This essay was written for Professor Pelham Edgar during the first semester of Frye’s final year at Victoria College. It was submitted for English 3e, “Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature.” The title page of the essay is dated 29 November 1932. Frye received a grade of 86 for the paper, the typescript of which is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 10.
Primitivism is the name given to a literary movement following in the wake of the rococo or eighteenth-century tradition and anticipatory of the romantic revival. Positively considered in itself, it is merely a passing aberration of judgment; relatively, to the two great periods which sandwiched it, an episode of the highest significance. The comparatively unimportant formulation of the myth of the noble savage takes on a more dignified aspect when its roots are seen embedded in that profound change of thought, the most complete and far-reaching the world had yet seen, which the transition in question signifies.
The prevailing note of primitivism is dissatisfaction, in any sphere in which it makes its appearance. And the expression of dissatisfaction in literature is usually in terms of revolt against the prevailing style. English poetry had worn a fashion ever since the Restoration, when the rhymed couplet came clanking in like the Spectre of the Haunted Grange, and a fashion which was as limited in scope as it was exclusive in appeal. For the preceding century the idea of poetry was a peculiarly plastic one. Criticism, under the leadership of Samuel Johnson of the pachydermatous ear, accepted the maxim that poets, like children, should be seen and not heard.1 “Form” in a tangible sense was the chief desideratum—Johnson himself, though he could not hear poetry, could at least feel it, and, hence, preferred the hard enamelled surfaces of Pope and Dryden to the rough-hewn masses of Shakespeare or Milton. Now Dryden and Pope, to be appreciated, certainly do have to be judged from a plastic point of view—their neatness, smoothness, finish, precision, dexterity—all plastic terms—are what we see in them. Similarly, Edmund Burke’s rococo theory of aesthetics, though intended as a general survey of the field, is couched throughout in plastic metaphors— rough, smooth, hard, soft, are the words he works with.2 Blake, too, clung to the hard, carven line, abhorring the Titian-Correggio-Rembrandt technique. Even such a “nature poem” as The Tyger expresses the joy of a sculptor in creation:
And what shoulder, & what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart? [lines 9–10]
—lines hardly the work of a paysagiste.3 The romantic movement was a revolt in favour of the pictorial. In my freshman days I was told to evaluate all the poets I encountered in terms of their “feeling for nature,” and soon had a collection ranging from Pope, who was not supposed to have any, to Wordsworth and Keats, who were supposed to have a good deal, and it gradually dawned on me that a feeling for nature was an essential concomitant of romanticism. Now this pictorial attitude— which implies a landscape—was woven into the very fabric of the poems—Coleridge’s mastery of alliteration, Keats’s exquisite vowel-play, are static and literally picturesque sound patterns. The very rhythms seem caught up and arrested, as they are in a painting. And when we compare the cameos in the Songs of Innocence with the brush-work of the Book of Thel it is obvious that a change has taken place.4 In such a case it is inevitable that primitivism should bridge the gap. Rococo poetry dealt with civilization, romantic with the landscape; primitivism was the transitional, thetical, argumentative period which compared them to the advantage of the newer.
The philosophical change underlying this is too immense to deal with in detail, but it may be possible to indicate a few leading principles. The French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the sudden growth of cities, the decay of old privileges, the rise of nationality and democracy, all point to the unifying fact that the centre of gravity in life was no longer the small culture-town, with its guild conceptions of workmanship, but the new metropolis. Aristocratic patronage gave way to popular approval. Now the old towns had their roots very definitely in the land; they drew from it life and power. Creativeness, which up to this time had been a necessary stamp of greatness, means a living strength pressing the intellect into the service of blood and being. But the new soul in the big city floats free in space; he has no roots anywhere. Now in the first place this pulling up of roots leads to a sense of freedom.5
This freedom is that of primitivism, and of irresponsibility. Other great poets refused to be bound by conventions, but in being original they were quite conscious of origins. Spenser in his archaic medievalism, Shakespeare in his plot derivativeness, Donne in his scholasticism, Milton in his Christianity, all supported a great tradition, but primitivists were the first instance of a literary movement dissatisfied with its traditions. They did not want to return to but to constitute origins—the aboriginal rather than the original was their aim. They referred vaguely to Homer and Ossian as poets who were great because they had no traditions. Their position was, of course, a hopelessly false one, modern scholarship having proved that they were quite as wrong about Homer as they were about Ossian. But there is good reason for its falsity. To be dissatisfied with things as they are and to “return,” to put back the clock, is always a fallacy, for the simple reason that the movement of time permits of no alteration. To react is to be suspended, and primitivism, therefore, created no new style in itself, remaining eighteenth century through and through, as with Warton and his contemporaries, until the romantic attitude became definitely established.
It will be apparent that the change above-mentioned can be expressed in terms of the collapse of creativeness and the rise of criticism. As long as art is drawn from the soil it is living; when separated from it into a metropolitan product, it no longer is life, but looks at life. That is the obvious reason for the pictorial nature of romanticism. In philosophy the eighteenth century saw the final expression of the great creative period when Leibnitz, in his poetic pregnancy of language and extraordinary penetration of mind, brought into existence the ultimate convictions of Western thought, to be followed by Kant, who compressed that thought itself into its final categories. Following the creativeness of metaphysics comes the criticism of ethics, of politics, of aesthetics, of a philosophy of history and a history of philosophy.
