incarnation as appearing in obscurity and darkness in the midst of a much more specifically historical situation. Nonetheless, when it comes, it disrupts Herod’s futile efforts to establish continuity and progress in his society (“Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little”), and because it does, it turns a well-meaning liberal into an enemy of God.16
There are naturally an infinite number of issues involved with these Romantic views of time, but time affects me as well as the Romantics, and allows me only one to conclude with. In the Defence of Poetry Shelley speaks of a polarization in our awareness of time. On one side is the perception of the environment as familiar and routine. The same things keep turning up, the same cycles of nature go round and round, life is involuntary and death invariable, and so a tendency develops to think of life in time fatalistically, a passive acceptance of what must be. This corresponds in Shelley to demonic time. The poetic or creative faculty pulls in the opposite direction: its vision is always a renewal of the freshness and energy of man’s view of nature. The next step is to realize that there are two powers in the consciousness, one analytic and the other synthetic, and that the latter is the poetic faculty properly speaking. “Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.”17 The poet constructs wholes or configurations; these become in their turn part of the one great poem that all the poets in history have helped to construct, that is, the mythological universe which is the model for the world man wants to live in, as distinct from the world that is there.
However, Shelley’s separation of the analytic reasoning faculty and the synthetic creative or poetic one points to a curious paradox in the Romantic treatment of history. History, qua history, is the record of what actually occurred: the reason, sifting evidence and rejecting whatever cannot have existed in the past, plays a primary role in the awareness of it. What imagination, attending only to the similitudes of things, gets from the past is not history but myth—the same thing that it gets from the future, as, according to Shelley, poets are “the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”18 Myth normally appears in the form of romance when the genre employed is that of prose fiction. In the Romantic period a good deal of fiction appeared under the category of “historical novel,” and we note that such historical novels are actually romances, in which whatever is historical is inserted as a kind of tour de force. Thus in the Waverley Novels, we get a lively characterization of James I in The Fortunes of Nigel, with probably some relevance to the original king. In Ivanhoe and The Talisman, however, the John Bullish patriot king Richard I has little resemblance to the obsessed gangster of history, whose only interest in the countries he ruled over was to mulct them for crusades. Such things do not really matter: it is the form of romance that matters. The formulas of Scott are very close to the formulas of the late Classical writers of the Second Sophistic—Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Longus—who also called their romances by such names as Ethiopica or Babyloniaca in order to claim some affinity with the historian. The same romance formulas reappear in contemporary science fiction, where the mythical shape is projected on the future rather than the past.
The writer of the period who really succeeds in giving us a sense of historical awareness is rather the writer who concentrates on the immediate data of sense experience and waking consciousness—in short, the compensatory form of Romantic whom we call the realist. By turning his back on history, the realist records the world in front of him, and in due course his picture of that world becomes something of a historical document. In the pastiche of Gibbon in Scott’s Count Robert of Paris, or of Commines in Anne of Geierstein, there is little of much historical value, entertaining as these stories may be on other grounds. But in Mansfield Park, though of course the structure of comic romance is still there, the reflection of the life of the Regency period has a genuine historical importance. Later in the century, Oscar Wilde remarked, in “The Decay of Lying,” which is really a manifesto of romantic and mythical writing as opposed to realism, “M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of life.”19 Put less polemically, we may say that, of the two categories of this conference, Romanticism deals with the recurring constants of myth and romance, Historicism with the specific features of an age, normally the age contemporary with the writer, which are most successfully recorded by those who most successfully resist the temptations represented by the word “Romanticism.”