Similarly primitivism is also a criticism of life as it had up to that time been lived. Its forward bias pushes it into the pessimism of the great romantics and the fatalism of Hardy. It may be a foolish and futile criticism, but it was a pioneering one, and it implied more than it realized.
But if primitivism is a transitional phase, it must, like all transitional phases, carry implicit a contradiction which leads to its extinction, as it of necessity brings into sharp conflict the differing ideas of the two ages it separates. Primitivism split on several such contradictions. In the first place, it abjured a pessimistic view of human nature as such, resenting such a view as emanating from materialists, like Hobbes, who regarded man as essentially an animal and only incidentally a human being. The whole primitivistic thesis rests on the assumption that man is by nature good. Now this in itself is a mark of the rising tide of democracy and the rule of the “people.” The diction of the common man was quite good enough for Wordsworth.6 Even earlier the common man was set above the artificial gentleman suspected of hypocrisy, as shown in the antitheses of Charles and Joseph Surface, Tom Jones and Blifil.7 The same idea is carried out later in Dickens ad nauseam. The attack on privilege, on the infringement of rights, in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the economists’ superposition of individual happiness over the common good, all focus the attention on the dignity and worth of the individual in the abstract. The old land-town connection implied a felt if never rationalized consensus: being all parts of an organism, individuals felt themselves integrated into a living unity. But the loss of that inward unity forced the individual himself to become the centre of the world, and in this primitivistic conception the romantic egoism and the egoistic romantic theory of imagination alike had their origins.
The greatest poetry, according to this theory, was the spontaneous outpourings of the bard. Hence, a search began to find other poetry which was equally the work of the common men, therefore natural and unforced, therefore good.8 Although literary fingers got rather badly burned occasionally by Ossian, by Rowley, even by the “Shakespearean” forgery of Vortigern,9 a great deal was done, and Gray’s Icelandic researches, Percy’s Reliques, Scott’s antiquarianism, all brought out much valuable work.10 But this influx resulted in a more eclectic survey of poetry than had hitherto been possible, paving the way for greater tolerance and appreciation—for popular approval, in short, as opposed to the judgment of a clique. Thus, in accomplishing its mission primitivism did something it did not altogether intend to do. It got the freedom it wanted, but it brought a more adequate appreciation of traditions with it.
The theory of imagination was partly fostered by dearth of intelligent criticism. Eighteenth-century critics became more and more at a loss in dealing with the new poetry, and later, in the time of Shelley and Keats, when Century and Blackwood’s presided over English literature like a couple of Carthaginian idols,11 the average critic of the time was a pompous ass, with no brains or ears.12 To call Keats a cockney is, properly and sympathetically analysed, a most profound remark to make about him, but when this is found in connection with wholesale condemnations of his poetry by “critics” who had not read it, it does not inspire confidence.13 But such a collapse was inevitable in view of the fact that, since the poet himself was becoming a critic, he had to arrogate the function of criticism, as with Byron, Coleridge, and Poe’s dissection of his Raven.14 The primitivistic theory, thus, works through historically to its direct opposite, for if poets or poet-natures can alone evaluate poetry, it follows that the appeal of poetry is an esoteric one, and this idea is developed by Arnold, Pater, Swinburne, and others until it reaches its extreme statement in Wilde: “Man has two duties in life. The first duty is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.”15
A similar metamorphosis of rococo into romanticism through primitivism may be worth noticing here. The primitivistic ideas developed from the movement that marked the collapse of the old order in the first place—the cult of sensibility. The strength of the great baroque tradition breaks down into a decadence of femininity. The fussy intricacies of the later architecture, the powerful influence of the economic factor of the woman reader—which helped to develop the Richardson novel— the outpouring of sentiment in the form of confessions, diaries, and letters, all mark the female character of the period. Poets like Klopstock, Mackenzie’s men of feeling, and many other instances of the vague emotionalism of thought, apparent alike in the deism and the scepticism of the time, testify that the sopping handkerchief was the order of the day. This tendency produced Rousseau’s Confessions—it is hardly necessary to condemn it in stronger terms—and Rousseau was the immediate ancestor of primitivism. When primitivism itself came, it was largely a feminine admiration of the strong man—Rousseau’s philosophy is of the type best adapted to be discussed at gatherings of women—and if not invariably feminine, certainly often effeminate. The economic change described above, which forced the whole of life down into the distaff side, is accompanied by many complaints about the loss of masculinity. There is then a very evident development from here to the swashbuckling romantic tradition of Hugo, Dumas, Schiller, Echegaray, perhaps even Byron, which springs up as a narcotic to the sedentary. Here again there is a final and extreme formulation at the opposite end in Strindberg.
Primitivism was more successful in its ideas on diction, which with Wordsworth start a development the closing scenes of which are now being enacted. As long as poetry is a living language it is natural and sacrosanct. Prose expresses something conceptually rather than imaginatively and is a style subordinate to matter—what is said is something over and above the manner of saying it. When poetry, too, begins to “say something,” in the conceptual sense, the barrier between prose and poetry disappears. The gradual interabsorption is a long and complex question, but its existence is apparent enough. Ossian made the first assault; Blake followed. The vers libre form was then popularized by Whitman and the spade work was finished with him. The criticisms hurled at this poet on technical grounds all revert to the one complaint eventually, that prose and poetry were merging. Bad free verse is not only bad poetry but also bad prose. With the advent of the prose poem (e.g. Giovannitti’s The Walker)16 the boundary is well on the way to dissolution. So many hairline cases exist at present—Marianne Moore, for instance—that to refuse a writer the title of poet on the ground that he writes prose has long been regarded as pedantic. The connection is probably that free verse tends to equate the line with the idea, and prose the sentence with the idea. It is an open question if any better free verse is written today than the prose of Bernard Shaw, whose long sentences are obviously intended to be spoken in a breath, like the lines in a poem of Sandburg’s, or than the antiphonal chant of G.K. Chesterton.
The approach in manner as well as technique starts with primitivism. Gray’s theory, built as it was on a classical training, had to give way before a tendency toward what we can only call colloquialism. Wordsworth did not get very far along this line; here Blake is the pioneer, with his direct and forceful speaking style. The leader in this field is Browning, corresponding to Whitman on the technical side. The spiritual informalization of poetry by Browning (together with Meredith, Hood, and even Gilbert) played a great part in shaking up the idea of “elegance,” and perhaps the violent reaction produced by the work of Tennyson was an even greater negative influence. Today the language of poetry approximates more closely than ever before to speech, the great goal of the primitivists. Inversions, extended similes, expedients like “o’er,” “th’ expanding,” etc., the use of words—“ere,” e.g.—not found in conversation, are excluded from modern poetry to an extent which even so rigid a formalist as Pope would probably find incomprehensible.
The objectifying of art into the realm of the sense world brings with it an immensely widened scope. The idea of absolute freedom in choice of subject, taking its rise from pioneers like Thomson in the country, Blake and the child, Wordsworth in his wide but coherent world which included even idiots, and followed by the great romantics whose subjects were essentially exotic, brought poetry into every sphere. This point is evidenced in Stevenson’s discussion of Whitman and his use of the word “hatter.” You can’t bring a hatter into a serious poem, said Tusitala; it’s not literary tact.17 Primitivism and its successors deny the existence of literary tact. But this depends again on the validity of the egoistic theory, for infinite subjects imply infinite methods of treating them. Primitivism aims at breaking down the old strict forms one by one—the development of the ode is a symptom that a new spirit was striving for the mastery, not of form, but over form itself. Primitivism never gets away from impressionistic implications. And as impressionism is a highly artificial and sophisticated form of art, we are back in the vicious circle we noted above.
Primitivism created no new style, for it was not a new idea but the first of literary fads. It is, in fact, the literary fad, for all crazes are primitivistic, the feverish desire to find something new being itself the result of an artificial and disillusioned weariness, through ready recognition, of further complications of old practices. Unless something genuinely new does come, however, the fad has no support in reality and what is ascribed to the primitive is a cheap product of the status quo. Space utterly precludes discussion of the many false alarms which have since been raised. The development of national consciousness in America built up a primitivistic complex there, as it was considered that Whitman and others would form the basis of a brand new literature. Says Edgar Lee Masters of his earlier, undistinguished poetry:
Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!
[Petit, the Poet, lines 17–18]
The association of Homer with Whitman has a familiar ring. Now Whitman certainly had this idea himself, but, being the anticipation, not of a new culture, but of the advancing mature civilization of the United States he proved to be a born poet but not a born prophet. It is true that the United States itself never woke up to the possibility of such a poetic mantle being cast upon it until its renaissance just before the war, when it was far too late. Whitman, for instance, wrote some superb poetry, but in attempting to formulate the conceptions of a dawning future age, of democracy, liberty, individualism, and so forth, he was simply reproducing the ideas of a belated Patrick Henry. Mark Twain’s pitiful failure to deal with the teeming life in which he moved is more striking. The old country, however, not being so close, was more ready to revive the primitivistic idea, and between London’s reception of Otaheite and that of Joaquin Miller there is hardly an atom of difference.18
Other fashions, such as the “Squirearchy” in Georgian poetry,19 the entry of the sea into English literature, and countless attempts in America, must here be passed over. Perhaps the best example in contemporary literature—though it has passed its meridian—is the cult of the Negro in the United States admiring thoroughly Yankee work produced by coloured people. It is believed by many that jazz originated in Africa, that Negro spirituals are Negroid folk music, and I understand it to be a current impression in Europe that the songs of Stephen Collins Foster are Negro folk tunes.
But the primitivism which helped to destroy the eighteenth century and make the nineteenth century possible, being the first of these fads, signified far more by its appearance, and whatever we may think of its inherent quality, much of the finest English poetry is not fully comprehensible unless we recognize the inevitability and historical fitness of the noble savage.